The Ottoman Empire, also known historically as Turkey or the Turkish Empire, was a state that spanned much of Southeastern Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th century to the early 20th century, centred in modern-day Turkey. It also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe between the early 16th and early 18th centuries.
The empire emerged from a beylik, or principality, founded in northwestern Anatolia in c. 1299 by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into the Balkans by the mid-14th century, transforming their petty kingdom into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II. Further conquests by Selim I led the Sultans to adopt the title of caliph. With its capital at Constantinople and control over a significant portion of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the centre of interactions between the Middle East and Europe for six centuries. Ruling over diverse peoples, the empire granted varying levels of autonomy to its many confessional communities, or millets, to manage their own affairs per Islamic law. During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire became a global power.
Modern academic consensus posits that the empire began to decline after defeat in the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683, but continued to maintain a flexible and strong economy, society and military into much of the 18th century. The Ottoman Empire fell behind technologically from the rest of Europe by the late 18th century as imperial authority fragmented. Further defeats from Austria and Russia culminated in the loss of territory, and with rising nationalism after the French Revolution, a number of new states emerged in the Balkans. Following Mahmud II's reign and the Tanzimat reforms over the course of the 19th century, the Ottoman state became more powerful and organised internally as a new Ottoman identity took hold. In the 1876 revolution, the Ottoman Empire attempted constitutional monarchy, before reverting to an absolute monarchy under Abdul Hamid II, following the Great Eastern Crisis.
Over the course of the late 19th century, Ottoman intellectuals known as Young Turks sought to liberalise and rationalise society and politics along Western lines, culminating in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which reestablished a constitutional monarchy. However, following the disastrous Balkan Wars, the CUP became increasingly radicalised and embraced Turkish nationalism, leading to a coup d'état in 1913 that established a dictatorship.
In the 19th and in the start of 20th centuries, persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction and in the Russian Empire resulted in large-scale loss of life and mass migration into modern-day Turkey from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Crimea. The CUP joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. It struggled with internal dissent, especially the Arab Revolt, and engaged in genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. In the aftermath of World War I, the victorious Allied Powers occupied and partitioned the Ottoman Empire, which lost its southern territories to the United Kingdom and France. The successful Turkish War of Independence, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk against the occupying Allies, led to the end of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922.
Etymology
The word Ottoman is an historical anglicisation of the name of Osman I, the founder of the Empire and of the ruling House of Osman (also known as the Ottoman dynasty). Osman's name in turn was the Turkish form of the Arabic name ʿUthmān (عثمان). In Ottoman Turkish, the empire was referred to as Devlet-i ʿAlīye-yi ʿOsmānīye (دولت عليه عثمانیه), lit. 'Sublime Ottoman State', or simply Devlet-i ʿOsmānīye (دولت عثمانيه), lit. 'Ottoman State', and in Arabic, it was referred to as al-Dawla al-ʕaliyya al-ʕuṯmāniyya (الدولة العليَّة العثمانيَّة).
The Turkish word for Ottoman (Osmanlı) originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in the 14th century. The word subsequently came to be used to refer to the empire's military-administrative elite. In contrast, the term Turk (Türk) was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population and was seen as a disparaging term when applied to urban, educated individuals. In the early modern period, an educated, urban-dwelling Turkish speaker who was not a member of the military-administrative class typically referred to himself neither as an Osmanlı nor as a Türk, but rather as a Rūmī (رومى), or "Roman", meaning an inhabitant of the territory of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. The term Rūmī was also used to refer to Turkish speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond.
In Western Europe, the names Ottoman Empire, Turkish Empire and Turkey were often used interchangeably, with Turkey being increasingly favoured both in formal and informal situations. This dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–1923, when the newly established Ankara-based Turkish government chose Turkey as the sole official name.
History
Rise (c. 1299–1453)
As the Rum Sultanate declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was a patchwork of independent Turkish principalities known as the Anatolian Beyliks. One of these, in the Bithynia region on the Byzantine frontier, was led by Osman I (d. 1323/4), a figure of obscure origin from whom the name Ottoman is derived. Osman's early followers were Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine renegades, not all of them Muslim. Osman extended his principality by conquering Byzantine towns along the Sakarya River, and a Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 contributed to his rise. It is not well understood how the early Ottomans came to dominate their neighbours, due to a lack of sources. The Ghaza thesis popular during the 20th century credited their success to rallying religious warriors, but the idea is no longer generally accepted, and no other hypothesis has attracted broad support.
In the century after Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over Anatolia and the Balkans. The Byzantine–Ottoman wars, waged in Anatolia in the late 13th century before entering Europe in the mid-14th century, were followed by the Bulgarian–Ottoman wars and the Serbian–Ottoman wars in the mid-14th century. Osman's son, Orhan, captured the northwestern Anatolian city of Bursa in 1326 and made it the new capital, supplanting Byzantine control in the region. The important port of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in 1387 and sacked. The Ottoman victory in Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe. The Battle of Nicopolis for the Bulgarian Tsardom of Vidin in 1396, regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages, also failed to stop the Ottomans.
As the Turks expanded into the Balkans, the conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. The Ottomans already controlled nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city, but Constantinople's defenses and strategic position on the Bosporus Strait made it difficult to conquer. In 1402, the Byzantines were temporarily relieved when the Turco-Mongol leader Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, invaded Ottoman Anatolia from the east. In the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Timur defeated Ottoman forces and took Sultan Bayezid I as prisoner, throwing the empire into disorder. The ensuing civil war lasted from 1402 to 1413 as Bayezid's sons fought over succession. It ended when Mehmed I emerged as the sultan.
The Balkan territories lost by the Ottomans after 1402, including Thessaloniki, Macedonia, and Kosovo, were recovered by Murad II between the 1430s and 1450s. On 10 November 1444, Murad repelled the Crusade of Varna by defeating the Hungarian, Polish, and Wallachian armies under Władysław III of Poland and John Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna, although Albanians under Skanderbeg continued to resist. Four years later, John Hunyadi prepared another army of Hungarian and Wallachian forces to attack the Turks, but was again defeated at the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448.
In modern historiography, there is a direct connection between the rapid Ottoman advances and the Black Death from the mid-14th century onwards. Byzantine territories were exhausted demographically and militarily due to the plague, and this facilitated Ottoman expansion. In addition, slave hunting was a main economic motivation for the Ottomans. Some 21st-century authors re-periodise conquest of the Balkans into the akıncı phase, which spanned 8 to 13 decades, characterised by continuous slave hunting and destruction, followed by administrative integration into the Empire.
Expansion and peak (1453–1566)
The son of Murad II, Mehmed the Conqueror, reorganised both state and military, and on 29 May 1453 conquered Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire. Mehmed allowed the Eastern Orthodox Church to maintain its autonomy and land in exchange for accepting Ottoman authority. Due to tension between the states of western Europe and the later Byzantine Empire, most of the Orthodox population accepted Ottoman rule, as preferable to Venetian rule. Albanian resistance was a major obstacle to Ottoman expansion on the Italian peninsula.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire entered a period of expansion. The Empire prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective Sultans. It flourished economically due to its control of the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia.
Sultan Selim I (1512–1520) dramatically expanded the eastern and southern frontiers by defeating Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran, in the Battle of Chaldiran. Selim I established Ottoman rule in Egypt by defeating and annexing the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and created a naval presence on the Red Sea. After this Ottoman expansion, competition began between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottomans to become the dominant power in the region.
Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566) captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered the southern and central parts of the Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Ottoman–Hungarian Wars, and, after his historic victory in the Battle of Mohács in 1526, he established Ottoman rule in the territory of present-day Hungary and other Central European territories. He then laid siege to Vienna in 1529, but failed to take the city. In 1532, he made another attack on Vienna, but was repulsed in the siege of Güns. Transylvania, Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia, became tributary principalities of the Empire. In the east, the Ottoman Turks took Baghdad from the Persians in 1535, establishing Ottoman rule in Iraq and gaining naval access to the Persian Gulf. After the end of the Ottoman–Safavid War (1532–1555), the Caucasus became partitioned for the first time between the Safavids and the Ottomans, a status quo that persisted until the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century. By this partitioning as signed in the Peace of Amasya, Western Armenia, western Kurdistan, and Western Georgia fell into Ottoman hands, while southern Dagestan, Eastern Armenia, Eastern Georgia, and Azerbaijan remained Persian.
In 1539, a 60,000-strong Ottoman army besieged the Spanish garrison of Castelnuovo on the Adriatic coast; the successful siege cost the Ottomans 8,000 casualties, but Venice agreed to terms in 1540, surrendering most of its empire in the Aegean and the Morea. France and the Ottoman Empire, united by mutual opposition to Habsburg rule, became allies. The French conquests of Nice (1543) and Corsica (1553) occurred as a joint venture between French king Francis I and Suleiman, and were commanded by the Ottoman admirals Hayreddin Barbarossa and Dragut. France supported the Ottomans with an artillery unit during the 1543 Ottoman conquest of Esztergom in northern Hungary. After further advances by the Turks, the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand officially recognised Ottoman ascendancy in Hungary in 1547. Suleiman died of natural causes during the siege of Szigetvár in 1566. Following his death, the Ottomans were said to be declining, although this has been rejected by many scholars. By the end of Suleiman's reign, the Empire spanned approximately 877,888 mi2 (2,273,720 km2), extending over three continents.
The Empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea. The Empire was now a major part of European politics. The Ottomans became involved in multi-continental religious wars when Spain and Portugal were united under the Iberian Union. The Ottomans were holders of the Caliph title, meaning they were the leaders of Muslims worldwide. The Iberians were leaders of the Christian crusaders, and so the two fought in a worldwide conflict. There were zones of operations in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, where Iberians circumnavigated Africa to reach India and, on their way, wage war upon the Ottomans and their local Muslim allies. Likewise, the Iberians passed through newly-Christianised Latin America and had sent expeditions that traversed the Pacific to Christianise the formerly Muslim Philippines and use it as a base to attack the Muslims in the Far East. In this case, the Ottomans sent armies to aid its easternmost vassal and territory, the Sultanate of Aceh in Southeast Asia.
The Spanish–Ottoman wars took place primarily in the Mediterranean. Barbary corsairs from the North African cities of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which were nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, captured thousands of merchant ships and raided coastal towns in Europe, enslaving the people they captured.
During the 1600s, the world conflict between the Ottoman Caliphate and Iberian Union was a stalemate since both were at similar population, technology and economic levels. Nevertheless, the success of the Ottoman political and military establishment was compared to the Roman Empire, despite the difference in size, by the likes of contemporary Italian scholar Francesco Sansovino and French political philosopher Jean Bodin.
Revolts, reversals, and revivals (1566–1683)
In the second half of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire came under increasing strain from inflation and the rapidly rising costs of warfare that were impacting both Europe and the Middle East. These pressures led to a series of crises around the year 1600, placing great strain upon the Ottoman system of government. The empire underwent a series of transformations of its political and military institutions in response to these challenges, enabling it to successfully adapt to the new conditions of the 17th century and remain powerful, both militarily and economically. Historians of the mid-20th century once characterised this period as one of stagnation and decline, but this view is now rejected by the majority of academics.
