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The Ottoman Empire
Six centuries of rule from Istanbul over the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arab world and North Africa
For more than six centuries a single dynasty, the House of Osman, ruled a state that grew from a small frontier principality in northwestern Anatolia into an empire spanning three continents. At its height in the late seventeenth century, the Ottoman sultan governed Budapest and Baghdad, Belgrade and Mecca, Cairo and Algiers. The empire controlled the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Red Sea trade routes, and its capital, Istanbul, was one of the largest cities in the world. Its breakup after World War I produced much of today's map of the Balkans and the Middle East, and the borders, minority questions, architecture and cuisines of dozens of countries still bear its imprint.
The empire's core was Anatolia and the southern Balkans, joined at the straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, where Istanbul commanded the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. From there it spread up the Danube into the Hungarian plain, east across the Armenian highlands into Mesopotamia and down to the Persian Gulf, and south through Syria and the Hejaz to Yemen and the Nile valley. Its North African provinces of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers ran along the coast, often under local rulers. At its peak in 1683 it covered about 5.2 million square kilometers, much of it desert and steppe. Its former lands now lie in Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Albania, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, among others.
Osman I founded the state around 1299, and his successors crossed into Europe in the fourteenth century. Mehmed II captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire, and Selim I added Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Arabia in 1516 and 1517. Under Suleiman I the empire reached Vienna, which it besieged in 1529 and again in 1683. Its government combined a sultan, a professional bureaucracy and the devshirme levy, which took Christian boys into palace service and the Janissary corps. Territorial losses began in 1699, and Balkan nationalist movements won independence through the nineteenth century. Defeat in World War I, the deportations and mass killings of Armenians, which many states and scholars recognize as genocide while Turkey rejects the term, and the Turkish War of Independence ended the empire. The sultanate was abolished on November 1, 1922.