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Mehmet the Conqueror and Constantinople - A Portrait of Youth and Ambition (Hardcover)
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Mehmet the Conqueror and Constantinople - A Portrait of Youth and Ambition (Hardcover)
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In its significance for both Islam and Christianity, and ultimately
the wider world, the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 was to
herald the dawn of the early modern period and bring universal
recognition to the man forever known as Mehmet the Conqueror, or
Sultan Mehmet II (1432-1481); who at the age of twenty-one had
brought the millennium-old Byzantine empire to an end. The very
improbability of such an accomplishment, after many failed attempts
on Constantinople by different factions over the centuries, was to
only add to Mehmet’s growing status; while his quest for
territorial acquisition over the following twenty-five years, in
the establishment of an Ottoman empire, was to place this dynastic
family on the international stage, where they would remain a
significant political force over the following five centuries.
Little material evidence has survived from the formative period of
Mehmet's life, and certainly nothing of any direct significance
such as a portrait. However, Mehmet had an enduring interest in
that genre, though it was naturally assumed that after an absence
of more than five centuries a portrait of the young sultan in any
form had simply not survived the intervening period. The appearance
of a circular portrait relief of the sultan was thus to be of more
than passing interest, given the youthfulness of the turbaned
Muslim sitter, who was immediately identifiable as Mehmet the
Conqueror from both his modelled bronze relief profile and the
titles encircling his portrait, addressing its subject in Latin as
the 'Great Prince and Great Emir, Sultan Master Mehmet' - Magnus
Princeps et Magnus Amiras Sultanus DNS [= Dominus] Mehomet. The
willingness of Mehmet to commit his imperial vision to the hands of
a western artist at such an early period of his life is at the
heart of this extraordinary episode, which embraces the looming
extinction of the millennium-old empire of Byzantium, an expanding
Ottoman political enterprise and the fall of Constantinople itself.
It represents a fusion between east and west that is without
parallel in the mid-fifteenth century. Indeed, so directly can the
commission of the bronze relief be linked with Mehmet that beyond
the revelation of his youthful, and enigmatic, portrait is the
remarkable sense of an event of historic proportions, now viewable
through the eyes of the protagonist himself.
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