Mehmed the Conqueror

Mehmed became sultan twice: first in August 1444, when he defeated John Hunyadi's crusade after Hungarian forces broke the Treaty of Edirne and Szeged, then again from February 1451. In his second reign he built up the Ottoman Navy and prepared the siege that would take Constantinople in May 1453, claiming the throne of Rome on the ground that the city had been the Eastern Empire's capital since Constantine I consecrated it in 330. He pushed west into Bosnia, reunified Anatolia, and remade Constantinople into an imperial center through reform and patronage of the arts and sciences. He died in May 1481, a hero in modern Turkey, his name fixed to a district, a bridge, and a mosque in the city he won.