The Homosexuality Of Sultan Mehmed II

Byzantine chroniclers of the 15th century remembered Mehmed II not only as the conqueror of Constantinople. Their texts also include stories about his attraction to young men and about an intimate bond with Radu the Handsome, the brother of Vlad Dracula. In this article, we will look closely at what the sources actually claim and how different authors disagree.

A Brief Biography of Sultan Mehmed II

Mehmed II, most often called Mehmed the Conqueror, ruled the Ottoman throne twice: from 1444–1446, and then from 1451 until his death in 1481.

He was born on March 30, 1432. His father was Sultan Murad II, and his mother was a woman of enslaved status. Her origin remains unclear.

Mehmed’s first reign fell during a period of sharp confrontation with the Christian powers of Europe. In the 15th century, a “crusade” usually meant a large military coalition formed for war against the Ottoman Empire. It was during Mehmed’s first sultanate that the Ottomans managed to stop such a campaign.

After returning to the throne in 1451, Mehmed began preparing a decisive strike against Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

In 1453, at the age of twenty-one, Mehmed captured Constantinople and brought the Byzantine Empire to an end. After the victory, he adopted the title “Caesar of Rome,” implying that control over the former Roman capital gave him the right to present himself as the heir of the Roman emperors. In the new political reality, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the main center of Orthodoxy, recognized this status, while most European monarchs rejected it.

After the fall of Constantinople, the conquests did not stop. Mehmed again brought Anatolia under his control, that is, most of the territory of modern Turkey in Asia Minor, where separate domains and competing centers of power had previously remained. In the west, his campaigns reached Bosnia; Serbia was also conquered.

However, Mehmed was not only a commander. Inside the country he carried out a whole series of political and social reforms, strengthening central authority and bringing order to the administration of a vast state.

In 1481, the sultan set out on a new campaign with his army, but fell ill on the road and died.

In modern Turkey, Mehmed II is seen as a hero, above all as the ruler who took Constantinople and made it the Ottoman capital. The Istanbul district of Fatih is named after him (the word “fatih” in Turkish and Arabic means “conqueror”), as are many other places across the country.

The Sultan’s Character and Reputation

Sources describe Mehmed II’s character in very different ways. The image of the ruler depends heavily on the authors’ viewpoints and aims. In some narratives, the sultan appears as a cruel and depraved tyrant; in others, as an intelligent, cold-blooded, and enlightened ruler who valued art, science, and education.

From a young age, Mehmed was interested in the culture and history of Ancient Greece and Byzantium. He was inspired by heroes of classical legend, such as Achilles, and by great commanders like Alexander the Great. This fascination with antiquity went together with broad learning: the sultan studied languages, philosophy, and history, followed the intellectual currents of his time, and was open to ideas associated with the Renaissance.

He actively supported the arts and sciences. Artists, scholars, and architects were invited to his court from both the Islamic world and Europe, including Italian masters of the Renaissance. Mehmed assembled a collection of Western art, books, and Christian relics. Michael Kritoboulos, a Greek historian who served at the sultan’s court, called Mehmed a “philhellene,” meaning a “friend of the Greeks,” that is, someone sympathetic to Greek culture.

Such engagement with Christian culture provoked mixed reactions. In the West, some contemporaries even entertained the idea that the sultan might convert to Christianity, taking his interest as a sign of spiritual closeness. His son and successor, Bayezid II, by contrast, reproached his father for excessive tolerance and accused him of “not believing in the Prophet Muhammad.”

Alongside his state and cultural activity, Mehmed wrote poetry. He wrote under the pen name “Avni,” a word that means “helper” or “benefactor.”

By the end of his reign, Constantinople, which had become the Ottoman capital after the conquest, had turned into a lively and wealthy center of a vast empire.

Mehmed II’s Wives, Concubines, and Harem

Mehmed had at least eight women whom sources describe as his wives or concubines; at least one of them held the status of a lawful wife in the usual sense. In addition, like other Ottoman rulers, the sultan had a harem.

In the Ottoman Empire, the harem was a secluded palace household with strict guards, hierarchy, and a set of rules. It served several key purposes: it ensured dynastic continuity, it was where the ruler’s children were raised, and it was also a space of upbringing and education for women and children.

Mehmed II had at least four sons and four daughters.

Byzantine Testimonies About the Sultan’s Homosexuality

Discussion of Sultan Mehmed II’s possible same-sex preferences is based mainly on Byzantine texts.

Some testimonies concern the first days after the fall of Constantinople, when the city was taken by assault and looting began. Many residents, including boys and girls, were taken captive and enslaved; some captives ended up in harems. The Ottoman official and historian Tursun Beg, a contemporary of these events, wrote that after the final defeat of the enemy the soldiers began to plunder the city and to enslave boys and girls. In his words, every tent held many handsome youths and young women, and captured slaves were displayed naked in the city’s slave market.

Another group of sources describes Mehmed II’s relationship with the Wallachian prince Radu, known by the nickname “the Handsome.”

The Episode With the Son of Loukas Notaras

The most famous mention appears in the work of the Byzantine historian Doukas. He lived in the 15th century and wrote a book commonly known as Byzantine History, in which he described in detail the last years of the empire and its fall under Ottoman blows. Doukas was not an eyewitness to the siege of 1453, but he relied on the accounts of witnesses, on documents, and on his own observations, and he tried to compare information from different sources.

In his narrative there is a story that, as he claims, took place five days after the city was captured.

According to Doukas, Sultan Mehmed II held a banquet to celebrate the victory. When Mehmed was already quite drunk, he was told that the captured Byzantine commander Loukas Notaras had a fourteen-year-old son of extraordinary beauty named Iakovos.

In Byzantium, Loukas Notaras held the office of “megas doux,” that is, commander in chief of the fleet, and he was considered one of the most influential men in the empire. After the fall of the city, Notaras, his family, and his servants fell into Ottoman hands. The sultan spared Notaras and appointed him governor in order to restore order, but tragic events soon followed.

In Doukas’s version, Mehmed sent a eunuch, a court official responsible for the harem, demanding that the boy be brought to the palace.

Notaras refused, considering the demand humiliating. After that, Doukas continues, they were arrested, and the sultan ordered the execution of Notaras, his son, and his son-in-law. The historian describes the scene as deliberately cruel: the heads of the executed were brought to the banquet.

Other sources do confirm that Loukas Notaras was executed on the sultan’s order, but the circumstances of his death remain unclear. A number of chroniclers connect the punishment not to Mehmed’s personal motives, but to a refusal to hand over treasures.

There is also another version in the sources: Notaras’s son, Iakovos, did not die, but remained at the sultan’s court and lived there until 1460, after which he fled to Italy, settled with his sisters, married, and, it is claimed, was unhappy in marriage. In that case, it is possible that a different son of Notaras was executed.

Modern researchers, in particular the American professor Walter G. Andrews, doubt the reliability of Doukas’s story. He points out that the plot suspiciously resembles earlier Christian legends, for example the story of Saint Pelagius, with the same motif of attempted coercive seduction. Andrews believes that such stories could be created in order to portray Muslims as morally depraved conquerors, setting them against “virtuous” Christians.

In addition, Doukas himself was an opponent of Loukas Notaras. Doukas supported church union with the Catholics, while Notaras remained a supporter of Orthodoxy and became famous for the phrase: “Better to see the Turkish turban in Constantinople than the pope’s tiara.” In this context, Doukas’s account may be not so much a historical testimony as an attempt to discredit both the sultan and his personal enemy.

Other Byzantine historians, for example George Sphrantzes, report nothing of the sort about Mehmed and Iakovos. In his Chronicle, a different episode appears: after the fall of the city, Notaras comes to the sultan with gifts, and Mehmed merely asks why he did not help the emperor remove the palace treasures. Here the conflict is explained by money and power, not by the sultan’s personal desires.

Kritoboulos’s Version: Sphrantzes’s Son

The French historian René Guerdan retells one episode in his study, relying on the testimony of the Byzantine author Michael Kritoboulos.

Kritoboulos was a Greek historian of the 15th century who lived through the era of Constantinople’s fall. According to him, immediately after the assault the city saw killings, looting, and the mass enslavement of its inhabitants. Captives were taken without distinction: men and women, children, people of different ages and social ranks.

Kritoboulos also describes an episode in which the fate of the son of one Byzantine figure partly echoes the story of Loukas Notaras’s family. He writes that after the city was taken, the wife and children of another Byzantine historian, Sphrantzes, were captured. Sultan Mehmed II learned about Sphrantzes’s children and bought them for the palace. The historian’s three daughters were sent to the sultan’s harem.

Sphrantzes’s son, John, a fifteen-year-old boy, was, according to Kritoboulos, killed by the sultan after refusing to submit to his advances.

Sphrantzes himself confirms only one thing in his own text: he learned of his son’s death in December 1453, but he does not name the cause.

Mehmed II and the Sultan’s “Favorite,” Radu the Handsome

The Byzantine historian and chronicler Laonikos Chalkokondyles also left an episode about Mehmed II’s personal life. At the center of his story is the Wallachian prince Radu, the younger brother of Vlad, who entered legend as “Dracula.” Radu himself is known in history by the nickname “the Handsome.”

In the 15th century, Wallachia was a small principality north of the Danube, roughly on the lands of present-day Romania. Its rulers had to maneuver between powerful neighbors and often fell into dependence, including on the Ottoman Empire.

In 1443, Radu and Vlad were sent to the Ottoman Empire as hostages to Sultan Murad, Mehmed’s father. Radu converted to Islam, was admitted to the Ottoman imperial court, and found himself within the circle of the sultan and the court elite.

When Mehmed II took the throne, Radu, according to the accounts, stayed close to him and took part in his campaigns, including the siege of Constantinople.

Around 1451–1452, Laonikos Chalkokondyles recorded a story that Mehmed “loved Radu very much.” Mehmed, “burning with lust,” repeatedly invited him to banquets, trying afterward to draw him into the bedroom. But Radu rejected the sultan’s advances.

Then Mehmed kissed Radu, but Radu slashed the sultan’s thigh with a dagger, fled, and for a time hid in a tree. Later, when the danger had passed, he returned to court and again found himself among the ruler’s “favorites.”

The emperor kept by his side Vlad’s brother, the son of Dracul, and he was his favorite and lived close to him. And it happened that, when he began to rule, the emperor wanted to have relations with this youth and almost died because of it. Since the youth pleased him, the emperor invited him to feasts and, burning with lust, raised his cup, calling him into the bedroom. But the youth was stunned to see the emperor rush at him with such intent; he resisted and did not yield to the imperial passion. Yet the emperor kissed him against his will, and then the youth drew a dagger, cut the emperor’s thigh, and fled. The doctors healed the emperor’s wound. And the youth climbed the nearest tree and stayed there, hiding. Only after the emperor had gone did the youth climb down, leave, and then return to court and again become the emperor’s favorite.

– Laonikos Chalkokondyles

Other sources do not clarify whether Radu ultimately became Mehmed’s lover. The only firmly established fact is that later Radu married Maria Despina.

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Because the stories about Mehmed II’s possible same-sex desires have reached us mainly through the Byzantine tradition of writing about an “enemy,” they should be read with an allowance for genre and for the polemical purpose of such works. At the same time, these plots should not simply be dismissed: they reveal mid-15th-century ideas about male beauty, intimacy, and courtly favor. For that reason, from the standpoint of historical method, the conclusion must remain cautious.

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🇹🇷 This article is part of the course “LGBT History of Turkey”:

1. The Homosexuality Of Sultan Mehmed II
2. Homoerotic Themes in Taşlıcalı Yahya Bey’s Ottoman Poem “Shah and the Beggar”
3. Was Atatürk Gay or Bisexual?

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References and Sources

• Runciman, Steven. The Fall of Constantinople 1453. 1969.
• Chalkokondyles, Laonikos. The Histories.
• Beg, Tursun. The History of Mehmed the Conqueror.
• Doukas. Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks (ed. Magoulias, Harry). 1975.
• Guerdan, R. Byzantium: its triumphs and tragedy, Allen & Unwin, 1956 p. 219-220

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