THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 1299–1922 · Middle East & South Asia

Ottoman Empire

Also known as Ottoman Sultanate

The Ottomans began as one of many small Turkish principalities in north-west Anatolia, led around 1299 by Osman, from whom the dynasty takes its name. Combining frontier warfare against Byzantium with skilful alliances, his successors expanded into the Balkans, and in 1453 Mehmed II captured Constantinople.

Selim I conquered the Mamluk lands of Syria, Egypt and Arabia, and under Suleiman the Magnificent the empire reached Hungary and dominated the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. The sultans ruled a multi-ethnic, multi-faith realm through a slave-based elite, including the Janissary infantry, and allowed religious communities to manage their own affairs. From the late 17th century the empire lost territory to Austria and Russia and, despite modernising reforms, was dismantled after defeat in the First World War; the sultanate was abolished in 1922.

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The central dome of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, built by the architect Sinan for Suleiman the Magnificent, 1550–1557
The central dome of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, built by the architect Sinan for Suleiman the Magnificent, 1550–1557 Arild Vågen · CC BY-SA 3.0
Years
1299–1922
Capital
Söğüt, Bursa and Edirne, then Constantinople (Istanbul) from 1453
Greatest extent
1683, about 5.20 million km²
Region
Middle East & South Asia

Before the failed second siege of Vienna; c. 5.2M km² in 1683 (Taagepera 1997; Turchin, Adams & Hall 2006)

Legacy

For six centuries the Ottomans linked Europe, Asia and Africa, and their legacy shapes the borders, cuisines and politics of the Balkans and the Middle East today.

Timeline of Ottoman Empire

  1. Orhan takes Bursa, which becomes the Ottoman capital

    The Ottomans began as a small Turkish frontier principality in northwest Anatolia, on the edge of the shrinking Byzantine Empire. Orhan, son of the founder Osman I, first took Mudanya, the port linking the wealthy Byzantine city of Bursa (ancient Prusa) to the Sea of Marmara, and in 1326 Bursa itself fell after its commander was persuaded to change sides. Bursa became the first real Ottoman capital, with the first Ottoman mint, new mosques and markets, and a thriving silk trade. Owning a major city helped turn a raiding beylik into a state; the capital moved on to Edirne, in Europe, in the 1360s.

  2. Victory over a Serbian-led coalition at Kosovo

    By the 1380s the Ottomans had crossed into Europe and were pressing on the Serbian principalities left divided after the death of Emperor Stefan Dušan. On 15 June 1389 Sultan Murad I met an army led by Prince Lazar of Serbia, with Bosnian troops and other allies, on the Kosovo field near modern Pristina. Much of both armies was destroyed and both leaders were killed; Murad's death is traditionally credited to the knight Miloš Obilić. Reliable accounts are scarce and early reports even disagreed on who had won, but Serbia could no longer raise large armies, and its princes became Ottoman vassals in the following years.

  3. Timur defeats and captures Bayezid I at Ankara; civil war to 1413

    Sultan Bayezid I had built an empire from the Danube to eastern Anatolia and was blockading Constantinople when he clashed with Timur, the Turco-Mongol conqueror of Central Asia and Persia. On 28 July 1402 the two armies met on the Çubuk plain near Ankara; Timur's larger, mostly cavalry force, perhaps 140,000 strong against no more than 85,000, won decisively after troops from the Anatolian beyliks deserted Bayezid. The sultan was captured and died in captivity months later. His sons then fought a civil war, the Ottoman Interregnum, until Mehmed I defeated his last rival at Çamurlu in 1413 and reunited the state.

  4. Mehmed II conquers Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire

    By 1453 the Byzantine Empire was little more than its capital, Constantinople, surrounded by Ottoman lands in Europe and Asia. The young Sultan Mehmed II besieged it from 6 April with an army that far outnumbered the defenders, and with giant cannons that blasted gaps in the ancient Theodosian walls. After 53 days the city fell on 29 May, and the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died in its fall. Mehmed made Constantinople (Istanbul) his capital in place of Edirne and styled himself Caesar of the Romans. The conquest joined the empire's Anatolian and Balkan halves around a single imperial city, and is often taken as the end of the Middle Ages.

  5. Selim I defeats Safavid Shah Ismail at Chaldiran

    The Shia Safavid dynasty under Shah Ismail I had won a fervent following among the Turkmen Qizilbash tribes of eastern Anatolia, a direct threat to the Sunni Ottomans. Sultan Selim I marched east, and on 23 August 1514 his army, estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 with heavy artillery and musket-armed Janissaries behind a barrier of carts, crushed Ismail's cavalry at Chaldiran in northwest Iran. Ismail was wounded and the Safavid capital, Tabriz, was briefly occupied. The Ottomans annexed eastern Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia, halting Safavid expansion to the west and opening 41 years of war that ended only with the Peace of Amasya in 1555.

  6. Mamluk Sultanate annexed: Syria, Egypt and the Hejaz become Ottoman

    After Chaldiran, Selim I turned on the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, a rival for the spice trade and for leadership of the Muslim world. On 24 August 1516 his army routed the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo, where Sultan al-Ghawri was killed, and on 24 January 1517 it won again at Ridaniya outside Cairo. The last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay, was captured and hanged at a gate of Cairo, and the Sharif of Mecca accepted Ottoman overlordship. Syria, Egypt and the Hejaz, with Mecca and Medina, became Ottoman, turning a mainly Anatolian and Balkan state into an empire spanning the traditional heartlands of Islam.

  7. Suleiman I crushes Hungary at Mohács

    Suleiman I took Belgrade in 1521, opening the road into the Kingdom of Hungary, which was weakened by quarrelling nobles and a weak monarchy. On 29 August 1526 his army, with the grand vizier Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha, met the Hungarian royal army near Mohács on the Danube. The Hungarians charged too early and were encircled and destroyed by Ottoman troops and artillery; the young King Louis II drowned in a marshy stream while fleeing, and much of the nobility died. Hungary was left without a king or army, and by 1541 it was divided between the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and an eastern kingdom under Ottoman protection.

  8. Conquest of Crete completed after the long Cretan War

    Crete was the largest and richest overseas possession of the Republic of Venice. The Ottomans invaded in 1645 and quickly overran most of the island, but the fortified capital, Candia (modern Heraklion), held out in a siege that began in 1648 and lasted more than twenty years, supplied by sea with help from France, the Papacy and the Knights of Malta. A final great expedition under Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed broke Venetian resistance, and Candia surrendered on 5 September 1669. Venice kept only a few island fortresses off the coast, and Crete remained Ottoman until it became autonomous in 1897.

  9. Second siege of Vienna fails; the empire is at its greatest extent

    Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, hoping to succeed where Suleiman had failed in 1529, besieged the Habsburg capital of Vienna in the summer of 1683. After two months the city was close to falling, but on 12 September a relief army of Imperial German and Polish troops under King John III Sobieski of Poland attacked from the Kahlenberg heights and routed the besiegers. Kara Mustafa was executed in Belgrade on 25 December for the defeat. The empire was then at or near its greatest extent, but the failure opened the Great Turkish War against a Holy League of Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia, and Vienna was never besieged again.

  10. Treaty of Karlowitz: Hungary and Transylvania lost to the Habsburgs

    The Great Turkish War that followed the defeat at Vienna went badly for the Ottomans, ending in a crushing defeat by the Habsburg army at Zenta in 1697. At Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci, in today's Serbia) the sultan signed peace with the Holy League on 26 January 1699, each side keeping the land it held. The Habsburgs gained most of Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia, with Transylvania under Austrian governors; Poland recovered Podolia; and Venice took the Morea (Peloponnese) and most of Dalmatia. It was the first major Ottoman loss of territory in Europe, reversing almost four centuries of expansion and making the Habsburgs the leading power in the region.

  11. Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca after defeat by Russia; Crimea made nominally independent

    Russia under Catherine II went to war with the Ottomans in 1768 and won a series of victories on land and sea. The peace signed at Küçük Kaynarca (now Kaynardzha in Bulgaria) on 21 July 1774 forced the sultan to recognise the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate, an Ottoman vassal, as independent; in practice the khanate depended on Russia, which annexed it in 1783. Russia also gained Azov, Kerch and land at the mouth of the Dnieper, giving it outlets to the Black Sea, plus the right to speak for Orthodox Christians in the empire. The Black Sea was no longer an Ottoman lake, and the Crimea was the first Muslim land the sultans lost.

  12. Greek independence formally recognised

    The Greeks rose against Ottoman rule in 1821. Britain, France and Russia intervened, destroying the Ottoman fleet at Navarino in 1827, and Russia's victory in the war of 1828–29 forced the sultan to accept the Treaty of Adrianople. On 3 February 1830 the three powers signed the London Protocol, the first international act recognising Greece as a fully independent, sovereign state, with a northern border running from the mouth of the Achelous river to the mouth of the Spercheios. In 1832 the small new Kingdom of Greece received Prince Otto of Bavaria as king. It was the first Balkan nation to break away completely from the empire.

  13. Congress of Berlin confirms heavy losses in the Balkans

    In 1877–78 Russia defeated the Ottomans again and, by the Treaty of San Stefano, created a large Russian-aligned Bulgaria reaching the Aegean. Britain and Austria-Hungary objected, and Europe's great powers met in Berlin, with Otto von Bismarck as mediator, from 13 June to 13 July 1878. The Treaty of Berlin cut back Bulgaria and returned Macedonia to the sultan, but it recognised the full independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, made Bulgaria an autonomous principality and Eastern Rumelia a self-governing province, let Austria-Hungary occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, and gave Britain Cyprus. The empire lost direct control of much of its Balkan land.

  14. Balkan Wars (1912–13) strip away almost all remaining European land

    In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro formed the Balkan League to drive the Ottomans out of Macedonia and Thrace, where many of their own peoples still lived. The First Balkan War began on 8 October 1912; within weeks the League's armies had overrun Macedonia and Albania, and Bulgarian forces were stopped only at the Çatalca line outside Istanbul. By the Treaty of London (30 May 1913) the empire gave up almost everything in Europe, and Albania became independent. In the Second Balkan War the allies turned on Bulgaria, and the Ottomans regained Edirne, but only Eastern Thrace remained of nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule in Europe.

  15. Sultanate abolished on 1 November; the Ottoman state ends

    The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on Germany's side in 1914; after its defeat, Allied troops occupied Istanbul and treaties carved up its lands. A Turkish national movement led by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) set up a Grand National Assembly in Ankara in 1920 and won the War of Independence. On 1 November 1922 the Assembly abolished the sultanate, ending an empire that had lasted since about 1299, and the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Istanbul on the British warship HMS Malaya on 17 November. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, and the caliphate was abolished in March 1924.

Periods and reigns

Rulers

Realms on the map

Wars

Chapters

Sources