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www.timesonline In Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600, the biggest exhibition of Turkish culture ever mounted in this country, the Royal Academy captures the colossal history of the Turkic people.
It starts with tribes from the distant wastes of Mongolia and moves in great nomadic leaps as the Uighurs, the Timurids and the Seljuks conquer vast swaths from east of Samarkand to Ankara, from the Indian Ocean to the Aral Sea and from Iran to Libya, from the Red Sea to Thrace.
Mehmet won his place in history not just for his military crusades but for the symbolism of his conquest of Constantinople. The Ottomans had already made their capital in Edirne, many miles to the west, but his conquest of the last feeble trace of the Roman Empire placed his domain on the divide between East and West, geographically, politically and culturally. He himself came to represent the East’s yearning for cultural rediscovery and the West’s fascination for what had seemed an alien and dangerous culture.
As the exhibition reveals, the Conqueror was not content to wreak havoc on all who opposed him, nor just to enjoy the pleasures of the harem with its 500 concubines. No, he saw himself as the successor to Alexander the Great and a man of the Renaissance.
He was a calligrapher of note, as the fabulous swirls and curlicues of his signature testify, and helped to make the art form among the highest paid in the royal court and one which shaped the design of books and of metalwork, jewellery and carpets.
As well as the Conqueror, he was Mehmed the Poet and Mehmed the Shopper. He ordered the building of the Grand Bazaar  the Harvey Nicks of its day  in which “you walk in the midst of towering heaps of brocade from Baghdad, linens from Hindustan, cashmeres from India and Persia and tissues from Cairoâ€Â, and “ten voices at once address you Monsieur. Captain. Caballero! Eccellenzia! My Lord!†Today the salesmen are still there, just as imploring, but owing more to the Bluewater Shopping Centre with their T-shirts, football strips and belly-dancing outfits.
Mehmed embraced the sciences, maths and geography as he tried to match the great Italian princes, such as the Medicis and Sforzas, and encouraged trade and cultural exchange. The Medicis took advantage of the Turkish hostility to Venice to develop trade in silk and carpets, sending their own designers to Anatolia to copy clothes, armour and pictures as well as costumes for carnivals and masked balls.
Indeed, even as he contemplated attacking Venice, Mehmed signalled his enthusiasm for Italian art by hiring Gentile Bellini  official portraitist of the Venetian doges  to paint his portrait. It is one of the most enduring images of the era. His son, Bayezid II, continued the tradition by asking Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to design a bridge to connect Constantinople with the opposite bank of the Golden Horn.
Mehmed introduced craftsmen from the Turkish cities of Edirne and Bursa and turned the church of St Sofia, built almost 1,000 years before by the Emperor Justinian, into a mosque. Instead of razing it, Mehmed added the minarets, cleared the interior and swung the altar so that it faced east, but he left the Christian crosses on the outside and preserved the 9th-century mosaics and marble within.
As if to keep pace with the architectural triumphs of the Renaissance, Mehmed built the Fatih mosque with its soaring dome and 22 cupolas, a modest tribute to Muhammad and himself.
A visit to the Museum of Islamic Art and Mehmed’s old palace, the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, from which many of the 300-plus exhibits have been sourced  as well as from Berlin, St Petersburg and London  gives a dazzling, wildly extravagant taste of the London exhibition. There are arrows covered with precious stones, swords and daggers encrusted with rubies and emeralds, thumb rings for archers made of gold, ivory belts and an extravagant helmet made for Süleyman the Magnificent, everything adorned with gold, ruby, turquoise, emeralds and more gold. There are parchments of painstaking calligraphy and magic carpets wider than the Bosphorus.
All the possessions of the sultans were kept when they died so we find a rock-crystal writing box to illustrate their wisdom and literacy, chess sets inlaid with rubies and emeralds, solid gold ceremonial flasks. Although Selim II’s voluminous trousers, big enough to hide half a dozen wives, will not be turning up in London, the Conqueror’s haute couture kaftan in yellow and red silk is fashion statement enough  especially when you realise that hidden in its lining is solid chain-mail.
Many of the exhibits were gifts from vassal princes or seized as booty. But when it comes to acquisitiveness, little has changed. One of the exhibits is the wood and bronze gates from a 12th-century mosque. An elaborate handle of an entwined dragon and lion was stolen in 1969 by Danish adventurers and is now in a Copenhagen museum.
Just as Mehmed offered spoil and plunder, the greedy have been dining off that “brilliant banquet†ever since.
· The Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600, Royal Academy (020-7300 8000), from January 22
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