Mehmet Chelebi – Sultan – may God fasten the strap of his authority to the pegs of eternity and reinforce the supports of his power until the predestined day!
Inscription on the tomb of the mother of Mehmet II
Constantine Palaiologos, in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans
Ceremonial title of Constantine XI, eighty-eighth emperor of Byzantium
The man destined to tighten the Muslim noose on the city was born ten years after Murat’s siege. In Turkish legend, 1432 was a year of portents. Horses produced a large number of twins; trees were bowed down with fruit; a long-tailed comet appeared in the noonday sky over Constantinople. On the night of March 29, Sultan Murat was waiting in the royal palace at Edirne for news of a birth; unable to sleep, he started to read the Koran. He had just reached the Victory suras, the verses that promise triumph over unbelievers, when a messenger brought word of a son. He was called Mehmet, Murat’s father’s name, the Turkish form of Muhammad.
Like many prophecies, these have a distinctly retrospective feel to them. Mehmet was the third of Murat’s sons; both his half-brothers were substantially older, and the boy was never his father’s favorite. His chances of living to become sultan were slim. Perhaps it is significant of the entry Mehmet made into the world that considerable uncertainty surrounds the identity of his mother. Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet’s nature. Whatever the genetic cocktail of his origins, Mehmet was to reveal a character quite distinct from that of his father, Murat.
The tugra of Mehmet
By the middle of the fifteenth century Ottoman sultans were no longer unlettered tribal chieftains who directed war bands from the saddle. The heady mixture of jihad and booty had given way to something more measured. The sultan still derived immense prestige as the greatest leader of holy war in the lands of Islam, but this was increasingly a tool of dynastic policy. Ottoman rulers now styled themselves the “Sultan of Rum” – a title that suggested a claim to the inheritance of the ancient Christian empire – or “Padishah,” a high-flown Persian formula. From the Byzantines they were developing a taste for the ceremonial apparatus of monarchy; their princes were formally educated for high office; their palaces were high-walled; access to the sultan became carefully regulated. Fear of poison, intrigue, and assassination were progressively distancing the ruler from his subjects – a process that had followed the murder of Murat I by a Serbian envoy after the first battle of Kosovo in 1389. The reign of the second Murat was a fulcrum in this process. He still signed himself “bey” – the old title for a Turkish noble – rather than the grander “sultan” and was popular with his people. The Hungarian monk Brother George was surprised by the lack of ceremonial surrounding him. “On his clothing or on his horse the sultan had no special mark to distinguish him. I watched him at his mother’s funeral, and if he had not been pointed out to me, I could not have recognised him.” At the same time a distance was starting to be interposed between the sultan and the world around him. “He never took anything in public,” noted Bertrandon de la Brocquière, “and there are very few persons who can boast of having seen him speak, or having seen him eat or drink.” It was a process that would lead successive sultans to the hermetic world of the Topkapi Palace with its blank outer walls and elaborate ritual.
It was the chilly atmosphere of the Ottoman court that shaped Mehmet’s early years. The issue of succession to the throne cast a long shadow over the upbringing of male children. Direct dynastic succession from father to son was critical for the empire’s survival – the harem system was instrumental in ensuring an adequate supply of surviving male children to protect it – but comprised its greatest vulnerability. The throne was a contest among the male heirs. There was no law prioritizing the eldest; the surviving princes simply fought it out at the sultan’s death. The outcome was considered to be God’s will. “If He has decreed that you shall have the kingdom after me,” a later sultan wrote to his son, “no man living will be able to prevent it.” In practice, succession often became a race for the center – the winner would be the heir who secured the capital, the treasury, and the support of the army; it was a method that might either favor the survival of the fittest or lead to civil war. The Ottoman state had nearly collapsed in the early years of the fifteenth century in a fratricidal struggle for power in which the Byzantines were deeply implicated. It had become almost state policy in Constantinople to exploit the dynasty’s moment of weakness by supporting rival claimants and pretenders.
In order both to guard against preemptive strikes and to teach their sons the craft of monarchy, the sultans dispatched their male heirs at a very early age to govern provinces under the watchful eye of carefully chosen tutors. Mehmet spent his first years in the palace harem in Edirne but was sent to the regional capital of Amasya in Anatolia at the age of two to begin the early preparation for his education. His oldest half-brother Ahmet, who was twelve years of age, became governor of the city at the same time. Dark forces stalked the heirs to the throne during the next decade. In 1437 Ahmet died suddenly in Amasya. Six years later, when his other half-brother Ali was governor, a gruesome Ottoman version of “the Princes in the Tower” mystery took place in the town. A leading noble, Kara Hizir Pasha, was dispatched to Amasya by unknown persons. He managed to steal into the palace at night and strangle Ali in his bed, as well as both his infant sons. A whole branch of the family was snuffed out in a single night; Mehmet remained the only heir to the throne. Rippling like a black shadow behind these murky events was a long-running power struggle within the Ottoman ruling class for the soul of the state. During his reign Murat had strengthened the Janissary corps of slave-recruited troops and elevated some Christian converts to the status of vizier in an attempt to establish a counterbalance to the power of the traditional Turkish nobility and army. It was a contest that would be played out to its final conclusion before the walls of Constantinople nine years later.
Ali had been Murat’s favorite son: his death affected the sultan deeply – though at the same time it is not impossible that Murat himself ordered the executions on discovering a plot by the prince. However he realized that there was now no choice but to recall the young Mehmet to Edirne and to take his education in hand. At that moment the eleven-year-old represented the only future for the Ottoman state. Murat was horrified when he saw the boy again. He was already headstrong, willful, and almost uneducable. Mehmet had openly defied his previous tutors, refusing to be chastised or to learn the Koran. Murat called in the celebrated mullah Ahmet Gurani with orders to thrash the young prince into submission. Cane in hand, the mullah went to see the prince. “Your father,” he said, “has sent me to instruct you, but also to chastise you in case you do not obey.” Mehmet laughed aloud at the threat, at which the mullah delivered such a beating that Mehmet swiftly buckled down to study. Under this formidable tutor, Mehmet began to absorb the Koran, then a widening circle of knowledge. The boy revealed an extraordinary intelligence coupled with an iron will to succeed. He developed fluency in languages – by all accounts he knew Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, as well as spoken Greek, a Slavic dialect, and some Latin – and became fascinated by history and geography, science, practical engineering, and literature. A remarkable personality was starting to emerge.
The 1440s marked a new period of crisis for the Ottomans. The empire was threatened in Anatolia by an uprising by one of its Turkmen vassals, the bey of Karaman, while a new Hungarian-led Crusade was being prepared in the West. Murat appeared to have defused the Christian threat with a ten-year truce and departed to Anatolia to deal with the troublesome bey. Before he went, he took the surprising step of abdicating from the throne. He was fearful of civil war within the state and wanted to confirm Mehmet in power before he himself died; world-weariness too may have been a factor. The burdens of office hung heavily on an Ottoman sultan, and Murat may have been depressed by the murder of his favorite son, Ali. At the age of twelve Mehmet was confirmed as sultan at Edirne under the guidance of the trustworthy chief vizier Halil. Coins were minted in his name, and he was mentioned in weekly prayers, according to prerogative.
The experiment was a disaster. Tempted by the opportunity presented by a callow young sultan, the pope immediately absolved the Hungarian king Ladislas of his oath of truce and the crusader army rumbled forward. In September it crossed the Danube; a Venetian fleet was dispatched to the Dardanelles to block Murat’s return. The atmosphere in Edirne became turbulent. In 1444 an inspirational religious fanatic of a heretical Shia sect had appeared in the city. Crowds flocked to the Persian missionary who promised reconciliation between Islam and Christianity, and Mehmet himself, attracted by his teachings, welcomed the man into the palace. The religious authorities were shocked, and Halil himself was alarmed by the popular enthusiasm for the heretic. An attempt was made to arrest him. When the missionary sought sanctuary in the palace, Mehmet had to be persuaded to give the man up. He was eventually hauled off to the public prayer site and burned alive; his followers were massacred. The Byzantines also decided to profit from this confusion. A pretender to the Ottoman throne, Prince Orhan, whom they were holding in the city, was released to foment a revolt. Uprisings ensued against the Ottomans in the European provinces. There was panic in Edirne; a large portion of the town was burned down, and Turkish Muslims started to flee back to Anatolia. Mehmet’s reign was unraveling in chaos.
Murat meanwhile had negotiated a truce with the bey of Karaman and hurried back to confront the threat. Finding the Dardanelles blocked by Venetian ships, he was ferried across the Bosphorus with his army by their rivals, the Genoese, at the handsome fee of a ducat a head and advanced to meet the crusader army at Varna on the Black Sea on November 10, 1444. The outcome was a crushing victory for the Ottomans. Ladislas’s skull was mounted on a lance and sent to the old Ottoman city of Bursa as a triumphal token of Muslim supremacy. It was a significant moment in the holy war between Christianity and Islam. After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe. It confirmed the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and left Constantinople emphatically isolated as an enclave within the Islamic world, reducing the likelihood of Western help in the event of Ottoman attack. Worse still, Murat held the Byzantines responsible for much of the chaos of 1444, an opinion that would soon shape Ottoman strategy.
Immediately after Varna, and despite the early failure of Mehmet’s sultanship, Murat again retired to Anatolia. Halil Pasha remained first vizier, but Mehmet was more influenced by the two men who acted as his governors: the chief eunuch Shihabettin Pasha, lord of the European provinces, and a forceful Christian renegade, Zaganos Pasha. Both these men favored advancing the plan for taking Constantinople, in the knowledge that the city still held the pretender Orhan; capturing it would stabilize Mehmet’s rule and bring the young sultan immense personal kudos. It is clear that even at an early age Mehmet was magnetically attracted to the project of capturing the Christian city and making himself heir to the Roman Empire. In a poem he wrote that “my earnest desire is to crush the Infidels,” yet Mehmet’s longing for the city was as much imperial as it was religious, and derived in part from a source that was surprisingly non-Islamic. He was deeply interested in the exploits of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Alexander had been transformed into an Islamic hero by medieval Persian and Turkish epics. Mehmet would have known of Alexander from his early years; he had the Greek biography of the World Conqueror by the Roman writer Arrian read to him daily in the palace. From these influences he conceived for himself twin identities – as the Muslim Alexander whose conquests would reach to the ends of the earth, and as a gazi warrior leading jihad against the infidel. He would reverse the flow of world history: Alexander swept east; he in his turn would bring glory to the East and to Islam by conquering the West. It was a heady vision, fueled by his personal advisers, who saw that their own careers might be made on the wave of conquest.
The precocious Mehmet, supported by his tutors, started to plan a new assault on Constantinople as early as 1445. He was thirteen years old. Halil Pasha was thoroughly alarmed. He disapproved of the young sultan’s plan; after the debacle of 1444, he feared such a move would end in further disaster. Despite its formidable resources, the Ottoman Empire had all but collapsed within living memory under civil war, and Halil retained the deep fear of many, that a concerted attempt on Constantinople could provoke a massive Christian response from the West. He had personal motives too: he was concerned for the erosion of his own power and that of the traditional Muslim-Turkish nobility at the expense of the warmongering Christian converts. He decided to engineer Mehmet’s deposition by instigating a Janissary revolt and petitioning Murat to return to Edirne to take control again. He was welcomed back with wild enthusiasm; the haughty, aloof young sultan was not popular with either the people or the Janissaries. Mehmet retired to Manisa with his advisers. It was a humiliating rebuff that he would never forgive or forget; one day it would cost Halil his life.
Mehmet remained in the shadows for the rest of Murat’s life, though he continued to regard himself as sultan. He accompanied his father to the second battle of Kosovo in 1448, where the Hungarians made one final bid to break Ottoman power. It was Mehmet’s baptism of fire. The outcome, despite huge Ottoman losses, was as decisive as Varna and further served to cement the legend of Ottoman invincibility. A gloomy pessimism started to pervade the West. “The Turks through such organisation are far ahead,” wrote Michael the Janissary. “If you pursue him, he will flee; but if he pursues you, you will not escape … the Tartars have several times won victories over the Turks, but the Christians never, and especially in pitched battle, most of all because they let the Turks encircle them and approach from the flank.”
Murat’s final years were spent in Edirne. The sultan seems to have lost the appetite for further military adventure, preferring the stability of peace to the uncertainties of war. As long as he lived, Constantinople breathed in uneasy peace; when he died in February 1451 he was mourned by friend and foe alike. “The treaties that he had sworn sacredly with the Christians,” declared the Greek chronicler Doukas, “he always kept intact. His anger was short-lived. He was averse to warfare and keen on peace, and for this reason the Father of Peace rewarded him with a peaceful death, rather than being dispatched by the sword.” The Greek chronicler would have been less generous had he known the recommendation Murat left to his successor. Byzantine meddlings in the 1440s had convinced him that the Ottoman state could never be secure as long as Constantinople remained a Christian enclave. “He left as a bequest to his illustrious successor,” said the Ottoman chronicler Sad-ud-din, “the erection of the standards of the jihad for the capture of that city, by the addition of which … he might protect the prosperity of the people of Islam and break the back of the wretched misbelievers.”
The death of a sultan always constituted a dangerous moment for the Ottoman state. In accordance with tradition, and to forestall any armed revolt, the news was kept secret. Murat had one other son, a baby called Little Ahmet, who posed no immediate threat to Mehmet’s succession, but the pretender Orhan remained in Constantinople, and Mehmet was hardly popular. News of his father’s death was dispatched in a sealed letter by flying courier. In it Halil advised Mehmet not to tarry; a swift arrival at Edirne was imperative – any delay might provoke insurrection. According to legend, Mehmet immediately had his horse saddled and called to his retainers, “Let him who loves me, follow me.” Accompanied by his household troops, he made the crossing at Gallipoli in two days. As he rode across the plain to Edirne, he was met by a vast throng of officials, viziers, mullahs, state governors, and common people, in a ritual harking back to their tribal past on the Asian steppes. When they were a mile off, the welcoming party dismounted and walked toward their new ruler in dead silence. Half a mile distant, they stopped and broke into wild ululations for the dead sultan. Mehmet and his retinue similarly dismounted and joined in the communal lamentation. The winter landscape echoed with mournful cries. The chief officials bowed before the new sultan, then the whole gathering remounted and progressed back to the palace.
The following day the official presentation of the ministers took place. It was an edgy occasion, the moment when the viziers of the old sultan discovered their fate. Mehmet was seated on the throne, flanked by his own trusted advisers. Halil Pasha hung back, waiting to see what Mehmet would do. The boy sultan said, “Why do my father’s viziers hang back? Call them forward, and tell Halil to take his usual place.” Halil was restored to the role of chief vizier. It was a typical move by Mehmet: to maintain a status quo while he kept his deeper plans close to his chest and bided his time.
The new sultan was just seventeen years old, a mixture of confidence and hesitancy, ambition and reserve. His early years had evidently marked Mehmet deeply. He had probably been separated from his mother when very young and had survived in the shadow world of the Ottoman court largely through luck. Even as a young man he emerges as deeply secretive and suspicious of others: self-reliant, haughty, distant from human affection, and intensely ambitious – a personality of paradox and complexity. The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.
A handful of portraits painted over the course of his life provide probably the first authentic likenesses of an Ottoman sultan. A reasonably consistent face emerges – an aquiline profile, the hawk nose protruding over sensual lips like “a parrot’s beak resting on cherries” in the memorable phrase of an Ottoman poet, complemented by a reddish beard on a thrusting chin. In one stylized miniature, he is delicately holding an uncrushed rose to his nose between jeweled fingers. It is the conventional representation of the sultan as aesthete, the lover of gardens and the author of Persian quatrains, but it is informed by a fixed gaze, as if he were looking at some faraway point where the world vanishes. In other mature portraits he is bull-necked and corpulent, and in the famous late portrait by Bellini now hanging in the National Gallery in London he just looks grave and ill. All these pictures contain a note of steady authority, the natural abrogation of power by “God’s shadow on earth,” that assumes the world sits in his hand too naturally to be called arrogance, but there is a chilly melancholy too that recalls the cold and dangerous childhood years.
The pictures are matched by a vivid account of the complex young Mehmet by an Italian, Giacomo de Languschi:
The sovereign, the Grand Turk Mehmet Bey is a youth … well-built, of large rather than medium stature, expert at arms, of aspect more frightening than venerable, laughing seldom, full of circumspection, endowed with great generosity, obstinate in pursuing his plans, bold in all undertakings, as eager for fame as Alexander of Macedon. Daily he has Roman and other historical works read to him. He speaks three languages, Turkish, Greek and Slavic. He is at great pains to learn the geography of Italy … where the seat of the pope is and that of the emperor, and how many kingdoms there are in Europe. He possesses a map of Europe with the countries and provinces. He learns of nothing with greater interest and enthusiasm than the geography of the world and of military affairs; he burns with desire to dominate; he is a shrewd investigator of conditions. It is with such a man that we Christians have to deal … Today, he says, the times have changed, and declares that he will advance from east to West as in former times the Westerners advanced into the Orient. There must, he says, be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.
It was a vivid snapshot of Mehmet’s ambition to reverse the tide of history by carrying Islamic banners into Europe, but at his accession the obsession and intelligence were largely hidden from the West. They saw only a callow and inexperienced youth whose early taste of power had ended in humiliation.
Two years before Mehmet’s accession to the throne, Constantinople had also welcomed a new emperor, though in very different circumstances. The man destined to oppose Mehmet in the struggle ahead bore the name of the city’s founder – a fact that superstitious Byzantines would be quick to recall. Constantine XI was the eighth member of the ruling dynasty of Palaiologos to sit on the throne since 1261. The family had usurped power, and their rule coincided with the relentless downward spiral of the empire into anarchy and discord. His own background was typically multiracial. He was Greek speaking but hardly Greek: his mother was Serbian, and Constantine adopted her family name of Dragases, his father was half Italian. He described himself, like all Byzantines, as a Roman, and signed himself with the proud and ancient title of his predecessors: “Constantine Palaiologos, in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans.”
Signature of Constantine as emperor of the Romans
It was a hollow protocol but typical of the ritual formulas and ceremonial that the Byzantines clung to during their relentless decline. The empire had a high admiral, but no fleet, a commander in chief but few soldiers. Within the Lilliputian world of the court, the nobility jostled and squabbled for absurdly pretentious titles such as Grand Domestic, Grand Chancellor, or Lord of the Imperial Wardrobe. Constantine was effectively an emperor without power. His territory had shrunk to the city and its suburbs, a few islands, and linked dominions in the Peloponnese, which the Greeks called, rather poetically, the Morea, the Mulberry Leaf: the peninsula was famous for its silk production, and its shape reminded them of this food of silkworms.
It is hard to envy Constantine his crown. He inherited bankruptcy, a family with a taste for civil war, a city divided by religious passions, and an impoverished and volatile proletariat. The empire was a snake pit of internecine feuding – in 1442 his brother Demetrios marched on the city with Ottoman troops. It lived a half-life as the vassal of the Ottoman emperor, who could lay siege to the city at any time. Nor was Constantine’s personal authority particularly secure: a whiff of illegitimacy surrounded his accession to the throne in 1449. He was invested in Mistra in the Peloponnese, a highly unusual protocol for an emperor, and never subsequently crowned in St. Sophia. The Byzantines had to ask Murat’s approval of their new emperor but were then too poor to provide him with transport home. Humiliatingly, he had to beg passage to his throne on a Catalan ship.
There are no contemporary illustrations of the city he returned to in March 1449. A slightly earlier Italian map shows Constantinople to be a place of empty spaces, while across the Golden Horn, the Genoese trading colony known as Galata, or Pera, was reported to be thriving and prosperous: “a large town, inhabited by Greeks, Jews and Genoese” according to the traveler Bertrandon de la Brocquière, who declared it to be the handsomest port he had ever seen. The French knight found Constantinople itself fascinating but down at its heels. The churches were impressive, particularly St. Sophia, where he saw “the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was broiled, and a large stone in the shape of a washstand, on which they say Abraham gave the angels food when they were going to destroy Sodom and Gomorra.” The great equestrian statue of Justinian, which he mistook for Constantine the Great, was still in place: “He holds a sceptre in his left hand, and holds his right extended towards Turkey in Asia and the road to Jerusalem, as if to denote that the whole of that country was under his rule.” But the truth was obvious – the emperor was scarcely master in his own house.
There are merchants from all nations in this city, but none so powerful as the Venetians, who have a bailey to regulate all their affairs independently of the Emperor and his ministers. The Turks also have an officer to superintend their commerce, who, like the Venetian bailiff, is independent of the Emperor. They have even the privilege, that if one of their slaves should run away and take refuge within the city, on their demanding him, the Emperor is bound to give him up. This prince must be under great subjection to the Turk, since he pays him, I am told, a tribute of ten thousand ducats annually.
De la Brocquière noted everywhere the epitaphs of vanished greatness – none more telling than (apparently) three empty marble plinths in the Hippodrome: “here stood once three gilt horses, now at Venice.” It seemed only a matter of time before the Ottomans came for the city again and the people just opened the gates for them. They had received a terrible warning of the alternatives in 1430 when Thessaloniki had refused to submit to Murat. It took the Ottomans just three hours to storm the walls; three days of rape and plunder followed; 7,000 women and children were carried off into slavery.
An Italian map of Constantinople from the early fifteenth century. It portrays a sizeable moat on the left-hand side outside the land walls. Galata is at the top.
We have little idea what Constantine looked like; his face is almost a blank. He seemed to have inherited the strong, regular features and bearing of his father Manuel II, but the empire was too distracted to commission portraits of the new emperor, and the gold seal of state that shows a thin hawklike face is far too schematic to be meaningful. However, there is consensus about his personality. Of all the sons of Manuel, Constantine was the most capable and trustworthy, “a philanthropist and without malice,” imbued with resoluteness, courage, and a deep patriotism. Unlike his quarrelsome and unprincipled brothers, Constantine was straightforward; he seems to have inspired deep loyalty among those around him. He was by all accounts a man of action rather than a skilled administrator or a deep thinker, adept in horsemanship and the arts of war, courageous and enterprising. Above all, he was resolute in the face of setbacks. A strong sense of responsibility for the Byzantine inheritance ran through his character; he spent a lifetime trying to shore it up.
Constantine was twenty-seven years older than Mehmet; he was born in Constantinople in 1405, and from his early youth can have had few illusions about the city’s plight. At seventeen he experienced Murat’s siege of 1422; the following year he was appointed regent while his brother John VIII made one of the many fruitless trips around the states of Christendom to seek support for the Byzantine cause. At his accession in 1449, he was forty-four years old, and he had twenty years of fighting behind him. The majority of this time had been spent trying to regain full Byzantine control of the Peloponnese, with varying success. By 1430 he had cleared most of the small foreign kingdoms out of the peninsula, and during the 1440s, as despot of Morea, he pushed its boundaries forward into Northern Greece. To Murat he was a constant irritant; a rebellious vassal who needed to be cuffed back into line. Definitive retribution came in 1446 after the failed Crusade of Varna. An Ottoman army swept into the Morea, devastating the countryside and enslaving 60,000 Greeks. Constantine was forced to conclude a humiliating truce, making vows of vassalage to the sultan and paying a heavy tribute. Failure had dogged the enterprise of rebuilding Byzantine fortunes in Greece, but his spirit, military skill, and straightforwardness contrasted with the behavior of his three brothers – Demetrios, Thomas, and Theodore – by turns self-seeking, treacherous, quarrelsome, and indecisive, they contrived to hinder his attempts to prop up the remnants of empire. Their mother, Helena, had to insist on Constantine’s claim to the throne: he alone could be entrusted with the inheritance.
Coin of Constantine
In subsequent Byzantine legend bad luck clung to Constantine like a curse – his well-meaning imperial venture in the Morea had been courageous but ill-starred. He had fought on alone after the catastrophe at Varna, when the Venetian fleet sailed home and the Genoese failed to send their promised aid, but this persistence had visited considerable suffering on the Greek people. His personal life was similarly unlucky. His first wife died childless in 1429; his second in 1442. During the late 1440s he made repeated attempts to forge a dynastic marriage that would shore up the fortunes of his crown and create the possibility of a natural successor. They all failed to come to fruition in the increasingly fraught political atmosphere on the eve of Mehmet’s succession.
In February 1451 Mehmet settled into the royal palace at Edirne. His first act was startling and decisive. When he died, Murat had left behind an infant son by another wife – Little Ahmet. A few days later, while the mother was paying an official visit to the throne room to express her grief at his father’s death, Mehmet dispatched a minion, Ali Bey, to the women’s quarters to drown Little Ahmet in the bath. The next day he executed Ali Bey for the crime, then married the distraught mother off to one of his nobles. It was an act of ruthless intelligence that carried the struggle for power in the Ottoman court to its logical conclusion: only one could rule, and to avoid the fractious possibilities of civil war, only one could survive – to the Ottomans this seemed preferable to the endless struggles that sapped the lifeblood of Byzantium. Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: “whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order. Most of the jurists have approved this procedure. Let action be taken accordingly.” Henceforth execution was to stalk the succession as a dreadful certainty. It would reach its apogee with the sultanate of Mehmet III in 1595, when nineteen coffins containing the bodies of his brothers were carried out of the palace. Despite this, the fratricide law failed to prevent civil wars: with it came preemptive acts of rebellion by frightened sons, a consequence that would return to haunt Mehmet. In Constantinople the circumstances surrounding Little Ahmet’s death should have provided a key to Mehmet’s character: it appears they did not.