Ottoman Empire

An empire that began as a frontier warband and ended as the sick man of Europe, having ruled three continents for six hundred years. The Ottomans emerged around 1300 as one of several Turkish principalities on the Byzantine frontier in Anatolia and outgrew the rest by crossing into Europe early, taking the Balkans before they took the rest of Anatolia. Mehmed II captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Roman Empire and giving the state a capital it kept until the end. Selim I took Syria, Egypt and the holy cities in 1516 and 1517, making the sultans the leading Sunni power; Suleiman besieged Vienna in 1529. The empire governed a religiously plural population through the millet system, which let Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish communities run their own law and schooling under their own leaders in exchange for taxes and obedience - a workable arrangement that nationalism destroyed in the nineteenth century. Its elite was recruited partly by the devshirme, a levy of Christian boys from the Balkans converted and trained for the army and administration. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were invited to settle. Decline was slow, relative and much exaggerated by European writers. The nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms rebuilt the law, army and schools without saving the state. Defeat in the First World War ended it. The Armenian genocide of 1915 was carried out under its last government. The sultanate was abolished in 1922. The empire lasted from around 1299 to 1922 under a single dynasty. Constantinople, which the Turks called Istanbul, was its capital from 1453. At its height it held perhaps 30 million people across three continents. Turkey was proclaimed a republic in 1923.

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