A Sultan of Paradox: Mehmed the Conqueror as a Patron of the Arts

Author(s): Julian Raby

Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1, Patronage (1982), pp. 3-8
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360098
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A Sultan of Paradox: Mehmed the Conqueror as a patron of
the arts
JULIAN RABY
Fig. 1. Costanzada Ferrara:Bronzemedalof Mehmedthe Conqueror,first state, signed, undated,diam. 12.3 cm. National GalleryofArt,
Washington,SamuelH. Kress Collection.Obverse(left) and reverse(right).
The aquiline, beturbaned features that glare out from
this Quattrocento bronze medallion (Fig. 1) are not a
romantic artist's fanciful image of 'The Oriental
Potentate', but an ad vivum likeness of Mehmed II,
the Ottoman Sultan whose conquest of Constanti-
nople in 1453 and destruction of the millenium-old
Byzantine Empire, earned him at the age of 21 the
awesome sobriquet of Fatih, the Conqueror. Yet what
prompted a Muslim potentate to invite an Italian
medallist to his court in the renascent city of Con-
stantinople, the city that became known as Istanbul,
or as Mehmed himself punned "Islambul", "Full of
Islam"? Was there not a paradox in a Muslim prince
patronising an Italian medallist? If there was, this
was not the only paradox surrounding Mehmed the
Conqueror.
Mehmed was heir to an empire that was far from
the homogeneous orthodox Sunni state that his six-
teenth-century successors, in their clash with the
heterodox Shiite Safavids, wished to promote. In the
fifteenth century there were various attempts, most
notably Shaykh Badreddin Simavna's popular move-
ment, to minimise the differences between Islam and
Christianity. In this period of transition we find mem-
bers of the Palaeologan house serving as commanders
of the Sultan; and Mehmed's long-standing Grand
THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL- 5:1 1982
Vizier, Mahmud Pasha, had a brother who was his
opposite number - Grand Voivode - in Serbia,
while their mother was granted a monastery in Istan-
bul. Acculturation could not keep pace with the rapid
march of Ottoman arms, and the conquest of Con-
stantinople, in particular, extended the Ottomans'
cultural horizons, bringing them, on the one hand,
face to face with metropolitan Byzantine culture,
encouraging them, on the other, to become a naval
power with extensive maritime contacts.
As an adolescent Mehmed's behaviour had caused
his elders considerable concern; he was slow - and
had to be beaten - to memorise the Koran, and even
when he assumed the reins of power on his father's
first, and premature, retirement from the throne, he
consorted with Hurufi dervish missionaries from
Iran, who were spreading heterodox ideas about the
divine Logos and the divinity of man. Despite, or
perhaps because of, the young Sultan's interest, these
missionaries were bloodily suppressed; this is not the
only instance in the fifteenth-century Ottoman
Empire when orthodox and heterodox clashed.
Mehmed earned a reputation as a somewhat way-
ward child, but two aspects of his education are sig-
nificant for us. First, he has left a scrap-book of pen
and ink drawings which include, apart from his
3

N in Mehmed's first documented invitation to an Italian
/' - artist. As a young man he had twice figured in Renais-
l(
f and produced a feeble image. The image served,
\A''\^
/ , I
. I.I
f..1
Fig. 2. A page from Mehmed's "school book", 28.5 x pupil, failed to reach Istanbul. The Sultan was more
21.5 cm. TopkapiSarayMuseum, Istanbul(H. 2324).
imperial cypher and studies of animals and arabes-
ques, profile and three-quarter face portrait busts.
Portraiture was not entirely unknown in the Islamic
world, but it was uncommon and tended to be stereo-
typic and symbolic. These boyhood drawings are
proof of an observant eye and a certain taste for cari-
cature. In spirit they evince a European influence
which is also evident in the use of cross-hatching and
in their format, approaches to drawing and form
which were unknown in the Islamic world (Fig. 2).
Secondly, this interest in European pictorial
methods was matched by an interest in European
history and historiography. Aside from Muslim
teachers, Mehmed had two tutors, one schooled in
Latin, the other in Greek, who just prior to the fall
of Byzantium read to him daily from "Laertius,
Herodotus, Livy, Quintus Curtius, Chronicles of the
Popes, Emperors, the Kings of France and the Lom-
bards...." It has long been maintained that the Latin
tutor was that ardent and influential Hellenophile,
Cyriacus of Ancona, but the claim was based on a
manuscript misreading, for the lector was not Cyria-
cus but one of his companions, at present, unidenti-
fied. The change of players may rob the scene of some
of its glamour, but it cannot alter the fact of the
ancient history lessons.
4 THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL -
Interests in portraiture and history were combined
sance medals, but nothing is known of the artists or
the circumstances of their commission. In 1461, how-
ever, Mehmed asked Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of
Rimini, for the services of his artistic factotum,
Matteo de' Pasti. In his letter of reply, agreeing to
Matteo's mission, Sigismondo refers to Mehmed's
interest in historical portrait sculptures and to his
request that Matteo be sent to "paint and sculpt
him". The mission was aborted when Matteo was
arrested as a spy by the Venetian authorities in Crete.
Nevertheless, the correspondence confirms Meh-
med's historical bias and the intimate connection, for
the Sultan, between sculpted and graphic portraiture.
The importance of this connection to Mehmed is
borne out by the fact that he demanded, in addition to
painted portraits, a bronze portrait medallion from
Gentile Bellini even though he was a tyro at the craft
however, as the model for Bertoldo's medal, com-
missioned, it would seem, by Lorenzo de' Medici
following Mehmed's seizure of the Pazzi conspirator
and assassin of Giuliano de' Medici, Bernardo
Bandini. In fact, no other Renaissance prince,
whether in Italy or Germany, had such a number of
artists sculpt medallions of him, and Hill's Corpus
devotes an appendix to the anonymous medals of the
Sultan. The quality of the medals is variable, and
regrettably Matteo de' Pasti, Pisanello's most noted
fortunate with another follower of Pisanello, Costanzo
da Ferrara. The Pisanello connection is perhaps sig-
nificant, because it may well have been Pisanello's
medal of the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeolo-
gus which stimulated Mehmed's medallic passion;
that medal, at least, must have been known in the
Levant and Costanzo, little known though he is, in
turn produced one of the finest portrait medals of the
Renaissance (Fig. 1).
Costanzo was sent to Istanbul at an unknown date
by Ferdinand of Naples. Again, the initiative was
Mehmed's, although it is unclear whether he speci-
fied Costanzo by name, as he had Matteo. Better
documented is the visit of Gentile Bellini in 1479
and 1480, but here again there is no evidence that
Mehmed insisted on Gentile. The only official record
mentions a request for a "sculptor and bronze-
founder" - sculptural interests once again to the fore.
The sculptor the Serenissima sent with Bellini was
the Paduan Bartolommeo Bellano, whose visit has
hitherto been questioned. Departure was in Septem-
ber, but by October Mehmed was asking the Vene-
tians for a master-builder, who in the end was pre-
vented by illness from leaving, and a bronze sculptor
"the same or even better than the first". The refer-
ence must surely be to Bellano since no other sculp-
tors are known to have been sent at this time. The
implied criticism of Bellano took the Serenissima by
surprise, and they wrote back with the defensive plea
5:1 1982
that "the first bronze founder we sent there is very
famous in these parts of ours for this sort of work".
Mehmed seems to have viewed Bellano's talents dif-
ferently, and his judgement concurs with that of the
contemporary critic Gaurico, who condemned Bell-
ano as an "ineptus artifex", or the heirs of Raimondo
Solimani who accused Bellano in court of producing a
funerary monument for Solimani of shameful quality
- "such an inept and deformed work and a tomb
with such deformed and utterly vile figures". The
Sultan too was no blind advocate of Italian art.
Even before Mehmed received a reply from Venice
about his second request, he sent an envoy to
Florence seeking "maestri di squlture di bronzo" and
"maestri d'intaglio e di legname, e di tarsie". There
is no record of how many Florentines made the visit,
but it is evident that in the last two and a half years of
his life the Sultan established a sizeable European
atelier in Istanbul. Bellini and Bellano were both
accompanied by two assistants, and in January 1480
the Sultan asked the Venetians for the services of a
painter by the name of Bernardo. In the same year a
painter from Ragusa was also in Istanbul; Ottoman
sources credit him with training Sinan Bey in
portraiture. By 1480 Sinan was the Sultan's head
painter, and according to official Venetian corres-
pondence he and his relatives wielded considerable
influence at court. Alongside the numerous foreign
invitees, then, was a group of Ottoman artists prac-
tising a foreign, Italianising style.
Painting and medallic sculpture were not the limits
of Mehmed's European horizon. We have seen how
he asked the Venetians for a master-builder and the
Florentines for intarsia artists and other craftsmen,
and it is tempting to see these as complementary invi-
tations for a planned building which would have been
both tectonically and decoratively European. More
unusual invitations were also extended at this time;
from Venice he sought christallini craftsmen and
makers of chiming-clocks, from the Venetian colony
of Coron a scabbard maker. Several outstanding
swords attest to Mehmed's discrimination in this
field, but what is intriguing about the Coron invita-
tion is that Mehmed is said to have whiled away his
idle hours fashioning archer's thumbrings, belt-
buckles - and scabbards. Patronage found its pend-
ant in the Sultan's own handiwork.
This burst of patronage in the last years of Meh-
med's life was facilitated by the declaration of peace
with Venice, which ended a sixteen-year war which
had precluded all cultural contact. The Sultan, in
worsening health, seized the opportunity to rest from
campaigning and to devote himself to cultural pur-
suits. Previously, during the mid 1460s, he had had to
rest due to illness, and on that occasion too he con-
centrated, as we shall see, on cultural activities. What
emerges is his openness to the latest artistic develop-
ments; these included Italian engravings, a collection
of which, to judge from circumstantial evidence, he
formed as gifts from the Florentine merchants of
Pera.
THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL - 5:1 1982
His patronage was not without its limitations, how-
ever. Gentile Bellini was commissioned to paint por-
traits of the Sultan and his favourites, but his activi-
ties seem to have been confined behind the high walls
of the imperial Saray, to the private realm of the Sul-
tan. Mehmed does not appear, either from docu-
mentary evidence or the evidence of Bellini's known
works, to have encouraged Gentile to express his
vedutistatalents, even though architecturescapes and
processions were to become characteristic of Ottoman
miniature painting in the sixteenth century. On his
return to Italy, therefore, Bellini was able to supply
his fellow artists with single studies of oriental figures,
but he failed to provide panoramic views of Ottoman
architecture or contextual studies of Muslims in a
Muslim habitat.
This claim may be surprising in view of the fre-
quent claim that Gentile was the father of Venetian
orientalism, the source and inspiration, that is, of the
oriental mode at the end of the fifteenth century. The
claim is misleading, however, because the major
expression of Venetian orientalism at this period was
not Ottoman in inspiration, but Mamluk, the rival
dynasty which reigned in Syria and Egypt.
Bellini never visited Egypt or Syria. He was in no
position therefore to be the source of Mamluk motifs.
Furthermore it is only with the advent of what we
might term the Mamluk mode that Venetian oriental-
ism attempts to make the eastern figure an actor
rather than a mere onlooker. Bellini's art does not
reflect this development until the independent arri-
val of the Mamluk mode. Bellini's limited contribu-
tion to the oriental mode must surely be linked to the
restricted character of Mehmed's patronage.
Two documented commissions reflect the very
private character of this patronage - one was for
erotica, the other for a painting of the Madonna and
Child. Two independent Italian sources claim that
Mehmed commissioned Gentile to paint a Virgin and
Child to accompany his collection of Christian relics.
Both claim Gentile as their authority, and the artist
was in a good position to know what commissions he
had received. The existence of the relic collection is
proven beyond all question of doubt by a list drawn
up in Italian on the orders of Mehmed's son and
successor, Bayezid II, offering the relics - "in the
palace of the Grand Signor in which the Grand Turk,
the late father of the [sultan] placed them when he
took Constantinople" - for sale to the King of
France. The purpose of the collection is less certain,
though, and a contemporary, Sagundino, records two
conflicting opinions that were current; one was that
it was a pragmatic collection, destined for barter or
sale to a European power, the other that it expressed
Mehmed's "sincera divotione". The importance of
the Madonna commission is that it confirms the per-
sonal relevance of the collection to Mehmed. How
many of his subjects knew of the collection or under-
stood its significance for the Sultan is doubtful; even
his librarian, Molla Lutfi, in whose charge some of
the relics were kept, and who, incidentally, was exe-
5
cuted as a heretic after Mehmed's death, angered
the Sultan when, in order to fetch down a book, he
stood on the 'Stone of the Nativity'!
These Christian relics were salvaged during the
sack of Constantinople, and they raise the question of
Mehmed's response to Byzantium. Other items such
as the imperial regalia were rescued on the Sultan's
orders, and he gathered a large collection of Byzan-
tine marble statuary, including almost all the por-
phyry sarcophagi from the imperial necropolis at the
Church of the Holy Apostles, and the "miraculous"
marble toad of Leo the Wise which was in the habit of
waking up at night and scouring the streets of the city
for garbage. Mehmed's collections of sacred relics and
secular marbles reflected Byzantium in its twin guise
as the New Jerusalem and the New Rome, and both
Greeks and Italians at his court flattered him with the
title of Roman Emperor. It is true that he had the
great bronze equestrian statue of the Augustaeon
pulled down from its hundred-foot-high column out-
side Hagia Sophia, but this was on the advice of his
astrologers who warned him the rider was a talisman
of the city. For the Turks it was a maleficent object,
and its demolition is no proof of a general iconoclastic
campaign. Viceversa,a beneficent talisman, the snake-
preventing Serpent Column in the Hippodrome, was
preserved by Mehmed; legend claims that he broke
one of the serpent's jaws with his mace, but this is
unfounded, whereas there is good evidence that he
had a mulberry tree, which was growing dangerously
close to the column, cauterised to its roots.
A collection of Greek manuscripts still in the Top-
kapi Saray is believed also to have been rescued from
the sack. However, seventeen manuscripts have now
been identified which represent the library not of the
last Byzantine Emperor of Constantinople, but the
first Ottoman Sultan of Istanbul. Some were prob-
ably intended for the training of Mehmed's Greek
chancellery staff, for Greek continued as a language
of diplomatic exchange into the first decades of the
sixteenth century. Others, on the other hand, bear
directly on the Sultan's interests.
One is a copy of Arrian's Anabasis, the standard
classical source on the life of Alexander the Great; it is
a companion volume to a history of Mehmed the
Conqueror written by a Greek courtier, Kritobulos,
the leitmotiv of whose work was Mehmed's image as
the neo-Alexander. There is a copy of the Iliad pro-
duced, it appears, shortly after Mehmed's visit to
Troy in 1462 when, according to Kritobulos, he stood
in the plain of Ilium "shaking his head a little" and
asking to see the tombs of Ajax and Achilles, heroes
fortunate, he said, to have had Homer as their eulo-
gist. He even referred to himself as a Trojan come
to avenge the East for all the injustice they had
received from the West; the reference echoes a well-
known conceit, which Pope Pius II made efforts to
refute, that the Turks, the Turci, were descendants
of the Trojans, the Teucri.
Other manuscripts catered to his interest in geo-
graphy, but the most telling expression of this interest
6
came during the mid-1460s when he had the leading
expert on Ptolemy, George Amirutzes, prepare a
wall-map of the world from the discrete maps in
Ptolemy's Geography;Amirutzes and one of his sons
were commissioned to translate the work into Arabic.
During his enforced rest in 1465 Mehmed studied
peripatetic philosophy with Amirutzes. Mehmed
conversed about Christianity with the monk Genna-
dios whom he had instated as the first patriarch of
Istanbul, and following an imperial request Genna-
dios wrote a tract on the Christian faith, which was
duly translated. And it must have been from Genna-
dios that Mehmed or one of his circle acquired the
fragments of the Laws by the fifteenth-century neo-
Platonist, Georgios Gemistos Plethon, for these frag-
ments, which include a hymn to Zeus, survive in
Arabic translation in an imperial manuscript attribut-
able to his reign.
Another of the Greek manuscripts in the Saray is a
copy, dated 1474, of the Antiquities of Constantinople,
which includes an account of Santa Sophia. Mehmed
is known to have collected oral and written records of
the building's history, questioning Greek priests and
ordering translations of Greek works on its construc-
tion and the founding of Constantinople. Several
Turkish and Persian versions are recorded from the
late 1470s, some commissioned and/or dedicated to
the Sultan. Mehmed's response to Constantinople
and its culture went far beyond physical salvage.
Nevertheless, there is little evidence that he patron-
ised Greek artists, although this may reflect more on
the sources, or the parlous state of late Byzantine
crafts, than on Mehmed himself. On one occasion,
however, he organised a competition between two
Greeks and a Persian musician, aimed at testing the
Byzantine system of musical notation. The episode
is cited in sixteenth-century Patriarchal sources as
evidence of Mehmed's open-mindedness to Greeks as
well as Turks, and his image in the Patriarchal
chronicles as an enlightened tyrannoscontrasts with his
image in the Byzantine aulic histories where he is
depicted as an apocalyptic monster. For the aulic
historians the conquest had meant the end if not of
the world, at least of their world, whereas the patriar-
chate found new, and unexpected, life with Meh-
med's decision to reconstitute it with spiritual and
temporal leadership over the Greek community.
*
* *
This breathless retailing of facts should have served
to demonstrate Mehmed's voracious and eclectic
mentality, as well as the personal character of much
of his patronage. Thus far we have almost entirely
avoided the topic of architecture; yet aspects of Meh-
med's architectural patronage are revealing. In the
first place they confirm his contacts with Italy and his
taste for innovation; secondly, they illustrate the
rewards and penalties he meted out to his artists and
testify, thirdly, to the diversity of Mehmed's cultural
borrowings. Finally, and most importantly, they
reveal the divide between his public and his private
patronage.
THE OXFORDARTJOURNAL- 5:1 1982
 His interest in Italian architectural innovations is
borne out by his invitation to the Bolognese architect
and engineer, Aristotile Fieravante, while Fiera-
vante's associate Filarete certainly planned a visit in
1465 to Istanbul, where his contact was the influential
Amirutzes. At the time Mehmed was building his
most important religious structure, the huge Fatih
mosque complex in Istanbul, and it is perhaps no
coincidence that its symmetrical layout was a depar-
ture in Ottoman architecture and bore a similarity to
Filarete's Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, or more
exactly to the idealised plan in his architectural treat-
ise. Mehmed also converted Filarete's theoretical
musings about star-shaped fortresses into reality,
anticipating the rest of the world by decades. In fact,
within little more than twelve years he built four
major fortresses in or around Istanbul. The first was
entirely mediaeval in its empirical plan and emphasis
on vertical defence, but its scale alone was remark-
able. Built in less than five months, it had three great
towers, one of which was larger than any in Europe
except for the now obliterated Donjon of Coucy. One
of the later castles, by contrast, prefaced the develop-
ment of sixteenth-century fortification; it was a low
enceinte in which the role of artillery was fully inte-
grated. (Artillery was another of Mehmed's interests,
as his siege guns at Constantinople conclusively
proved). In the building of the later castles he sought
the advice of the leaders of the Florentine community
in Pera. Given this rapid sequence of construction,
the growing conceptual character of the architecture,
and the involvement of Europeans, it comes as no
surprise that Mehmed's military buildings had little
influence on the long-term evolution of Ottoman
fortification.
A dark side of Mehmed's patronage emerges from
his treatment of the architect of the Fatih mosque.
Christian sources identify him as Christodoulos,
Ottoman sources as Sinan-i Atik; they may refer to
one and the same person, not least because both claim
that the architect was executed on the Sultan's orders.
In better days Sinan had been generously rewarded
with property, and his death was seen in popular
circles as a shameful incident that blackened the repu-
tation of a Sultan already resented for financing his
grandiose schemes by harsh exactions on the pro-
vinces. Sinan died "after repeated beatings"; "I
wonder", writes the author of the AnonymousChron-
icles, "was his sin so great that he deserved to die in
this way?" One wonders too. Sinan's fate contrasts
with Bellini's rewards. Gentile and Costanzo, as well
as the Venetian envoy who negotiated the peace of
1479, were all "knighted" by the Sultan, Bellini
receiving a gold medal and chain which must have
been meant to correspond to the collana of the Euro-
pean equestrian orders. And Bellini, who left the Sul-
tan one of his father Jacopo's treasured sketchbooks,
now in the Louvre but still in the Saray in the seven-
teenth century, was rewarded with, among other
things, the golden armour of Doge Dandolo.
Whatever the racial origins of the architect of Meh-
THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL - 5:1 1982
med's Fatih mosque, and whatever the displeasure
of the Sultan, the result was a monumental testament
to Islam. By its position and size alone it invited com-
parison with Santa Sophia, the newly converted
mosque of Ayasofya. A courtier of Mehmed's des-
cribed the Fatih mosque as fashioned on the design of
Ayasofya but in a new and modern style. This bears
out the success of the mosque in integrating the in-
fluence of the Justinianic church - in scale and the
use of the semi-dome - into a by now well-esta-
blished Ottoman architectural tradition.
This integration enabled the mosque and its
dependencies to play an important role in the develop-
ment of Ottoman architecture. The same cannot be
said, however, of all Mehmed's palace architecture.
Mehmed was responsible, on the one hand, for
much of the palace known today as the Topkapi
Saray. It was a legacy that served the Ottoman court
for some 400 years. On the other hand, he indulged
in eclectic fantasy, building three pavilions a stone's
throw one from another, one in the Persian-Kara-
man, another in the Greek, the third in the Turkish
style. The first, the Qinili K6sk, survives, and, splen-
did though it is, it is an anomaly in Ottoman architec-
ture; the other two have disappeared without trace.
These pavilions seem to be the material expression of
Mehmed's intellectual eclecticism. But the lack of
coherence attendant on eclecticism made his example
difficult to follow.
The contrast between Mehmed's religious architec-
ture and his pleasure pavilions illustrates the di-
chotomy between what we may broadly call his "pub-
lic" and "private" patronage. We have concentrated
here on the private sphere, because that is where his
contacts with Europe and Byzantium were centred.
The result, however, is misleading. First, he was a
generous patron of Muslim intellectuals, poets,
musicians and craftsmen. Second, his lasting contri-
bution to the Ottoman heritage was in the public
rather than private realm.
Mehmed's private patronage was, as we have seen,
eclectic with a strong interest in both historical and
contemporary Western culture, if by the West we in-
clude Byzantium. In the visual arts his love of painted
and medallic portraiture was modish, and in a Mus-
lim context innovatory; in architecture he could be
innovatory not only in an Ottoman but in a European
context also. As a patron, however, he was active in
so many different spheres and directions that it seems
he failed to develop - if indeed he wanted to - a
coherent intellectual or aesthetic programme. Cer-
tainly, his private patronage remained just that -
overdependent on his own person. He failed to
create, by involvement or delegation, a sufficiently
broad base of interest at court, so that on his death
the initiative passed, and those who disapproved
could eradicate different facets of patronage as they
7
pleased. And there were the disapproving, for Meh-
med's patronage had religious and political implica-
tions.
Like some of Alexander the Great's Macedonian
followers, many resented Mehmed's advancement of
foreign talent, voicing the complaint:
If you wish to stand in high honour on the Sultan's
threshold,
You must be a Jew, or a Persian, or a Frank;
You must choose the name Habil, Kabil, Hamidid,
And behave like Zorzi: show no knowledge.
Others must have found the European figural in-
fluence objectionable; even if figural painting was an
established feature of many Muslim courts, it was
anathema in religious circles and there were those
who looked for an absolute interdiction.
Among the disapproving was Mehmed's son Baye-
zid who was backed by powerful religious and Turk-
ish factions. Bayezid on his accession sold Mehmed's
paintings and disposed of his relics. As Tomaso di
Tolfo wrote to Michelangelo from Turkey in 1519,
Bayezid took "no delight in figures of any sort; in-
deed he hated them". Mehmed's portrait initiative,
suffered a peremptory fate.
However, Bayezid did not repudiate Mehmed's
public patronage, in the form of his finest achieve-
ment - the city of Istanbul. From the ashes of Con-
stantinople, a city depopulated and ruinous even
before the Sack, Mehmed had created one of the great
capitals of the world. The process cannot be detailed
here; all one can do is to emphasise that he laid the
foundations for Istanbul's demographic, topographic
and architectural future. By his repopulation he
BibliographicNote
The standard biography of Mehmed is F. Babinger, Mehmedthe
Conqueror and his time, Bollinger series, XCVI, Princeton, N.J.,
1978, which is an English edition of a work that first came out in
1953. Some of Mehmed's invitations to European artists, in parti-
cular Bellini, are detailed in L. Thuasne, GentileBelliniet le Sultan
Mohammed II, Paris, 1888, and J. von Karabacek, Abendldndische
Kinstler zu Konstantinopel im XV. und XVI. JahrhundertsVol. I,
Kaiserliche Akademie der Wiss. in Wien.Phil.-hist. Klasse,
Denkschriften 62 Band, 1 Abhandlung, Vienna 1918. The most
recent study is M. Andaloro, 'Costanzo da Ferrara. Gli anni a
Costantinopoli alla corte di Maometto II', Storiadell'Arte,Vols.
38/40, 1980, pp. 185-212. For the medals, G.F. Hill, A corpusof
Italian medalsof the RenaissancebeforeCellini, 2 vols, London, 1930.
For the "schoolbook", S. Unver, Fatihin focukluk defteri. Un
cahier d'Enfance du Sultan MehemmedLe Conquerant"Fatih", Istan-
bul, 1961. On the ancient history lessons, J. Raby, 'Cyriacus of
Ancona and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II', Journalof the War-
8 THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL -
established the multi-racial and multi-sectarian
character of the Ottoman city for more than 400
years. And he built its major palace, military and
mercantile sites, while with his Fatih mosque he set
the pattern for the imperial edifices that grace the
city skyline. Admittedly, his demographic decision
was controversial, but the rebuilding he achieved
with traditional methods: the modules of urban
development were characteristic of Islamic cities, the
building schemes were characteristically Ottoman.
Delegation played a vital role in Mehmed's urban
plan, and he was well supported by his courtiers.
These public works were, moreover, entirely ani-
conic; and no attempt was made to foist his private
interests on the populace. The influence of Mehmed's
private patronage, therefore, was short-lived - little
more than thirty years; the repercussions of his public
patronage can still be sensed today.
* * *
Like Bahram Gur who had seven pavilions each of a
different colour, and each inhabited by a princess
of a different realm, Mehmed could move, as the
cultural mood took him, between his different pavil-
ions. It is hardly surprising, then, that his image in
Europe was ambivalent, just as it was among the
Greeks. The facts, let alone the rumours, were diffi-
cult for his contemporaries to reconcile.
Mehmed was accused by his son Bayezid of "not
believing in Muhammad"; others, perhaps nearer the
mark, accused him of not believing in any one faith.
We might add the rider that he did not believe in any
one culture. Is that an accusation too?
burgand CourtauldInstitutes, Vol. 43, 1980, pp. 242-246.
For aspects of Mehmed's urban policy and architecture, H.
Inalcik, 'The policy of Mehmed II towards the Greek population
of Istanbul and the Byzantine buildings of the city', Dumbarton
OaksPapers,23-24, 1969-70, pp. 229-249; M. Restle, 'Bauplan-
ung und Baugesinnung unter Mehmed II Fatih. Filarete in
Konstantinopel', Pantheon,39, 1981, pp. 361-367. On the Greek
manuscripts, J. Raby, 'Mehmed the Conqueror's Greek Scrip-
torium', DumbartonOaksPapers, 37, 1983 (forthcoming).
The question of Bellini's influence on Venetian orientalism is
the subject of a monograph due to be published Autumn 1982,
J. Raby, Venice,Direr and the OrientalMode (Hans Huth Memorial
Papers 1). For some of the other topics, including unpublished
Venetian documents, I can here only refer the reader to my book,
El Gran Turco:Mehmedthe Conqueroras a Patronof theArts of Christen-
dom, which is scheduled for publication by Alexandria Press in
Spring 1984.
5:1 1982