OK, I want you to just close your eyes for a
second. Picture a scene that if you saw it in
some high budget Hollywood movie, you'd probably
roll your eyes and say, OK, the writers are trying
way too hard now. Right. It's just too unbelievable.
Exactly. So it's the middle of the night. It's
pitch black. The date is April 22nd, 1453. You're
standing on a hill and you're overlooking the
Golden Horn, this massive legendary harbor of
Constantinople. It's quiet. maybe a little foggy
and then suddenly you hear this sound yeah and
it's it's not the wind it's not the sea it's
this deep groaning of wood yeah and the cracking
of whip the bellowing of thousands and thousands
of oxen yeah and drums the steady rhythmic almost
terrifying beating of drums and the torches light
up and what you see It just shouldn't be possible.
You see ships, full size, 70 foot Ottoman warships
with their sails furled, but they aren't in the
water. No, they're moving over the side of the
hill. Over land. It's one of the most surreal
images in all of military history. 80 galleys
being physically dragged up and over a steep
forested hill on these greased logs for over
a mile. Why? To get around a giant chain. A simple
chain that was blocking the harbor entrance.
It is this incredible moment where the solution
to an impossible military problem wasn't some
brilliant strategy. And it wasn't diplomacy.
It was just sheer brute force engineering. Just
manpower and will. It's absolute madness. And
it sets the stage perfectly for the guy we're
talking about today. Because this whole landship
maneuver, this wasn't the idea of some grizzled,
battle -hardened general with 40 years of experience.
Not even close. This was the brainchild of a
21 -year -old. That is the part. That always,
always gets me. He was barely out of his teens.
Today on The Deep Dive, we are tackling the life
of Mehmed II, better known to the world as Mehmed
the Conqueror. And I think for most people, the
mental image of an Ottoman sultan is, you know,
pretty fixed. Oh, yeah. You picture this stern
warrior figure, maybe a guy with a scimitar and
a big turban looking very severe, very distant.
The scourge of God archetype. The man who basically...
ended the Middle Ages by smashing the walls of
Eastern Rome. And look, he was that. He was absolutely
a conqueror in the most literal sense. But the
source material we've been digging through for
this, I mean, it just paints a picture that is
so much more, well, jarring. It's just full of
these crazy contradictions. We are talking about
a guy who was a master gardener, an oed, who
wrote these incredibly emotional verses under
a pseudonym. A scholar who spoke, what, half
a dozen languages? And he's commissioning portraits
from Italian Renaissance masters. And in the
same breath, we are talking about a man who legally
codified the execution of his own brothers to
ensure the stability of the state. A man who
impaled his enemies by the thousand and absolutely
terrified Europe for half a century. That's the
tension. That's what we're going to unpack today.
How does a Renaissance prince, because that is
really what he was in many ways, also become
the architect of mass impalements and legal fratricide?
It's a huge question. We have a massive stack
of campaign logs, diplomatic letters, Venetian
spy reports to get through. Our mission is to
understand how this 21 -year -old kid managed
to do what entire armies had failed to do for
a thousand years. And whether he was, in the
end, a monster, a genius, or maybe both. And
to get there, you really can't start at the conquest.
You can't start with the ships on the hill. The
whole psychology of Mehmed II is rooted in a
really traumatic childhood. You have to go back
to what I call the false start. I love that term
for it. Because usually when we hear about these
great kings, their story is so linear. They're
born, they're educated, they take the throne
and they rule. Mehmed's path was just so much
messier. Much, much messier. So he's born in
a derny in 1432. Now, context here is absolutely
key. He was the third son of the reigning sultan,
Murad II. His mother, Humahatun, was a slave
concubine. So not a royal princess from another
kingdom. No, we don't know much about her. Possibly
she was of European or Slavic origin. But in
the Ottoman system, that wasn't a disqualifier
status followed the father. But being the third
son, well, that meant he wasn't the priority.
He wasn't plan A for the succession. He's the
spare to the spare. Exactly. But in the Ottoman
tradition, these young princes didn't just sit
around the palace. They were sent out to govern
provinces to learn the ropes. It was like an
apprenticeship in ruling. So at age 11, Mehmed
is sent to Amasya. Yep. It's a governorship.
He has to learn how to manage taxes, how to judge
legal disputes, how to command local troops.
It's a very real hands -on internship running
a piece of the state. But then fate intervenes.
His two older brothers die. Suddenly this 11
-year -old is the heir apparent. And then his
father, Sultan Murad II, does something that
is almost unheard of in history. He quits. He
literally abdicates. He just steps down. Murad
had a really rough go of it. He'd been fighting
these draining wars on two fronts, in Europe
and in Anatolia. He finally manages to sign peace
treaties with Hungary in the west and the Karamanids
in the east. He looks at the map, sees peace
for the first time in years, and basically says,
I'm done. I'm out. I want to study religion,
retire to a nice garden in Manisa, and just relax.
So in 1444, he steps down and he hands the...
absolute power of the Ottawa Empire to Mehmed,
his 12 -year -old son. Imagine being 12. In our
timeline, you're just starting middle school.
And he's handed the nuclear codes. He is the
sultan. And it goes about as well as you would
expect. Right. It's a disaster. The vultures
started circling immediately. Instantly. The
Christian powers in Europe look at the Ottoman
throne. They see a child sitting on it and all
those peace treaties Murad just signed. They're
torn up. And this wasn't just some minor border
skirmish. This was a full -blown crusade. It
was led by John Hunyadi of Hungary and King Ladislav
of Poland and Hungary. They saw a once -in -a
-lifetime opportunity to wipe the Ottomans off
the map of Europe. I want to pause on the justification
for breaking that treaty because the sources
mention a specific figure, a Cardinal Julian
Cesarini. He's the one who really pushes for
this. Yes, the papal legate. He used a very cynical
bit of theological logic to convince the king
of Hungary to attack. He essentially argued that
an oath sworn to an infidel, a Muslim, was null
and void in the eyes of God. So breaking the
truce isn't a sin. He argued it was almost a
holy duty. So the crusade launches. Yeah. The
Ottoman army is panicking. The Grand Vizier,
a guy named Shandarva Halil Pasha, who really,
really did not like Mehmed, is panicking. And
12 -year -old Sultan Mehmed realizes, I cannot
handle this. It has to be a profoundly humiliating
realization for a boy who has been told his whole
life that he's a prince destined to rule. So
he sends a message to his father, who's off in
his garden retreat, begging him to come back
and lead the army. And Murad refuses. He basically
says, no, I'm retired. I'm praying. It's your
problem now, son. Good luck. Which is just incredible.
And this is where we get the first real flash
of the brilliance and maybe the snark that defines
Mehmed later in life. He writes a second letter.
And this is one of the most famous documents
in all of Ottoman history. So good. It's brilliant.
He writes, If you are the sultan, come and lead
your armies. But if I am the sultan, I hereby
order you to come and lead my armies. Checkmate,
dad. There's no way out of that one. It worked.
Murad II came back. completely crushed the Crusader
army at the Battle of Varna and saved the empire.
But then, and this is the crucial psychological
blow for young Mehmed, he stayed. He took the
throne back. So Mehmed is deposed. Yeah, unsultaned.
He's packed up and sent back to the minor leagues
as a governor in Manisa. That has to absolutely
destroy a kid's ego. You taste absolute power.
You fail spectacularly. Your dad has to come
and rescue you. And then you're basically grounded
for years. It created a chip on his shoulder
the size of the bus for a street. Most historians
agree that his time in Manisa was spent just
stewing. He became obsessed. He wanted to prove
to his father, to the court, to the world that
he wasn't just some incompetent child. And he
had people in his ear. Right. Mentors who are
shaping this ambition. Oh, absolutely. Specifically,
a very influential religious figure named Aksham
Sadin and his tutor Mola Gurani. They whispered
a very specific destiny in his ear. They told
him his. Purpose in life, his holy duty was the
conquest of Constantinople. This wasn't just
a random military target. It had this deep religious
significance. Huge. There is a Hadith, a saying
attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that says,
Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What
a wonderful leader will he be and what a wonderful
army will that army be. So they're telling him
this isn't just about glory, Mehmed. This is
about you fulfilling prophecy. Exactly. It's
not just about territory. It's about spiritual
validation. It's your destiny. So when his father
finally died in 1451 and Mehmed took the throne
for the second time, he was 19 years old and
he was a completely different person. No more
ask you for help. None. He was aggressive, he
was secretive, and he was singularly focused.
The Byzantine emperor at the time, Constantine
XI, actually tried to play these old diplomatic
games with him, sending envoys to demand more
money, thinking Mehmed was still that incompetent
kid from the first reign. He could stay. Huge.
Mehmed didn't even bother responding diplomatically.
He just started building. Let's talk about the
preparation for 1453. Yeah. Because he didn't
just march an army up to the walls. He strangled
the city first. It was a strategic chokehold,
a brilliant one. He looked at the Bosphorus Strait,
that narrow strip of water that connects the
Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Constantinople
relied on grain shipments coming down from the
Black Sea ports to survive. So if you control
the Strait... You control the city's food supply.
His grandfather had already built a fortress
on the Asian side. So Mehmed went to the European
side, directly opposite, and in a ridiculously
short amount of time, built Rumelihisari. the
name is so intense the source is translated as
the fortress on the land of the romans but colloquially
it was known as the throat cutter and it was
literal he installed these massive cannons right
at the water level any ship passing through now
had to lower its sails acknowledge the ottoman
presence and pay a toll if they didn't well we
have the account of a venetian ship that tried
to run the blockade The captain thought he was
fast enough. He thought he could use the current
and the wind to just zip past the guns. He was
wrong. Badly wrong. A single stone cannonball
weighing hundreds and hundreds of pounds shattered
the ship's hull. I agree. The crew was captured
and beheaded. But the captain, Mehmed, had him
impaled on a stake and displayed on a rocky outcrop
visible to anyone sailing by. It's a billboard.
It's a billboard for the rest of Europe that
says, the rules have changed. I'm in charge now.
Which brings us to the siege itself. Spring.
1453. The scale of this whole operation is just,
it's hard to wrap your head around. It's asymmetrical
warfare at its most extreme. Inside the city,
you have maybe 7 ,000 defenders, a mix of Byzantines
and Genoese and Venetian mercenaries. 7 ,000.
Outside, Mehmed has an army that's estimated
somewhere between 80 ,000 and 200 ,000. But numbers
alone don't break the Theodosian walls. These
were a triple layer of fortifications that had
stood for a thousand years. They were legendary.
Attila the Hun couldn't break them. The Arabs
couldn't break them. They were the ultimate defensive
technology of the ancient and medieval world.
So Mehmed decides to bring in new technology
to break the old technology. We have to talk
about Orban. The gun for hire. the master mercenary
engineer. Orban was a Hungarian, a master cannon
founder. And ironically, he had actually gone
to the Byzantine emperor first. Yes, he offered
to build him super weapons to defend the city.
But the emperor was broke. He couldn't afford
Orban's salary. So Orban just shrugs, walks across
the battle lines to the Ottoman camp. And Memon
has the money. Oh, he has the money and the vision.
He asks Orban, can you build me a cannon that
can smash the walls of Babylon? Orban says, I
can cast the cannon, but I can't guarantee the
aim. And Mehmed essentially says, cast it. I'll
worry about the aim. And this is the birth of
the Basilica bombard. It was a monster. I mean,
we're talking about a tube 27 feet long. It fired
a stone ball that weighed over 1 ,300 pounds.
It took 60 oxen just to move the thing. And when
they test fired it back in Ader. The sound was
so powerful they had to send out criers to warn
pregnant women in the area because they thought
the shockwave could cause miscarriages. And when
that thing hit the walls of Constantinople, it
turned thousand -year -old masonry into dust.
But there was a problem. The reload time was
terrible. Maybe three hours between shots because
the barrel got so hot it would crack if they
didn't constantly cool it with oil. So the Byzantines
had time to repair the damage. Exactly. They
would frantically rebuild the wall with rubble
and barrels of dirt in between shots. It became
this slow, grinding war of attrition. The cannon
would knock it down. They'd build it back up.
But the city still had a lifeline, the sea. As
long as they could get supplies from their Genoese
and Venetian allies, they could theoretically
hold out forever. And the Ottomans couldn't get
into the main harbor because of the Great Chain.
A massive iron chain floated on wooden logs,
strung across the mouth of the Golden Horn. The
Ottoman Navy tried to break it multiple times
and failed miserably. And this is the point where
the siege almost collapsed for Mehmed. Really?
Yeah. His troops were getting restless. The old
guard viziers, the ones who never liked him,
were telling him, give it up, kid. It's impossible.
A European relief army is going to show up any
day now and crush us. And that brings us right
back to our intro. The ship's on the hill. This
was the moment that proved he wasn't just a kid
with a big cannon. It's the lateral thinking.
It's pure genius. He realized he couldn't break
the chain so he just circumvented it. He mobilized
thousands of workers to level a path behind the
Genoese colony of Galata. They laid down these
massive wooden planks, greased them with animal
fat and olive oil. And in a single night. In
a single night, they hauled 70 or 80 ships up
the hill over the top and splashed them down
into the water on the other side behind the chain.
The psychological impact on the defenders inside
the city must have been absolutely devastating.
Can you imagine? You go to sleep thinking your
flank is totally secure because of this impenetrable
chain, and you wake up to the sound of Ottoman
sailors chanting morning prayers from their fleet,
which is now sitting in your backyard. It's over.
It broke their morale. And more practically,
it stretched their defenses too thin. They had
to pull men off the mainland walls to guard the
much weaker sea walls. It was the beginning of
the end. On May 29, 1453, after a brutal 57 -day
siege, the final assault began. The fall of the
city is a chaotic, bloody affair. But I want
to focus on the moment Mehmed himself enters
the city. He's 21. He has just done the impossible.
He rides his horse to the Hagia Sophia, the greatest
church in all of Christendom. And what does he
do? He dismounts. He stoops down, takes a handful
of dust, and pours it over his turban as a sign
of humility before God. And then he wanders through
the ruined halls of the Ukuleon, the ancient
palace of the Caesars. And this is where the
poet side of him comes out. He doesn't cheer,
he doesn't give a victory speech. No, he quotes
a Persian couplet from the poet Saadi. The spider
is curtain -bearer in the palace of Chosros.
The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afraiziab.
It's this profound reflection on how fleeting
power is. One day you are the Roman emperor,
the next day spiders are literally spinning webs
in your bedroom curtains. It shows this depth
of character you just don't expect from a warlord
in the middle of a sack. He was deeply, deeply
aware of history. And speaking of history, this
brings us to a really major insight from the
sources. Mehmed didn't see himself as the destroyer
of Rome. No, not at all. Quite the opposite.
He saw himself as the conqueror who has earned
the right to possess it and, in his view, save
it. He immediately adopted the title Caesar Irum.
Which means? Caesar of Rome. His logic, from
his perspective, was airtight. The seat of the
Roman Empire is Constantinople. I hold the seat.
Therefore, I am the emperor. Did anyone else
buy that? I have to imagine the Pope wasn't thrilled
about a Muslim Caesar of Rome. The Catholic West
definitely laughed at it. Or rather, they feared
it, but they certainly didn't recognize it. But
here's the critical nuance. The Orthodox Church
more or less accepted it. And that was entirely
by design. He didn't wipe out the Christians
in the city. No, he sought out a specific man,
a monk named Gennadius Scolarius. And he was
known for being staunchly anti -Catholic, right?
Viciously so. Gennadius famously said, I would
rather see the Turkish turban in the city than
the Latin miter. He hated the Pope and the Catholic
Church for what he saw as their betrayal. So
Mehmed finds him, makes him the new patriarch,
and gives him authority over all Orthodox Christians
in the entire empire. That is just. It's 4D chess.
By empowering the anti -Catholic faction of the
Greeks, he ensures they will never, ever unite
with the Catholic West to launch a crusade against
him. Exactly. It's strategic tolerance. He integrates
the Orthodox Church into the Ottoman state machinery.
He gives the patriarch the rank of a pasha, makes
him the second largest landlord in the empire.
He wanted to rule a universal empire, not just
a Muslim one. And he had this fascination with
the deeper history, too. The sources mention
he actually went to the site of ancient Troy.
Yes, about 10 years later, he walked the ruins
of Troy and reportedly told his companions that
by conquering the Greeks, the Byzantines, he
had finally avenged the Trojans. He saw history
as this long, continuous narrative arc, and he
was the climax. He's the avenger of Hector. He's
the avenger of Hector, he's the new Alexander
the Great, and he's the new Caesar, all rolled
into one. So he has the title, he has the capital,
but he did not settle down. The section on his
later campaigns is just... It's exhausting just
to read. The man was an endless campaigner. He
spent pretty much his entire adult life on a
horse. He expanded into Serbia, Bosnia, Trebizond,
the Moria in Greece. But we have to talk about
the personal rivalries because there are two
men who really defined his later years and the
stories are just wild. Okay, let's start with
the big one. Vlad. Vlad III. Vlad Dracula. And
the history here is intensely personal. It's
not just two kings fighting over territory. They
knew each other as kids. Intimately. Vlad and
his younger brother Radu had been sent as child
hostages to the Ottoman court to ensure their
father's loyalty. He grew up alongside Mehmed.
He probably studied in the same classrooms, trained
with the same weapons masters. He learned Ottoman
military tactics, the language, their psychology.
He knew the system from the inside out. So when
Vlad eventually goes back to rural Wallachia
and decides to stop paying tribute to the sultan,
he knows exactly who he's poking. He does. And
when Mehmed sent envoys to demand the tribute,
Vlad committed an act of just, incredible diplomatic
desecration. The Ottoman envoys refused to take
off their turbans in his presence. It's a religious
custom. A sign of respect. Exactly. And Vlad
said, I will help you keep them on forever. He
had his men hold them down and nail the turbans
to their skulls. That's a declaration of war.
A very clear one. So Mehmed marches north with
a massive army. But Vlad knows he can't fight
him in an open battle. He's totally outnumbered.
Ten to one, at least. So Vlad uses terror as
his primary weapon. He wages a campaign of pure
psychological warfare. He poisons the wells.
He burns the crops so the Ottoman horses have
nothing to eat. And he even sends people with
infectious diseases, leprosy, tuberculosis, the
bubonic plague, into the Ottoman camps to mingle
with the soldiers. That's biological warfare
in the 15th century. And then you have the famous
night attack of 1462. This is like a special
ops mission from a modern movie. Vlad took his
best men, disguised them in Ottoman uniforms,
and walked right into the middle of the Ottoman
camp in the dead of night. What was the goal?
A decapitation strike. His one and only goal
was to find Mehmed's personal tent and assassinate
him. They tore through the camp, causing absolute
chaos. They actually hit the tent of two of his
grand viziers, mistaking it for the sultan's,
but the message was clear. You are not safe,
not even in the heart of your own army. And then
Mehmed marches on Vlad's capital, Targovieti,
and what he finds there is... The forest. The
forest of the impaled. It was a field of stakes
stretching for kilometers. Sources say 20 ,000
bodies, men, women and children, all impaled.
And on the highest stake, right in the center,
was the rotting corpse of Hamza Bey, the Ottoman
general who Vlad had captured earlier. The sources
say that even Mehmed, a man we know was a hardened
killer, was physically sickened by the sight.
He reportedly said, how can I despoil the lands
of a man who does such things? It was this moment
of grudging, horrified respect for the sheer...
of the brutality, Mehmed actually withdrew his
main army. So Vlad won. Not exactly. And this
is the genius of Mehmed again. He didn't lose.
He just changed tactics. He used politics. He
left behind Vlad's younger brother, Radu. Radu
the Fair. Who was also a hostage, but unlike
Vlad, Radu had assimilated completely. He was
handsome, charming, and totally loyal to Mehmed.
Mehmed basically let Radu and the Wallachian
nobles, who were tired of Vlad's reign of terror,
fight it out. Eventually, Vlad was ousted by
his own people. Mehmed won by proxy without losing
another. We tend to see Mehmed as this invincible
figure after Constantinople, but the sources
are clear that he did take some serious losses.
The siege of Belgrade in 1456 was a total disaster
for him. A complete and utter failure. He went
up against John Hunyadi again, the man who had
defeated the crusade when Mehmed was a boy. During
battle, the Ottoman lines broke, and Mehmed,
trying to rally his troops, charged into the
melee personally. He fought himself. He did.
He killed a knight in single combat, but then
he took a javelin to the thigh. He was badly
wounded and had to be carried off the field unconscious.
The Ottomans retreated in disarray. It was a
huge humiliation. And then there was Skanderbeg
in Albania. Another former hostage. Yes. It seems
like the Ottomans had a really bad habit of training
their own worst enemies. Skanderbeg was a military
genius. He held out in the mountains of Albania
for decades. Mehmed led multiple armies against
him personally, and he could not break him. It
was guerrilla warfare before the turn even existed.
Albania only fell to the Ottomans after Skanderbeg
died of natural causes, malaria. So it shows
that while the Ottoman war machine was incredibly
powerful, it wasn't unstoppable. But Mehmed just
kept pushing. In 1480, near the end of his life,
he made the move that terrified Europe more than
anything else. He landed an army in Italy. The
invasion of Otranto. This is often just a footnote
in textbooks, but at the time it was seen as
the apocalypse. Ottoman troops seized a major
city on the heel of the Italian boot. They were
only about 350 miles from Rome itself. The Pope
was literally packing his bags. Pope Sixtus IV
was making concrete plans to evacuate the Vatican
and flee to France. The panic in Italy was absolute.
They called Mehmed the Grand Turk. The red apple
was about to be his. They thought, this is it.
St. Peter's Basilica is going to become a mosque
just like the Hagia Sophia. And honestly, if
Mehmed had lived another five or ten years...
The history of Western Europe would look fundamentally
different. There's no question. We'll get to
his death. But I want to pivot now to the other
side of his personality, the side that is so
hard to reconcile with all this. We touched on
it in the intro, the Renaissance intellectual.
Because while he was busy impaling people in
the Balkans, he was collecting fine art in Istanbul.
He was a true polymath. He didn't want to just
conquer the West. He wanted to participate in
its high culture. He invited Italian artists,
architects, and scholars to his court. The most
famous of these is the Venetian painter, Gentile
Bellini. And that's where we get that iconic
portrait Mehmed in profile, wrapped in furs,
this sharp, intelligent, almost severe look on
his face. That's a Bellini. It is. And you have
to think about how radical that is. In conservative
Islamic tradition, distinct portraiture creating
realistic images of living things can be seen
as a form of idolatry. Mehmed did not care. He
wanted to be immortalized on metals and in paintings,
just like a European prince. In his library.
The sources that list the inventory are just.
It's wild. It's a universal library for a universal
empire. He had the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek.
He had works on geography, astronomy, mathematics,
medicine. He had texts in Hebrew, Latin, Persian,
Arabic. He was obsessed with Alexander the Great,
right? Completely. He supposedly slept with Arian's
biography of Alexander under his pillow. He read
about the lives of the popes. He read about the
Frankish kings. He wanted to know everything
about everyone, friend and foe alike. And then
there are the Christian relics. This part is
so strange. The source mentions he collected
things like the alleged arm of St. John the Baptist
and the Stone of the Nativity. This is a really
weird one. Some of his contemporaries in Europe
claimed he just held them hostage to squeeze
money out of Christian states. But other accounts
say he treated them with genuine reverence. There's
a story that he would light candles in front
of the relics. That kind of behavior must have
really confused people. There were actual rumors
in Europe that he was a closet Christian or that
he was on the verge of converting. Pope Pius
II actually wrote him a letter, a very, very
long letter, basically saying, just a drop of
water, Mehmed, just get baptized, and I will
name you emperor of the East and the West. We
can rule the world together. Did Mehmed ever
answer? No. He likely just laughed at it. He
didn't need the Pope's permission to be emperor.
He had the canons. But it shows how much of an
enigma he was to his contemporaries. He was a
devout Muslim, no doubt, but he wasn't dogmatic
in the way they expected. But not everyone in
his own court loved this Renaissance fight he
was cultivating. His son, Bazid, was the complete
opposite. Bazide was pious, deeply conservative,
and he hated the Italian influence at court.
He thought his father was essentially a heretic,
that he was straying too far from tradition.
When Bazide eventually took the throne, one of
the first things he did was sell off his father's
entire European art collection in the bazaar.
He just got rid of it. Purged the court of the
Western influence. He wanted to take the empire
back to what he saw as its pious roots. Which
brings us to the structure of the empire itself.
Mehmed didn't just expand the borders. He completely
rewired the operating system of the state. He
centralized everything. Before him, the sultans
had to share power with these incredibly powerful
Turkish aristocratic families like the Dajshundarling
clan. Memin systematically broke them. He had
his own grand vizier, Shandala Halil, executed
right after the conquest of Constantinople. It
was a message. It was a very clear message. No
one is untouchable. The only power here is me.
And he replaced those old Turkish families with
the Defshirme. The gathering. This was the system
where Christian boys were taken as a tax from
the Balkan provinces, converted to Islam, and
raised in the palace schools. They were completely
cut off from their families, their roots, their
culture. They had no loyalties to anyone or anything
except the sultan's person. It created a meritocracy,
but a slave meritocracy. It did. A man could
start as a shepherd in Serbia and end up as the
grand vizier ruling the entire empire. But legally,
he was the sultan's personal slave. It made the
Sultan the absolute, unquestionable center of
gravity. Mehmed also made himself physically
distant. He stopped eating in public. He built
high walls around the new Topkapi Palace. He
became the shadow of God on Earth, a remote,
almost divine figure. But the most controversial
part of his governance, and maybe his darkest
legacy, is the law regarding succession. The
law of fratricide. This is the one that just
makes modern listeners shudder. He actually wrote
it down into law. He codified it in his kanunim,
his great book of laws. The line reads, and I'm
paraphrasing slightly, of any of my sons that
ascends the throne, it is acceptable for him
to kill his brothers for the common benefit of
the people. For the common benefit of the people.
That's the cold utilitarian argument right there.
It's the ultimate trolley problem. Mehmed looked
at the history of his own grandfather's reign.
After his death, there had been a brutal civil
war, the Ottoman interregnum, where brothers
fought each other for the throne for a decade.
And this newly destroyed the empire. It did.
Thousands of soldiers died. Villages were burned.
The state almost collapsed entirely. Mehmed looked
at that and decided that the state sanctioned
death of one or two princes was a tragic but
necessary price to pay to prevent a civil war
that would kill tens of thousands of common people.
The concept of Nizam -i Yelem, the order of the
world. That was the core concept. It sounds barbaric
and monstrous to us, but to him, it was an act
of mercy for the realm. and it became standard
practice. For centuries after him, a new sultan's
first act upon taking the throne was to send
out the executioners to strangle his brothers
with a silk bowstring. The coffin of the old
sultan would leave the palace through one gate,
and the small coffins of his sons would leave
through another. That is a chilling, chilling
image. It's the price of absolute power. So we
have this man -conqueror, scholar, poet, fratricide
legalizer, and then 1481, he's only 49 years
old. He's in the absolute prime of his power.
He gathers a massive new army. He crosses the
Bosphorus to the Asian side. The destination
is a state secret, as always. Some think he was
going for Egypt to fight the Mamelukes. Others
think he was finally going for Rhodes to fight
the Knights of St. John. But he never makes it.
He falls ill. At a place called the Sultan's
Meadow, near Geddes. The official symptoms sound
like dysentery or maybe severe gout, which he
suffered from. But the historical consensus leans
heavily toward something darker. Poison. Poison.
The timing is just too convenient. He was on
the verge of yet another world -changing campaign.
So who are the suspects? The list is long. Venice
is always a prime suspect. Their spy network
had tried to assassinate him a dozen times before.
But a lot of the circumstantial evidence points
closer to home. To his own son, Bayzid. The conservative
son who hated the art and the Western influence.
The son who was tired of waiting in the wings.
The son who may have feared that Mehmed was about
to pass the throne to his other, more favored
son, Semselton. The theory goes that Mehmed's
personal doctor, a man named Yakub Pasha, was
the one who administered the poison, likely flipped
by either Venetian agents or, more likely, Bayzid's
faction. And when the news of his death hit Europe.
It was like VE Day. Church bells rang out in
London and Paris. In Venice, the messenger ran
into the Senate shouting, La grande chila morta.
The great eagle is dead. They lit bonfires and
celebrated in the streets because they truly
believed they had just dodged extinction. It's
hard to overstate that. They really thought he
was coming for Rome next. And he probably was.
So when we look back at his legacy, he completely
transformed the city. He turned a dying, depopulated
Byzantine ruin into the thriving metropolis of
Istanbul. Though, quick fact check, the name
Istanbul wasn't made official until the 1930s,
right? That's right. The Ottomans themselves
called it Constantinia, the city of Constantine
for centuries. But Mehmed was the one who repopulated
it. He used forced resettlement, the surrogate,
to bring Muslims, Christians and Jews from all
over his empire to create a new cosmopolitan
world capital. He laid the foundation for the
Ottoman Empire to last another 400 years. So
when you boil it all down, what's the takeaway?
Why does Mehmed II still matter to someone listening
to this in the 21st century? I think he matters
because he is in many ways the prototype of the
modern state builder. He broke the old feudal
model. He centralized power. He used new technology
gunpowder to render ancient defenses obsolete.
And he understood the immense power of image
and propaganda. He stands with one foot firmly
in the medieval world using impalement and religious
rhetoric and one foot in the early modern era
using cannons, centralized bureaucracy and Renaissance
art. He's a bridge, a very violent, very brilliant,
very complicated bridge. He literally broke the
timeline. So here's a thought to leave you with.
A what if. We know he had troops in Otranto in
Italy. We know the Pope was panicking. If Mehmed
hadn't drunk that glass of sherbet or whatever
it was that was poisoned, if he had lived another
10 years to be 60, would we today be talking
about the Ottoman Empire as the legitimate continuation
of the Roman Empire? Would St. Peter's Basilica
in Rome be a mosque today? That is the question
that haunts historians of this period. It would
have rewritten the next 500 years of global history.
If you have a second today, pull up your phone
and Google Bellini Mehmed II. Just look at the
face of the man who ended one world and started
a new one. Thanks for diving deep with us. Until
next time.