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By the year 1453, when the vestigial remains of the Byzantine Empire were destroyed with the fall of Constantinople, much of the Balkan peninsula was already in the hands of the conquering Ottoman Turks. The overthrow of Byzantium in that year was the capstone in a century-long process that transformed an originally militant Muslim Anatolian border emirate into a powerful Muslim empire that straddled two continents and represented a major contender in contemporary European great power politics. Over half of the population subject to the Ottoman sultan were Christian European inhabitants of the Balkans: Greeks, Serbs, Vlahs, Albanians and Bulgarians. With the conquest of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II Fatih, the victorious Turkish ruler, faced the quarrelsome problem of devising a secure means of governing his vast, Muslim-led empire that contained a highly heterogeneous non-Muslim population.