Ottoman Empire: A Visual History

The Ottoman Empire began around 1299 as one of many small Turkish beyliks on the frontier of a shrinking Byzantine Empire. It captured Constantinople in 1453, dominated the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa in the 1500s under Suleiman the Magnificent, and twice reached the gates of Vienna. From the eighteenth century it lost ground to Russia and Austria and became known as the 'sick man of Europe', yet it survived until defeat in World War I. The sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the Republic of Turkey emerged from its Anatolian core.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Ottoman Empire. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Territory of the Ottoman Empire

Approximate area including vassal states and tributaries at various dates.

Timeline of the Ottoman Empire

1. c. 1299
   Osman I founds the beylikA small principality on the Byzantine frontier.
2. 1354
   Foothold in EuropeOttomans occupy Gallipoli.
3. 1389
   Battle of KosovoSerbian power broken; both rulers die.
4. 1402
   Battle of AnkaraTimur captures Sultan Bayezid I; civil war follows.
5. 1453
   Fall of ConstantinopleMehmed II ends the Byzantine Empire.
6. 1517
   Egypt conqueredSelim I destroys the Mamluk Sultanate; Ottomans control Mecca and Medina.
7. 1529
   First siege of ViennaSuleiman is repulsed at the Habsburg capital.
8. 1571
   Battle of LepantoHoly League fleet defeats the Ottoman navy.
9. 1683
   Second siege of ViennaRelief by Jan Sobieski; the long retreat from Europe begins.
10. 1699
    Treaty of KarlowitzHungary ceded to Austria.
11. 1826
    Janissaries abolishedMahmud II destroys the corps in the 'Auspicious Incident'.
12. 1876
    First constitutionSuspended within two years.
13. 1908
    Young Turk RevolutionConstitution restored.
14. 1912-1913
    Balkan WarsAlmost all European territory lost.
15. 1915
    GallipoliAllied landings defeated; Armenian deportations begin.
16. 1922
    Sultanate abolishedMehmed VI goes into exile.

Rise of the House of Osman

Osman I led a band of Turkish warriors on the Byzantine frontier in north-west Anatolia. His successors took Bursa in 1326, crossed into Europe at Gallipoli in 1354 and won the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which brought Serbia under Ottoman control. Timur's crushing victory at Ankara in 1402 nearly ended the dynasty, but it recovered within a generation.

On 29 May 1453 Mehmed II, aged 21, took Constantinople after a 53-day siege, using enormous cannon and dragging ships overland into the Golden Horn. The city that had been the Roman capital for over a thousand years became the Ottoman capital, and Mehmed styled himself Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of Rome.

The classical age

Selim I doubled the empire's size in eight years (1512-1520), defeating the Safavids at Chaldiran and conquering the Mamluk Sultanate, which brought Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Ottoman rule. His son Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566) took Belgrade, Rhodes and most of Hungary, besieged Vienna in 1529 and made the Ottoman navy master of the Mediterranean.

The empire ran on a distinctive system: the devshirme levy of Christian boys trained as elite Janissary soldiers and administrators, the millet system giving religious communities self-government, and a sultan who was also caliph. Suleiman is called Kanuni, the Lawgiver, in Turkish for his codification of the law.

Stagnation and the long retreat

The naval defeat at Lepanto in 1571 was replaced within a year, but the failed second siege of Vienna in 1683 was different: the counter-offensive that followed cost the empire Hungary at the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, its first major territorial loss. Through the eighteenth century Russia pushed the Ottomans back from the Black Sea; Crimea was lost in 1783.

The nineteenth century brought nationalist revolts (Serbia, Greece in 1821-1829, then Bulgaria and Romania), the loss of Egypt to Muhammad Ali's dynasty and of Algeria to France, and a growing dependence on European loans. The Tanzimat reforms tried to modernise the army, law and administration, and a constitution was briefly granted in 1876 and restored by the Young Turks in 1908.

World War I and dissolution

The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 stripped away almost all remaining European territory. In 1914 the Young Turk government sided with Germany. Ottoman forces won at Gallipoli in 1915 but lost Mesopotamia and Palestine to Britain, and the wartime deportation and mass killing of Armenians, widely recognised as genocide, remains bitterly contested by Turkey.

The 1920 Treaty of Sevres would have partitioned Anatolia itself. Mustafa Kemal's nationalist movement fought the Turkish War of Independence, drove out Greek forces, and won the far better Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The Grand National Assembly had abolished the sultanate in November 1922; the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Istanbul on a British warship, and the caliphate followed in 1924.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Byzantine Empire (395 to 1453)
• Mamluk Sultanate (1250 to 1517)
• Safavid Empire (1501 to 1736)
• Russian Empire (1721 to 1917)
• Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867 to 1918)
• Qajar Empire (1789 to 1925)

Wars of the same era and region

• Conquests of Timur (1370 to 1405)
• Ottoman-Venetian wars (1396 to 1718)
• Polish-Ottoman wars (1485 to 1699)
• Crimean War (1853 to 1856)
• Greek War of Independence (1821 to 1829)
• Balkan Wars (1912 to 1913)
• World War I (1914 to 1918)
• Turkish War of Independence (1919 to 1923)

10 surprising things about the Ottoman Empire

1. Ottoman sultans practised royal fratricide: on taking the throne a new sultan often had his brothers strangled with a silk cord to prevent civil war. Mehmed III had nineteen killed in 1595.
2. The 'sick man of Europe' label was already in use in the 1850s. The patient then lived another seventy years.
3. Suleiman's chief admiral Barbarossa (Hayreddin) began as a pirate; his fleet wintered in Toulon as a guest of the King of France in 1543.
4. The Ottomans introduced coffee to Europe; legend says the Viennese found sacks of it abandoned outside the city after 1683 and opened the first coffee houses.
5. The empire had a Chief Black Eunuch who was one of the most powerful officials in the state and controlled the sultan's harem and vast charitable endowments.
6. The tulip is a Turkish flower; the 'Tulip Period' of the 1720s in Istanbul preceded Dutch tulip mania's revival and gave the flower its cultural cachet in Europe.
7. The Ottoman army fielded a giant bombard at Constantinople in 1453 that needed 60 oxen to move and could fire only about seven times a day.
8. In 1683 the coalition army that saved Vienna included Poles, Austrians, Bavarians and Saxons under a Polish king; the Ottoman grand vizier was executed for the failure with a silk cord.
9. The Ottoman Empire once nominally included parts of present-day Ukraine, Ethiopia (Massawa) and Yemen, and its navy fought the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.
10. The last Ottoman caliph, Abdulmecid II, ended his days in Paris as a painter; his death in 1944 came a year before the empire's successor Turkey joined the war against Germany.

Sources

• Ottoman Empire Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Ottoman Empire Wikipedia
• Fall of Constantinople Wikipedia
• Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire (2005) John Murray
• Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600 (1973) Weidenfeld and Nicolson
• Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans (2015) Allen Lane

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