Mehmed II, byname Mehmed Fatih (Turkish: Mehmed the Conqueror), (born March 30, 1432, Adrianople, Thrace, Ottoman Empire—died May 3, 1481, Hunkârçayırı, near Maltepe, near Constantinople), Ottoman sultan from 1444 to 1446 and from 1451 to 1481. A great military leader, he captured Constantinople and conquered the territories in Anatolia and the Balkans that comprised the Ottoman Empire’s heartland for the next four centuries.
The conqueror reorganized the Ottoman government and, for the first time, codified the criminal law and the laws relating to his subjects in one code, whereas the constitution was elaborated in another, the two codes forming the nucleus of all subsequent legislation. In the utterly autocratic personality of the conqueror, the classical image of an Ottoman padishah (emperor) was born. He punished with the utmost severity those who resisted his decrees and laws, and even his Ottoman contemporaries considered him excessively hard.
Nevertheless, Mehmed may be considered the most broad-minded and freethinking of the Ottoman sultans. After the fall of Constantinople, he gathered Italian humanists and Greek scholars at his court; he caused the patriarch Gennadius II Scholarios to write a credo of the Christian faith and had it translated into Turkish; he collected in his palace a library of works in Greek and Latin. He called Gentile Bellini from Venice to decorate the walls of his palace with frescoes as well as to paint his portrait (now in the National Gallery, London). Around the grand mosque that he constructed, he erected eight colleges, which, for nearly a century, kept their rank as the highest teaching institutions of the Islamic sciences in the empire. At times, he assembled the ʿulamāʾ, or learned Muslim teachers, and caused them to discuss theological problems in his presence. In his reign, mathematics, astronomy, and Muslim theology reached their highest level among the Ottomans. And Mehmed himself left a divan (a collection of poems in the traditional style of classical Ottoman literature).
