Father of the Conquest
While England was busy losing France and preparing to lose its mind—Henry VI’s collapse was two years off, the Wars of the Roses four—the Ottomans were quietly putting an empire back together. They had rather more to put back.
Mehmed I took the throne in 1413, though not everyone was persuaded. First came a brother nobody had expected to see again: Mustafa, with an account of how he had been captured at Ankara, carried off to Samarkand, and released only after Timur died. The account was not believed. He was given the name Düzme—”the counterfeit”—and demanded half the empire regardless. Then the Byzantine emperor released Mehmed’s nephew Orhan, son of Süleyman, who promptly began conspiring on his own account. And alongside Mustafa there rose Sheikh Bedreddin, preaching the abolition of property and the essential unity of all the Abrahamic faiths. The year 1416 was a full one.
None of this stopped Mehmed from rebuilding what Timur and the civil war had taken apart. In eight years he recovered nearly all the Anatolian beyliks save Karaman, absorbed the Jandarids, and took part of Albania. His son Murad II inherited the throne, and with it his father’s difficulties entire.
Murad began by blinding his two younger brothers, Yusuf and Mahmud, and shutting them up in Bursa. Mehmed I, it is said, had intended to send the boys to the Byzantine emperor for safekeeping; the emperor, learning that the arrangement had been ignored, released Mustafa from custody. Mustafa was caught and hanged in 1422. Next Murad’s own younger brother made his attempt—another Mustafa, called Küçük, “the Small,” to tell him from the first. This one was betrayed by his own tutor and got the same rope. The blinded pair in Bursa were carried off by plague some years later. By the mid-1420s there were no claimants left.
Modern scholarship, incidentally, holds that the counterfeit Mustafa was nothing of the kind—that he was Bayezid’s son exactly as he claimed, and that the Ottoman chroniclers made an impostor of him to keep the succession tidy. Two sultans’ legitimacy rested on his being a fraud, and the men who wrote the histories worked for the sultans.
Having reigned some thirty years—with an interval during which he abdicated in favour of his twelve-year-old son, and then had to be fetched back because a twelve-year-old proved insufficient at Varna—Murad left the throne to Mehmed II, called Fatih. The usual translation is “the Conqueror,” and it is correct, though the root ف‑ت‑ح means to open: the same root gives miftah, “key,” and the name of the first sura, al-Fatiha, “the Opening.” There is no contradiction. The sura on the taking of Mecca is al-Fath, “the Opening,” and the chronicles of the Arab conquests are the futuh. To take a city is to open it.
His contemporaries, in fact, used the longer form: Ebü’l-Feth, “father of the conquest”—which is how Dursun Bey, who served him, titled his chronicle. The title was not new. Four centuries earlier the caliph had bestowed it on Alp Arslan, not for Manzikert as is generally supposed but for the taking of Ani in 1064; Malik-Shah held it after him. The formula for those who open gates was waiting; it remained only to find gates worth the trouble. The short Fatih attached itself to Mehmed centuries later, once the fatherhood had ceased to be of interest. But that is another story.
