 This group stood in close contact with two powerful viziers, Mesih Pasha and Hass Murad Pasha, both of whom were descendants of nobles with the name Palaiologos and had been forced to covert to Islam after Constantinople's fall, as well as with other converted scions of Byzantine and Balkan aristocratic families like Mahmud Pasha Angelović, forming what the Ottomanist Halil İnalcık termed a "Greek faction" at the court of Mehmed II.