Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was one of the longest-lived states of the early modern world: founded about 1300, it spanned more than 600 years and came to an end in 1922 ¹. At its height the empire encompassed most of southeastern Europe to the gates of Vienna, parts of the Middle East, North Africa as far west as Algeria, and large parts of the Arabian Peninsula ¹. It was founded in Anatolia, the region of modern-day Turkey, emerging from Söğüt near Bursa ¹. It was replaced in 1922 by the Turkish Republic and successor states in southeastern Europe and the Middle East ¹.

The name Ottoman is a dynastic appellation derived from Osman I, the nomadic Turkmen chief who founded both the dynasty and the empire about 1300 ¹. His father Ertugrul had a power base at Söğüt near Bursa; the empire began at the end of the 13th century with raids by Turkic warriors known as ghazis ¹. Osman I is regarded as the founder of the Ottoman Turkish state ². The dynasty he founded ruled for more than six centuries ¹.

In their early expansion the Ottomans led the Turkish warriors for the faith of Islam, known by the honorific title ghazi, against the shrinking Christian Byzantine state ¹. The dynasty expanded early on through extensive raiding; by about 1300 Osman’s domain stretched from Eskişehir to the plains of İznik ¹. Osman I was the ruler of a Turkmen principality in northwestern Anatolia ².

Osman was succeeded by his son Orhan, who captured Bursa in 1326 ². The capture — dated by some sources to 1324 — gave the principality the means to develop a real state’s administration, economy, and army ¹. Bursa became the first capital and the sultan’s seat in the early 14th century ³. Murad I captured Adrianople in 1361; renamed Edirne, it became the new Ottoman capital and a base for the administrative and military control of Thrace ¹.

Murad was killed at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, and his successor Bayezid I could not turn the victory into further European conquest ¹. Bayezid beat back the crusade at the Battle of Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396, and Ottoman rule south of the Danube was assured ¹. At the Battle of Ankara in 1402 Timur overwhelmingly defeated him, and Bayezid was taken captive and died within a year ¹. In the Interregnum of 1402–13 four of his sons competed for the right to rule the entire empire ¹. Restoration came under Mehmed I and Murad II, in whose reign the devşirme system was developed: Christian youths were drafted from the Balkan provinces for conversion to Islam and life service to the sultan ¹.

Mehmed II, an Ottoman sultan from 1444 to 1446 and from 1451 to 1481, captured Constantinople and conquered the lands in Anatolia and the Balkans that formed the empire’s heartland for the next four centuries ⁵. He had the Hungarian master gunsmith Urban cast cannon of a size unknown as yet even in Europe ⁵. Preparations included the Rumeli fortress and a fleet of 31 galleys; the siege that followed lasted 55 days, from April 6 to May 29, 1453 ⁶.

The city’s ancient land wall spanned 4 miles (6.5 km): a double line of ramparts with an outer moat, the higher wall standing as high as 40 feet (12 metres) on a base up to 16 feet (5 metres) thick ⁶. Against the defenders between 60,000 and 80,000 soldiers fought on land, accompanied by 69 cannon ⁶. The Ottomans breached the ancient land wall after the 55-day siege, and the dwindling Byzantine Empire came to an end ⁶. The fall removed a powerful defence for Christian Europe against Muslim invasion and allowed for uninterrupted Ottoman expansion into eastern Europe ⁶.

Mehmed rode through the streets to the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the largest in all of Christendom, and converted it into the mosque Ayasofya ⁶. He repopulated the city with people of many backgrounds and faiths and moved his capital there from Edirne, a multicultural seat of power for a multicultural empire ⁶. A survey of 1478 counted 16,324 households and 3,927 shops in Constantinople and neighbouring Galata ⁵. Internally, the conquest meant the end of power and influence for the old Turkish nobility and the triumph of the devşirme and their supporters ¹.

Selim I subdued the Kizilbash and defeated the Safavid ruler Ismāʿīl at the Battle of Chāldirān, on the eastern side of the Euphrates, in August 1514 ⁷. The campaigns of 1516–17 brought Syria, Egypt, and Palestine under Ottoman rule ⁷. Selim extended the empire to the Hejaz as well and raised the Ottomans to leadership of the Muslim world ⁷. In Cairo the sharif of Mecca presented him with the keys to the holy city, a gesture acknowledging him as leader of the Islamic world ⁷.

Süleyman succeeded his father in September 1520 and began his reign with campaigns against the Christian powers in central Europe and the Mediterranean ⁸. Belgrade fell to him in 1521 and Rhodes, long under the rule of the Knights of St. John, in 1522–23 ⁸. At Mohács in August 1526 he broke the military strength of Hungary, whose king, Louis II, lost his life in the battle ⁸. In 1529 he laid siege to Vienna to end Habsburg intervention, but time, distance, bad weather, lack of supplies, and Christian resistance forced him to raise it ⁸. Süleyman’s armies conquered Hungary — held by the Ottomans for over 150 years — and advanced as far west as Vienna ⁹.

Under Süleyman, popularly known as the Magnificent or the Lawmaker, the Ottoman empire reached the apogee of its military and political power ⁹. He codified a centralized legal system called kanun, expanded both the territory and the revenue of the empire, and built up Constantinople as the empire’s capital ⁸. At sea the fleet’s victory off Preveza in 1538 gave the Ottomans the naval initiative in the Mediterranean until the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 ⁸. In architecture the period’s outstanding achievements were the public buildings of Sinan, chief of the Corps of Royal Architects, remembered for his mosque complexes of Süleymaniye in Istanbul and of the later Selimiye in Edirne ⁹⁹. Süleyman himself died while besieging the fortress of Szigetvár in Hungary ⁸.

The Ottoman centuries divide into periods that run from the foundation about 1300 to the dissolution in 1922 ¹. The imperial seat moved from Bursa to Edirne and then, after 1453, to Constantinople (Istanbul), capital until 1923 ⁴. The Cambridge History of Turkey treats the later empire — from the death of Mehmed III in 1603 to the tanzimat of 1839 — as a field of serious study in its own right ¹⁰.

Only late in the 14th century did Murad I and Bayezid I begin building the sultan’s personal military slave force, the kapıkulu ¹. The devşirme system — developed under Murad II — drafted Christian youths from the Balkan provinces for conversion to Islam and life service to the sultan ¹. The Janissary corps was originally staffed through this levy: boys taken from the Balkan provinces, converted, and drafted into Ottoman service ¹². The Janissaries were an elite corps in the standing army from the late 14th century to 1826 and became a powerful political force within the state ¹². During peacetime they garrisoned frontier towns and policed the capital, Istanbul; they constituted the first modern standing army in Europe ¹².

Mehmed II consolidated the empire’s political, religious, and legal institutions through secular laws called kanun, compiled by subject into law codes called kanunnames ¹. The Ottoman form of fief was the timar, the basis of Ottoman military and administrative organization as the European portions of the empire were conquered ¹. Süleyman later codified the centralized legal system that carried the same name, kanun ⁸. Administration and law were directed from the divan, the council of state led by the grand vizier ¹.

Under Ottoman rule the major religious groups were allowed to establish their own self-governing communities, called millets ¹. Each retained its own religious laws, traditions, and language under the general protection of the sultan ¹. Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other communities lived under that protection, governed in their internal affairs by their own religious authorities ¹⁵.

In the conquered capital Mehmed II restored the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate on January 6, 1454, and established a Jewish grand rabbi and an Armenian Apostolic patriarch in the city ⁵. The restoration of these communal authorities was part of the wider settlement of the capital’s religious communities after 1453 ⁵. Mehmed’s repopulation of Constantinople had brought people of many backgrounds and faiths into the capital ⁶.

City life was shaped by the waqf, the public endowment system, which related kulliyes and villages in a single economic and social framework ³. In Bursa the city grew from five focal points, mostly on hills, where five sultans — Orhan Ghazi, Murad I, Yıldırım Bayezid, Çelebi Mehmed, and Murad II — established public kulliyes of mosques, madrasahs, hamams, imarets, and tombs ³. Kulliyes served as nuclei providing public services before neighbourhoods arose, letting a vivid, sustainable new capital take shape quickly ³. Cumalıkızık was a waqf village that permanently belonged to an institution: its purpose was to provide income for the Orhan Ghazi Kulliye, as stated in historical documents ³.

Bursa and Cumalıkızık embody the urban and rural system that made the city the first Ottoman capital and the sultan’s seat in the early 14th century ³. Founded in 200 BC and ruled for centuries by the Roman and Byzantine empires, it became the first political centre of the Ottomans ¹⁴. Cumalıkızık was the system’s rural half — the waqf village providing income for the Orhan Ghazi Kulliye ³. Bursa’s texture came from five sultans’ public kulliyes of mosques, madrasahs, hamams, imarets, and tombs ³.

Edirne, the former Ottoman capital, is dominated by the Selimiye Mosque Complex commissioned by Selim II — Sinan’s ultimate architectural expression of the Ottoman kulliye ¹⁵. The great dome, on eight pillars, spans 31.5 metres over a prayer space of 45 by 36 metres, and four soaring minarets dominate the skyline ¹⁵. The interior decoration using İznik tiles from the peak period of their production testifies to an art form unsurpassed in this material ¹⁵. Sinan himself recognised the complex as his most important architectural work ¹⁵.

Istanbul, on the Bosphorus between the Balkans and Anatolia, was successively the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Ottoman Empire, and has been associated with major events in political, religious, and art history for more than 2,000 years ¹⁶. Its skyline, built over many centuries, encompasses Hagia Sophia, the 15th-century Fatih complex and Topkapı Palace, Sinan’s Süleymaniye and Şehzade complexes reflecting the 16th-century climax of Ottoman architecture, and the 17th-century Blue Mosque ¹⁶. The historic areas include monuments recognised as masterpieces of the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, among them Hagia Sophia and Sinan’s Süleymaniye complex ¹⁶. The vernacular housing around the major religious monuments in the Süleymaniye and Zeyrek quarters provides exceptional evidence of the late Ottoman urban pattern ¹⁶.

After the peak of Ottoman rule under Süleyman the Magnificent in the 16th century, the empire struggled to maintain its bloated bureaucracy and decentralized political structure ¹. Economic strain and a lag in military technique added to the difficulty ¹. The failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 became the turning point: the lifting of the siege marked the beginning of the end of Ottoman domination in eastern Europe ¹¹. With tacit Hungarian support, 150,000 Ottoman troops laid siege to Vienna, captured the outer fortifications, and began tunnelling toward the inner walls; the emperor fled ¹¹. Relief came from a combined force led by John III Sobieski of Poland ¹¹.

Reform attempts began with Selim III’s nizam-ı cedid, the new-order reform of the army ¹. Their decisive moment came in June 1826, in the so-called Auspicious Incident: Mahmud II, on learning of new Westernized troops, declared war on the revolting Janissaries and, on their refusal to surrender, had cannon fire directed on their barracks ¹². From 1839 the administrative reconstruction of the Ottoman state, the tanzimat, set the agenda ¹⁰.

The most far-reaching of the reforms, the Tanzimat, contributed to a debt crisis in the 1870s ¹. It was an era of legal, educational, and administrative reconstruction, proclaimed in 1839 ¹⁰. By 1876 the strain had produced a first constitution and a new sultan’s autocracy ¹³¹³.

Abdülhamid II was an Ottoman sultan from 1876 to 1909, under whose autocratic rule the reform movement of the Tanzimat reached its climax ¹³. He adopted a policy of pan-Islamism in opposition to Western intervention in Ottoman affairs ¹³. The Hejaz Railway, financed by Muslim contributions worldwide, was a concrete expression of that policy ¹³. He promulgated the first Ottoman constitution on December 23, 1876, primarily to ward off foreign intervention ¹³. He dismissed the Parliament and suspended the constitution in February 1878, then ruled for 30 years from his seclusion at Yıldız Palace, assisted by secret police, an expanded telegraph network, and severe censorship ¹³.

Discontent with Abdülhamid’s despotic rule and resentment against European intervention in the Balkans led to the military revolution of the Young Turks in 1908 ¹³. The revolution restored constitutional rule; after a short-lived reactionary uprising in April 1909, Abdülhamid was deposed and his brother was proclaimed sultan as Mehmed V ¹³. The ascendancy of the Young Turks — remembered as the CUP era — ran on to the First World War ¹³.

Upon the Ottoman defeat in World War I the empire disintegrated and was partitioned ¹. A combination of nationalist movements and partition agreements among the Allied powers forced its disintegration into numerous territories, with Turkey as the empire’s immediate successor ¹. Six centuries of Ottoman rule were ending ¹.

The peace imposed at Sèvres in 1920 abolished the Ottoman Empire ¹⁷. Signed on August 10, 1920 between the victorious Allied powers and the Ottoman government, it obliged Turkey to renounce all rights over Arab Asia and North Africa ¹⁷. Rejected by the new Turkish nationalist regime, it was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 ¹⁷.

Lausanne was the final treaty concluding World War I ¹⁸. It was signed on July 24, 1923 — after a seven-month conference at Lausanne, Switzerland — by representatives of Turkey, successor to the Ottoman Empire, on one side and by Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on the other ¹⁸. The treaty recognised the boundaries of the modern state of Turkey ¹⁸. Turkey made no claim to its former Arab provinces and recognised British possession of Cyprus and Italian possession of the Dodecanese ¹⁸.

The empire’s cities still carry its architecture: the world heritage sites of Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa preserve the Ottoman urban and monumental tradition ¹⁴. Objects of Ottoman learning survive in museum collections — among them an astrolabic quadrant of lacquered fruitwood in the British Museum, engraved with the name of the maker Muhammad al-Sakkāsi al-Jarkasi ¹⁹. The Cambridge History of Turkey emphasises the political, cultural and artistic accomplishments of the Ottomans in the post-classical period ¹⁰.

The richest and most valuable archival material inherited from the Ottoman state is held in the Ottoman Archives complex of the State Archives Directorate ²⁰. It reaches back to the Hazine-i Evrak Nezareti, founded in 1846 — the beginning of fully modern archival practice and the core of today’s state archive ²⁰. By the decree of Sultan Abdülmecid, the first modern Hazine-i Evrak building was completed in 1849 ²⁰.