Sultan Mohammad II, Fatih, the Ottoman Emperor, who conquered Constantinople

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On March 30, 1432 AD, Sultan Mohammad II, Fatih, the Ottoman Emperor, who conquered Constantinople and ended Byzantine or the Eastern Roman Empire, was born in Edirne, then the capital city of the Ottoman Turks. His father was Sultan Murad II. In 1453 at the age of 21 – two years after becoming Sultan – he conquered Constantinople, which was renamed Islambol, and is known as Istanbul today. It is said that when he entered the Byzantine capital and stepped into the ruins of the Boukoleon, known to the Ottomans and Iranians as the Palace of the Caesars, which was built over a thousand years before by Theodosius II, he recited the famous verse of Persian poetry from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: “The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.â€‌
Sultan Mohammad Fatih, who reigned for 30 years, did not persecute the Christians and even allowed the Greek Orthodox Church to maintain its headquarters in Constantinople. On 1 June 1453, just three days after the fall of the city, the procession of the new Patriarch, Gennadius, passed through the streets where the Sultan received the Head of the Christian Church graciously and himself invested him with the signs of his office.
This ceremonial investiture would be repeated by all Sultans and Patriarchs thereafter until the end of Ottoman rule in 1923. The Ottomans divided their Empire into millets or subject nations, of which the Greek Christians were the largest, known as the Millet-e Roum. Sadly, when the Greeks, revolted against Ottoman rule with the support of Britain, France and Russia, during the 1820s and 1830s, they launched a general massacre of Muslims in what is now Greece, destroyed centuries of Islamic culture, and converted mosques into churches.