Chapter One: The Conqueror
The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople ... Therefore you are the legitimate Emperor of the Romans ... And he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also Emperor of the whole earth.
-George Trapezuntios to Mehmed the Conqueror, 1466
On the afternoon of 29 May 1453 the Sultan entered the long-desired city. Riding a white horse, he advanced down an avenue of death. The city of Constantinople was being put to the sack by the triumphant Ottoman army. According to an observer from Venice, blood flowed through the streets like rainwater after a sudden storm; corpses floated out to sea like melons along a canal. An Ottoman official, Tursun Beg, wrote that the troops `took silver and gold vessels, precious stones, and all sorts of valuable goods and fabrics from the imperial palace and the houses of the rich. In this fashion many people were delivered from poverty and made rich. Every tent was filled with handsome boys and beautiful girls.' On rode the Sultan, until he reached the mother church of Eastern Christendom and seat of the Oecumenical Patriarch, the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom built 900 years earlier by the Emperor Justinian with the largest dome in Europe. He dismounted and bent down to pick up a handful of earth, which he poured over his turban as an act of humility before God.
Inside the shrine which Greeks considered `the earthly heaven, throne of God's glory, the vehicle of the cherubim', a Turk proclaimed: `There is no God but Allah: Muhammad is his Prophet.' The cathedral of Haghia Sophia had become the mosque of Aya Sofya. As the Sultan entered, hundreds of Greeks who had taken refuge in the cathedral hoping to be saved by a miracle, were being herded out by their captors. He stopped one of his soldiers hacking at the marble floor, saying, with a conqueror's pride: `Be satisfied with the booty and the captives; the buildings of the city belong to me.' Below golden mosaics of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, Orthodox saints and Byzantine emperors, he prayed to Allah. After receiving the congratulations of his retinue, he replied: `May the house of Osman there forever continue! May success on the stone of its seal be graven!'
Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, known in Turkish as Fatih, the Conqueror, was only 20 in 1453. Born in Edirne, the Ottoman capital zoo miles north-west of Constantinople, he had, according to a chronicle which he himself commissioned, been possessed since his childhood with the idea of conquering Constantinople, and constantly insisted on the necessity of taking the city without delay. The opportunity to realize his ambition came after he inherited the throne in on the death of his father Murad II.
