The ottoman empire

The Ottoman Empire, also historically referred to as the Turkish Empire or Turkey, was a state founded by Turkish tribes under Osman Bey in north-western Anatolia in 1299. With the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453, the Ottoman state was transformed into an empire.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most powerful states in the world – a multinational, multilingual empire that stretched from the southern borders of the Holy Roman Empire on the outskirts of Vienna, Royal Hungary and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the north to Yemen and Eritrea in the south; from Algeria in the west to Azerbaijan in the east; controlling much of southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.

At the beginning of the 17th century the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states, some of which were later absorbed into the empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries. With Constantinople as its capital and vast control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the empire was at the center of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for over six centuries. The reign of the long-lived Ottoman dynasty lasted for 623 years, from 27 July 1299 to 1 November 1922, when the monarchy in Turkey was abolished.

After the international recognition of the new Turkish parliament headquartered in Ankara, by means of the Treaty of Lausanne signed on 24 July 1923, the Turkish parliament proclaimed on 29 October 1923 the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as the continuing state of the defunct Ottoman Empire, in line with the treaty. The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924; the Caliphate’s authority and properties were transferred to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Name In Ottoman Turkish the Empire was referred to as Devlet-i ? Aliyye-yi ?

Osmaniyye, In Modern Turkish it is known as Osmanl? Devleti or Osmanl? Imparatorlugu. In older English usage, mostly the 19th century and earlier, it was usually referred to as the Turkish Empire or Turkey. In western accounts, the two names “ Ottoman” and “ Turkey” – were used interchangeably in relation to the Turkish state during the age of the Empire. This dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–23 when the Ankara-based Turkish regime favoured Turkey as a sole official name, which had been one of the European names of the state since Seljuq times.

History Rise Upon the demise of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, precursor of Ottomans, in 1300s, Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of independent states, the so-called Ghazi emirates. By 1300, a weakened Byzantine Empire had lost most of its Anatolian provinces to ten Ghazi principalities. One of the Ghazi emirates was led by Osman I, from which the name Ottoman is derived, son of Ertugrul, around Eskisehir in western Anatolia. Osman I extended the frontiers of Turkish settlement toward the edge of the Byzantine Empire.

In this period, a formal Ottoman government was created whose institutions would change drastically over the life of the empire, but that would prove vital to the Ottoman Empire’s rapid expansion. The government used the socio-political institution known as the millet system, under which religious and ethnic minorities were allowed to manage their own affairs with substantial independence from central control. Such religious tolerance resulted in limited opposition when conquering other territories and peoples. Osman I openly welcomed any and all fighting men dedicated to the advancement of his cause.

In the century after the death of Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Osman’s son, Orhan, captured the city of Bursa in 1324 and made it the new capital of the Ottoman state. The fall of Bursa meant the loss of Byzantine control over Northwestern Anatolia. The important city of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in 1387. The Ottoman victory at Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe.

The Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, widely regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages, failed to stop the advance of the victorious Ottoman Turks. With the extension of Turkish dominion into the Balkans, the strategic conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. The Empire controlled nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city, but the Byzantines were temporarily relieved when Timur invaded Anatolia in the Battle of Ankara in 1402.

He took Sultan Bayezid I as a prisoner. The capture of Bayezid I threw the Turks into disorder. The state fell into a civil war that lasted from 1402 to 1413, as Bayezid’s sons fought over succession. It ended when Mehmed I emerged as the sultan and restored Ottoman power, bringing an end to the Interregnum, also known as the Fetret Devri in Ottoman Turkish. Part of the Ottoman territories in the Balkans were temporarily lost after 1402, but were later recovered by Murad II between the 1430s and 1450s.

On 10 November 1444, Murad II defeated the Hungarian, Polish and Wallachian armies under Wladyslaw III of Poland and Janos Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna, which was the final battle of the Crusade of Varna. Four years later, Janos Hunyadi prepared another army to attack the Turks, but was again defeated by Murad II at the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448. Growth Expansion and apogee The son of Murad II, Mehmed II, reorganized the state and the military, and conquered Constantinople on 29 May 1453. Mehmed allowed the Orthodox Church to maintain its autonomy and land in exchange for accepting Ottoman authority.

Because of bad relations between the latter Byzantine Empire and the states of western Europe, the majority of the Orthodox population accepted Ottoman rule as preferable to Venetian rule. Sultan Selim I dramatically expanded the Empire’s eastern and southern frontiers by defeating Shah Ismail of Safavid Persia, in the Battle of Chaldiran. Selim I established Ottoman rule in Egypt, and created a naval presence on the Red Sea. After this Ottoman expansion, a competition started between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottoman Empire to become the dominant power in the region.

Suleiman the Magnificent captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered the southern and central parts of the Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Ottoman–Hungarian Wars, and, after his historical victory in the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, he established Turkish rule in the territory of present-day Hungary and other Central European territories. He then laid siege to Vienna in 1529, but failed to take the city. In 1532, he made another attack on Vienna, but was repulsed in the Siege of Guns. Transylvania, Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia, became tributary principalities of the Ottoman Empire.

In the east, the Ottoman Turks took Baghdad from the Persians in 1535, gaining control of Mesopotamia and naval access to the Persian Gulf. France and the Ottoman Empire, united by mutual opposition to Habsburg rule, became strong allies. The French conquests of Nice and Corsica occurred as a joint venture between the forces of the French king Francis I and Suleiman, and were commanded by the Ottoman admirals Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha and Turgut Reis. A month prior to the siege of Nice, France supported the Ottomans with an artillery unit during the Ottoman conquest of Esztergom in 1543.

After further advances by the Turks in 1543, the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand officially recognized Ottoman ascendancy in Hungary in 1547. By the end of Suleiman’s reign, the Empire’s population totaled about 15, 000, 000 people extending over three continents. Plus, the Empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea. By this time, the Ottoman Empire was a major part of the European political sphere. The success of its political and military establishment has been compard to the Roman Empire, by the likes of Italian scholar Francesco Sansovino and the French political philosopher Jean Bodin.

Bodin wrote: “ The only power who with justification can lay claim to the title of universal ruler is the Ottoman Sultan. Only he can justifiably claim to be the descendant of the Roman Emperor. ” The next year, the invasion was repeated but repelled at the Battle of Molodi. The Crimean Khanate continued to invade Eastern Europe in a series of slave raids, and remained a significant power in Eastern Europe until the end of the 17th century. In southern Europe, a Catholic coalition led by Philip II of Spain won a victory over the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto .

It was a startling, if mostly symbolic, blow to the image of Ottoman invincibility. The battle was far more damaging to the Ottoman navy in sapping experienced manpower than the loss of ships, which were rapidly replaced. The Ottoman navy recovered quickly, persuading Venice to sign a peace treaty in 1573, allowing the Ottomans to expand and consolidate their position in North Africa. By contrast, the Habsburg frontier had settled somewhat, a stalemate caused by a stiffening of the Habsburg defences.

The Long War against Habsburg Austria created the need for greater numbers of infantry equipped with firearms, resulting in a relaxation of recruitment policy. This contributed to problems of indiscipline and outright rebelliousness within the corps, which was never fully solved. Irregular sharpshooters were also recruited, and on demobilization turned to brigandage in the Jelali revolts, which engendered widespread anarchy in Anatolia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. With the Empire’s population reaching 30, 000, 000 people by 1600, shortage of land placed further pressure on the government.

During his brief majority reign, Murad IV reasserted central authority and recaptured Yerevan and Baghdad from the Safavids. The Sultanate of women was a period in which the mothers of young sultans exercised power on behalf of their sons. The most prominent women of this period were Kosem Sultan and her daughter-in-law Turhan Hatice, whose political rivalry culminated in Kosem’s murder in 1651. During the Koprulu Era, effective control of the Empire was exercised by a sequence of Grand Viziers from the Koprulu family.

The Koprulu Vizierate saw renewed military success with authority restored in Transylvania, the conquest of Crete completed in 1669 and expansion into P olish southern Ukraine, with the strongholds of Khotyn and Kamianets-Podilskyi and the territory of Podolia ceding to Ottoman control in 1676. This period of renewed assertiveness came to a calamitous end when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha in May 1683 led a huge army to attempt a second Ottoman siege of Vienna in the Great Turkish War of 1683–1687.

The final assault being fatally delayed, the Ottoman forces were swept away by allied Habsburg, German and Polish forces spearheaded by the Polish king Jan at the Battle of Vienna. The alliance of the Holy League pressed home the advantage of the defeat at Vienna, culminating in the Treaty of Karlowitz, which ended the Great Turkish War. The Ottomans surrendered control of significant territories, many permanently. Mustafa II led the counterattack of 1695–96 against the Habsburgs in Hungary, but was undone at the disastrous defeat at Zenta .

Stagnation and reform During this period Russian expansion presented a large and growing threat. Accordingly, King Charles XII of Sweden was welcomed as an ally in the Ottoman Empire following his defeat by the Russians at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 Charles XII persuaded the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III to declare war on Russia, which resulted in the Ottoman victory at the Pruth River Campaign of 1710–1711. After the Austro-Turkish War of 1716–1718 the Treaty of Passarowitz confirmed the loss of the Banat, Serbia and “ Little Walachia” to Austria.

The Treaty also revealed that the Ottoman Empire was on the defensive and unlikely to present any further aggression in Europe. The Austro-Russian–Turkish War, which was ended by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, resulted in the recovery of Serbia and Oltenia, but the Empire lost the port of Azov to the Russians. After this treaty the Ottoman Empire was able to enjoy a generation of peace, as Austria and Russia were forced to deal with the rise of Prussia. Educational and technological reforms were made, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as the Istanbul Technical University.

In 1734 an artillery school was established to impart Western-style artillery methods, but the Islamic clergy successfully objected under the grounds of theodicy. In 1754 the artillery school was reopened on a semi-secret basis. Muteferrika’s press published its first book in 1729, and, by 1743, issued 17 works in 23 volumes, each having between 500 and 1, 000 copies. Under the pretext of pursuing fugitive Polish revolutionaries, Russian troops entered Balta an Ottoman-controlled city on the border of Bessarabia and massacred its citizens and burned the town to the ground.

This action provoked the Ottoman Empire into the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca of 1774 ended the war and provided freedom to worship for the Christian citizens of the Ottoman-controlled provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. By the late 18th century, a number of defeats in several wars with Russia led some people in the Ottoman Empire to conclude that the reforms of “ Deli Petro” had given the Russians an edge, and the Ottomans would have to keep up with Western technology in order to avoid further defeats.

In 1821, the Greeks declared war on the Sultan. A rebellion that originated in Moldavia as a diversion was followed by the main revolution in the Peloponnese, which, along with the northern part of the Gulf of Corinth, became the first parts of the Ottoman empire to achieve independence . By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire was called the “ sick man” by Europeans. The suzerain states – the Principality of Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia and Montenegro – moved towards de jure independence during the 1860s and 1870s. Decline and modernisation

During the Tanzimat period, the government’s series of constitutional reforms led to a fairly modern conscripted army, banking system reforms, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the replacement of religious law with secular law and guilds with modern factories. The Ottoman Ministry of Post was established in Istanbul on 23 October 1840. Samuel Morse received his first ever patent for the telegraph in 1847, which was issued by Sultan Abdulmecid who personally tested the new invention. Following this successful test, installation works of the first telegraph line began on 9 August 1847.

The reformist period peaked with the Constitution, called the Kanun-u Esasi. The empire’s First Constitutional era, was short-lived. The parliament survived for only two years before the sultan suspended it. The Christian population of the empire, owing to their higher educational levels, started to pull ahead of the Muslim majority, leading to much resentment on the part of the latter. The war caused an exodus of the Crimean Tatars, about 200, 000 Crimean Tatars moved to the Ottoman Empire in continuing waves of emigration.

Toward the end of the Caucasian Wars, 90% of the Circassians were exiled from their homelands in the Caucasus and fled to the Ottoman Empire, resulting in the settlement of 500, 000 to 700, 000 Circassians in Turkey. The Russo-Turkish War ended with a decisive victory for Russia. As a result, Ottoman holdings in Europe declined sharply; Bulgaria was established as an independent principality inside the Ottoman Empire, Romania achieved full independence. Serbia and Montenegro finally gained complete independence, but with smaller territories.

In 1878, Austria-Hungary unilaterally occupied the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Novi Pazar, but the Ottoman government contested this move and maintained its troops in both provinces. In return for British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s advocacy for restoring the Ottoman territories on the Balkan Peninsula during the Congress of Berlin, Britain assumed the administration of Cyprus in 1878 and later sent troops to Egypt in 1882 with the pretext of helping the Ottoman government to put down the Urabi Revolt; effectively gaining control in both territories.

From 1894–96, between 100, 000 to 300, 000 Armenians living throughout the empire were killed in what became known as the Hamidian massacres. As the Ottoman Empire gradually shrank in size, many Balkan Muslims migrated to the empire’s remaining territory in Balkans or to the heartland in Anatolia. By 1923, only Anatolia and eastern Thrace remained as the Muslim land. Dissolution The Second Constitutional Era began after the Young Turk Revolution with the sultan’s announcement of the restoration of the 1876 constitution and the reconvening of the Ottoman Parliament.

It marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This era is dominated by the politics of the Committee of Union and Progress, and the movement that would become known as the Young Turks. Profiting from the civil strife, Austria-Hungary officially annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, but it pulled its troops out of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, another contested region between the Austrians and Ottomans, to avoid a war. During the Italo-Turkish War in which the Ottoman Empire lost Libya, the Balkan League declared war against the Ottoman Empire.

The Empire lost the Balkan Wars . It lost its Balkan territories except East Thrace and the historic Ottoman capital city of Adrianople during the war. Some 400, 000 Muslims, out of fear of Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian atrocities, left with the retreating Ottoman army. According to the estimates of Justin McCarthy, during the period from 1821 to 1922 alone, the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims in the Balkans led to the death of several million individuals and the expulsion of a similar number.

By 1914 the Ottoman Empire had been driven out of nearly all of Europe and North Africa. It still controlled 28 million people, of whom 17 million were in modern-day Turkey, 3 million in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and 2. 5 million in Iraq. Another 5. 5 million people were under nominal Ottoman rule in the Arabian peninsula. In November 1914, the Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers, in which it took part in the Middle Eastern theatre.

There were several important Ottoman victories in the early years of the war, such as the Battle of Gallipoli and the Siege of Kut, but there were setbacks as well, such as the disastrous Caucasus Campaign against the Russians. The United States never declared war against the Ottoman Empire. In 1915, as the Russian Caucasus Army continued to advance in eastern Anatolia, aided by some Ottoman Armenians, the Ottoman government started the deportation and massacre of its ethnic Armenian population, resulting in what became known as the Armenian Genocide.

Genocidal acts were also committed against the Greek and Assyrian minorities. An estimated three million people died during the systematic massacres. The Arab Revolt which began in 1916 turned the tide against the Ottomans at the Middle Eastern front, where they initially seemed to have the upper hand during the first two years of the war. The Armistice of Mudros, signed on 30 October 1918, ended the hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre, and was followed with occupation of Constantinople and subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Sevres, the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire was solidified. The occupation of Constantinople and Izmir led to the establishment of a Turkish national movement, which won the Turkish War of Independence under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922, and the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left the country on 17 November 1922. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey declared the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. The caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924.