The Ottoman Empire, also known historically as Turkey or the Turkish Empire, was a state that spanned much of Southeastern Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14thcentury to the early 20thcentury, centred in modern-day Turkey. It also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe between the early 16th and early 18thcenturies.
The empire emerged from a beylik, or principality, founded in northwestern Anatolia in by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into the Balkans by the mid-14thcentury, transforming their petty kingdom into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II. Further conquests by Selim I led the Sultans to adopt the title of caliph. With its capital at Constantinople 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. Ruling over diverse peoples, the empire granted varying levels of autonomy to its many confessional communities, or millets, to manage their own affairs per Islamic law. During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16thcentury, the Ottoman Empire became a global power.
Modern academic consensus posits that the empire began to decline after defeat in the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683, but continued to maintain a flexible and strong economy, society and military into much of the 18thcentury. The Ottoman Empire fell behind technologically from the rest of Europe by the late 18thcentury as imperial authority fragmented. Further defeats from Austria and Russia culminated in the loss of territory, and with rising nationalism after the French Revolution, a number of new states emerged in the Balkans. Following Mahmud II's reign and the reforms over the course of the 19thcentury, the Ottoman state became more powerful and organised internally as a new Ottoman identity took hold. In the 1876 revolution, the Ottoman Empire attempted constitutional monarchy, before reverting to an absolute monarchy under Abdul Hamid II, following the Great Eastern Crisis.
Over the course of the late 19thcentury, Ottoman intellectuals known as Young Turks sought to liberalise and rationalise society and politics along Western lines, culminating in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which reestablished a constitutional monarchy. However, following the disastrous Balkan Wars, the CUP became increasingly radicalised and embraced Turkish nationalism, leading to a coup d'état in 1913 that established a dictatorship.
In the 19th and in the start of 20thcenturies, persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction and in the Russian Empire resulted in large-scale loss of life and mass migration into modern-day Turkey from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Crimea. : "The emerging Christian nation states justified the prosecution of their Muslims by arguing that they were their former 'suppressors'. The historical balance: between about 1820 and 1920, millions of Muslim casualties and refugees back to the remaining Ottoman Empire had to be registered; estimations speak about 5 million casualties and the same number of displaced persons" : "Muslims had been the majority in Anatolia, the Crimea, the Balkans, and the Caucasus and a plurality in southern Russia and sections of Romania. Most of these lands were within or contiguous with the Ottoman Empire. By 1923, 'only Anatolia, eastern Thrace, and a section of the southeastern Caucasus remained to the Muslim land ... Millions of Muslims, most of them Turks, had died; millions more had fled to what is today Turkey. Between 1821 and 1922, more than five million Muslims were driven from their lands. Five and one-half million Muslims died, some of them killed in wars, others perishing as refugees from starvation and disease' (McCarthy 1995, 1). Since people in the Ottoman Empire were classified by religion, Turks, Albanians, Bosnians, and all other Muslim groups were recognised—and recognised themselves—simply as Muslims. Hence, their persecution and forced migration is of central importance to an analysis of 'Muslim migration'."
: "The main migrations started from Crimea in 1856 and were followed by those from the Caucasus and the Balkans in 1862 to 1878 and 1912 to 1916. These have continued to our day. The quantitative indicators cited in various sources show that during this period a total of about 7 million migrants from Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands settled in Anatolia. These immigrants were overwhelmingly Muslim, except for a number of Jews who left their homes in the Balkans and Russia in order to live in the Ottoman lands. By the end of the century the immigrants and their descendants constituted some 30 to 40 percent of the total population of Anatolia, and in some western areas their percentage was even higher. ... The immigrants called themselves Muslims rather than Turks, although most of those from Bulgaria, Macedonia, and eastern Serbia descended from the Turkish Anatolian stock who settled in the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." : "Migration was a major force in the social and cultural reconstruction of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century. While some seven to nine million, mostly Muslim, refugees from lost territories in the Caucasus, Crimea, Balkans and Mediterranean islands migrated to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries ..." : "The immigration had far-reaching social and political consequences for the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. ... Between 1821 and 1922, some 5.3 million Muslims migrated to the Empire.50 It is estimated that in 1923, the year the republic of Turkey was founded, about 25 per cent of the population came from immigrant families." : "The road from Berlin to Lausanne was littered with millions of casualties. In the period between 1878 and 1912, as many as two million Muslims emigrated voluntarily or involuntarily from the Balkans. When one adds those who were killed or expelled between 1912 and 1923, the number of Muslim casualties from the Balkans far exceeds three million. By 1923 fewer than one million remained in the Balkans" : "To top it all, the Empire was host to a steady stream of Muslim refugees. Russia between 1854 and 1876 expelled 1.4 million Crimean Tartars, and in the mid-1860s another 600,000 Circassians from the Caucasus. Their arrival produced further economic dislocation and expense." : "In total, many millions of Turks (or, more precisely, Muslim immigrants, including some from the Caucasus) were involved in this 'repatriation' – sometimes more than once in a lifetime – the last stage of which may have been the immigration of seven hundred thousand Turks from Bulgaria between 1940 and 1990. Most of these immigrants settled in urban north-western Anatolia. Today between a third and a quarter of the Republic's population are descendants of these Muslim immigrants, known as Muhacir or Göçmen" The CUP joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. It struggled with internal dissent, especially the Arab Revolt, and 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 end of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922.
Etymology
The word Ottoman is an 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 (). In Ottoman Turkish, the empire was referred to as (), , or simply (), .
The Turkish word for Ottoman () originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in the 14th century. The word subsequently came to be used to refer to the empire's military-administrative elite. In contrast, the term Turk () was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population and was seen as a disparaging term when applied to urban, educated individuals. In the early modern period, an educated, urban-dwelling Turkish speaker who was not a member of the military-administrative class typically referred to himself neither as an nor as a , but rather as a (), or "Roman", meaning an inhabitant of the territory of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. The term was also used to refer to Turkish speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond.
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.
History
Rise (c. 1299–1453)
As the Rum Sultanate declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was a patchwork of independent Turkish principalities known as the Anatolian Beyliks. One of these, in the Bithynia region on the Byzantine frontier, was led by "Osman was simply one among a number Turkoman tribal leaders operating in the Sakarya region."; Osman I, also called Osman Gazi, (born —died 1324 or 1326), ruler of a Turkmen principality in northwestern Anatolia who is regarded as the founder of the Ottoman Turkish state. Osman I ( 1323/4), a figure of obscure origin from whom the name Ottoman is derived. Osman's early followers were Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine renegades, not all of them Muslim. Osman extended his principality by conquering Byzantine towns along the Sakarya River, and a Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 contributed to his rise. It is not well understood how the early Ottomans came to dominate their neighbours, due to a lack of sources. The Ghaza thesis popular during the 20th century credited their success to rallying religious warriors, but the idea is no longer generally accepted, and no other hypothesis has attracted broad support.
In the century after Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over Anatolia and the Balkans. The Byzantine–Ottoman wars, waged in Anatolia in the late 13th century before entering Europe in the mid-14th century, were followed by the Bulgarian–Ottoman wars and the Serbian–Ottoman wars in the mid-14th century. Osman's son, Orhan, captured the northwestern Anatolian city of Bursa in 1326 and made it the new capital, 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. The Battle of Nicopolis for the Bulgarian Tsardom of Vidin in 1396, regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages, also failed to stop the Ottomans.
As the Turks expanded into the Balkans, the conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. The Ottomans already controlled nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city, but Constantinople's defenses and 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.