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Six centuries from a frontier warband to a world empire: Osman's beylik, the taking of Constantinople in 1453, and the classical age of Selim and Suleiman with its Janissaries and millet system...
Six centuries from a frontier warband to a world empire: Osman's beylik, the taking of Constantinople in 1453, and the classical age of Selim and Suleiman with its Janissaries and millet system; then the long stall after Vienna in 1683, the Tanzimat reforms, the Armenian genocide of 1915, and Ataturk's republic.
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Osman I, leader of a small Turkish frontier principality, breaks with the declining Seljuk order and builds an independent state on the Byzantine border. The dynasty and empire take their name from him. The 1299 date is a traditional marker; the beylik grew over the following decades rather than being founded in a single year.
Orhan, Osman's son, takes the Byzantine city of Bursa after a long blockade and makes it the first Ottoman capital. The conquest gives the young state a real administrative center, a mint, and the resources to expand further.
Ottoman forces seize Gallipoli and establish their first permanent foothold on European soil. From this base they begin a steady advance into the Balkans that would last for centuries.
Ottoman and Serbian-led armies fight to mutual devastation; Sultan Murad I is killed, but the battle breaks Serbian power and opens the Balkans to Ottoman control. The event became a central myth in later Serbian national identity.
Sultan Bayezid I destroys a large crusader army drawn from across Latin Christendom. The defeat ends the last major western effort to roll back the Ottoman advance in the Balkans for generations.
Timur (Tamerlane) crushes the Ottoman army and captures Sultan Bayezid I, who dies in captivity. The empire nearly collapses into an eleven-year civil war among Bayezid's sons before Mehmed I reunites it. The near-death of the state shows how fragile the early empire still was.
Through the devshirme, the state periodically levied Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam, and trained them for army and government service. The most famous were the Janissaries, an elite standing infantry loyal to the sultan. The system produced skilled administrators and soldiers, but the Janissaries later grew into a powerful faction that resisted reform.
The Ottomans organize non-Muslim subjects into self-governing religious communities, or millets, each running its own courts, schools, and charities under its own leaders. Christians and Jews paid a special tax and faced legal limits but were allowed to practice their faith. The system gave the empire a workable way to rule a vast, mixed population, though it fell short of modern equality.
Mehmed II takes Constantinople after a seven-week siege, using massive cannon to breach the ancient walls. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, dies in the fighting, ending the Roman imperial line that had lasted since antiquity. The city becomes the Ottoman capital and Mehmed takes the title of conqueror.
The Byzantine Empire fell to Sultan Mohammed II in 1453Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft
After Spain expels its Jewish population, Sultan Bayezid II invites the refugees to settle in Ottoman lands and reportedly mocks the Spanish king for impoverishing his own realm. Sephardic Jews build large communities in Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir, contributing to trade, printing, medicine, and finance. The welcome stands in sharp contrast to their treatment in Christian Europe.
Selim I defeats the Safavid Shah Ismail, whose forces lacked the Ottomans' firearms and artillery. The victory secures eastern Anatolia and checks the spread of Safavid Shia influence, hardening a Sunni-Shia rivalry between the two empires that would shape the region for centuries.
Selim I destroys the Mamluk Sultanate and absorbs Syria, Egypt, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Ottomans become guardians of Islam's holiest sites, and the sultans later claim the title of caliph, leader of the wider Muslim community. The conquest doubles the empire's size and wealth.
Suleiman I begins a 46-year reign often seen as the empire's golden age. Known in the West as the Magnificent and to his own people as the Lawgiver, he reforms the legal code, sponsors great architecture, and pushes the empire to its cultural height and near its greatest extent.
Suleiman destroys the Hungarian army in under two hours and kills King Louis II. The battle ends the medieval Kingdom of Hungary and brings much of central Europe under Ottoman control or influence, setting up a long contest with the Habsburgs.
Suleiman marches on the Habsburg capital but fails to take it, hampered by rain, long supply lines, and a late-season start. The failed siege marks the limit of Ottoman expansion into central Europe and becomes a symbol of the empire's high tide in the West.
Suleiman dies during the siege of a Hungarian fortress; his death is hidden from the army until the campaign ends. His reign is often treated as the peak of Ottoman power, after which the empire remained strong but faced slower growth and mounting internal strain.
also in Armies and navies: the machinery of war, Military and security
A Holy League fleet of Christian states, using galleys and gun-armed galleasses, decisively defeated the Ottoman navy. It was one of the last major battles fought primarily between oar-powered galley fleets before sail-and-cannon ships became dominant at sea. The battle checked, for a time, Ottoman naval expansion in the western Mediterranean.
A second Ottoman attempt to take Vienna collapses when a relief army led by the Polish king Jan Sobieski smashes the besiegers. The defeat is usually treated as the empire's high-water mark in Europe and the start of a long retreat. A Habsburg-led coalition went on the offensive in the wars that followed.
also in Making peace: the great settlements, State, law, and coercion
Peace between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, ceding most of Hungary to the Habsburgs. It marked the start of the Ottoman retreat from central Europe.
Greeks revolt against four centuries of Ottoman rule, eventually winning independence with British, French, and Russian intervention at Navarino. It is the first successful national independence movement against the Ottomans.
Sultan Mahmud II crushes a Janissary revolt with artillery and disbands the corps, killing thousands. Once an elite fighting force, the Janissaries had become a conservative bloc blocking military and state reform. Their destruction cleared the way for a modern army and the reforms that followed.
The Gülhane edict opens a decades-long push to modernize the empire: equal legal standing for all subjects regardless of religion, a reformed tax and conscription system, secular schools, and new law codes. The Tanzimat tried to hold the empire together by making it more centralized and modern. Results were mixed, and conservative resistance ran deep.
Britain and France join the Ottomans against Russia and win, but the war leaves the empire deep in foreign debt. The Russian tsar's reported description of the Ottoman state as the 'sick man of Europe' captured the view that its collapse was only a matter of time and that the great powers were circling its lands.
Reformers push through the empire's first constitution and an elected parliament. Within two years Sultan Abdul Hamid II suspends both and rules as an autocrat for three decades. The brief experiment showed a real hunger for constitutional government that would resurface in 1908.
After defeat by Russia, the great powers redraw the empire's European map. Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania gain full independence and Bulgaria wins autonomy. The empire loses most of its remaining Balkan territory and millions of subjects, feeding waves of Muslim refugees into what remained.
The Committee of Union and Progress, known as the Young Turks, forces Abdul Hamid II to restore the constitution and parliament. A modernizing, nationalist movement, it soon dominated the government and led the empire into World War I. Its rule mixed reform with a harder Turkish nationalism.
A coalition of Balkan states drives the Ottomans out of nearly all their remaining European territory in the first war, then fights over the spoils in the second. The empire loses almost its entire European heartland and sees another huge wave of Muslim refugees. The defeats deepened the sense of crisis on the eve of World War I.
The empire joins the Central Powers alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary after a secret alliance and a naval attack on Russian ports. The decision, driven by the Young Turk leadership, tied the empire's fate to Germany's and opened fronts from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia to the Sinai. Defeat would end the empire.
also in How the First World War unfolded, The British Empire
An Allied attempt to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war by forcing the Dardanelles fails at great cost.
also in Armenia: the first Christian nation
The Ottoman government carried out the systematic deportation and mass killing of its Armenian population, along with Assyrian and Greek communities. Around one to one and a half million Armenians died through massacres, death marches, and starvation. It is documented as genocide by historians and many governments. The modern Turkish state disputes the term and the intent; that position is a denial of an established historical fact, not a competing account of it.
also in Colonialism: the conquest of the world, Secret bargains: the hidden treaties, State, law, and coercion, The British Empire
Britain and France secretly divide the Ottoman Middle East into spheres of influence, with Russian assent, contradicting promises made to Arab allies. Its publication by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused lasting distrust in the region.
Backed by Britain, Sharif Hussein of Mecca leads an Arab uprising against Ottoman rule, aided by officers including T. E. Lawrence. The revolt helped break Ottoman control of the Arab provinces. Arab leaders believed they were promised independence, a promise that clashed with secret Allied plans to divide the region.
The Ottomans sign an armistice ending their part in World War I, and Allied forces soon occupy Istanbul and much of Anatolia. The government in the capital is reduced to a figurehead under foreign control. The occupation set the stage for a nationalist resistance movement in the interior.
The Allies impose a treaty that strips the empire of its Arab lands and much of Anatolia, handing territory to Greece, Italy, France, and proposed Armenian and Kurdish states. The terms were so harsh they galvanized the nationalist movement, which rejected the treaty and fought to overturn it. Sèvres was never fully carried out.
After the nationalists win the Turkish War of Independence, the Grand National Assembly abolishes the sultanate. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, leaves the country. More than six centuries of Ottoman monarchy come to an end, and power shifts decisively to the new government in Ankara.
Mustafa Kemal, later given the surname Ataturk, proclaims the Republic of Turkey with himself as first president. The Treaty of Lausanne earlier that year had recognized the new state's borders and replaced the discarded Treaty of Sèvres. Ataturk launched sweeping reforms to build a secular, nationalist, modern state on the empire's remains.
also in How Islam began and spread, Religion and ideology
The Turkish Grand National Assembly under Ataturk abolishes the Ottoman caliphate, ending an institution dating to Muhammad's successors. Its absence reshapes debates about religious authority across the Muslim world.