Fatih Sultan Mehmet laid claim to all the territories previously held by the Byzantines, so that his empire incorporated most of Greece and the Balkans, as well as Anatolia.
The empire of Fatih Sultan Mehmet spanned from Greece to the Balkans.
It's the kind of high-low juxtaposition--of reference, of language, of moral importance--that Woody Allen executes so wonderfully, such as in this excerpt from The Scrolls: Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?