THE CONVENTIONAL CLAIM of European history is that secularism, tolerance, and modernity began in Europe with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. That series of treaties ended the Christian European wars of religion and instituted the principle of tolerance of religious minorities. But nearly two hundred years earlier, after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, melancholy conqueror and resolute leader Mehmed II institutionalised the principles and practices of toleration that had begun the century before under his predecessors. Mehmed II made decisions that left their mark on Ottoman and world history. He conquered Constantinople and then sought to legitimise his victory and rule over it by appealing to Muslims and Christians alike. He called himself caesar and claimed the inheritance of Rome, appropriating the monuments of Constantinople’s greatest ancient rulers, Constantine and Justinian.1 He rebuilt the city not only as the centre of the Ottoman dynasty and the heart of his new imperial administration formed out of converts, but also as a multireligious metropolis. How did he do it?
By the time twenty-year-old Mehmed II launched the siege of Constantinople, the great Byzantine capital was no longer the envy of the world. Once it had boasted half a million inhabitants and had been one of the wealthiest cities in the world. But by 1452, its population thinned by waves of plague, it may have had a paltry fifty thousand people within its walls.2 It was protected on three sides by water and on the fourth side by massive land walls thirty metres high and ten metres deep that had stood for a thousand years. But seen in the larger scope of things, Constantinople was but a small island of Byzantium marooned in the middle of an Ottoman sea.
Determined to capture Constantinople, Mehmed II played a leading role in the siege, making a number of brilliant tactical decisions. He first ordered the construction of Rumeli Hisarı, a new fortress five kilometres north of the city on a steep, rocky slope on the European side of the narrowest point of the Bosporus (merely seven hundred metres across), opposite Anadolu Hisarı, a fourteenth-century Ottoman fortress on the Asian side. Anadolu Hisarı had been constructed by Mehmed II’s grandfather, Bayezid I, in readiness for his failed eight-year attempt to take Constantinople at the turn of the fifteenth century.
Realising that the fortress was an omen of the destruction of the Christian city and ruin of the Byzantine Empire, the inhabitants of the last island of a once mighty kingdom ‘trembled in their deep distress’.3 The wild hillside, previously covered in large swaths of lilac-coloured Judas trees, soon boasted a triple-towered stone fortress. Mehmed II is said to have personally participated in its rapid construction. The fortress was raised in less than four months.
By August 1452, Constantinople’s access to the Black Sea was cut off. Reflecting this turn of events, the Ottomans named the fortress Boğazkesen, which means ‘Cutter of the Straits’, or more literally, ‘Throat-Cutter’. In Greek, it translates as ‘Decapitator’.4 Mehmed II ordered that any ship attempting to pass the fortress would have to stop, and any ship disobeying would be sunk. A Venetian ship, the first vessel attempting to pass through to deliver goods to the now besieged Constantinople, was sunk by the Ottomans’ massive and accurate cannons. Its crew was brought ashore and decapitated, and its captain impaled ‘by a stake through the anus’.5
Although he had cut off access to the Black Sea side of the Bosporus strait and was using his navy in the Marmara Sea to bombard the sea walls, Mehmed II still faced the problem of not being able to get his ships close enough to attack the inner city. For the Byzantines had constructed a giant chain, which they used as a seemingly impenetrable floating gate, to block access to the Golden Horn, the waterway that led inland to the city’s harbour. So confident were the Byzantines that the city was safe from Ottoman naval attack that they left the walls along the Golden Horn unguarded. But Mehmed II had a plan. In April 1453, he ordered his men to lay down giant beams greased with animal fat leading inland from the Bosporus to the Golden Horn. Five dozen ships were fastened to long cables and pulled along these glide ways up the steep hill and across land by the hands of thousands of soldiers from the Bosporus to the Genoese colony—marked by its tower and numerous Catholic churches—and then downhill to the Golden Horn. It made for an unbelievable sight, ‘ships borne along on the mainland as if sailing on the sea, with their crews and their sails’.6 Seeing the Ottoman warships lying at anchor in the Golden Horn, the Byzantine defenders were stupefied. Bad portents—icons dropped at religious processions, flash floods and torrential hail, a dense fog that signalled the divine presence abandoning the city—terrified them further.7
Attacking by land and sea, Ottoman forces surrounded the city and outnumbered the city’s defenders more than ten to one. Well over one hundred thousand Ottoman soldiers—Muslims, Christians converted to Islam, and those who remained Christians—faced six or seven thousand Byzantine and allied defenders, including Catalans, Genoese, and Venetians. The Byzantines managed to survive another month, but by May the city’s fate had been sealed. Mehmed II had ordered the building of a pontoon bridge across the Golden Horn, which the Byzantines could not destroy. To destroy the city’s land walls in the west, Mehmed II had also ordered the construction of one of the largest cannons the world had ever seen. Cast by a Christian renegade from Hungary, the cannon would allow Ottoman forces to break through.8 It marked the first time the Ottomans used gunpowder technology to bring down a besieged city’s walls.
The Ottomans’ final assault began before dawn and lasted until late morning on 29 May 1453. The bronze cannon’s innovative gunpowder-filled metal cannon balls tore holes through the ancient land walls with a ‘blast and crash like thunder from the heavens’ whose ‘piercing air-rending sound’ could be heard over ten miles away and whose sudden shock was allegedly so powerful that it left unsuspecting men speechless and caused pregnant women to abort.9 Having rent the walls thanks to the unrelenting bombardment, Mehmed II’s army entered the city on the fifty-fourth day of the siege. Such gunpowder weapons would soon be adopted across Western Europe. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Paleologus, died in that last battle, his corpse reportedly identified by its purple shoes.
Byzantine and Ottoman historians concur about what followed. Mehmed II allowed his soldiers one day’s rampage and free plunder. They gave no quarter to commoner or nobility, raping women, maidens, nuns, and ‘beautiful young boys’.10 They murdered or enslaved the survivors of the siege and conquest. They looted and pillaged, desecrated churches and tombs—disinterring corpses in the search for gold—plundered the Byzantines’ riches, destroyed their icons, and burned their holy books.11 Indeed, ‘there was good booty and plunder. Gold and silver and jewels and fine stuffs.… They enslaved the infidels of the city and the gazis embraced [raped] their beloved women and girls’.12 As the Ottomans boasted, ‘Every tent [of the sultan’s army] was heaven, filled with boys and girls, the sexual servants of paradise, each a stately beauty, a cypress, from which shoots spring, [offering] a juicy peach’ (that is, a wet, lover’s kiss).13
As the conquering soldiers overran the city, thousands of Christians sought refuge in the Church of Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), believing in a prophecy. A sword-wielding angel would descend to the thirty-five metre, fourth-century Column of Constantine standing at the heart of Constantinople on its main thoroughfare and hand the weapon to a common man, who would single-handedly avenge the Greeks, causing the Ottomans to flee while cutting them down and driving them from Byzantium.14 The angel failed to arrive on cue.
Ottoman soldiers reached the church, broke down the locked doors, and took the thousands of Christians inside captive. ‘Who can describe the wailing and the cries of the babes, the mothers’ tearful screams and the fathers’ lamentations?’15 The most common soldier ‘sought the most tender maiden. The lovely nun, who heretofore belonged only to the one God, was now seized and bound by another master. The rapine caused the tugging and pulling of braids of hair, the exposure of bosoms and breasts, and outstretched arms’.
And then Mehmed II cut the rape short. He rode through the Edirne Gate at the western edge of Constantinople. When he saw ‘what a large number had been killed, and the ruin of the buildings, and the wholesale ruin and destruction of the City, he was filled with compassion and repented not a little’. As his eyes filled with tears, he cried, ‘What a city we have given over to plunder and destruction!’16 He rode through the city on a white horse to the glorious sixth-century Church of Divine Wisdom. The Hagia Sophia was not only the seat of the Greek Orthodox Church but the largest building in the world, with the most magnificent, highest dome ever built. Mehmed II dismounted from his horse and entered. He ascended to the dome to gaze upon the conquered city. Those accompanying him exclaimed, ‘If you seek Paradise, Oh you Sufi, the topmost heaven is Hagia Sophia’.17
Mehmed II examined the ‘strange and wondrous’ icons, frescoes, and mosaics that decorated the church, ‘mounting as Jesus the spirit of God ascended to the fourth sphere of heaven’. As he looked down upon the ruined buildings, ‘he thought of the impermanence and instability of this world, and of its ultimate destruction’. In sadness, he recited an ancient Persian verse from the thirteenth-century poet Saadi about the transitory and unstable nature of power: ‘The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes [an ancient Persian Shah] / The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab [Samarkand]’.18 Life is short, and even in moments of triumph a leader must remember his own mortality.
Along with such melancholy, was there also love among the ruins for Mehmed II?19 After the conquest, the sultan offered Lukas Notaras, the high admiral and grand duke of Constantinople, the opportunity to serve as leader to the remaining Greeks in the city. But while drunk at a banquet, he also demanded that Notaras give him his beautiful youngest son, a fourteen-year-old beardless youth. Mehmed II may have wanted to have the young man join his wine-drinking soirees to serve as the object of love poetry, and eventually have him converted to Islam and trained in the palace to join either his bureaucracy or his elite infantry regiment, the Janissaries. Mehmed II had other Byzantine nobles executed, and ‘from among their wives and children, he selected the beautiful maidens and handsome boys, and entrusted them to the watchful care of the Chief Eunuch’.20
Immediately after the conquest, a history written to flatter Mehmed II describes how he had taken his share of the human spoils, including ‘beautiful virgins’ and ‘the handsomest boys, some of whom he even bought from the soldiers’.21 He appointed some of the scions of nobility to serve as his bodyguards ‘and to be constantly near him’, and others to serve as his palace pages, boys who ‘were indeed of signal physical beauty’ and ‘splendid physique’.22 The same Ottoman phrase ‘palace pages’ was used to describe the ‘loveable catamite boys’ at Bayezid I’s court who ‘served’ the sultan.23 Perhaps one day Notaras’s youngest son would serve the sultan as grand vizier, the head of his government.
With the Notaras father deployed as head of the Christians and the son a loyal servant trained in his palace, Mehmed II would ensure control over the Christian population, maintain the loyalty of an important Byzantine family, and gain a handsome young man at his side. But it was not to be. Notaras refused to surrender his child to the conqueror, reportedly protesting, ‘It is not our custom to hand over my own child to be despoiled by him. It would be far better for me if the executioner were sent to take my head’. And this Mehmed II did. He responded by having Notaras and his sons killed in this fashion.24
Mehmed II did, however, use the conquest to gain legitimacy among Muslims and Christians alike. Ever since the third quarter of the seventh century, Muslim empires had sent armies to capture Constantinople. But none had never succeeded. Seeking Islamic legitimacy, Mehmed II made sure the hadith—the saying attributed to Muhammad, ‘Constantinople will be conquered. Blessed is the commander who will conquer it, and blessed are his troops’—would be inscribed in Arabic at the entrance to his imperial mosque complex in the centre of the historic peninsula.
During the siege, Mehmed II was accompanied by his spiritual advisor, a Sufi named Sheikh Akşemseddin, who claimed that, in a village outside the land walls on the Golden Horn, he had rediscovered the tomb of Ayyub al-Ansari, a companion of Muhammad sent to conquer Constantinople in the late seventh century. The alleged finding of the tomb linked Mehmed II to Islam’s Prophet and contributed further to his Islamic legitimacy. After the conquest, at that location he built a mosque and proper tomb for al-Ansari, which became a pilgrimage site for Muslims. As the city’s holiest mosque, it became the place where future sultans would perform the ceremony of ‘girding the sword’, the equivalent of a coronation, embracing a sword that had allegedly belonged to Muhammad.
Rather than seeing his exploit as merely an Islamic conquest, however, Mehmed II cultivated awareness of his connection to the Roman legacy. In the words of Mehmed II’s Greek counsellor George Amiroutzes, writing to the sultan over a dozen years after the conquest, ‘No one doubts that you are the Emperor of the Romans. Whoever holds by right the centre of the Empire is the Emperor and the centre of the Roman Empire is Constantinople’.25 Mehmed II’s chroniclers, Greek and Ottoman, placed him in a long line of great leaders including the Macedonian Alexander the Great and the Roman Julius Caesar. They compared the conquest of Constantinople to those of Troy, Babylon, Carthage, Rome, and Jerusalem. Addressing the sultan, one panegyrist wondered whether the comparatively petty deeds of others were better known because they had been carried out by Greeks in Greek history, while Mehmed II’s vast accomplishments, comparable to those of Alexander the Great, would not be passed on to posterity in Greek.26 The sultan’s historian depicted Mehmed II as aiming to rule the world in emulation of the Alexanders and Pompeys and caesars and other famous kings and generals.27 This historian wrote in Greek to inform not only Greeks of Mehmed II’s deeds but all of Western Europe, even those who inhabited the British Isles.28
To flatter him, the same Greek author depicted the sultan as a great general and a wise philosopher king. Mehmed II may have had great physical power and energy, but that alone did not make him a ruler worthy of respect. His wisdom and his knowledge of history aided his ability to rule, for he studied the philosophies and histories of the Arabs, Ottomans, and Greeks.29
A Venetian visitor concurred, describing Mehmed II as being ‘as eager for fame as Alexander of Macedonia. Daily he has Roman and other historical works read to him’ by an Italian. Keen to expand his domains, he made a great effort to ‘learn the geography of Italy’, including ‘where the Pope is and that of the Emperor, and how many kingdoms there are in Europe’. He possessed a map of Europe, as he was most interested in ‘the geography of the world and of military affairs’. Most frightening for the observer was how the sultan stated that ‘the times have changed and declared 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’.30 To build this universal vision of one world religion, there was no place more worthy than Constantinople.
No sooner had he conquered the city than Mehmed II set about rebuilding it. He converted its greatest church, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque by adding a single minaret, but he did not cover up all the mosaics and frescoes inside the church. Muslims could still see winged angels with mysterious faces soaring above them as they prayed. Nearby Hagia Eirene (Church of Holy Peace), the first church built in Constantinople, however, was converted into an arsenal and incorporated within the New Palace (Topkapı Palace) grounds. The hilltop imperial Christ the Almighty (Saint Saviour Pantocrator) monastery and church became the city’s first Islamic college.
The first Ottoman chroniclers writing about Mehmed II’s reign wished to see the fall of Constantinople as the conquest of a Christian city and the erection of a Muslim city in its place. They envisioned a city full of mosques, madrasas, and Sufi lodges, of Muslims pious and ascetic, referring to Constantinople as Islambol, ‘full of Islam’.31 Other writers offered a unidimensional account of good, pious Muslims shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is most great) and fighting on God’s side against evil, impious Christian infidels, who are inevitably defeated in battle and are killed or surrender and then humbled for the glory of Islam. Devoting two folios to the marvellous dome of Hagia Sophia and ten folios to the reconstruction of the city, one chronicler devoted only one sentence to the mention of the sultan’s having transported ‘captives from the lands of the infidels which he conquered by sword and settled them around Constantinople’.32 He was more interested in narrating how Mehmed II had made Constantinople into a Muslim city with mosques and madrasas, Sufi lodges, and a mausoleum and mosque for Ayyub al-Ansari, the ‘patron saint’ of the Muslim city.33 He mentioned Ottoman Muslims arriving voluntarily to take possession of abandoned homes and properties.34
In point of fact, Mehmed II did not choose to remake Constantinople as a purely Muslim city. Because the city was taken by force, its defenders, the Greeks, should have been barred from the city, as in Thessalonike. After its nadir in the immediate aftermath of conquest, however, the Greek population of Constantinople increased thanks to Mehmed II’s policies.35 The sultan sent commands to every corner of the empire that as many Christians, Muslims, and Jews as possible should be forcibly deported there.36 Following the conquest, Mehmed II ordered the deportation of all of Thessalonike’s Greek Jews to Istanbul. Due to these forced relocations, approximately twenty-five years after the conquest Istanbul’s depleted population had grown by 50 percent to around eighty thousand. Sixty percent of the population was Muslim, 20 percent Greek Orthodox, 11 percent Jewish, 5 percent Armenian, and 3 percent Italian.37 Across the Golden Horn lay Pera and Galata, the former Genoese colony with which the Ottomans had long engaged in trade, and which had surrendered to the conquerors a couple of days after the city fell in 1453. Galata’s population was 39 percent Greek Orthodox, 35 percent Muslim, 22 percent Italian (mainly Genoese), and 4 percent Armenian.38
The new migrants needed new homes and new markets. Mehmed II constructed the first component market areas of what would become the Grand Bazaar, which would grow over the ensuing centuries into a sprawling covered market comprising dozens of streets and thousands of stalls. There, Arab, Armenian, Genoese, Greek, Jewish, Turkish, and Venetian merchants sold precious luxury goods including jewels, gold, and silver, and textiles such as silks, leather goods, and carpets. It was an entrepôt befitting a wealthy city open to the world.
The many migrants also needed new places of worship and congregation: churches, mosques, and synagogues; fountains, taverns, hospices, Sufi lodges, inns, and public bath houses; Islamic colleges and universities. These, too, were constructed, even though the city had been conquered by force. In such a situation, according to Islamic precedent, no new Christian or Jewish houses of worship should have been permitted to be built. But they were.
To rule over all these new migrants, deportees, and the diverse population that remained after the conquest, Mehmed II institutionalised the toleration Ottomans had been practising de facto for over a century in Southeastern Europe. This was at least a century before religious minorities were tolerated in Western and Central Europe. In the first decade after the conquest, Mehmed II appointed leaders for the recognised religions of the Ottoman Empire—Sunni Islam, Greek Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Armenian Christianity (the Apostolic Church)—in the imperial capital. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these leaders’ jurisdiction would extend to include all members of their respective religions in the empire. Members of these religions were permitted to live according to their own system of beliefs and practices. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders were granted the privilege of restricted administrative, fiscal, and legal powers to regulate their members’ private and spiritual affairs. They oversaw judicial courts, judges, jails, and policing agents adjudicating personal law (marriage, divorce, and inheritance), as well as schools and seminaries, hospitals, cemeteries, and houses of worship. In the following centuries, the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians were even allowed to set up printing presses in the city, before Muslims were permitted to operate their own. They were expected in return to raise taxes to fund their own religious institutions and to pay for the privilege. Such tolerance of diversity was an expression of the Ottomans’ Turco-Mongol and Islamic heritages, out of which they created an empire built upon the maintenance of difference. The Ottomans did not aim to make all subjects into Muslims, or even into Ottomans—that is, the members of the ruling elite. Rather, they established institutions that allowed members of tolerated religions to pursue their religious and personal lives with minimal interference.
Mehmed II appointed a mufti, a specialist in Islamic law. He relied on the Byzantine rabbi Moses Capsali as a mediator with Jews in the city.39 He also tapped an Armenian he knew, the metropolitan of Bursa, Hovakim, to be the first Armenian patriarchate in the city, so as to rival the catholicates in Echmiadzin in Armenia and Sis in Cilicia.40 As Greek patriarch, he named a man he could trust: the anti-papist George Scholarios, also known as Gennadios, who opposed the union of the Catholic Church with the Orthodox Church. He could be counted on not to support a Crusade to liberate the city.41
The fact that the patriarchs (and indeed, all church officials) were appointed by the sultan and that a synod could only affirm his choice demonstrated the awesome powers assumed by the Ottoman ruler within this system of tolerance and secular control of the religious hierarchy. The patriarch would refer to the sultan as the ‘legal emperor’ with the right to intervene in church affairs, a right that previously had been given to the Byzantine emperor.42
Whereas in the former Byzantine Empire the emperor, as head of the church, had had the authority to appoint and dismiss the Greek patriarch, the Muslim sultan assumed this duty because he was head of the government. The Greek and Armenian patriarchs were given limited jurisdiction over church offices in the imperial capital and surrounding regions, restricted control of church properties, nonexclusive authority in family law, and the ability to collect taxes from Christians.43 The patriarchs serving as designated tax collectors simplified the taxation of their members and ensured Christian loyalty. This system was also practical, in that it eased the otherwise onerous task of ruling over diverse populations, making it easier to locate cooperative partners who would collect taxes and share in the responsibility of rule as part and parcel of society. Greek, Armenian, and Jewish law courts were not separate and autonomous, but were instead an integral part of the Ottoman system of law.
But tolerance is built on hierarchies, and in the religious hierarchy of the empire, Islam was supreme. Tolerance is the expression of an unequal power relation. The sultan and not the patriarchs had the authority to decide to what extent the visible remains of the city’s Christian past would endure. Mehmed II dreamed of erecting his own monumental imperial mosque and palace complex at the centre of Constantinople. To build his mosque in 1463, he demolished the Church of the Holy Apostles, which held the tombs of Byzantine emperors since Constantine and housed the Greek patriarchate that he had established less than a decade earlier.44 The second church to serve as the patriarchate, Pammakaristos, would be converted to a mosque called ‘Conquest’ a century later.45 Mehmed II’s mosque complex combined a royal congregational house of prayer, a dynastic monument, the premier educational institutions in the empire, and a new residential and commercial area. This first palace, which would come to be referred to as the Old Palace, became the primary residence of the women and young children of the dynasty. Located at the centre of the city, he found it unsatisfactory.
For a palatial centre of his power, Mehmed II was drawn instead to the isolated hill at the tip of the peninsula, the site of the former Byzantine acropolis, extending into where the Bosporus strait spills into the Marmara Sea.46 There, between 1459 and 1478, he constructed his second palace, the exclusively male New Palace, or Topkapı (Cannon Ball Gate) Palace. The palace’s ornate inscription on the outermost Imperial Gate (Bab-ı Hümayun) refers to Mehmed II in the tripartite fashion befitting his and his empire’s nature: in the Turco-Mongol style as ‘khan’ and ‘sultan’, in the Islamic style as ‘the shadow of God’, and as the ruler of Asia and Europe as ‘sovereign of the two continents and the two seas [the Mediterranean and the Black Sea]’.
Topkapı Palace bore all the hallmarks of the Ottoman’s tripartite heritage: Byzantine-Roman, Turco-Mongol, and Muslim.47 The outermost court of the palace contained the former church of Hagia Eirene converted into an arsenal. Like his Seljuk predecessors, the sultan conferred much administrative and military authority on his deputies, called viziers, and so his New Palace was divided into an outer palace complex for relations with the outside world, and an inner complex that included the precinct where he resided without his family. Mehmed II housed his family in the harem, or private quarters, of the Old Palace in the centre of the city.
Mehmed II set in motion the process, realised in the next century, of making the office of the sultanate into a more secluded and less public role, more like a caesar than a frontier gazi. Topkapı Palace comprised a series of connected courts arranged in hierarchical fashion, each space more restricted in access and smaller than the preceding one. The unseen yet all-seeing sultan was situated at its symbolic core, the many features and functions of palace design revolving around him.48 Yet, in a gesture to his Turco-Mongolian heritage, Mehmed II also made sure to include ample space in the palace gardens for a sport pitch with an attached tiled pavilion from which he could enjoy a good game of Mongolian polo, a feature that would not be out of place in Central Asia. A series of single-story buildings given precise functions was like a Turco-Mongol military tent camp—in which the tents of the soldiers were set up around the tent of the khan at the centre—in stone form.49
Although the palace grounds contained a number of mosques, Topkapı was built next to Hagia Sophia, which was used as the imperial Friday mosque. The first courtyard, accessed by the Imperial Gate, was open to everyone. It contained a hospital, the imperial mint, a bakery, and the former Hagia Eirene, used as an armoury. Passing through the Middle Gate or Gate of Salutation (Bab-üs Selâm), one reached the second courtyard, the location of the treasury and the divan, the meeting place of the imperial council. The first and second courtyards were thus devoted to public ceremonies and administration. At the opposite end of the second courtyard was the Gate of Felicity (Bab-üs Saadet), where the sultan sat when presiding over ceremonies. After Mehmed II’s reign, most enthronements were held at this gate.
During an enthronement, the sultan sat on the gold divan throne before the Gate of Felicity, accompanied by the acclamations and prayers of a palace herald. The viziers, army commanders, and leaders of the Muslim religious class bowed, knelt, or prostrated before the seated sovereign. One by one, they kissed either the tips of his fingers, his feet, the hem of his robe, the foot of the throne, the carpet placed before it, or even the ground before him, offering their oath of allegiance and wishes of good fortune.50 The oath of allegiance had both an Islamic and a Turco-Mongol precedent. In the Ottoman case, it expressed the proper relation between the master (the sultan) and his servants. An accession gratuity would be distributed to the army, including the Janissaries, to ensure a smooth and peaceful transition from one sultan to the next. A cannon salute would sound to inform the residents of the city that a new ruler had taken over, and town criers would share at the public squares the news, which would also be announced from minarets. Coins would be minted in the new sultan’s name. Preferably held on a Friday, the enthronement would be followed by communal prayers at the nearby Hagia Sophia, where the sermon would be read in the sultan’s name.51
Only the highest officials in the land and foreign ambassadors could pass through the Gate of Felicity. The Chamber of Petitions, the external throne room, was located just on its other side, in the third courtyard. Within the third courtyard, the gate itself was flanked by the dormitories and schools of the pages in training for palace service, a male harem. The third and fourth courtyards thus made up the inner palace, hosting the sultan and the youth being trained for imperial service. The fourth courtyard contained gardens, pools, and pavilions, and the residence of the sultan’s private physician. Mehmed II’s privy physician was an Italian Jew, Giacomo of Gaeta, who converted to Islam and became known as Hekim Yakub Pasha.52
The Collection of children was institutionalised with the building of the schools in Topkapı Palace. An Ottoman decree from 1493 commanded those conducting the levy to take boys except those who ‘show signs of reaching puberty or [who] have begun to grow a beard’.53 When the levied boys arrived in Istanbul as a tribute tax imposed on Christian subjects, they were circumcised. The ‘children of superior beauty’ were taken into inner palace service.54 Their superior moral qualities were allegedly revealed by the pseudoscience of physiognomy, which deduced which boys had ‘the sign of felicity on their foreheads’ as determined by the eunuch who was the agha (‘lord’ or ‘master’, a ranking servant of the imperial household) of the Gate of Felicity.55 After a number of years of education in the palace, those in this first, privileged group—the pretty palace pages—again passed through a selection process in which those with the best moral character and physique were chosen for further physical, spiritual, and cultural education. They would become the leading administrators of the empire.
Those with ‘the mark of evil and rebellion in the part of the forehead between the middle and the temple’, however, would not be taken into inner palace service, for they would be susceptible to being ‘seditious, tyrannical, and egotistical and destroy the peasantry with the flame of oppression, burning them’.56 Rather than obtain administrative positions, they would become soldiers. The majority of boys were thus not taken into palace training as pages but were sent to Turkish farms in Anatolia en route to becoming Janissaries. They engaged in difficult physical labour for seven or eight years, becoming accustomed to hardship, learning Turkish, and studying Islam after having been circumcised and converted to the faith. Following this, the young men were called back to the imperial capital, where they served as a labour force in the palace stables, kitchens, and gardens, or in apprenticeships at the arsenal or mosque construction sites, or with the military (army or navy) before finally being enrolled in the elite infantry unit of the Janissaries, one of the army’s two main fighting forces (the other being the provincial cavalry).
The presence of the pages in the innermost courtyard of the palace illustrates Mehmed II’s preference for creating a new Ottoman class in place of the Turcoman gazi warriors who had been instrumental in the dynasty’s rise to power. Mehmed II refused to ‘respectfully stand up at the sound of martial music as a sign of readiness for gaza’.57 This defiance was a concrete manifestation of his new strategy of rule, which entrusted his bureaucracy and army to Christian boys who were converted to Islam and raised in the palace schools. The important law code attributed to him confirmed this practice, signalling a turning away from the gazi ethos towards a bureaucratic empire.
Mehmed II’s code of law set out the ranks and duties of officials, such as the eunuchs in charge of the different spheres of the court, the military judges, the financial secretary or treasurer, and the chancellor. It elaborated the functioning of the palace system, including the imperial council, which met after 1470 in the newly completed council chamber in the second courtyard of Topkapı Palace. The council, presided over by the grand vizier, met four days a week to advise the sultan on political and military matters, issue decrees in his name, make promotions and appointments, and act as a law court for the most serious crimes, especially those committed by the sultan’s servants. Its executive officers included three or more top viziers, the two military judges (kadıasker) of Rûmeli (Southeastern Europe) and Anatolia, one or more treasurers, and a chancellor. Mehmed II’s code of law detailed court etiquette, including proper facial hair and turban material and size: the higher and finer the turban, the more exalted one’s rank. As the sultan’s deputy, the grand vizier was granted political and executive authority and replaced the sultan as the man responsible for the day-to-day affairs of administration and in leading troops to battle. The grand vizier, and no longer the sultan, presided over the imperial council and served as army commander. The sultan thereafter would become less gazi and more caesar.
After the conquest, Sultan Mehmed II had ordered the dismissal and execution of veteran grand vizier Çandarlıoğlu Halil Pasha, who unlike the lesser viziers had advocated peace with the Byzantines and had counselled against the conquest of Constantinople. His Anatolian Muslim family had provided viziers to the dynasty for two centuries. He was replaced by the convert Mahmud Pasha (in office 1455–1474, executed 1474). This change marked the beginning of the end of the power of great Muslim families and the creation of a new meritocracy of converts trained in the palace and entrusted with many important positions. Sultan Mehmed II’s subjugation of most of Southeastern Europe in the latter part of his reign secured this source of manpower. Converts recruited through the Collection would henceforth serve in the highest office in the administration, the grand vizierate, and make up the Janissary corps. Thereafter, the leading administrators of the empire, especially the grand vizier, would usually not be Turkish Muslims. In the fifteenth century, they would often be the converted offspring of conquered Christian dynasties, including Byzantine.
With his new, elevated status and an aloof relationship with the outside world, Mehmed II withdrew into an envelope of silence within the palace. He spent most of his time at the centre of the series of increasingly secluded courtyards that culminated in the inaccessible royal residence housing the sultan and his boy pages, while his family lived at the Old Palace.58 The outcome was the consolidation of the new ruling class. The New Palace, Topkapı, was the centre of the administration and of ritualised, Byzantine-style pomp and ceremony, where orchestrated ritual movement marked the passage from one carefully guarded formal station and courtyard to the next, expressing the new hierarchy of empire.
The dynasty’s transition from a principality based on Ottoman gazis to an empire based on meritocracy and converts did not go smoothly, however. Elite Byzantine families remained in the city and still held positions of power—some while remaining Christians, others after converting to Islam.59 Many of the grand viziers between 1453 and 1515 would be from elite Greek families, including the nephew of the defeated Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Paleologus.60 As late as the end of the sixteenth century, descendants of Byzantine royalty held key financial positions.61 Tensions following the conquest centred on the rise of this Christian-convert administrative class, the appointing of Christians—especially Byzantine nobles who were members of the Paleologon dynasty—and Jews to positions of authority, and the allocation of revenues and landholdings to them. The rise to power of Collection recruits and individual Christians and Jews was accompanied by the decreased power of born Muslims, especially Sufis, nomads, frontier warriors, and even members of the religious class. The latter were infuriated by Mehmed II’s abolishment of the endowments that had funded religious institutions. Mehmed II’s new silver coin, taxation, extension of imperial control over the lands of wealthy families, and expansion of tax farming were all unpopular.62
Seeing the writing on the wall that these changes were permanent, gazis protested when in 1457 Mehmed II ordered an assault on Belgrade. The gazis said that when the city was captured, they would have to plough the land.63 They did not want to be settled agriculturalists, tied to the land and controlled by others. They wanted to wage constant war and live from plunder and booty. They sought to pin their frustrations on others. That the assault was led by converted Byzantine noble and grand vizier Mehmed Pasha Angelović (in office 1455–1468) contributed to their sense of alienation.64
Viziers of Christian and Jewish origin and Jewish tax farmers were vilified in historical accounts written after Mehmed II’s death by those representing the interests of the mystics and frontier warriors whose power and privilege had been limited by Mehmed II. They expressed resentment of the financial favours given to Greeks settled by Mehmed II in Istanbul, which resulted in some Christians or converted Christians rising to positions of wealth and power. Sufis’ wrath targeted the sultan’s confidant, the converted Byzantine noble Grand Vizier Rûm Mehmed Pasha, who was blamed for convincing Mehmed II to impose policies benefiting Christians and harming Muslims.65 The most prominent author among these writers was outraged by the new financial policies imposed by the vizier, which meant that he had to pay rent on the mansions and shops he had acquired after the conquest, contrary to Mehmed II’s original decree that any Muslim who voluntarily settled in the city would be allowed to own abandoned Christian or Jewish property.66
Writers also cast their aspersion on Jews, focusing in particular on Mehmed II’s converted Jewish physician and later boon companion and vizier, Hekim Yakub Pasha. The same Muslim author who sided with Sufis and gazis and castigated viziers of Christian origin claimed that, supposedly, prior to Hekim Yakub, sultans had never assigned public office to Jews ‘because they considered them corrupters of morals’. But when Hekim Yakub became vizier, ‘however many greedy Jews there are, they all meddled in the Sultan’s business’. Further, ‘Until he came, administrators were not hanged’.67 The author was referring to the Jewish tax farmer Yakub son of Israel, who was executed in 1472. When Mehmed II died in 1481, the Janissaries blamed Hekim Yakub Pasha—he was alleged to have been paid by Venice to poison the sultan—and went on a rampage in Istanbul, looting Jewish and Christian homes in the city, attacking the mansions of the wealthy and government officials, and decapitating the grand vizier and plundering his palace.68 What this burst of violence meant was that the interplay between integrating a new elite through conversion and the resulting tensions of this multireligious metropolis would have to be managed.
As of 1453, one of the greatest cities of Christendom was in Muslim hands. Unlike so many Arab and Turkish rulers before him, Mehmed II had succeeded in conquering Constantinople. But was it enough in his eyes? As he was completing his new palace in 1480, the sultan sent his navy to attack the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John on the island of Rhodes and their ally the Kingdom of Naples. The siege of Rhodes failed, but the fleet conquered the fortress of Otranto on the Italian mainland. After holding it for a year, however, it was relinquished without further territorial gain. The sultan had to content himself with being the ruler of the Second Rome, not the first.
Emperor and caesar. Khan and sultan. The Ottoman dynasty bore all the hallmarks of its Byzantine, Mongol-Turkish, and Muslim heritage, a Eurasian amalgam that lasted more than five hundred years. With their conquest of the Second Rome, the Ottomans became more like the Byzantines, claiming authority as successors to the Eastern Roman Empire, taking on an imperial ideology, seeing themselves as the inheritors of Rome, and adapting its architectural models. Like the Byzantine ruler before him, the Ottoman ruler called himself emperor and Roman caesar, with new horizons of power. The Byzantine emperor had been ‘God’s regent’ on earth, and the Ottoman ruler was ‘God’s shadow on earth’. Both appointed the leader of the ruling religious institution. After conquering Constantinople, Ottoman architecture, especially its mosques, always emulated the magnificent domed Byzantine Church of Divine Wisdom, the Hagia Sophia.
The Ottomans had become less like the Mongols. In 1478, for the first time, Mongol khans—in this case the Tatar khans of the Crimea, the descendants of Genghis Khan—acknowledged Ottoman suzerainty, rather than the reverse.69 The Ottomans established dominion over most of Anatolia by utilising artillery to decimate the Karamanids, one of the last of the Turcoman principalities, centred at Konya in the south, and the White Sheep (Akkoyunlu), the last of the Turcoman-nomad armies in the east, who had failed to obtain promised Venetian firearms.70
But like the Mongols, the Ottomans based their authority on the personal loyalty of their followers, borrowing their concepts of secular law and forms of military organisation, utilising gunpowder and cavalry. Genghis Khan had pronounced rules and regulations as well as set penalties for crimes; each decree was recorded and consulted and enacted by future rulers.71 Secular law came into being as the result of decisions made by the khan. Intended as more than merely the decrees of individual rulers, this dynastic law, the law of the ruling family, was binding so long as that family remained in power.72 Ottoman sultans also pronounced decrees that became the law of the land. The first Ottoman law code is attributed to Mehmed II.
As the Mongol rulers had before him, Mehmed II—who called himself, among other things, ‘khan’ like a Mongol leader—allowed for religious privileges among the conquered population. Genghis Khan had opposed bigotry and the preference of one ‘superior’ faith over another because he was the adherent of no religion. He had ‘honoured and respected the learned and pious of every sect’. His children and grandchildren had chosen different faiths, while others in his retinue followed the religions of their forefathers or none at all. No matter what religion they confessed, they adhered to Genghis Khan’s secular law, which did not distinguish between sects.73 At the Mongol court, the wives of the khan practised different religions than he, including Christianity. So, too, had the Christian princesses who lived as wives or concubines or mothers of sultans in the Seljuk harem been allowed to remain Christian. They had practised Christian rites in the harem’s chapels presided over by priests and had baptised their children, including future sultans, who were also circumcised according to Islamic custom.74 Many Seljuk rulers had spoken Greek with their wives, mothers, and daughters. This reflected the fact that until puberty they had been raised by their mothers in the harem where Greek women and Orthodox Christianity predominated. Many Seljuk sultans were half-Greek and half-Turkish.
But unlike the Mongols and the Seljuks, the large proportion of Christian women of the Ottoman harem were converted to Islam and taught to speak Turkish. The Ottomans tolerated differences, but they were not indifferent to them. They ranked religions according to a hierarchy: superior (Sunni Islam), tolerated (Christianity and Judaism), and ostensibly prohibited (Shi’i Islam, paganism, and atheism). Less religiously tolerant than the Mongols, and shedding their nomad ethos, the Ottomans became ever more European. They consolidated a new ruling class composed mostly of converted Christians. Their territory was the same as the Byzantine Empire when it had controlled much of Southeastern Europe and Anatolia. They made the Orthodox patriarch and church an arm of Ottoman power, laying the groundwork for the expansion of Orthodox Christianity at the expense of the Catholic Church in the Mediterranean and Southeastern Europe.75
The conquest of Constantinople made the Ottoman enterprise into a truly European empire, opening much of Southeastern Europe to further conquest. With Constantinople’s capture, the Ottomans ended Byzantine rule, declared themselves the inheritors of ancient Rome, and rebuilt the city. Mehmed II’s programme for the transformation of Constantinople—including the conversion of Byzantine churches, monasteries, and palaces, and the construction of Topkapı Palace as the new centre of administration—led to a new, Islamised cityscape. As the Ottomans revitalised the ‘dead centre of a dead empire’, whose revival was fed by repopulating the city with Christians, Jews, and Muslims from their ever-expanding empire, the Islamic world gained an imperial centre to match and even surpass Christendom in its wealth, size, and magnificence.76
The city was the beating heart of an Islamic power that was superior to the West prior to the modern West’s rise to global predominance. And, as we shall see, with a ruler who patronised Italian artists, attracted the admiration of his Western European peers, collected the wisdom of the ancients and his contemporaries in multiple languages in his personal library, and strengthened diplomatic and economic relations with the rest of Europe, Istanbul was anything but cut off from the exciting developments of the Renaissance.