Mehmed II Becomes Sultan

February 3, 1451

The nineteen-year-old, already once-deposed and sent home in humiliation, buried his father Murad II and took the Ottoman throne with a single cold obsession: Constantinople. Within weeks he was commissioning bronze siege cannons from a Hungarian renegade named Urban and building a fortress on the Bosphorus. His obsession with Constantinople was both personal and strategic, fulfilling a prophecy attributed to the Prophet Muhammad himself.