DRAFT 2 -- Mehmed II Vignette:
1. From Baghdad to Istanbul: Another Kind of Coexistence
The School of Ḥunayn exemplified something like high syncretism: genuine intellectual fusion across confessional lines, enabled by thin Tier‑1 virtues operating within a relatively favorable imperial patronage structure. Not all successful intercultural arrangements look like that. More common—and often more durable—are structured modi vivendi: arrangements in which deep differences persist, communities remain segmented, yet coexistence is maintained over long periods through institutional frameworks and calibrated policies. By modus vivendi here, I mean a working arrangement for coexistence that does not require shared ultimate values or thick mutual recognition, only institutions and reciprocal restraint.¹ The Ottoman Empire under Mehmed II and his successors offers a particularly instructive case of a third type: a non‑liberal, hierarchical order that nonetheless sustained multi‑confessional coexistence for centuries. Understanding how such arrangements work—what thin virtues they require, what limits they face—expands our conceptual repertoire beyond the liberal/illiberal binary that dominates contemporary debates.¹
2. Palimpsest and Word–Deed Integrity
Mehmed II has long functioned as a kind of Rorschach figure. Contemporary Venetian reports, later Habsburg pamphlets, and some Byzantine exiles cast him as an apocalyptic Antichrist; nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century Turkish nationalists refigure him as a proto‑secular nation‑builder; other modern biographers emphasize his patronage of Greek and Italian humanists, or his supposed attraction to Christianity, or his ruthless “one faith, one ruler” intransigence.² Babinger, to his credit, warns the reader at the outset that “the absence of reliable documentation makes it impossible to sketch a psychologically rounded portrait of Mehmed,” and then spends the rest of his book doing precisely that, stitching together hostile diplomatic reports, courtly panegyrics, retrospective theological judgments, and romantic nationalist histories into a vivid but internally strained figure.³ Genres and temporal layers blur into a single palimpsest. The result tells us at least as much about the hopes and fears of successive observers as it does about Mehmed himself.
A stricter evidentiary discipline is possible. In what follows, only those words that are tied to Mehmed’s acts of will, and that cohere with institutional practices over time, will count as evidence for his priorities. That means privileging texts such as his kanunname (law code), his charters to the Orthodox Patriarch and the Bosnian Franciscans, and the theological confession he commissioned Gennadios Scholarios to write, and pairing them with deeds such as the systematic use of the devşirme (the “human tithe”—a periodic levy of Christian boys from Balkan villages, converted, trained in palace schools or Janissary corps, and often promoted to high office), the reorganization of the Janissaries, and the long, messy work of repopulating and rebuilding Constantinople.⁴ What falls away are uncorroborated anecdotes and free‑floating ascriptions of motive. This does not yield a “true inner Mehmed,” but it does allow a more disciplined reconstruction of the thin virtues his rule in fact exhibits.
3. A Thin Virtue Profile
Viewed through that word–deed filter, Mehmed does not look like a proto‑liberal avant la lettre, nor like a flat caricature of “Oriental despotism.” What comes into focus instead is a cluster of thin, Tier‑1 virtues: traits of intelligence and restraint that help make a multi‑confessional modus vivendi governable from above, without presupposing egalitarian respect or high syncretic openness.
3.1 Prudential, systemic intelligence
The first is a kind of cold prudential intelligence: an ability and willingness to think in systemic, long‑term terms about the empire as a whole. The devşirme turns scattered Christian village boys into a centrally controlled corps whose advancement depends on the sultan, addressing recurrent problems of military loyalty and provincial magnate power.⁵ The Janissary corps and palace schools built on that human material become key instruments of centralized rule, staffed by men with no local power base apart from their office.⁶ The kanunname codifies punishments, taxes, salaries, and offices in a way that both constrains lesser officials and concentrates ultimate authority in the palace.⁷ The notorious succession clause—on which more below—casts even dynastic violence in the same dry, impersonal idiom of “order of the world” rather than personal vendetta.⁸ None of this requires attributing humane motives. It does show a ruler preoccupied with consequences at the scale of the dynasty and the empire, and willing to impose relatively stable, general rules on his own officials in pursuit of that end.
3.2 Structured openness to difference
A second thin virtue is structured openness to difference. Mehmed shows little interest in theological fusion; there is no Ottoman analogue to the collaborative translation workshops of Baghdad in his court. But he consistently treats confessional and ethnic diversity as a resource to be organized rather than an anomaly to be crushed. Greek and Italian architects and engineers are employed to repair and adapt Byzantine structures and to construct new mosques and fortifications; Armenian and Greek merchants and financiers are drawn into the fiscal apparatus; Jewish and Christian diplomats and dragomans serve as indispensable intermediaries with Latin Christendom.⁹ His charter to the restored Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople recognizes the Patriarch as ethnarch of the Greek Orthodox community, grants him certain tax exemptions and judicial authority, and promises protection in exchange for loyalty and tribute.¹⁰ A similar pattern appears in the ahidnâme granted to the Bosnian Franciscans, which confirms their right to maintain churches and property on condition of political obedience.¹¹ None of these documents proclaim equality of faiths. They do, however, instantiate a durable, formalized place for religious others within the imperial order. That is a recognizable virtue of structured openness: the capacity to treat plural communities as enduring components of an imperial system rather than as temporary hostages or enemies to be extirpated.
3.3 Conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint
A third thin virtue is conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint. Isaac Zarfati’s mid‑fifteenth‑century letter, urging German and Hungarian Jews to migrate to Ottoman lands, contrasts the persecutions and expulsions of Christendom with the relative security and opportunity Jews enjoy under the sultan: “Here every man may dwell in peace under his own vine and fig tree, and no one makes them afraid.”¹² The rhetoric is promotional, but it reflects a real pattern. Mehmed’s policies toward the Greek population of Istanbul, as Halil İnalcık shows, combine coercive forced migrations (sürgün) to repopulate the city with tax privileges and recognition of communal institutions; churches are sometimes converted to mosques, sometimes left in Christian hands, and major Byzantine buildings are repaired rather than destroyed.¹³ Across the empire, non‑Muslims remain subordinate, marked and taxed as such. Yet they are also repeatedly treated as communities to be governed and taxed, not as permanent enemies to be expelled or annihilated. Toleration here is not premised on equal respect; it is a calibrated restraint grounded in revenue needs, geopolitical calculation, and a certain recognition that the empire cannot function without its religious minorities.
4. Constantinople as Test Case
Constantinople provides the clearest test of this thin virtue profile. The city could easily have gone the way of other conquered centers: left to decay into a garrisoned semi‑ruin, stripped of its multi‑confessional character, or broken into a provincial backwater eclipsed by some upstart capital. Mehmed instead treats it as the linchpin of a new, explicitly imperial project. Strategically, it controls the Bosporus and joins Anatolia to the Balkans; symbolically, it allows him to claim the title Qayser‑i Rûm (Caesar of Rome) and to present the Ottoman house as heir to both Byzantine and Islamic imperial traditions.¹⁴
The ensuing policies are anything but haphazard. Immediately after the conquest, Mehmed ransoms some prisoners himself and allows them to remain; shortly thereafter, he issues edicts ordering the transfer of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish households from other parts of the empire to repopulate the city.¹⁵ These forced migrations (sürgün) are often paired with inducements: tax reductions, grants of land or lodging, the allocation of specific quarters to particular confessional groups.¹⁶ Over time, as İnalcık and others document, the state layers voluntary migration on top of these coerced movements, creating a city in which Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish neighborhoods are distinct yet economically interdependent.¹⁷ By the end of Mehmed’s reign, Constantinople’s population likely exceeded its late Byzantine levels, and the city had resumed its role as a major commercial and administrative center of the eastern Mediterranean.¹⁸
This is not a melting pot. Confessional lines remain salient and legally encoded in the millet structure that will later be elaborated. At the same time, it is not a simple story of zero‑sum domination. Mehmed’s word–deed pattern here illustrates the thin virtues already identified: systemic planning, structured openness to difference, and conditional tolerance as tools for building a multi‑faith modus vivendi under autocratic rule. The empire that emerges is hierarchical, often harsh, and never liberal in any meaningful sense. Yet for centuries it sustains a dense, multi‑confessional urban life in its capital and across its provinces under conditions that, on many alternative paths, could easily have yielded depopulation, expulsion, or permanent low‑grade religious war.
5. Fratricide as Limit Case
It is precisely against this background that the law of fratricide must be read—not as an awkward detail to be explained away, but as a dark counterpoint. Mehmed’s kanunname does not merely record a brutal custom; it explicitly authorizes whoever ascends the throne to kill his brothers “for the order of the world” (nizâm‑i ‘âlem), and states that “the majority of the ulema have approved this procedure.”¹⁹ Later Ottoman jurists labor to justify the article using the familiar tools of maslaha (public interest), “lesser of two evils” reasoning, and the Qurʾanic dictum that “fitna is worse than killing,” presenting the elimination of rival princes as a measure adopted in the name of public order.²⁰
By almost any Tier‑2 standard one might bring to bear—including those of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, humanism, and, crucially here, the Qurʾan and Sharia as understood within the empire itself—deliberately killing non‑rebellious or infant brothers is a grave sin. Ottoman legal discussions themselves acknowledge that the execution of non‑rebelling princes pushes the limits of Sharia, conflicting with basic norms against killing innocents and punishing one person for another’s potential sins.²¹ Jurists distinguish between executing a brother in open rebellion (treated as uncontroversially legal), killing one clearly preparing revolt (debated but sometimes shoehorned into the law of rebelliousness), and killing non‑rebellious or infant princes merely for their potential to cause future fitna (the most contentious category).²² Some scholars refuse to endorse the broadest applications; others acquiesce under political pressure, and the kanunname itself conspicuously concedes that only “most” jurists approve.²³
What is most striking, in this context, is not simply that fratricide occurs—dynastic killings were common from Europe to Asia—but that Mehmed’s law frames the sin of fratricide, by almost any standard including the Qurʾan and Sharia, not even as a “necessary evil” but as a public good, an act done “for the order of the world” in the public interest.²⁴ It stands as one of the darkest chapters in this autocratic regime’s history, and after a particularly shocking succession in which Mehmed III had nineteen brothers—many of them young children—strangled in a single day, it was quietly abandoned in practice.²⁵ Within a generation, Ahmed I broke with precedent by sparing his brother Mustafa and shifting toward a system of seniority and confinement in the kafes; the fratricide clause was never formally repealed, but it ceased to guide succession.²⁶ Even judged narrowly on its own instrumental terms, the law misfires: it generates controversy, trauma, and continued succession strife rather than the stable order it purports to serve.
The law of fratricide, in other words, marks a limit case. The same systemic, order‑obsessed intelligence that helps construct a durable multi‑confessional modus vivendi in Constantinople is, in this domain, willing to override the religious and moral standards the regime otherwise enforces and to recode a grave sin as a public good. Thin Tier‑1 virtues of planning and consequence‑tracking can coexist with, and even abet, serious Tier‑2 failures. The Ottoman example is instructive not because it offers a model to emulate, but because it shows how far a non‑liberal, autocratic regime can go in sustaining a multi‑faith modus vivendi for reasons that have little to do with liberal ideals of equal respect—and how sharply those same thin virtues can break loose from the thicker moral frameworks in whose name they are exercised.
6. Political–Philosophical Payoff
In a world where many nominally liberal states struggle to maintain even a minimal modus vivendi in the face of resurgent nationalism and religious polarization, this pre‑Westphalian, unapologetically hierarchical, yet remarkably durable imperial order has something to teach. The lesson is not that one should “be like Mehmed,” still less that empire is a superior form of life. It is that the conceptual space between “liberal toleration” and “pure oppression” is not empty. An autocrat with extensive coercive power and little tolerance for organized political opposition can nonetheless, under some conditions, choose structured coexistence over homogenization or expulsion for his religiously diverse subjects.²⁷
The virtues on display in that choice are thin and the justice they support is limited. But that is precisely what makes the case worth dwelling on. Mehmed’s regime combines serious moral failures—including a succession law that recodes fratricide as a public good—with a set of Tier‑1 dispositions that enable a multi‑confessional city and empire to function for centuries without requiring deep agreement or modern liberal norms of equal respect. That combination neither licenses nostalgia for empire nor supports fatalism about contemporary democracies. It suggests, more modestly, that the repertoire of workable modi vivendi is broader than our current binaries admit—and that thinking clearly about thin virtues and dark chapters together is part of learning how to live, and let others live, under conditions of enduring difference.
For contrasting portraits, see Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time; Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan; and standard biographical overviews.
On the kanunname, charters, Gennadios’s confession, devşirme, Janissaries, and repopulation, see Halil İnalcık, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City”; and “Fratricide in Ottoman Law.”
On devşirme as a structural solution to loyalty problems, see Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel K. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1.
On palace schools and Janissaries, see Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650.
Mehmet Akif Aydın, “Kanunname,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi.
Belleten, “Fratricide in Ottoman Law,” quoting the succession clause.
On Mehmed’s use of Greek and Italian technical experts and non‑Muslim financiers, see İnalcık and Imber.
For the Patriarchal charter, see İnalcık, “The Policy of Mehmed II…”.
On the Bosnian Franciscans’ ahidnâme, see Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History.
Isaac Zarfati’s letter in translation, in B. Cooperman (ed.), and online reproductions.
On Qayser‑i Rûm and imperial ideology, see Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State; and “Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s Istanbul.”
On immediate post‑conquest policies, see İnalcık and “Forced migration (sürgün) in Constantinople after the Ottoman conquest.”
On population estimates and recovery, see İnalcık and demographic reconstructions in The Cambridge History of Turkey.
Ibid.; see also Daily Sabah, “The history of fratricide in the Ottoman Empire,” parts 1–2.
On Mehmed III’s execution of nineteen brothers and contemporary shock, see Belleten and popular summaries.
On Ahmed I, Mustafa I, and the shift to kafes and seniority, see “Ahmed I” and the Belleten article’s conclusion.
For the contrast with contemporary “liberal” failures of modus vivendi, see later case studies in this volume on the EU, Northern Ireland, and India.
Mehmed II Vignette:
This episode, precisely because the textual record on Mehmed II’s “inner life” is thin, offers a relatively clean case for showing the sparse virtues required to sustain a non‑liberal, multi‑faith modus vivendi over centuries rather than a high, syncretic ideal of mutual recognition.
1. The palimpsest problem
In his classic study, Franz Babinger frankly concedes the evidentiary deficit that ought to discipline any attempt at a psychological portrait of Mehmed II:
“What makes an unbiased appraisal of Mehmed II so exceedingly difficult is the absence of reliable documentation concerning his personality. For the fifteenth century we are entirely lacking in the type of reportage which the Venetian relazioni provide for the sixteenth century and later periods.”¹
Yet immediately after this admission, Babinger and many who follow him assemble a vivid but internally strained figure out of heterogeneous and often hostile materials: the monstrous destroyer and Antichrist of Western polemic; the national hero of later Ottoman and Turkish apologetics; the heretical Persian‑leaning freethinker who, so Gian‑Maria Angiolello reports, “did not believe in the Prophet Mohammed”; the supposed worshipper of Christian relics; the man who allegedly proclaimed “one faith and one rule” and claimed to be bound by no law but God’s; the quasi‑cosmopolitan ruler who shows “liberal ideas on religion” and makes his empire a “paradise for non‑Moslem subjects, especially Jews.”²
As this composite grows, source genres and temporal layers blur into a single, overdetermined palimpsest: late Greek chronicles, Venetian and other Western observers, Ottoman court historians, and modern nationalist embellishments are made to speak with one voice, even though they clearly do not.³ The result is a Rorschach portrait that tells us at least as much about the preoccupations of observers—from fifteenth‑century Christian polemicists to twentieth‑century historians and nation‑builders—as it does about Mehmed himself.
2. Word–deed integrity as a filter
Against this background, it is methodologically cleaner to adopt a strict “word–deed integrity” rule. On this view, only speech that (a) is clearly tied to Mehmed’s own acts of will (laws, formal charters, explicit diplomatic undertakings, or writings he commissioned and promulgated), and (b) coheres with well‑attested institutional and policy practices, counts as evidence for stable traits or “virtues.” By contrast, uncorroborated rhetoric in narrative sources, hostile anecdotes, and retrospective theological or nationalist judgments are not treated as transparent windows into “personality.”
On the “word” side, the relevant materials include:
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The kanunname compiled at Mehmed’s order around 1477, which codifies the secular offices, ranks, emoluments, and penalties of the imperial hierarchy and famously formulates the law of fratricide in stark, political‑order terms: “Whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behooves him to kill his brothers in the interest of the world order. Most of the jurists have approved this procedure. Let action be taken accordingly.”⁴
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Charters, berats, and ahidnâmes by which Mehmed confirms the privileges and jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch and other non‑Muslim corporate bodies, and guarantees specific Christian communities (for example, the Bosnian Franciscans) protection and limited autonomy.⁵
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Commissioned works such as the Greek confession of faith prepared by Patriarch Gennadios and translated into Turkish by Ahmed Bey, which testify not to an impending conversion, as rumor sometimes suggested, but to Mehmed’s desire to understand the religion of his new subjects for administrative purposes.⁶
On the “deed” side, we can refer to:
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The systematic use of the devşirme (the “human tithe”) to recruit boys from Christian villages, train them for the Janissary corps and palace service, and promote them into the highest administrative offices, such that, apart from one old Ottoman family of viziers, “there was no high‑ranking state official or general from the time of Mehmed II until well into the sixteenth century who did not owe his career to the human tithe.”⁷
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The codified reorganization and disciplining of the Janissaries after mutinous behavior, including the dismissal and punishment of their commanders and the incorporation of other palace servitors under tighter central control.⁸
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The deliberate repopulation and restructuring of Constantinople after 1453 through a combination of compulsory relocations (sürgün), distribution of property, tax incentives, and recognition of communal leaders, which turned a semi‑ruined shell into a functioning imperial capital within his lifetime.⁹
Under this filter, thick claims about inner moods and religious psychology—whether the skeptical “unbeliever,” the “liberal” cosmopolitan, or the tormented syncretist pulled between Sunni orthodoxy, Shiʿi mysticism, and Christian relics—simply lack the evidentiary footing that the composite portraits suggest. What does remain visible is a thinner but nonetheless significant profile at the level of public action and institutional design.
3. A thin virtue profile: modus vivendi under an autocrat
If we restrict ourselves to this harder evidence, a modest but philosophically interesting cluster of virtues emerges. These are not liberal virtues of equal respect or high syncretic openness, and they do not rest on any ascription of inner benevolence. They are the traits required to build and preserve a multi‑confessional modus vivendi from above.
Prudential wisdom and long‑term planning. Mehmed’s reign displays a consistently strategic grasp of the structural problems posed by his position: a young ruler inheriting a bi‑continental polity, having just acquired an iconic but endangered city, and facing powerful military corps and old Ottoman magnates. His resort to a centralized kul administration recruited through the devşirme, the codification of offices and penalties in the kanunname, and the careful management of Janissary pay and discipline all point to a ruler who thinks in terms of systemic constraints and incentives rather than impulsive outbursts alone.¹⁰ The law of fratricide, horrifying to modern sensibilities, is cast in the same dry, systemic idiom: the elimination of rival princes is justified not as a personal vendetta but “in the interest of the world order,” and is declared licit by supportive jurists.¹¹
Instrumental openness to difference. Mehmed’s empire is not monolithically Turkish or Muslim in its functioning personnel. Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Italians, and Slavs appear in his fiscal, technical, and diplomatic apparatus, from physicians and financiers like Maestro Jacopo to engineers, dragomans, and the high officials who rose through the palace schools.¹² The formal recognition and privileging of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Armenian ecclesiastical structures, and Jewish communal leadership shows a willingness to work through existing religious and communal hierarchies, rather than destroy them, in order to govern.¹³ This is not egalitarian respect, but it is a real, structured openness to making productive use of difference in the service of imperial stability.
Conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint. Under Mehmed, non‑Muslim subjects are not reduced to a private, purely tolerated existence, nor are they relentlessly pushed toward conversion. Contemporary evidence—from Isaac Zarfati’s 1454 letter portraying the Ottoman lands as a relative haven for Jews compared with Central Europe, to the preservation of Christian and Jewish communal institutions under corporate heads—points to a de facto regime in which “each man could seek salvation in his own way,” so long as he accepted the fiscal and political obligations of a subordinate status.¹⁴ Babinger himself emphasizes that, despite sporadic local abuses, “it is equally certain that this was not the work of the supreme authorities,” and concludes that the “magnanimous treatment of non‑Moslems in the Ottoman Empire under Mehmed can in large measure be attributed to his indulgence and mildness in religious matters, qualities which were in all likelihood closely related to his own liberal ideas on religion.”¹⁵ One need not follow him to the last, introspective clause to see that a pattern of conditional toleration and restraint is visible at the level of imperial policy.
Taken together, these traits instantiate the kind of minimal virtues that sustain a modus vivendi rather than a utopia: the ability to calculate and act over long horizons; the readiness to institutionalize difference under clear hierarchies instead of pursuing coercive homogenization; and a disciplined refusal to let maximal doctrinal or ethnic ambitions override the pragmatic requirements of governing a diverse realm.
4. Constantinople as capital: a concrete test case
The fate of Constantinople after 1453 offers a concrete test of this thin virtue profile. On the eve of the conquest, the city was a shadow of its former self—its population perhaps a fraction of its late antique size, its urban fabric partially ruined, its political reach greatly diminished.¹⁶ It could easily have followed the path of other once‑great cities that dwindled into provincial backwaters or near‑ruins.
Mehmed’s choice to make Constantinople his capital is explicable in prudential and ideological terms that do not require speculative inner psychology. Strategically, the city sat astride the Bosporus, joining the Ottoman domains in Anatolia and the Balkans and controlling the maritime link between Black Sea and Mediterranean; it was already equipped with harbors, fortifications, and palaces that could be seized and modified rather than built ex nihilo.¹⁷ Symbolically, taking possession of the old Roman and Byzantine capital allowed Mehmed to claim the mantle of universal empire; he adopted the title Qayser‑i Rûm (Caesar of Rome), and in Western eyes, as Babinger notes, even Pope Pius II contemplated the possibility of recognizing his imperial status in exchange for conversion.¹⁸
The subsequent policies by which Mehmed repopulated and restructured the city show the same combination of coercion, prudence, and conditional toleration that characterizes his rule more broadly. Halil İnalcık’s reconstruction of the post‑1453 years emphasizes that Mehmed, from the outset, conceived of Istanbul as a multi‑faith imperial center and used both sürgün (forced relocation) and incentive structures to bring in new inhabitants: Muslims from Anatolia and the Balkans, Greeks from other regions, Armenians, and Jews, each settled in designated quarters and often granted tax privileges or property to encourage stability.¹⁹ The aim was not to create a melting pot of syncretic fusion, but a segmented yet interdependent city in which differentiated communities—each under its own religious head and subject to Ottoman sovereignty—would together sustain the provisioning, defense, and economic life of the capital.²⁰
Within a generation, administrative records and later estimates suggest that the city had not only recovered but surpassed its pre‑conquest population, becoming one of the largest urban centers in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.²¹ The same choice that could have turned Constantinople into a Turkish garrison town or a cautionary ruin instead produces a working, multi‑faith metropolis, in which non‑Muslim communities retain a measure of corporate autonomy and legal personality while serving an explicitly non‑egalitarian imperial order.
This is not a story of benign cosmopolitanism, let alone liberal recognition. It is a case in which an autocrat who “brooks no dissent” chooses, for reasons of prudence and imperial imagination, to build and preserve an order that relies on structured coexistence rather than suppression or expulsion of religious and ethnic others.
5. A durable, non‑liberal modus vivendi
Seen in this light, Mehmed II becomes a useful, if limited, exemplar of the virtues required for a non‑liberal modus vivendi rather than a candidate for psychological rehabilitation or demonization. Babinger’s own warning—that we lack the kind of personality reportage that would authorize a robust inner portrait—frees us from treating the contradictory narrative palimpsest as a puzzle to be decoded.²² Instead, we can attend to those public deeds and codified words that do exist, and that clearly helped shape a multi‑faith arrangement which, in various transformed guises, endured for centuries under the Ottomans.
From this restricted angle, what merits philosophical attention is not whether Mehmed was “really” tolerant in some moralized sense, or whether his personal beliefs align with later liberal sensibilities, but the fact that a ruler with extensive coercive means, steeped in a universalist religious idiom, nonetheless chose to:
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Preserve and privilege the institutional structures of non‑Muslim communities as corporate interlocutors.
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Rebuild and repopulate a ruined Christian imperial city into a multi‑confessional capital rather than abandon or radically homogenize it.
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Bind the most dangerous elements in his own military and nobility into a centralized, legally articulated order that, however harsh in its instruments, provided a framework within which different communities could live, worship, trade, and transmit their languages and identities over long periods.²³
In a world today where many nominally liberal states struggle to maintain even a minimal modus vivendi in the face of resurgent nationalism and religious polarization, such an example—pre‑Westphalian, unapologetically hierarchical, yet remarkably durable—has something to teach. Its virtues are thin and its justice limited, but it shows that the choice between maximalist domination and liberal utopia is not exhaustive: autocratic, exacting rulers can and sometimes do opt for a structured coexistence that, while far from ideal, is far better than the alternatives on offer.
Notes
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Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, Book Seven, “The Ruler and the Man.”
Babinger, ibid., discussion of Venetian informants, Angiolello, Spandugino, and Mehmed’s supposed “liberal ideas on religion.”
On the spectrum of Western and Ottoman portrayals—destroyer and Antichrist vs. flawless national hero—see Babinger’s contrast of Western accounts and Ottoman historiography.
Babinger’s citation and discussion of the succession clause in the kanunname (“Whichever of my sons inherits…”).
On early Ottoman charters to Christian communities (e.g. Bosnian Franciscans) and the pattern of ahidnâmes, see overviews in studies of Ottoman guarantees to subject Christians.
On Gennadios’s profession of faith, prepared at Mehmed’s bidding and preserved in Greek and Turkish, see Babinger’s discussion.
Babinger on the devşirme and the rise of kul officials: “Apart from the Jandarlızadeler…there was no high‑ranking state official or general from the time of Mehmed II until well into the sixteenth century who did not owe his career to the human tithe.”
Babinger’s account of the Janissary unrest at Bursa, the donative, and Mehmed’s subsequent reorganization and disciplinary measures.
On Mehmed’s post‑conquest rebuilding of Istanbul, the use of sürgün, property distribution, and tax incentives, see Halil İnalcık, “The Policy of Mehmed II Toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City”; and Babinger’s synthesis of demographic and fiscal developments.
For the kanunname’s detailed hierarchy of offices, emoluments, and penalties, see Babinger’s summary and later editions of the text.
Succession clause in the kanunname, as in note 4.
Babinger’s discussion of the muteberri (court suppliers and experts), including physicians, philosophers, engineers, and foreign specialists, and of Jewish and Christian financiers and advisers.
On the Patriarchate and other millets as recognized corporate bodies, see studies of the Rum millet and İnalcık’s analysis of Greek corporate privileges under Mehmed.
Babinger on Isaac Zarfati’s 1454 letter and on the situation of Jews and Christians under Mehmed; see also translations of Zarfati’s letter.
Babinger, ibid., emphasizing Mehmed’s “indulgence and mildness in religious matters” and describing the empire as a “paradise for non‑Moslem subjects…especially Jews,” measured against their treatment in contemporary Europe.
On late Byzantine Constantinople’s depopulation and decline, see overviews in modern syntheses on the fall of Constantinople.
On Constantinople’s strategic and logistical advantages—a bridge between Anatolia and the Balkans, control of the Bosporus—see standard accounts of the conquest and Mehmed’s strategic thinking.
Babinger on Mehmed’s adoption of Roman titles and Pius II’s remarkable letter inviting him, in effect, to become Christian emperor, and on Venetian recognition of his claims to ancient Greek colonies.
Halil İnalcık, “The Policy of Mehmed II Toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” esp. on sürgün and tax policy; see also related work on population transfers in the Ottoman Empire.
On the organization of Istanbul into communal quarters and the role of patriarch, chief rabbi, and other leaders in the city’s governance under Mehmed, see İnalcık and later studies of Mehmed’s Istanbul.
Babinger’s use of sixteenth‑century fiscal registers and earlier indications to estimate post‑conquest population growth; modern estimates of Istanbul’s size relative to other European cities.
Babinger’s admission regarding the lack of personality reportage, as in note 1.
On Mehmed’s refusal to denationalize Balkan populations and the long‑term preservation of languages and identities under Ottoman rule, see Babinger’s reflections on the empire’s structural resemblance to Byzantium in this respect.
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