Which ottoman leader captured the city of constantinople

Anatolia gradually transformed from a Byzantine Christian land into an Islamic land dominated by the Turks. For a long time the Turks in Anatolia were divided up into a patchwork of small Islamic states. However, one ruler, Osman I, built up a powerful kingdom that soon absorbed all the others and formed the Ottoman Empire.

In the century after the death of Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. The fall of Bursa meant the loss of Byzantine control over northwestern Anatolia. The important city of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in The Ottoman victory at Kosovo in effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe.

The Battle of Nicopolis in , widely regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages, failed to stop the advance of the victorious Ottoman Turks.

With the extension of Turkish dominion into the Balkans, the strategic conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. The empire controlled nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city, but the Byzantines were temporarily relieved when Timur invaded Anatolia in the Battle of Ankara in He took Sultan Bayezid I as a prisoner.

The capture of Bayezid I threw the Turks into disorder. It ended when Mehmed I emerged as the sultan and restored Ottoman power. Against all these enemies, the Byzantines could only look west in search of help. The pope, however, continued to stress that aid would only come if the Byzantines adopted the Catholicism of the Latin church. While the Byzantine emperors were willing to do so in order to save their empire, the populace hated the Catholics for the sack of Constantinople, and so attempts to reconcile with the Catholic Church only led to riots.

Further theological disagreements inflamed the bitterness between the Orthodox and the Catholics. While civil war and religious disputes occupied the Byzantines, the Ottomans slowly closed in on the empire. They crossed into Europe and annexed most of the lands around Constantinople. The Ottoman Turks swiftly conquered the lands in the Near East, until eventually Constantinople was reduced essentially just to its city limits, a capital without its empire.

Inside the city walls, Emperor Constantine XI was determined to hold out, even if the situation was hopeless. The siege, once it began, lasted for eight weeks. The defenders hunkered down behind the huge thousand-year-old walls of their capital and waited. Seven thousand defenders were matched against some 80, invaders. Outside the city was mustered the huge Ottoman army, which in fact, even included some Christian forces who were fighting with the Ottomans as allies.

The elite of the Ottomans were the Janissaries. The Janissaries were what we today would call shock troops, who as boys had been taken from their Christian parents in the Balkans, under Ottoman rule, had been converted to Islam and then conscripted into the Ottoman army, where they were a kind of supersoldier. Learn more about Istanbul-Capital of the Byzantine Emperors.

One other figure played a decisive role in the fall of Constantinople, and that was a Hungarian artillery expert by the name of Orban, who gave the Ottomans a dreaded new weapon, a monster cannon using gunpowder. Gunpowder, with its explosive potential, was actually a Chinese invention, from around the 9 th century. Knowledge of gunpowder had reached Europe around the 12 th century.

Once this technology was perfected by people like Orban, it would devastate the certainties and the traditions and the way of life of the medieval age. Think of the Middle Ages, and one of the first things that probably would leap to mind for us are castles, those immense, strongly fortified structures that were the power bases of their day.

Artillery would change all of that, as the shattering of the walls of Constantinople demonstrated. The young artillery expert Orban at first offered his services to Constantinople.

His native Hungary was a Christian country, so there was this religious affinity, and for a while, Orban worked for Constantinople. But then the money to pay him ran out, so Orban went over to the Turks because they offered him a better salary. It was nothing personal, just better financial incentives. Now, Orban, the professional artillery master constructed a monster cannon, the largest yet seen, that would be used to pound the ancient walls of Constantinople.

The cannon was 27 feet long, and it was able to shoot a 1,pound stone ball at the defenses of the beleaguered city. When this huge artillery piece was actually cast and constructed in faraway Adrianople, it had to be hauled more than a hundred miles to the besieged city. Hundreds of Turkish soldiers and teams of oxen dragged it there, moving two and a half miles every day.

When it finally had been dragged and put into position, the sight must have been awe-inspiring, and clearly very bad news for the defenders of Constantinople.

With deafening thunder, the cannon fired. In fact, the cannon could only be fired seven times each day, because it needed to be cooled off in between or risk exploding. In addition to this monster, guns were many other smaller cannons that continued the bombardment that had begun.

This was the sound of a military revolution, making stone walls and towers and battlements largely obsolete. Learn more about the fall of the Roman Empire. More than feet long, it's estimated to have seated up to , people. The Hagia Sophia marked a triumph of architectural design. Built on the site of former imperial churches by Justinian I, it was completed in less than six years by a workforce of 10, laborers.

Four columns supported a massive dome with a diameter of more than feet, while its polished marble and dazzling mosaics gave the Hagia Sophia the impression of always being brightly lit. Constantinople became a center of the iconoclast controversy after Leo III in outlawed the worshipping of religious icons. Although the Seventh Ecumenical Council of reversed that decision, iconoclasm resumed as a rule of law less than 30 years later and lasted until With the Great Schism of , when the Christian church split into Roman and Eastern divisions, Constantinople became the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, remaining so even after the Muslim Ottoman Empire took control of the city in the 15th century.

Famed for its immense wealth, Constantinople endured at least a dozen sieges over its 1,plus years as the Byzantine capital. These included attempts by Arab armies in the seventh and eighth centuries, as well as the Bulgarians and the Rus early Russians in the ninth and 10th centuries. In the early 13th century, prior to heading to Jerusalem , the armies of the Crusades were diverted to Constantinople over a power struggle. When their promised payments fell through, they sacked the city in and established a Latin state.

Although the Byzantines reclaimed control of Constantinople in , the city remained the sole major population center of what was now a shell of the empire. Shortly after ascending to the Ottoman throne in , Mehmed II began formulating plans for a major assault on Constantinople.

With the overwhelming size of his armed forces, and additional advantages gained by the use of gunpowder, he succeeded where his predecessors failed, claiming Constantinople for Muslim rule on May 29, While the early decades of an Ottoman Empire-ruled Constantinople were marked by the transformation of churches into mosques, Mehmed II spared the church of the Holy Apostles and allowed a diverse population to remain.

Following the conqueror, the most prominent ruler of the Ottomans was Suleyman the Magnificent who ruled from to Along with developing a series of public works, Suleyman transformed the judicial system, championed the arts and continued to expand the empire. In the 19th century, the declining Ottoman state underwent major changes with the implementation of the Tanzimat Reforms, which guaranteed property rights and outlawed execution without a trial.

The Treaty of Lausanne formally established the Republic of Turkey, which moved its capital to Ankara. Old Constantinople, long known informally as Istanbul, officially adopted the name in Ancient History Encyclopedia. The Age of Suleyman the Magnificent. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Washington Post. The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.