26 May – summer 1421
Mehmed’s death, 1421
Mehmed dies at Edirne on 26 May 1421. By Ottoman tradition he is struck by a stroke while hunting and falls from his horse. On his deathbed he asks his viziers to hide his death until his son Murad arrives, and Bayezid Pasha keeps it secret for about forty days. Murad, sixteen years old and governor of Amasya, rides to Bursa and is proclaimed sultan there. Mehmed’s body is then carried from Edirne to Bursa and buried in the Green Tomb, a domed hexagon faced with green and blue tiles that Murad builds on the hill above his father’s mosque.
Mehmed I on his deathbed, in an Ottoman manuscript of 1585Wikimedia Commons, unknown Ottoman painter, Public domain (Mehmed Çelebi on his death bed.jpg)
Mehmed had wanted to send his young sons Yusuf and Mahmud to Manuel II as hostages, so that Manuel would go on holding Mustafa. Bayezid Pasha refuses to hand the boys over, and Manuel releases Mustafa and Cüneyd from Lemnos and recognizes Mustafa as Bayezid’s heir, after Mustafa promises to give up towns to Byzantium if he wins the throne.
The Green Tomb of Mehmed I at BursaWikimedia Commons, Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Yeşil Türbe 01.jpg)
At Mehmed’s death the Ottoman lands reach in Europe from the Danube, with Dobruja, to Thessaly and Valona, and in Anatolia from İzmir to Ankara, Amasya and Samsun. Byzantium holds Constantinople, Thessalonica and the Morea, Wallachia pays tribute, and the beys of Karaman, Germiyan, Menteşe, Teke and Candar rule their own lands.
Sources
- Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina (about 1462).
- Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (late 15th century).
- Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ (late 15th century).
- Halil İnalcık, “Meḥemmed I”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 6 (1991), 973–978.
- Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (1990).
Prev: Bursa and Edirne under Mehmed I