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As Mehmed waited outside Constantinople, his troops raped women and boys, killed and enslaved thousands. ‘Every tent was heaven,’ boasted an Ottoman soldier, ‘filled with boys and girls, sexual servants of paradise, each a stately beauty offering a juicy peach.’ At the end of the third day, the sultan ended the pillage and entered on horseback, dazzled by the Queen of Cities. In the old Boukoleon Palace – its ruins still stand – he reflected on the transience of empires by quoting Saadi:

The spider is curtain bearer in the palace of Khusrau,

The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.

Visiting Hagia Sophia, he caught a soldier looting treasures and clobbered him with the flat of his sword.

Mehmed was now master of a ruined, half-empty Constantinople. Acclaiming himself Kayser-i-Rum, Caesar of Rome, he converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque and built his own palace on the Forum and a second New (Topkapı) Palace on the site of the Mega Palation, which he demolished.^* As for Halil, his grand vizier, who had foiled all his schemes since 1444, he was beheaded, the first of many viziers to be killed. Henceforth most viziers were not Turks but formerly enslaved Slavs or Greeks, all converted to Islam. At least one of the Palaiologos nephews of the last emperor converted to Islam and rose to grand vizier. Ottoman tolerance has been exaggerated by historians. ‘Tolerance is not the same as celebrating diversity,’ writes Marc David Baer, but ‘a state of inequality’. Jews and Christians existed at the mercy of the ruler, providing they offered total submission, often having to wear special badges and costumes to mark their inferiority to Muslims and suffering bursts of persecution. There were always exceptions: Caesar-sultans do not have friends, but Mehmed’s closest courtier was his physician, an Italian Jew named Giacomo of Gaeta who converted to become Hekim Yakub (Dr Jacob) Pasha, later chief vizier.

The pope called for a crusade to restore the Second Rome, but to the north Mehmed’s conquests contributed to the rise of Russia, transforming the princes of Moscow from recent Mongol enforcers to haughty Orthodox Caesars.

Scarcely resting after taking Constantinople, Mehmed looked to exploit the ruin of the Golden Horde, forming an alliance with Haji Giray, descendant of Genghis and Jochi. Giray founded his own family kingdom, the Tatar khanate of the Crimea, which remained a formidable European power for 300 years, fielding armies of 50,000 cavalry that at various times took Moscow and almost Vienna.

Mehmed and Giray attacked the Italian cities of the Crimea and took over their slave markets. Giray then started raiding Christian Poland, Muscovy and Lithuania to capture fair-skinned slaves. Mehmed galloped around the Black Sea into Wallachia (Romania) where, backed by Radu the Beautiful, he attacked the prince’s defiant brother Vlad, who hated the Ottomans. Vlad made up for his meagre resources by intrepid tactics and eyewatering cruelty, killing Mehmed’s envoys by driving nails into their turbans. In between Ottoman invasions and during three reigns as voivode, Vlad purged enemies, Saxons and Turks, by rectally impaling them in forests of stakes – a practice which shocked even the sultan and earned him the epithet the Impaler, inspiration for Dracula – before he was driven out and replaced by Radu.^*

In 1460, Mehmed mopped up the offshoots of Constantinople; he captured Trebizond and advanced into Greece, which remained Ottoman until the 1820s. There he expelled the last emperor’s brother, Thomas Palaiologos, Despot of Morea, who escaped with his baby daughter Zoë. The girl was adopted by the pope. In a demonstration of how female power could connect and transform, this gifted princess would have a special role in the creation of Russia: in 1472, when she was twenty-three, the pope married her by proxy in St Peter’s to the thirty-two-year-old grand prince of Muscovy, Ivan III. Adopting the Orthodox name Sophia, this Greek-Roman sophisticate arrived in rough, cold Moscow to meet her fearsome husband for the first time.

Ivan had been raised in the toughest school. Moscow’s rise was far from assured. For a long time it looked as if Lithuania, not Muscovy, would unite a Slavic empire. The dukes of Lithuania were the last pagan potentates in Europe until in 1385 the pagan potentate Jagiełło, thirty-three years old, converted to Catholicism to win the crown of Poland by marrying Jadwiga, its heiress.^* While the two monarchies remained formally separate, Jagiełło called himself grand duke of the Lithuanians, king of Poland and lord of Rus, creating a singular Lithuanian–Polish union that became the biggest state in Europe. Jagiełło, who took the name Władysław II, defeated the Teutonic Knights in the north, later swallowing Prussia before expanding southwards, gobbling up the lands of old Rus.