Muhammad al-Fatih
Ottoman sultan who took Constantinople in 1453 at the age of 21, fulfilling a hadith of the Prophet ﷺ: 'You shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful prince its prince, and what a wonderful army its army.' Ended the Byzantine Empire. Named Istanbul.
- Lived
- 1432 - 1481 CE
- Read next
- Meaning of the name Muhammad
Who was Muhammad al-Fatih? Ottoman sultan who took Constantinople in 1453 at the age of 21, fulfilling a hadith of the Prophet ﷺ: 'You shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful prince its prince, and what a wonderful army its army.' Ended the Byzantine Empire. Named Istanbul.
Life
Mehmed II ibn Murad ("Muhammad al-Fatih" in the Arabic tradition, "the Conqueror") ascended the Ottoman throne in 1451 at 19, on the death of his father Murad II. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had said, in a hadith preserved in the Musnad of Ahmad: "You shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful prince its prince, and what a wonderful army its army." Every Muslim ruler for eight centuries had aspired to be that prince.
Mehmed was prepared for it from boyhood. He was fluent in five languages, read Alexander and Caesar, studied the failed sieges of Constantinople across seven previous Muslim attempts. In April 1453, at the age of 21, he arrived at the walls of Constantinople with 80,000 troops and cannons cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban, including one gun so large it required 60 oxen to move.
The siege lasted 53 days. His most audacious act was to portage his fleet overland, greased logs and rollers, from the Bosphorus into the Golden Horn, bypassing the Byzantine chain that had defended the harbour for a millennium. On 29 May 1453 the walls were breached at the Gate of St Romanus. Constantine XI, the last Roman emperor, died fighting in the breach. His body was never identified.
Mehmed entered the city, prayed the first Zuhr in Hagia Sophia, ordered the church converted to a mosque but the Christian populations of the city protected and their properties respected. He turned Constantinople into Istanbul, the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. The Byzantine Empire, 1,123 years old, the last continuous political line of the Roman Empire, ended on his watch.
He continued expansion for the rest of his life: Bosnia, Serbia, Trebizond, Crimea, and campaigns against Venice and the Papal States. He died in 1481, at 49, on his way to a campaign whose target he had kept secret. He was called al-Fatih, the Conqueror, from that day forward.
Stories
Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic historical sources.
The walls of Constantinople
For 53 days in the spring of 1453 the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II besieged the greatest walls of the medieval world. When they finally broke, the Roman Empire, unbroken for 1,123 years, ended. The Prophet ﷺ had promised its conqueror paradise. Mehmed had trained for that promise since childhood.