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| Mehmet II |
As an isolated military action, the taking of
Constantinople did not have a critical effect on European security,
but to the Ottoman Dynasty the capture of the imperial capital was
of supreme symbolic importance. Mehmet II regarded himself as the
direct successor to the Byzantine emperors. He made Constantinople
the imperial capital, as it had been under the Byzantine emperors,
and set about rebuilding the city. The cathedral of Hagia Sophia
was converted to a mosque, and Constantinople--which the Turks called
Istanbul replaced Baghdad as the center of Sunni Islam. The city
also remained the ecclesiastical center of the Greek Orthodox Church,
of which Mehmet II proclaimed himself the protector and for which
he appointed a new patriarch after the custom of the Byzantine emperors.
The disappearance of the Serbian kingdom, followed
by the absorption of Herzegovina and much of Bosnia, left Hungary
as the major European power facing the Ottomans. Mehmed's failure
to take Belgrade in 1456 left the line of the middle Danube and
lower Sava as the Ottoman boundary with Hungary for over sixty years.
With the final re-absorption of Karaman in 1468 the last of the
independent emirates disappeared, leaving the Turcoman confederation
of the  Akkoyunlu
(White Sheep) as the Ottomans' major opponents in the area until
their destruction by the Safavids of Iran in the early 16th century.
Further north, Mehmed established a bridgehead in the Crimea by
the capture of Caffa (Kefe) from the Genoese in 1475, thus bringing
the Khanate of the Crimea, the most important of the successor states
of the Golden Horde, under Ottoman control
The last years of Bayazid n's reign, and most of that of his successor
Selim I (1512-20), were largely taken up with events in the east,
in Iran, Egypt and the western fertile crescent. The rise of the
Safavids in Iran had brought to power a state both militarily strong
and ideologically hostile to the Ottomans as their eastern neighbour.
Shi'ism, the form of Islam favoured by the Safavids, was also attractive
to dissident forces and groupings within the Ottoman state, who
rallied to support the new dynasty in Iran. A series of Shi'i-inspired
risings among the Turcoman tribes of eastern Anatolia in the last
years of Bayazid n's reign was a prelude to the war which broke
out in the reigns of Selim and Shah Isma'il (1501-24), culminating
in the defeat of the Safavids at the battle of Caldiran in 1514.
For a time, eastern Anatolia was secured and the threat of religious
separatism removedSelim's annexation of the emirate of Dhu'lQadr
in 1515 brought the Ottomans into direct contact with the Mameluke
empire for the first time. Over the next two years Selim destroyed
the Mamelukes politically and militarily, conquering Aleppo and
Damascus in 1516, and taking Cairo in 1517. As well as bringing
Syria and Egypt under Ottoman control, this campaign also added
the Holy Places of Christendom and Islam to the empire, thus adding
to the prestige and authority of Selim and his successors. At Selim's
death in 1520 the Empire stretched from the Red Sea to the Crimea,
and from Kurdistan to Bosnia, and had become a major participant
and contender in the international power politics of the day. Furthermore,
substantial Turkish Muslim migration to the Balkans had begun to
make permanent changes in the demographic and ethnic structure of
that area.
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