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Rh began the siege in 1453. Constantine Palaeologus, the last occupant of the imperial throne, took every measure that the courage of despair could devise for the defence of the doomed city; but his appeal to the pope for the aid of Western Christendom was frustrated through the bigoted, anti-Catholic spirit of the Greeks. The defenders were dispirited and torn by sedition and dissensions, and the emperor could rely on little more than 8000 fighting men, while the assailants, 200,000 strong, were animated by the wildest fanatical zeal. The siege had lasted fifty-three days when, on the 29th of May 1453, a tremendous assault was successful; the desperate efforts of the Greeks were unavailing, Constantine himself falling among the foremost defenders of the breach. The sultan triumphantly entered the palace of the emperors, and the next Friday's prayer was celebrated in the church of St Sofia (see ).

After some days' stay in Constantinople, during which he granted wide privileges to the Greeks and to their patriarch, the sultan proceeded northwards and entirely subdued the southern parts of Servia. A siege of Belgrade was unsuccessful, owing to the timely succour afforded by Hunyadi (1456). Two years later internal dissensions in Servia brought about the conquest of the whole country by the Turks, only Belgrade remaining in the hands of the Hungarians. The independent princes of Asia Minor were now completely subjugated and their territories finally absorbed into the Turkish dominions; Walachia was next reduced to the state of a tributary province. Venice having adopted a hostile attitude since Turkey's conquests in the Morea, greater attention was devoted to the fleet; Mytilene was captured and the entrance to the straits fortified. The conquest of Bosnia, rendered necessary by the war with Venice, was next completed, in spite of the reverses inflicted on the Turks by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, the son of János Hunyadi. The Turks continued to press the Venetians by land and sea; Albania, which under Scanderberg had for twenty-five years resisted the Ottoman arms, was overrun; and Venice was forced to agree to a treaty by which she ceded to Turkey Scutari and Kroïa, and consented to pay an indemnity of 100,000 ducats (Jan. 25, 1478). The Crimea was next conquered and bestowed as a tributary province on the Tatar khan Mengli Girai. Mahommed now endeavoured to strike a blow at Rhodes, the stronghold of the Knights of St John, preparatory to carrying out his long-cherished plan of conquering Italy. A powerful naval expedition was fitted out, but failed, an armistice and treaty of commerce being signed with the grand master, Pierre d'Aubusson (1479). But a land attack on southern Italy at the same time was successful, Otranto being captured and held for a time by the Turks. In 1481 the sultan was believed to be projecting a campaign against the Circassian rulers of Syria and Egypt, when he died at Gebzé. He is said to have been of a merry and even jocular disposition, to have afforded a generous patronage to learning, and, strange to say for a sultan, to have been master of six languages.

Mahommed II. was the organizer of the fabric of Ottoman administration in the form which it retained practically unchanged until the reforms of Mahmud II. and Abd-ul-Mejid. He raised the regular forces of the country to a total exceeding 100,000; the pay of the Janissaries was by him increased, and their ranks were brought up to an effective of upwards of 12,000. He established the system whereby the lands conquered by the arms of his troops were divided into the different classes of fiefs, or else assigned to the maintenance of mosques, colleges, schools and charitable institutions, or converted into common and pasturage lands. Many educational and benevolent foundations were endowed by him, and it is to Mahommed II. that the organization of the ulema, or legist and ecclesiastical class, is due.

Upon Bayezid II. succeeding to his father a serious revolt of the troops took place, which led to the institution of the

regular payment of an accession donative to the Janissaries. At the outset of the reign Bayezid's brother, Prince Jem, made a serious attempt to claim the throne; he was defeated, and eventually took

refuge with the knights of Rhodes, whom Bayezid bribed to keep him in safe custody. The unfortunate prince was led from one European stronghold to another, and, after thirteen years' wandering, died at Naples in 1494 (see ). Freed from the danger of his brother's attacks, the sultan gave himself up to devotion, leaving to his ministers the conduct of affairs in peace and war. But, though of an unambitious and peace-loving temper, the very conditions of his empire made war inevitable. Even when peace was nominally in existence, war in its most horrible forms was actually being waged. On the northern frontier border raids on a large scale were frequent. Thus, in 1492 the Turks made incursions into Carinthia as far as Laibach, and into Styria as far as Cilli, committing unspeakable atrocities; in 1493 they overran both Styria and Croatia. The Hungarians retaliated in kind, burning and harrying as far as Semendria, torturing and murdering, and carrying off the saleable inhabitants as slaves. In 1494 a crushing victory of the emperor Maximilian drove the Turks out of Styria, which they did not venture again to invade during his reign. In 1496 the temporary armistice between the Poles and Turks, renewed in 1493, came to an end, and John Albert, king of Poland, seized the occasion to invade Moldavia. The efforts of Ladislaus of Hungary to mediate were vain, and the years 1497 and 1498 were marked by a terrible devastation of Poland by the Ottomans; only the bitter winter, which is said to have killed 40,000 Turks, prevented the devastation from being more complete. By the peace concluded in 1500 the sultan's dominions were again extended. Meanwhile, in June 1499, war had again broken out with Venice, mainly owing to the intervention of the pope and emperor, who, with Milan, Florence and Naples, urged the sultan to crush the republic. On the 28th of July the Turks gained over the Venetians at Sapienza their first great victory at sea; and this was followed by the capture of Lepanto, at which Bayezid was present, and by the conquest of the Morea and most of the islands of the archipelago. By the peace signed on the 24th of December 1502, however, the status quo was practically restored, the sultan contenting himself with receiving Santa Maura in exchange for Cephalonia.

Meanwhile in Asia also the Ottoman Empire had been consolidated and extended; but from 1501 onwards the ambitious designs of the youthful Shah Ismail in Persia grew more and more threatening to its security; and though Bayezid, intent on peace, winked at his violations of Ottoman territory and exchanged friendly embassies with him, a breach was sooner or later inevitable. This danger, together with the growing insubordination of the aged sultan's sons, caused his ministers to urge him to abdicate in favour of Selim, the younger but more valiant. This prince pushed his audacity so far as to attack his father's troops, but the action merely increased his popularity with the Janissaries, and Bayezid, after a reign of thirty-one years, was obliged to abdicate in favour of his forceful younger son; a few days later he died. This reign saw the end of the Mussulman rule in Spain, Turkey's naval power not being yet sufficient to afford aid to her co-religionists. It also saw the first intercourse between a Russian tsar and an Ottoman sultan, Ivan III. exchanging in 1492 friendly messages with Bayezid through the Tatar khan Mengli Girai; the first Russian ambassador appeared at Constantinople three years later.

When he had ruthlessly quelled the resistance offered to his accession by his brothers, who both fell in the struggle for the

throne, Selim undertook his campaign in Persia, having first extirpated the Shia heresy, the prevalent sect of Persia, in his dominions, where it threatened to extend. After an arduous march and in spite of the mutinous behaviour of his troops, Selim, crushed the Persians at Chaldiran (1515) and became master of the whole of Kurdistan. He next turned against the Mameluke rulers of Egypt, crushed them, and entering Cairo as conqueror (1517), obtained from the last of the Abbasid caliphs, Motawakkil, the title of (q.v.)