Mehmed II

Mehmed II was the Ottoman sultan who captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the thousand year old Byzantine Empire and securing his own epithet, Fatih, meaning the Conqueror. He first came to the throne as a boy of twelve in 1444, when his father Murad II abdicated, but Murad was recalled to power after a crusader army threatened the empire and a subsequent janissary revolt, and Mehmed did not become sultan again in his own right until Murad's death in 1451. He prepared the siege of Constantinople with immense care, including the casting of enormous bronze cannon by the Hungarian engineer Orban and the construction of the fortress of Rumeli Hisari on the Bosphorus to cut the city off from Black Sea reinforcement, and the city fell after a siege of less than two months in May 1453. He went on to complete the Ottoman conquest of Byzantine successor states in Greece and the Balkans, absorb the remaining Serbian and Bosnian kingdoms, and extend Ottoman power into the Crimea, while ruling Constantinople, which he made his new capital, as a genuinely multi-religious imperial city. His reign is conventionally treated by many historians as marking the end of the medieval period in the eastern Mediterranean and the opening of the early modern one.