The death of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror

The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, died on his way to a new campaign whose destination he kept secret, at the age of forty-nine, after he had changed the face of history by conquering the capital of the Byzantines.

Mehmed II assumed the sultanate young, at twenty-one, and soon fulfilled the dream that Muslims had cherished for eight centuries by conquering Constantinople in 857 AH. He was titled "the Conqueror," and the city became the capital of his state.

He did not stop after the conquest; he annexed Serbia, the Morea, Bosnia, Trebizond and the Crimea, and organized the state with his famous Kanunname. With all this he loved learning and scholars, mastered several languages, and gathered jurists, philosophers and poets in his court.

On 4 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 886 AH (May 1481) he died in his camp near Üsküdar while preparing a great campaign whose destination he had kept even from those closest to him — some say he intended Italy — and he was buried in the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul.