The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire Read Online Free PDF

on 6 March 1447, succeeding Eugenius IV, and on 8 March of the following year, spurred on by John Hunyadi, he called for another crusade against the Turks. Hunyadi, this time with only the Vlachs and a few Germans and Czechs as allies, crossed the Danube in September 1448 into Serbia, while Murat set out from Sofia to stop him with a much larger army. The two armies met at Kosovo Polje, the ‘Field of Blackbirds’, where the Serbs had gone down fighting against the Turks in 1389. The outcome of the second Battle of Kosovo, fought from 17 to 20 October 1448, was the same as that of the first, with the Ottomans routing the Christians. Mehmet had his baptism of fire commanding the right wing of his father’s army in the battle, which ended when Hunyadi abandoned his defeated troops and fled the field, living to fight on against the Turks for another eight years.
    The Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus died on 31 October 1448. John was survived by his brothers Constantine, Demetrius and Thomas, as well as by his mother, the Empress Helena Dragas. Constantine, the eldest, used the surname Dragases, the Greek form of his mother’s maiden name. At the time of John’s death Constantine and his brother Thomas were in Mistra, capital of the Despotate of the Morea, while Demetrius was in Selembria, just a day’s ride from Constantinople. As soon as he received news of his brother’s death Demetrius rushed back to Constantinople to make his claim for the throne. But Helena was determined that Constantine should succeed, and so she stopped Demetrius from taking control and asserted her right to serve as regent in the interim. She then sent a courier to Mistra to inform Constantine that his brother John had died and that he was the rightful successor. When Constantine received the news his supporters acclaimed him as emperor, and they arranged for his coronation to be carried out at once. And so, on 6 January 1449, he was crowned in the church of St Demetrius at Mistra as Constantine XI, fated to be the last Emperor of Byzantium.
    After his coronation Constantine divided the Despotate of the Morea between his two brothers, with Demetrius ruling in Mistra and Thomas in Achaia, in the western Peloponnesos. Constantine then left Mistra for Constantinople, where he arrived on 12 March 1449. Shortly afterwards he sent a courier to Sultan Murat to convey his greetings and to ask for a peace agreement.
    Mehmet’s mother Hüma Hatun died in September 1449, after which she was buried in the garden of the Muradiye mosque in Bursa. The dedicatory inscription on her tomb records that it was built by Mehmet ‘for his deceased mother, queen among women - may the earth of her grave be fragrant’.
    Meanwhile, Mehmet had become a father for the first time in January 1448, when his concubine Gülbahar gave birth to a son, the future Beyazit II. Little is known of Gülbahar’s origins, but she was probably Greek. The concubines in the imperial harem were almost always Christians, although high-born Muslim women were sometimes taken in as wives of the princes or sultans in dynastic marriages. Murat himself had made two such dynastic marriages, the first of them to Princess Mara, daughter of George Brancović, the Despot of Serbia, and the second to Halima Hatun, daughter of Emir Ibrahim II, ruler of the Çandaroğlu Türkmen tribe in central Anatolia, thus seeking to establish cordial relations with powers in both Europe and Asia.
    Murat arranged for such a marriage for Mehmet the following year, though without consulting his son beforehand, which made him very resentful. The bride chosen by Murat for Mehmet was Princess Sitti Hatun, daughter of the emir Ibrahim, ruler of the Dulkadırlı Türkmen tribe in central Anatolia. By this dynastic union, together with his own marriage to Halima Hatun, Murat established alliances with two powerful tribes against his most formidable enemy in Anatolia, the Karamanid Türkmen, who blocked the expansion of