Murad II

Murad II ruled the Ottoman state twice, from 1421 to 1444 and again from 1446 until his death in 1451. He rebuilt Ottoman power after the turmoil that followed his grandfather Bayezid I's defeat by Timur, beat back two crusading coalitions at Varna and Kosovo, and handed his son Mehmed II an empire strong enough to take Constantinople two years after his death.

Murad was born in June 1404, probably at Amasya in Anatolia, a son of Sultan Mehmed I; the identity of his mother is disputed. He grew up in Amasya and governed the province there until his father died in 1421, when he was recognised as sultan at Bursa at the age of sixteen. The Byzantine emperor Manuel II immediately released a pretender, Mustafa Çelebi, who claimed to be a son of Bayezid I. Mustafa won over many Ottoman troops and took Edirne, but Murad outmanoeuvred him in Anatolia, besieged him at Gallipoli and had him executed.

To punish the Byzantines, Murad laid siege to Constantinople in 1422. He had to abandon it when the Byzantines and their Anatolian allies backed a revolt by his thirteen-year-old brother, also named Mustafa, who besieged Bursa. Murad caught and executed the boy and annexed several of the small Turkish principalities that had supported him, among them Aydın, Germiyan, Menteşe and Teke. He defeated the Karamanids in 1428.

In Europe Murad fought Venice, Serbia and Hungary. His capture of Thessalonica in 1430 ended Venice's attempt to hold the city, and he annexed Serbia in 1439. In 1435 he married Mara Branković, daughter of the Serbian despot, who remained a Christian. Hungarian successes under John Hunyadi in 1442–43, renewed war with the Karamanids and the death of his favourite son, Alaeddin, persuaded him to sign a ten-year truce with Hungary, the Peace of Szeged, and in 1444 he abdicated in favour of his twelve-year-old son, Mehmed II.

The Hungarians broke the truce almost at once, and the grand vizier Çandarlı Halil Pasha recalled Murad to lead the army. On 10 November 1444 he defeated the crusaders at Varna, on the Black Sea coast of today's Bulgaria; King Władysław III of Poland and Hungary was killed. Ottoman tradition later told how Murad dismounted to pray when the battle seemed lost. In 1446 a revolt in Edirne, probably caused by a debasement of the silver coinage, allowed the vizier to restore him to the throne.

That year Murad's cannon breached the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth and his armies devastated the Peloponnese, forcing the future emperor Constantine XI and his brother to pay tribute. He then campaigned in Albania against the rebel Skanderbeg, and on 17–20 October 1448 he defeated Hunyadi's army at the second Battle of Kosovo, ending Hungary's ability to launch offensives against the Ottomans. Murad died at Edirne on 3 February 1451 and was buried at Bursa, and Mehmed II succeeded him.

Murad presented himself as a ghazi sultan, a pious and simple warrior for Islam, and patronised translations of Persian, Arabic and Anatolian epics into Turkish. He gave Ottoman princes the title şehzade. Trade and towns grew during his reign, and in 1432 the Burgundian traveller Bertrandon de la Broquière put his annual revenue at 2,500,000 ducats.

Our 1400 map shows the Ottoman Empire just before the collapse that preceded Murad's birth, and our 1492 map shows the much larger state that he and his son built in the Balkans and Anatolia.