What was the Ottoman Empire? Six centuries in brief

The Ottoman Empire was a state founded in northwest Anatolia around 1299 and ruled by one Turkish Muslim family, the house of Osman, for more than 600 years. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries it held southeast Europe, the Middle East and most of North Africa's coast, with Istanbul, once Constantinople, as its capital. It ended after World War I, when the sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the Republic of Turkey took its place.

In short

• A small frontier principality grew into an empire on three continents, taking Constantinople in 1453 and reaching its peak under Suleiman the Magnificent.
• It ruled a population of many faiths and languages by letting religious communities run much of their own affairs, under a Muslim sultan.
• Its long retreat ended with defeat in World War I, which also brought the Armenian genocide, and its break-up drew much of the modern map of the Middle East and the Balkans.

How did a small principality become an empire?

The name comes from Osman I, a chieftain who ruled a small territory on the border of the Byzantine Empire in northwest Anatolia from about 1299. His son Orhan took the city of Bursa in 1326 and made it his capital. In the 1350s the Ottomans crossed into Europe, and over the next century they conquered most of the Balkans, defeating Serbian-led armies at Kosovo in 1389.

The decisive moment came on 29 May 1453, when Sultan Mehmed II, aged 21, took Constantinople after a siege of about seven weeks, ending the Byzantine Empire, the last direct heir of the Roman Empire in the East. The city became the Ottoman capital, increasingly known as Istanbul. In 1516 and 1517 Selim I conquered the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, bringing Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem under Ottoman rule and letting the sultans claim the title of caliph, leader of the Muslim world, according to the World History Encyclopedia.

Suleiman I, known in Europe as the Magnificent and in Turkey as Kanuni, "the Lawgiver", reigned from 1520 to 1566. His armies took Belgrade, crushed Hungary at Mohács in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529, and his navy dominated much of the Mediterranean. He issued law codes that organized taxes and land, and his architect, Mimar Sinan, built mosques that still define Istanbul's skyline.

How did the Ottomans govern so many peoples?

The empire held Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Slavs, Kurds, Jews and many others. It was an Islamic state: the sultan ruled under Islamic law, and Muslims had a higher legal status. But it did not try to convert everyone. Christians and Jews were recognized as protected communities. They paid a special tax and, in return, kept their places of worship and ran their own religious, educational and family-law affairs under their own leaders. In the 19th century these communities were formalized as millets.

The state also built its elite in an unusual way. Through the devshirme, a levy of boys taken from Christian families in the Balkans, young recruits were converted to Islam and trained as the Janissaries, the sultan's standing infantry, or as palace administrators. Some rose to be grand vizier, the sultan's chief minister. The system tied the empire's top servants to the sultan alone, rather than to a noble family or a region.

Tolerance, in this sense, meant hierarchy rather than equality. It did let many communities keep their languages and faiths for centuries. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, many settled in Ottoman cities such as Salonica and Istanbul.

Why did the empire decline?

"Decline" is a word historians now use with care, because the empire changed and reformed over three centuries rather than simply sinking. Still, its power relative to Europe's fell.

Date	Turning point
c. 1299	Osman I rules a frontier principality in Anatolia
1453	Mehmed II takes Constantinople
1516–1517	Selim I conquers Egypt and Syria
1520–1566	Reign of Suleiman; Mohács 1526; first siege of Vienna 1529
1683	Second siege of Vienna fails
1699	Treaty of Karlowitz: Hungary lost, the first major retreat
1830	Greece wins independence
1839–1876	Tanzimat reforms; a constitution in 1876, suspended in 1878
1908	Young Turk revolution restores the constitution
1912–1913	Balkan Wars: almost all of Europe lost
1914–1918	World War I on Germany's side; defeat
1922–1924	Sultanate abolished (1922), republic proclaimed (1923), caliphate abolished (1924)

The causes are several. European states pulled ahead in military technology, finance and trade, and new sea routes to Asia bypassed Ottoman lands. Nationalism spread among the Balkan Christians, who rose in revolts backed by Russia and other powers. Russia pushed south in a series of wars. The government borrowed heavily from European banks and defaulted in 1875, after which foreign creditors took over parts of its revenue. By the mid-19th century European diplomats called it "the sick man of Europe", and the great powers kept it alive mainly to stop one another taking its lands.

What happened at the end?

In 1914 the empire, by then run by the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks, entered World War I on Germany's side. It defeated the Allied landings at Gallipoli in 1915 and 1916, but lost Arab lands to British advances and an Arab revolt.

During the war, the government carried out the Armenian genocide. From spring 1915 to autumn 1916 it deported almost the whole Armenian population of Anatolia toward the Syrian desert. Of about 1.5 million Armenians in the empire, at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million were killed, in massacres or by starvation, exposure and disease on the deportations, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Assyrian and Greek Christians also suffered mass killings and deportations. Genocide scholars and most historians call the Armenian killings a genocide, and dozens of countries, including the United States in 2021, have recognized it as one. The Turkish government rejects the term, describing the events as a wartime tragedy with losses on all sides.

After the armistice in October 1918, the Allies planned to divide even Anatolia in the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920. A Turkish national movement led by Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, fought them off. The new nationalist government abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922, and the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923, set the borders of a new Turkey. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed that October.

What did the Ottomans leave on the map?

Dozens of countries today were once wholly or partly Ottoman. In the Balkans they include Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the Middle East, Britain and France divided the Arab provinces between them after 1918 as League of Nations mandates: Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan under Britain, Syria and Lebanon under France. Many of today's borders, and some of today's conflicts over them, date from that division.

The empire also left mosques, bridges and bazaars from Sarajevo to Cairo, shared foods and words across the region, and a long argument over its record: a model of coexistence to some, a foreign occupation to others, depending on where people stand. Weighing such memories against evidence is the subject of how historians know the past. Not far from Gallipoli, at the mouth of the same strait, lies the mound of Hisarlik, where archaeologists dug for Homer's Troy.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name three conquests that turned the Ottoman state into an empire, with their rough dates.
• How did the Ottomans rule communities of other faiths, and in what sense was that tolerance unequal?
• Why did the end of the Ottoman Empire shape the borders of so many countries in the Middle East and the Balkans?

Sources

• Ottoman Empire — World History Encyclopedia, Syed Muhammad Khan, 2020
• The Armenian Genocide (1915–16): overview — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Treaty of Peace with Turkey signed at Lausanne, 24 July 1923 — World War I Document Archive, Brigham Young University
• Armenian genocide recognition — Wikipedia
• Millet (Ottoman Empire) — Wikipedia