The Entire History of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire is usually introduced through its endings — the walls of Constantinople breached, the siege of Vienna lifted, the last sultan boarding a British warship. Those are real events, and the episode covers all three. But they make the empire sound like a long fall, which is a poor description of a state that outlasted the Byzantine Empire it replaced by four centuries and governed, at its height, most of the land between Budapest and Basra.

What follows is the reference layer beneath the episode: the chronology in order, the institutions named properly, the claims that are contested marked as contested, and the books each section rests on. Where the video simplifies — and twenty-one minutes forces a great deal of simplification — this page says so.

The conventional founding date is 1299, and it is conventional rather than documented. The Ottomans emerge in the historical record as one of a dozen or so Turkish beyliks — frontier principalities — that filled the space left when the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum fragmented under Mongol pressure in the late thirteenth century. Osman, the dynasty’s namesake, ruled a small territory in Bithynia, in north-west Anatolia, on the Byzantine border.

Nothing about that position obviously predicted what followed. Several rival beyliks were larger and better placed. The Ottomans’ advantage was geographic and specific: they sat directly on the frontier with a weakening Byzantine state, which gave them a supply of warfare, plunder and recruits that inland rivals lacked, and a reason for ambitious men from across Anatolia to come and fight for them.

The earliest surviving Ottoman narrative sources were written roughly a century and a half after Osman’s lifetime, which is why so much of the founding period is disputed. The story of Osman’s dream — a tree growing from his chest to shade the world — appears in that later tradition, not in a contemporary document. Historians read it as a dynasty explaining its success backwards.

Expansion was steady rather than dramatic. Bursa fell in 1326 and became the first substantial Ottoman capital. The decisive move came in the 1350s, when Ottoman forces crossed the Dardanelles and established a foothold at Gallipoli — the moment a small Anatolian principality became a European power. By 1389, at Kosovo, and 1396, at Nicopolis, Ottoman armies were defeating coalitions assembled specifically to stop them.

In 1402, near Ankara, Timur destroyed the Ottoman army and captured the sultan, Bayezid I. The empire did not survive the defeat intact. What followed was roughly a decade of civil war between Bayezid’s sons, known as the Interregnum, during which the Ottoman state effectively ceased to exist as a single polity.

This period deserves more attention than it usually gets, because it is the clearest evidence against reading Ottoman history as an inevitability. A conquest dynasty that fragments after a catastrophic defeat normally stays fragmented. The Ottomans did not. Mehmed I reunified the state by 1413, and his successors resumed expansion within a generation.

By 1453 the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to its capital and a few fragments. Constantinople’s population had collapsed from its medieval peak, its economy was largely in Genoese and Venetian hands, and the city had already been sacked once — by a Latin crusade in 1204, a wound it never fully recovered from.

None of which made the walls easy. The Theodosian land walls had held off attackers for a thousand years. Mehmed II’s siege, which ran from early April to 29 May 1453, combined a very large army, a naval blockade, and an artillery train built for the purpose, including guns cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban after Byzantine authorities declined to pay for them.

The conquest is the empire’s hinge. It gave the Ottomans a capital positioned between their European and Asian territories, control of the Bosphorus, and a claim — pressed deliberately by Mehmed II — to the inheritance of Rome. He took the title Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of Rome, and set about repopulating a city that had been half-empty when he took it.

The century after 1453 is what Ottomanists call the classical age, and it is defined less by conquest than by the machinery that made conquest sustainable.

Selim I’s campaigns of 1516–17 destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate and brought Syria, Egypt and the Hijaz — including Mecca and Medina — under Ottoman control, which roughly tripled the empire’s population and transformed it from a Balkan-Anatolian state into the dominant power of the Islamic world. Under Süleyman I, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, Ottoman forces broke the Hungarian kingdom at Mohács in 1526 and reached the walls of Vienna in 1529.

The institutions mattered more than the campaigns:

• The devşirme. A levy of Christian boys from Balkan villages, converted, educated and placed in state service — the janissary infantry at one end, the grand vizierate at the other. It was coercive by design and it also produced an administrative elite with no hereditary power base, answerable only to the sultan.
• The timar system. Revenue rights over land granted to cavalrymen in exchange for military service, rather than heritable ownership. It funded a large army without a treasury large enough to pay it.
• Kanun. Sultanic law issued alongside Islamic religious law, covering taxation, land tenure and criminal matters. Süleyman is called Kanunî, the Lawgiver, in Turkish for this reason — not “the Magnificent”, which is what European contemporaries called him.
• The millet arrangement. Non-Muslim religious communities administered their own civil affairs under their own religious authorities, in exchange for a poll tax and a subordinate legal status. It was not tolerance in the modern sense. It was considerably more accommodating than anything on offer in contemporary Western Europe.

The standard story after Süleyman is decline, and it is largely wrong — or at least much too simple. It originates partly in Ottoman writers of the period, who wrote reform memoranda arguing that things had been better under Süleyman because that was the persuasive way to argue for change, and partly in nineteenth-century European historians who found a narrative of Oriental decay congenial.

What actually happened is more interesting. Power moved out of the sultan’s person and into the household of the grand vizier, the imperial harem and the palace bureaucracy — a shift from a conquest state run by a warrior-sultan to a bureaucratic empire run by administrators. Sultans stopped leading campaigns. The devşirme wound down. The timar cavalry lost ground to paid infantry with firearms.

The military turning point is clearer than the political one. The failed siege of Vienna in 1683 was followed by sixteen years of war against a Habsburg-led coalition, ending in the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 — the first time the Ottomans negotiated as a defeated party and ceded substantial territory, including most of Hungary. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, ending a disastrous war with Russia, was worse: it conceded Russian claims to speak for Orthodox Christians inside Ottoman territory, which gave a hostile great power a permanent pretext to intervene.

From the late eighteenth century the Ottoman state ran a sustained reform programme, and understanding it as a response to military pressure explains most of its shape.

Selim III’s New Order army was destroyed, and Selim with it, by janissary revolt in 1807. Mahmud II succeeded where his predecessor failed: in 1826 he destroyed the janissary corps outright, an event Ottoman sources call the Auspicious Incident, and rebuilt the army on European lines.

The Tanzimat — “reorganisation” — ran from 1839 to 1876 and went far beyond the army: legal equality for non-Muslim subjects, a codified commercial law, conscription, secular schools, a modern tax administration, and eventually, in 1876, a constitution and parliament. The reforms were real and they were also destabilising, because legal equality dismantled the arrangement that had held a multi-confessional empire together without offering the communities involved any compelling reason to stay in it.

Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution in 1878 and ruled personally for three decades, combining continued administrative and infrastructural modernisation with censorship and a large secret police. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the constitution; by 1913 the Committee of Union and Progress was governing as a dictatorship.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 removed almost all remaining Ottoman territory in Europe within a year and produced hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees moving east into Anatolia — a demographic shock that hardened politics inside the empire immediately before the First World War.

The empire entered that war in late 1914 alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary. It held at Gallipoli in 1915 and at Kut in 1916, and it lost everywhere else that mattered. In 1915 the Ottoman government carried out the deportation and mass killing of its Armenian population; the Armenian genocide is recognised as genocide by the overwhelming consensus of historians of the period, and it is covered directly in the episode rather than elided.

The Armistice of Mudros ended Ottoman participation in October 1918. Allied forces occupied Constantinople. The Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal fought the resulting occupation and partition to a different settlement: the sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922, the Republic of Türkiye was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, and the caliphate — the office the Ottoman sultans had claimed since the sixteenth century — was abolished on 3 March 1924.

What the empire left behind is still visible in the borders, legal codes, property registers and confessional arrangements of a dozen successor states. That, rather than the sieges, is the part worth understanding — and it is the part the deep pages linked from here will go into properly.