ROMAN EMPIRE, LATER).
Secure in his possession of Constantinople the sultan proceeded northwards and entirely subdued the southern parts of Serbia. A siege of Belgrade was unsuccessful, owing to the timely succour afforded by Hunyadi (1456). Two years later internal dissensions in Serbia brought about the conquest of the whole country by the Turks, only Belgrade remaining in the hands of the Hungarians. Walachia was next reduced to the state of a tributary province. Venice having adopted a hostile attitude since Turkey's conquests in the Morea, greater attention was devoted to the fleet; Mytilene was captured and the entrance to the straits fortified. The con quest of Bosnia, rendered necessary by the war with Venice, was next completed, in spite of the reverses inflicted on the Turks by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, the son of Janos Hunyadi. The Turks continued to press the Venetians by land and sea; Albania was overrun ; and Venice was forced to agree to a treaty by which she ceded to Turkey Scutari and Kroia, and consented to pay an indemnity of Ioo,000 ducats (Jan. 25, 1478). The Crimea was next conquered and bestowed as a tributary province on the Tatar khan Mengli Girai. Mohammed now endeavoured to strike a blow at Rhodes, the stronghold of the Knights of St. John, preparatory to carrying out his long-cherished plan of conquering Italy. A powerful naval expedition was fitted out, but failed, though a land attack on southern Italy at the same time was suc cessful, Otranto being captured and held for a time by the Turks. In 1481 the sultan died at Gebze. He is said to have been of a merry and even jocular disposition, to have afforded a generous patronage to learning, and, strange to say for a sultan, to have been master of six languages.
Mohammed II. was the organizer of the fabric of Ottoman administration in the form which it retained practically unchanged until the reforms of Mahmud II. and Abd-ul-Mejid. He raised the regular forces of the country to a total exceeding io0,000. Under him the independent princes of Asia Minor were finally subjugated. Many educational and benevolent foundations were endowed by him, and it is to Mohammed II. that the organization of the ulema, or legist and ecclesiastical class, is due. (X.) Bayezid IL (1481-1512).—Bayezid reached the capital before his brother Jem and ascended his father's throne. To win over the followers of his brother he paid an accession present to the janissaries : this became an established custom. Jem's attempts
to seize the throne were defeated : he took refuge with the Knights of Rhodes, but they were paid to keep him in custody, and after 13 years' captivity he died in Naples. He was said to have been poisoned by Pope Alexander Borgia, who received 300,00o ducats from Bayezid, but from Taj-ut-Tevarih, the most reliable history of the period, his illness sounds like erysipelas.
Surnamed the "Saint," Bayezid was a man of peace by nature, but failed to curb the warlike tendencies of the young empire. He made attempts to withdraw from Otranto, and exempted Venice from her yearly tribute by imposing instead a 4% customs duty on Venetian goods imported. In 1492 the armies of the Turks invaded Laibach in Carniola and Cilli in Styria. In 1494 they were driven out of Styria by the Emperor Maximilian. While Bayezid was fighting against his brother's claims, Moldavians attacked Turkish territory in Walachia and he was forced to lead another Turkish army into Moldavia. The khan of the Crimea, Mengli Girai, fought in this army, and through his influence political correspondence was opened between Russia and Turkey, and the first Russian ambassador, Michel Belsetchev, arrived in Constantinople. Moldavia became a vassal state after two years of war. John Albert, King of Poland, invaded Moldavia in 1496; and this was followed by a counter-invasion of the Turks, but they were forced to return by the severe winter. In 1496 Hercegovina was annexed to the empire, and in 1500 the Polish wars ended with an armistice. Rome and the Italian States had encouraged the sultan to crush the Venetian republic. On July 28, 1499, the Turks gained over Venice their first great naval victory at Lepanto, and concluded peace on Dec. 24, 1502: a part of Morea and a few islands passed to Turkey, Venice retaining Cephalonia. On the Asiatic side Ismail Safevi, the shah of Persia, inspired with re ligious zeal for the propagation of Shia doctrines, raided the em pire 0500. The sultan attempted a pacific solution but failed to restrain his warlike son Selim from fighting the Persians. Shah Ismail's propaganda rooted the Shia doctrines so firmly in Anatolia that in spite of the sanguinary repressions during the reign of Sclim the Grim the Shia sects survive in Anatolia to this day as the Kizil-Bash. Bayezid had also to fight the Egyptian armies under the Mamelukes who had invaded Adana, and he drove them out.