The Ottoman Empire

Around 1290, Anatolia was a patchwork. The Seljuk Turkish sultanate had been broken by the Mongols, and many small Turkish principalities, called beyliks, competed for land.

To the west lay what was left of the Byzantine Empire, still ruling from Constantinople.

One beylik, led by a chief named Osman, lay right on the Byzantine border near Söğüt. Tradition dates its founding to 1299. The dynasty took his name: Osmanlı, in English, Ottoman.

His son Orhan took the Byzantine city of Bursa in 1326 and made it his capital.

In 1354, after an earthquake damaged its walls, the Ottomans took Gallipoli, their first foothold in Europe.

The Ottomans spread through the Balkans and moved their capital to Edirne. In 1389 they defeated a Serbian-led army at Kosovo.

By 1400 Constantinople was an island of Byzantine rule inside Ottoman lands.

Then in 1402 Timur, a conqueror from Central Asia, crushed the Ottoman army at Ankara and captured Sultan Bayezid. The state nearly broke apart, but recovered within twenty years.

Sultan Mehmed II, aged 21, besieged Constantinople in April 1453. Giant cannons pounded its thousand-year-old walls, and ships were hauled over land into the Golden Horn.

On 29 May the city fell. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. The Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

Mehmed made the city his capital and brought in settlers of many faiths. For the Ottomans, he was now also “Caesar of Rome”.

Sultan Selim I defeated the Shia Safavids of Iran at Chaldiran in 1514, thanks largely to cannon and muskets.

In 1516 and 1517 he destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate and took Syria, Egypt, and the protection of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Ottoman sultans now presented themselves as leaders of the whole Sunni Muslim world, and later also used the title of caliph (Episode 07).

Suleiman I took Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes in 1522. In 1526 he destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács, and in 1529 besieged Vienna, but failed to take it.

In the east he took Baghdad in 1534. Ottoman power now reached from Hungary to the Persian Gulf.

Ottomans remember him as Kanuni, the Lawgiver. His architect, Mimar Sinan, built the Süleymaniye mosque and hundreds of other buildings.

Through the devshirme, Christian boys from the Balkans were taken from their families, converted to Islam and trained as soldiers or officials. The best rose to become grand viziers.

The Janissaries, an elite infantry with firearms, were drawn from them. Cavalrymen were paid with the income of land grants called timars.

Religious communities, called millets, such as Orthodox Christians and Jews, ran their own courts, schools and charities under their own leaders.

Under the admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, the Ottoman fleet beat a Christian alliance at Preveza in 1538 and dominated the Mediterranean.

In the Indian Ocean, the Ottomans competed with the Portuguese. In the 1560s, the Sultan of Aceh in Sumatra asked for help, and Ottoman gunners and cannon were sent.

In 1571 a Holy League fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto. The Ottomans rebuilt it within a year, but their naval expansion slowed.

In 1683, near its greatest size, the empire besieged Vienna a second time. A relief army led by the Polish king Jan Sobieski broke the siege.

A long war followed. By the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottomans lost most of Hungary.

It was the first major treaty in which the Ottomans gave up large lands to European powers.

Russia defeated the Ottomans in 1774. Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. Greece won independence in 1830, and Egypt became autonomous under its governors.

Sultans tried to catch up. In 1826 the Janissaries were abolished. The Tanzimat reforms from 1839 promised equality for all subjects, new schools and new laws.

In 1876 the empire adopted its first constitution and parliament, though the sultan suspended them two years later.

In 1908 the Young Turks forced the sultan to restore the constitution. The empire then lost almost all its Balkan lands in the wars of 1912 and 1913.

In 1914 it entered the First World War on Germany’s side. It defeated an Allied landing at Gallipoli in 1915.

In 1915 and 1916 the government deported Armenians from Anatolia; hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, died. Most historians and many countries call this genocide; Turkey rejects the term.

An Arab revolt and British armies took the Arab provinces. In 1918 the empire surrendered.

The victors planned to divide even Anatolia. A national movement led by Mustafa Kemal fought back from Ankara and won the Turkish War of Independence.

The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922, and the last sultan left on a British warship.

On 29 October 1923 the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, with Ankara as its capital. In 1924 the caliphate was abolished too.

The Ottoman dynasty ruled for over six hundred years, longer than almost any other. Its lands now belong to dozens of countries, from Algeria to Iraq and from Hungary to Yemen.

Its food, music, architecture and words are shared across the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa.

Next: the Americas, where the Aztec and Inca empires rose and fell just as the Ottomans reached their peak.