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Bayazid's achievement was short-lived; his army was destroyed at Ankara in 1402 by Timur (Tamerlane), the last of the Mongol invaders to reach as far west as Anatolia. There followed an eleven-year hiatus between 1402 and 1413, when the Balkan states and the Anatolian emirates took advantage of the opportunity provided by the Mongol victory to shake off Ottoman rule, although further Mongol advance ceased after Timur's death in 1405.

The reconstruction of the Ottoman state by Mehmed I (1413-21) and the revival of the conquests in the reign of his son Murad (1421-51) again brought most of eastern and central Anatolia and the southern and eastern Balkans under direct or indirect Ottoman control. However, Ottoman rule in the Balkans was far less oppressive than the system it superseded, in which feudal dues and compulsory labour services weighed heavily upon the peasantry; in consequence, the Ottomans were often welcomed as deliverers. The rounding off of these conquests, and the emergence of the Ottoman state as a world power, was the work of Mehmed n al-Fatih, The Conqueror (1451-81), whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 removed the last major barrier to expansion into northern Anatolia and enabled the Ottomans to dominate the Straits and the southern shore of the Black Sea.

Aside from scattered outposts in Greece, all that remained of the Byzantine Empire was its capital, Constantinople. Cut off by land since 1365, the city, despite long periods of truce with the Turks, was supplied and reinforced by Venetian traders who controlled its commerce by sea. On becoming sultan in 1444, Mehmet II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) immediately set out to conquer the city. The military campaigning season of 1453 commenced with the fifty-day siege of Constantinople, during which Mehmet II brought warships overland on greased runners into the Bosporus inlet known as the Golden Horn to bypass the chain barrage and fortresses that had blocked the entrance to Constantinople's harbor. On May 29, the Turks fought their way through the gates of the city and brought the siege to a successful conclusion.

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