In
characteristic exuberance, Mehmed II, the Ottoman Sultan, decided to
leave Istanbul earlier than expected. His doctors warned him about
too much exertion at his age (forty-nine) to which Mehmed scoffed and
refused their medicines as a show of his vitality to his troops. They
cheered him, and the armies soon arrived in Italy to face crusaders
attempting to take back Otranto, which his general Gedik Ahmed Pasha
had seized the year before.
Mehmed
had come to rule the Ottomans at eleven years old when his father,
Murad II, retired after securing peace with the Karaman Emirate in
nearby Anatolia. Young Mehmed was immediately mixed up into war with
the Hungarians, who broke their treaty. Mehmed recalled his father to
office, writing to him, “If you are the Sultan, come and lead your
armies. If I am the Sultan I hereby order you to come and lead my
armies.” Murad returned for five years, and then Mehmed again
became sultan, now ready to lead his own armies.
Mehmed’s
first action was to secure the profitable Bosporus Straits. He built
up his navy and expanded fortresses, soon besieging the city that had
controlled the strait (and much of the world) for a millennium:
Constantinople. It had only ever fallen once, due to treachery in the
Fourth Crusade, but now Mehmed meant to conquer it. Despite
Constantinople’s cutting-edge siege techniques that had defended it
for centuries, Mehmed cut it off by land and sea, bringing ships
overland to attack from the north. Constantinople fell, and, at only
twenty-one years old, Mehmed secured “Caesar” as a new title for
himself.
Over
the next thirty years, Mehmed continued to conquer in every
direction. His armies stormed Serbia, Morea, Trebizond, Karaman,
Albania, and Crimea. Wherever he did not conquer directly, he
installed a sophisticated system of tribute and vassal states. If any
ever threatened to withhold tribute, that was grounds enough to
dispatch a new campaign for vicious conquest. Much of Mehmed’s time
was spent breaking the authority of the Italian Venetians and
Genoese, who had colonized much of the east with vast mercantile
forces. By 1479, Venice finally signed an extensive treaty to end the
Ottoman onslaught.
Mehmed’s
sight was then set on the Kingdom of Naples in Southern Italy. In
1480, he dispatched a force that besieged and took Otranto. Even as
the walls crumbled, the populace remained resilient with Bishop
Pendinelli and Count Largo making a final stand in the cathedral. To
break Italian spirits with shock tactics, the Ottomans seized over
eight hundred men from around the city and ordered them to convert to
Islam on threat of death. Antonio Primaldi, a tailor, was the first
to refuse. He was then also the first beheaded, followed by each of
the other martyrs. With the city secure and winter approaching, the
main force of the army retreated to Albania to campaign again the
next year.
In
the meantime, King Ferdinand of Naples began assembling an army. Pope
Sixtus IV called for a crusade, which was answered by the French and,
Mehmed’s old nemeses, the Hungarians. The crusader army besieged
the city on May 1 and was met later that week by Mehmed’s full
invading force. After a grueling two-day battle, the crusader army
was broken. With reinforcements half a continent away, the Neapolitan
army fought a series of retreating battles before Naples itself fell.
Rome was evacuated, and the pope fled to France.
With
the Papal States in chaos and no military buffer between them and the
Ottomans, the Republic of Florence proposed a treaty in 1482. Lorenzo
de Medici sent a young artist from nearby Vinci named Leonardo to
present a gift of a silver harp in the shape of a horse’s head.
Mehmed was impressed with Leonardo’s skills and added him to his
court in Istanbul, where he had collected some of the greatest minds
in the world.
Many
in Europe considered de Medici’s act betrayal of Christendom, but
other northern Italian states followed suit to protect themselves
from oblivion. Mehmed levied monetary tributes that squelched the
growing Renaissance there. Instead, many of the artists and
scientists migrated north to Germany or to Istanbul to work in
Mehmed’s university, library, and studios. While Islam remained the
dominant religion, Mehmed proved tolerant of others as long as they
maintained their treaties and paid taxes.
Italy
would be the last of Mehmed’s conquests, who died in 1484. His
successors continued to expand the empire into Africa and the Middle
East, exploiting new innovations in engineering to further their
military and infrastructure. Southern Italy proved a notoriously
violent province, routinely in rebellion spurred on by Christian
states such as Spain, who notably refused the Italian Christopher
Columbus’s suggestion to explore west as they needed the ships to
challenge Ottoman power in the Mediterranean. He later found an eager
ear in the French court, where papal authority was already waning.
While Istanbul remained the center of the world, Paris would be the
center of Catholicism, constantly battling the coalition of
Protestant states to the north and east.
--
In
reality, Mehmed II died in 1481 before reinforcing Italy, and Otranto
returned to Christian control. Legend holds that his untimely death
was poisoning at the hand of his doctors, possibly on the order of
his son. All through Christendom, church bells rang, and the people
rejoiced at the news of their deliverance from a man who seemed to be
an unstoppable conqueror.
