The Ottoman Empire,[j] historically and colloquially known as the Turkish Empire,[22][23] was

an imperial realm[k] that spanned much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the
14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe, between the
early 16th and early 18th centuries.[24][25][26]
The empire emerged from a beylik, or principality, founded in northwestern Anatolia in 1299 by
the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into
the Balkans by the mid 14th century, transforming their petty kingdom into a transcontinental empire.
The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed
II, which marked the Ottomans' emergence as a major regional power. Under Suleiman the
Magnificent (1520–1566), the empire reached the peak of its power, prosperity, and political
development. By the start of the 17th century, the Ottomans presided over 32 provinces and
numerous vassal states, which over time were either absorbed into the Empire or granted various
degrees of autonomy.[l] With its capital at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and control over a
significant portion of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the centre of interactions
between the Middle East and Europe for six centuries.
While the Ottoman Empire was once thought to have entered a period of decline after the death of
Suleiman the Magnificent, modern academic consensus posits that the empire continued to maintain
a flexible and strong economy, society and military into much of the 18th century. However, during a
long period of peace from 1740 to 1768, the Ottoman military system fell behind those of its chief
European rivals, the Habsburg and Russian Empires. The Ottomans consequently suffered severe
military defeats in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, culminating in the loss of both territory
and global prestige. This prompted a comprehensive process of reform and modernization known as
the Tanzimat; over the course of the 19th century, the Ottoman state became vastly more powerful
and organized internally, despite suffering further territorial losses, especially in the Balkans, where
a number of new states emerged.
Beginning in the late 19th century, various Ottoman intellectuals sought to further liberalize society
and politics along European lines, culminating in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led by
the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which established the Second Constitutional Era and
introduced competitive multi-party elections under a constitutional monarchy. However, following the
disastrous Balkan Wars, the CUP became increasingly radicalized and nationalistic, leading a coup
d'état in 1913 that established a one-party regime. The CUP allied the empire with Germany, hoping
to escape from the diplomatic isolation that had contributed to its recent territorial losses; it thus
joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. While the empire was able to largely hold its
own during the conflict, it struggled with internal dissent, especially the Arab Revolt. During this
period, the Ottoman government engaged in genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
In the aftermath of World War I, the victorious Allied Powers occupied and partitioned the Ottoman
Empire, which lost its southern territories to the United Kingdom and France. The successful Turkish
War of Independence, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk against the occupying Allies, led to the
emergence of the Republic of Turkey in the Anatolian heartland and the abolition of the Ottoman
monarchy in 1922, formally ending the Ottoman Empire.

Name
See also: Osman I § Name
The word Ottoman is a historical anglicisation of the name of Osman I, the founder of the Empire
and of the ruling House of Osman (also known as the Ottoman dynasty). Osman's name in turn was
the Turkish form of the Arabic name ʿUthmān (‫)عثمان‬. In Ottoman Turkish, the empire was referred to
as Devlet-i ʿAlīye-yi ʿOsmānīye (‫)دولت عليه عثمانیه‬, lit. 'Sublime Ottoman State', or simply Devlet-i
ʿOsmānīye (‫)دولت عثمانيه‬, lit. 'Ottoman State'.
The Turkish word for "Ottoman" (Osmanlı) originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in the
fourteenth century. The word subsequently came to be used to refer to the empire's military-
administrative elite. In contrast, the term "Turk" (Türk) was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant
and tribal population and was seen as a disparaging term when applied to urban, educated
individuals.[28]: 26 [29] In the early modern period, an educated, urban-dwelling Turkish speaker who was
not a member of the military-administrative class typically referred to themselves neither as
an Osmanlı nor as a Türk, but rather as a Rūmī (‫)رومى‬, or "Roman", meaning an inhabitant of the
territory of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. The term Rūmī was also used
to refer to Turkish speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond.[30]: 11 As applied to
Ottoman Turkish speakers, this term began to fall out of use at the end of the seventeenth century,
and instead the word increasingly became associated with the Greek population of the empire, a
meaning that it still bears in Turkey today.[31]: 51
In Western Europe, the names Ottoman Empire, Turkish Empire and Turkey were often used
interchangeably, with Turkey being increasingly favoured both in formal and informal situations. This
dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–1923, when the newly established Ankara-based Turkish
government chose Turkey as the sole official name. At present, most scholarly historians avoid the
terms "Turkey", "Turks", and "Turkish" when referring to the Ottomans, due to the empire's
multinational character.[32]

History
Main article: History of the Ottoman Empire
See also: Territorial evolution of the Ottoman Empire

Part of a series on the

History of the
Ottoman Empire

Timeline

show

Rise (1299–1453)
 show

Classical Age (1453–1566)

show

Transformation (1566–1703)

show

Old Regime (1703–1789)

show

Decline & Modernization (1789–1908)

show

Dissolution (1908–1922)

Historiography (Ghaza, Decline)

 v
 t
 e

Rise (c. 1299–1453)

Main article: Rise of the Ottoman Empire
 Ottoman miniature of Osman I by Yahya Bustanzâde (18th Century)
As the Rum Sultanate declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of
independent Turkish principalities known as the Anatolian Beyliks. One of these, in the region
of Bithynia on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, was led by the Turkish[33] tribal leader Osman
I (d. 1323/4),[34] a figure of obscure origins from whom the name Ottoman is derived.[35]: 444 Osman's
early followers consisted of Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine renegades, with many but not all
converts to Islam.[36]: 59 [37]: 127 Osman extended control of his principality by conquering Byzantine towns
along the Sakarya River. A Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 contributed to
Osman's rise. It is not well understood how the early Ottomans came to dominate their neighbors,
due to the lack of sources surviving. The Ghaza thesis popular during the 20th century credited their
success to rallying religious warriors to fight for them in the name of Islam, but it is no longer
generally accepted. No other hypothesis has attracted broad acceptance.[38]: 5, 10 [39]: 104
In the century after Osman I, Ottoman rule had begun to extend over Anatolia and the Balkans. The
earliest conflicts began during the Byzantine–Ottoman wars, waged in Anatolia in the late 13th
century before entering Europe in the mid-14th century, followed by the Bulgarian–Ottoman
wars and the Serbian–Ottoman wars in the mid 14th century. Much of this period was characterised
by Ottoman expansion into the Balkans. Osman's son, Orhan, captured the northwestern Anatolian
city of Bursa in 1326, making it the new capital and supplanting Byzantine control in the region. The
important port of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in 1387 and sacked. The Ottoman
victory in Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way
for Ottoman expansion into Europe.[40]: 95–96 The Battle of Nicopolis for the Bulgarian Tsardom of
Vidin in 1396, regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages, failed to stop the
advance of the victorious Ottomans.[41]
 The Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, as depicted in an Ottoman
miniature from 1523
As the Turks expanded into the Balkans, the conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective.
The Ottomans had already wrested control of nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city,
but the strong defense of Constantinople's strategic position on the Bosporus Strait made it difficult
to conquer. In 1402, the Byzantines were temporarily relieved when the Turco-Mongol leader Timur,
founder of the Timurid Empire, invaded Ottoman Anatolia from the east. In the Battle of Ankara in
1402, Timur defeated Ottoman forces and took Sultan Bayezid I as prisoner, throwing the empire
into disorder. The ensuing civil war 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.[42]: 363
The Balkan territories lost by the Ottomans after 1402, including Thessaloniki, Macedonia, and
Kosovo, were later recovered by Murad II between the 1430s and 1450s. On 10 November 1444,
Murad repelled the Crusade of Varna by defeating the Hungarian, Polish, and Wallachian armies
under Władysław III of Poland and John Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna, although Albanians
under Skanderbeg continued to resist. Four years later, John Hunyadi prepared another army of
Hungarian and Wallachian forces to attack the Turks, but was again defeated at the Second Battle of
Kosovo in 1448.[43]: 29
According to modern historiography, there is a direct connection between the rapid Ottoman military
advance and the consequences of the Black Death from the mid-fourteenth century onwards.
Byzantine territories, where the initial Ottoman conquests were carried out, were exhausted
demographically and militarily due to the plague, which facilitated Ottoman expansion. In addition,
slave hunting was the main economic driving force behind Ottoman conquest. Some 21st-century
authors re-periodize conquest of the Balkans into the akıncı phase, which spanned 8 to 13 decades,
characterized by continuous slave hunting and destruction, followed by administrative integration
into the Empire.[44][45][46][45][46][47]
Expansion and peak (1453–1566)
Main article: Classical Age of the Ottoman Empire
 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror's entry into Constantinople; painting
by Fausto Zonaro (1854–1929)
The son of Murad II, Mehmed the Conqueror, reorganized both state and military, and on 29 May
1453 conquered Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire.[48] Mehmed allowed the Eastern
Orthodox Church to maintain its autonomy and land in exchange for accepting Ottoman authority.
[49]
Due to tension between the states of western Europe and the later Byzantine Empire, most of the
Orthodox population accepted Ottoman rule, as preferable to Venetian rule.[49] Albanian resistance
was a major obstacle to Ottoman expansion on the Italian peninsula.[50]
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire entered a period of expansion. The Empire
prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective Sultans. It flourished economically due
to its control of the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia.[51]: 111 [m]
Sultan Selim I (1512–1520) dramatically expanded the eastern and southern frontiers by
defeating Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran, in the Battle of Chaldiran.[52]: 91–105 Selim I established Ottoman
rule in Egypt by defeating and annexing the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and created a naval
presence on the Red Sea. After this Ottoman expansion, competition began between
the Portuguese Empire and the Ottomans to become the dominant power in the region.[53]: 55–76

Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife Hürrem Sultan, by 16th century Venetian painter Titian
Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566)[54] 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
historic victory in the Battle of Mohács in 1526, he established Ottoman 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.[55]: 50 In 1532, he made another attack on Vienna, but was repulsed in
the siege of Güns.[56][57] Transylvania, Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia, became tributary
principalities of the 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. In 1555,
the Caucasus became partitioned for the first time between the Safavids and the Ottomans, a status
quo that remained until the end of the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). By this partitioning as
signed in the Peace of Amasya, Western Armenia, western Kurdistan, and Western Georgia fell into
Ottoman hands,[58] while southern Dagestan, Eastern Armenia, Eastern Georgia,
and Azerbaijan remained