Who Was the Real Mehmed II?
The stories we
are told as children have clearly differentiated heroes and villains.
Ever as we grow older, the idea of heroes and villains remains constantly
in our mind as we read literature, watch films, or even deal with other
people. It is common practice for us to approach history in the same
way. In historical narratives, we often search out own heroes and
villains. At the same time, we are acutely aware that human beings
are rarely easily categorized into these groups. Instead, we all
have both positive and negative personality traits and we all do positive
and negative things at some point. When looking at historical figures,
it important to keep this idea in mind and not try to make everyone into
an easily manageable hero or villain. Mehmed II is a figure we should
take particular caution with because Mehmed II is different things to different
people, some of whom would like us to view him as a hero and others consider
him to be a barbaric villain. As is the case, with you are I, Mehmed
II falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
On a spring morning,
in 1432, Mehmed II was born in the Ottoman capital of Edirne. His
father was the overwhelmingly popular sultan, Murad I, and his mother was
a Christian slave girl. He was Murad's third son, and he was never
loved by his father as much as his two older brothers, Ahmed and Ali.
At age two, he traveled to Amasya, where his oldest brother, Ahmed, was
serving as governor. Ahmed died only three years later, at which
time the five-year-old Mehmed took on the task of being Amsaya's governor.
His other brother, Ali, governor of Manisa, also died in his youth.
This left the young Mehmed as the most likely heir to the throne.1
In 1444, Murad I decided abruptly to retire from public life. The
relatively inexperienced Mehmed stepped in to fill his monolithic father's
shoes. At the time, he was only twelve years old and ill equipped
to face the challenges of ruling the Ottoman Empire. When Mehmed's
Hungarian subjects rose in rebellion, his father interceded and quelled
the rebellion. After only two years, Murad was thrust back onto the
throne where he remained until his death in 1451. With Murad I's
death, Mehmed II became sultan for a second time.2
The Europeans had
set low expectations for Mehmed's reign. They soon learned how poorly
they had judged him. Only two years after assuming the throne, Mehmed
set out to do what the Ottomans had been trying to do since 1301, conquer
the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. On April 6th, 1453, the
Ottoman siege of Constantinople began. The siege, and the almost
constant cannon bombardment of the city, lasted fifty-four days until Ottoman
forces finally breached the walls of the city on the morning of May 29th.
That afternoon, the victorious Sultan Mehmed II proudly rode into the newly
conquered city.3 Mehmed's contradictory
behavior on his initial trip into the city has been used by the both his
proponents and opponents to help support their claims. Mehmed remained
in the city until June, when he returned to Edrine and sent architects
and builders to replace him in Istanbul (as Constantinople is now called).
The conquest of Istanbul
was far from the end of Mehmed's military conquests, rather, it was the
beginning of them. He went on to win military victories in Trabzon,
Moldavia, Morea, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, Persia, Rhodes, and even Italy.4
These long military campaigns were not kind to Mehmed. He had aged
poorly; he suffered from gout, arthritis, and rheumatism, among other ailments.
In 1481, he died from an unknown stomach ailment at the young age of forty-nine.5
When we look back on Mehmed II's life, we find it full of contradictions.
These contradictions are what make it so difficult to get a clear picture
of what kind of a man he truly was. If one looks at Mehmed II's behavior
after the conquest of Constantinople, one might be confused by what seems
to be the same person acting in two very terse ways. The first places Mehmed
visited when he entered the city were the public areas like the markets,
palaces, and of course the churches, most notably Hagia Sophia. The
story is told that when he entered Hagia Sophia, he noticed a Turkish soldier
hacking away at the church's marble floor and killed him. He then
ensured that all of the Greeks left in the building, including the priests,
were safely escorted out of the city. Then he called for the muezzin
to begin the afternoon prayers, and he proclaimed from that moment on that
Hagia Sophia was to be a mosque.6
We see Mehmed here preserving
an Orthodox church only to convert it into a mosque. Also, while
he took great care to spare lives of the Greeks hiding within the confines
of Hagia Sophia, he did nothing to stop the pillage that continued throughout
the rest of the city. The Greek Historian, Kritovoulos, who was Mehmed
II's contemporary, tells us that Mehmed was disappointed by the pillage
of Constantinople. However, he did nothing to hinder his soldiers
as they continued to steal, rape, and murder over the course of the next
three days (the traditional period of pillage provided for by Islamic law).7
This of course raises the question whether or not it was in Mehmed's power
to stop the pillage. We can only assume that he could have because
when his troops conquered the foreign traders' enclave of Galata a few
days later, Mehmed saw to it that nothing was pillaged. Even homes
that had been abandoned by their owners were carefully inventoried, and
the rightful owners of the houses was given a period of time to claim their
property before the Ottoman treasury took possession of it.8
The question remains, if Mehmed disapproved of the pillage of Constantinople,
why did he not stop it? Or if Mehmed was such a barbaric person that
he relished the pillage of conquered cities, why did he prevent Galata
from suffering a fate similar to Constantinople's?
Having conquered Constantinople,
Mehmed had effectively subjugated the Orthodox Christian Church to his
Islamic state. During his reign as sultan, he usually treated
his Christian subjects very tolerantly. However, there are notable
exceptions that detract from the image of Mehmed as heroic egalitarian.
The same year of the conquest of Constantinople, a new Orthodox Patriarch
was appointed. Mehmed made an agreement with this new patriarch promising
the following: no other churches would be converted into mosques, Christian
religious practices and celebrations would be permitted to continue as
they always had, and most importantly Mehmed agreed to recognize the judicial
prerogatives of Orthodox bishops and metropolitans. His recognition
of bishops' judicial prerogatives, foreshadowed the installment of the
millet system under Mehmed.9 Millets
were self-governing religious communities established under the leadership
of a key religious figure. This system allowed all non-Muslims a
sense of autonomy from the Ottoman central government. Despite all
of this, there did exist a clear divide between Muslim and non-Muslim under
Mehmed's administration. Muslims were normally given preferential
treatment in housing, employment, etc. Furthermore, Christian subjects
were responsible for a significantly higher tax burden than their Muslim
neighbors.10
Mehmed II was definitely
an enigma. Was his a hero or a villain? Well, it is clear that
he can be classified as neither. Mehmed was simply a human being,
who suffered, as all human beings do, from certain character flaws.
I think it can be accurately said that Mehmed II was well intentioned,
but often fell short of doing the "right" thing. He was a man, like
Henry VIII, torn between the Medieval and the Modern Era, torn between
doing good and indulging his weaknesses. Mehmed spoke six languages
fluently, he relished Greek philosophy, and welcomed Western ideas into
his court. At the same time, he was a devout Muslim, an asocial loner,
and a despotic ruler. Instead of attempting to classify Mehmed II
as one type of person or another, it is better to look at the sum of his
beliefs and actions and enjoy him for what he was, not what we hopped he
had been.
_________________________
1 Babinger, Franz, Mehmed
the Conqueror and his Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992), 11-12
2 Ibid., 41, 64-65.
3 Inalcik, Halil, The
Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (New York: Praeger, 1973),
26.
4 Ibid., 27-29.
5 Babinger, 403-404.
6 Eversley, G. Shaw-Lefevre,
The
Turkish Empire (New York: H. Fertig, 1969), 87-88.
7 Kritovoulos, The
History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles Rigg (Princeton, Princeton
University
Press,
1954), 76-77.
8 Babinger, 101.
9 Ibid., 104.
10 Kinross, Patrick Balfour.
The
Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and the Fall of the Turkish Empire.
(New
York:
Marrow, 1977), 112-114.