Mehmed II the Conqueror
The Ottoman sultan who took Constantinople in 1453 at age 21, ending the thousand-year Byzantine Empire and recasting himself as heir to Rome.
A twenty-one-year-old broke the thousand-year Roman Empire. On May 29, 1453, Mehmed II rode a white horse through the shattered gate of Constantinople, the city that had defied every Muslim army since the seventh century, and by nightfall the last Roman emperor was a corpse somewhere in the rubble. Mehmed had inherited the throne for good at nineteen in 1451, a brooding, brilliant, ruthless young man fluent in several languages and obsessed with a single prize his ancestors had failed to take. He would spend the next thirty years turning a frontier warlordship into a world empire, but the city came first.
The fifty-three days
Mehmed prepared like an engineer. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus, choking off supply from the Black Sea, and hired a Hungarian gunfounder named Urban to cast bronze bombards larger than anything Europe had seen, monsters that hurled stone balls weighing over half a ton. When a Genoese chain sealed the Golden Horn against his fleet, he had some seventy ships hauled overland on greased logs and dropped behind the barrier overnight. For fifty-three days from April 6, his cannon hammered the Theodosian Walls, the triple ramparts that had held for a thousand years. The defenders, perhaps seven thousand against sixty thousand or more, patched the breaches each night until the walls finally gave way. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos threw off his imperial regalia and vanished into the last melee, his body never certainly found.
Heir to Caesar
Most conquerors would have razed the prize. Mehmed did the opposite. He proclaimed himself Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of the Romans, on the argument that whoever held Constantinople held the Roman inheritance, and he meant it. He made the ruined city his capital, the place the world would come to call Istanbul, and set about repopulating it, resettling Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Muslims under the millet system that let each religious community run its own affairs. He kept the Orthodox patriarchate alive and appointed its patriarch himself. He turned Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, into his imperial mosque, and raised his own palace, Topkapı, on the point above the harbor. A Renaissance prince as much as a Muslim warrior, he summoned the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini to paint him and collected Greek and Italian books.
The hinge
Historians often use 1453 to close the Middle Ages, and the shorthand is fair. A confident Islamic empire had swallowed the last fragment of Rome on Europe's doorstep, and the shock carried from Rome to Moscow, where the tsars would soon claim to rule a Third Rome. Mehmed did not stop at the Bosphorus. He mopped up the last Byzantine remnants at Trebizond and Morea, fought Venice for sixteen years, and in 1480 landed an army in Italy at Otranto. He was preparing yet another campaign when he died in 1481, still only forty-nine. The boy obsessed with one city left behind an empire that would twice besiege Vienna and outlast every rival who had mocked him. The horse he rode through the gate is long gone, but the mosque he made of Hagia Sophia still stands over the strait he closed.