Ottoman Empire

This article is about the empire. For the associated caliphate, see Ottoman Caliphate.

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 14th century to the early 20th century. It was centred in modern-day Turkey. It also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe between the early 16th and early 18th centuries.

The empire grew out of a beylik, or principality, founded in northwestern Anatolia in about 1299 by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into the Balkans by the mid-14th century, turning their petty kingdom into a empire that stretched across continents. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire when they conquered Constantinople in 1453, under Mehmed II. Later further conquests by Selim I led the Sultans to adopt the title of caliph. With its capital at Constantinople and control over a large part of the Mediterranean Basin, the empire was at the centre of contact between the Middle East and Europe for six centuries. It ruled many different peoples and gave its many religious communities, or millets, varying levels of self-rule to manage their own affairs under Islamic law. During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire became a global power.

Modern academic thinking holds that the empire began to decline after its defeat in the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683. It continued to keep a flexible and strong economy, society, and military into much of the 18th century. By the late 18th century, however, the Ottomans had fallen behind the rest of Europe technologically, as imperial authority broke apart. Further defeats by Austria and Russia led to the loss of territory. With rising nationalism spreading after the French Revolution, a number of new states emerged in the Balkans. During the reign of Mahmud II and the Tanzimat reforms over the 19th century, the Ottoman state became more powerful and better organised internally, and a new Ottoman identity took hold. During the 1876 revolution, the empire tried a constitutional monarchy, but it later returned to an absolute monarchy under Abdul Hamid II after the Great Eastern Crisis.

Over the late 19th century, Ottoman thinkers known as Young Turks wanted to modernise society and politics along Western lines. This led to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which brought back a constitutional monarchy. However, after the disastrous Balkan Wars, the CUP became more and more radical and embraced Turkish nationalism. This led to a coup d'état in 1913 that established a dictatorship.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction and in the Russian Empire caused large loss of life and mass migration into modern-day Turkey from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Crimea. The CUP joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. It struggled with internal opposition, especially the Arab Revolt, and carried out genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. After 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, brought about the end of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922.

Etymology

See also: Osman I § Name

The word Ottoman comes from 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 was the Turkish form of the Arabic name ʿUthmān. In Ottoman Turkish, the empire was called Devlet-i ʿOsmānīye, which means "Ottoman State."

The Turkish word Osmanlı first referred to the tribal followers of Osman in the 14th century. Later, it came to mean the empire's military and government leaders. The word Türk was used for the country people and tribal groups of Anatolia, and it was seen as an insult when used for educated city people. In the early modern period, educated city-dwelling Turkish speakers who were not part of the military and government class usually called themselves Rūmī, meaning "Roman," for the people of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. In Western Europe, the names Ottoman Empire, Turkish Empire and Turkey were often used in the same way, with Turkey becoming more popular. This was officially settled in 1920–1923, when the newly established Ankara-based Turkish government chose Turkey as the only official name.

History

Main article: History of the Ottoman Empire

See also: Territorial evolution of the Ottoman Empire

Main article: Rise of the Ottoman Empire

As the Rum Sultanate declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was divided into small Turkish principalities called Anatolian Beyliks. One of them, in the Bithynia region, was led by Osman I, and the name Ottoman comes from him. His followers were Turkish tribes and some former Byzantine soldiers. Osman took Byzantine towns, and a Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 helped his rise. Ottoman rule then spread over Anatolia and into the Balkans. Osman's son, Orhan, captured Bursa in 1326 and made it the new capital. The port of Thessaloniki was captured in 1387. The Ottoman victory at Kosovo in 1389 weakened Serbian power in the region. Ottoman leader Timur defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, which threw the empire into disorder until a civil war ended in 1413 with Mehmed I as sultan. Murad II later won back the lost Balkan lands. He defeated a Christian army at the Battle of Varna in 1444, but was victorious again in 1448 at the Second Battle of Kosovo. Many historians link the fast Ottoman advances to the Black Death, which weakened the Byzantine lands.

Main article: Classical Age of the Ottoman Empire

The conquest of Constantinople was an important goal for the Ottomans. In 1453, Murad II's son, Mehmed the Conqueror, took the city and ended the Byzantine Empire. He allowed the Eastern Orthodox Church to keep its freedom and property in return for accepting Ottoman authority. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the empire grew under strong sultans and became rich from trade between Europe and Asia. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566) captured Belgrade in 1521 and won the Battle of Mohács in 1526, which brought Hungary under Ottoman rule. The empire also took Baghdad in 1535. By the end of Suleiman's reign, the empire covered parts of three continents and was a strong naval power in the Mediterranean Sea.

Main article: Transformation of the Ottoman Empire

Further information: Ottoman decline thesis

In the late 16th century, the empire faced rising costs and problems with its government, but it changed its institutions and stayed strong. Mid-20th-century historians described this time as decline, but most scholars now reject that view. The Ottomans lost their trade advantage when Portugal found a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. However, Cairo stayed rich from trade, including coffee. In 1571, Ottoman-backed forces attacked Russia and burned Moscow, but the Ottomans lost a sea battle at Lepanto that year. The Ottomans later made peace with Venice. In 1683, a large Ottoman army under Kara Mustafa Pasha failed to take Vienna. The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 ended the Great Turkish War, and the Ottomans gave up many territories. In the 18th century, Russian expansion became a growing threat, and the Ottomans lost several wars against Russia and Austria. Some reforms were made, such as the printing press being allowed to publish non-religious books.

Main article: Decline and modernization of the Ottoman Empire

In 1789, Selim III tried to modernise the army, but the Janissary corps opposed change and rebelled. The next sultan, Mahmud II, ended the Janissary corps in 1826. Several parts of the empire broke away in the 1800s. The Greeks won independence in 1829, and Serbia gained self-rule. Muhammad Ali of Egypt later fought the Ottomans, and the empire needed help from Russia and European powers to survive. During the Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876), the government changed laws, schools, and the army. The empire became deeply in debt, and in 1875 it could not pay its debts. The Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) caused more losses. Russia won the second war, and Bosnia-Herzegovina was taken by Austria-Hungary in 1878. In the 1890s, violence against Armenians in the empire caused many deaths.

The Young Turk Revolution restored the Ottoman constitution in 1908 and started a period of hope for reform. However, the empire lost its North African lands in the Italo-Turkish War and nearly all its European lands in the Balkan Wars. In 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. The Ottomans defended the Dardanelles at Gallipoli, but the Arab Revolt turned the war against them in the Middle East. During the war, the Ottoman government and Kurdish tribes in the region carried out the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the Armenian genocide. After the war, the empire was partitioned under the Treaty of Sèvres. A Turkish national movement led by Mustafa Kemal won the Turkish War of Independence. The sultanate was abolished in 1922, and the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923, with Ankara as its capital. The caliphate was abolished in 1924.

Historiographical debate on the Ottoman state

See also: Ghaza thesis

Several historians, such as British historian Edward Gibbon and Greek historian Dimitri Kitsikis, have argued that after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman state took over the machinery of the Byzantine (Roman) state. They see the Ottoman Empire as essentially a continuation of the Byzantine Empire, wearing a Turkish Muslim appearance. American historian Speros Vryonis writes that the Ottoman state was centred on "a Byzantine-Balkan base with a veneer of the Turkish language and the Islamic religion." Kitsikis and American historian Heath Lowry think the early Ottoman state was a predatory confederacy open to both Byzantine Christians and Turkish Muslims. Its main goal was gaining booty and slaves, not spreading Islam, and Islam only later became the empire's main feature. Other historians followed Austrian historian Paul Wittek, who stresses the early Ottoman state's Islamic character and sees it as a "jihad state" dedicated to expanding the Muslim world.

Many historians, led in 1937 by Turkish historian Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, supported the Ghaza thesis. This idea says the early Ottoman state continued the way of life of the nomadic Turkic tribes who had moved from East Asia to Anatolia through Central Asia and the Middle East, but on a much larger scale. They argued that the most important cultural influences on the Ottoman state came from Persia. British historian Norman Stone suggests many links between the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. For example, the Byzantine zeugarion tax became the Ottoman Resm-i çift tax, the pronoia land system became the Ottoman timar system, and the Ottoman land measure, the dönüm, was the same as the Byzantine stremma. Stone also argues that although Sunni Islam was the state religion, the Ottoman state supported and controlled the Eastern Orthodox Church, which in return became the empire's largest landholder. Despite these similarities, Stone says a key difference was that timar land grants were not hereditary at first. Even after they could be passed down, land ownership stayed very insecure, and the sultan could take back grants whenever he wished. Stone argues this insecurity discouraged Timariots from developing their land for the long term, leading them instead to short-term exploitation, which harmed the Ottoman economy.

Government

Main article: State organisation of the Ottoman Empire

The Topkapı Palace and Dolmabahçe Palace were the main homes of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul, from 1465 to 1856 and from 1856 to 1922. Before the reforms of the 1800s and 1900s, the government had two main parts, military and civil, with the sultan at the top. The state also controlled the clergy. Some older Turkish traditions remained important, even though the empire had adopted administrative and legal practices from Iran. The state's main duties were to defend and expand the lands of the Muslims and keep order, following orthodox Islamic practice and the rule of one family. The House of Osman lasted longer and was larger than any other Islamic ruling family, and in Europe only the House of Habsburg ruled for a similarly long, unbroken line. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, was a direct male-line descendant of Osman I. The main purpose of the Imperial Harem was to make sure male heirs were born to continue the family's rule.

Starting with Selim I, the sultans also claimed the caliph title, which was known as the Ottoman Caliphate. The sultan, called pâdişâh or "lord of kings," was the empire's only ruler. The Harem was run by the valide sultan, and at times the women of the Harem controlled the state in what was called the "Sultanate of Women". The palace school trained future state leaders in two groups. Muslim students attended the Madrasa, which was paid for by vakıfs, and this helped children from poor families rise in society. Christian boys from Rumelia in the Balkans went to the free boarding school called the Enderûn, through a process known as Devshirme, which modern definitions consider genocide. Although the sultan held supreme power, his advisors and ministers gathered in a council called the Divan, which began as a council of tribal elders in the time of the Beylik. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the state became a constitutional monarchy, and an elected parliament formed the Imperial Government of the Ottoman Empire. Early diplomatic letters were written in the Greek language. The sultans' Tughra signatures were ornate, and they inspired a style of Ottoman-Turkish calligraphy.

Administrative divisions

Main article: Administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was first divided into provinces in the late 14th century. These were fixed areas of land, each with a governor chosen by the sultan. An eyalet (also called a pashalik or beylerbeylik) was the area ruled by a beylerbey, a "lord of lords" or governor. Each eyalet was further divided into Sanjaks.

In 1864, the vilayets were introduced through the "Vilayet Law" (Teskil-i Vilayet Nizamnamesi), as part of the Tanzimat reforms. Unlike the older eyalet system, this law set up a chain of local units: the vilayet, liva/sanjak/mutasarrifate, kaza, and village council. In 1871, another Vilayet Law added the nahiye.

Economy

Main article: Economic history of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman government wanted its capitals Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul to become major centres of trade and industry, so it welcomed merchants and craftspeople. Mehmed and his successor Bayezid also welcomed Jews from different parts of Europe, who settled in Istanbul and port cities such as Salonica. Many Jews in Europe faced persecution from Christians, such as in Spain after the Reconquista, so the Turks' tolerance was welcomed by these immigrants. The Ottoman economy grew strongly in the early modern period. Its yearly income quadrupled between 1523 and 1748, after adjusting for inflation.

The state mainly aimed to increase its income while keeping its people prosperous. Changes in trade, such as the opening of new sea routes, reduced the importance of land routes to the East. The Anglo-Ottoman Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Balta Liman, which opened Ottoman markets directly to English and French competitors, was one step in this change. Economic historian Paul Bairoch argues that free trade contributed to deindustrialisation in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike China, Japan, and Spain, which used protectionism, the Ottoman Empire had a liberal trade policy open to foreign goods. This came from capitulations of the Ottoman Empire, which lowered duties to 3% for imports and exports. British economist John Ramsay McCulloch praised these policies, but in the Corn Laws debate, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli later cited the Ottoman Empire as an example of the harm caused by unrestrained competition.

Demographics

Main article: Demographics of the Ottoman Empire

The population of the empire was estimated at 11,692,480 for the years 1520–1535. This number came from counting households in tax records and multiplying by 5. For unclear reasons, the population was lower in the 18th century than in the 16th century. The first census, in 1831, counted about 7,230,660 people, but this is seen as too low because the census was meant only to register possible soldiers. Official censuses only began in the early 19th century, and earlier population figures are estimates based on demographic patterns. By 1800 the population had risen to 25–32 million. Disease and famine caused major changes, and the 1812–1819 Ottoman plague epidemic cost at least 300,000 lives. Port cities grew, while some towns, such as Belgrade, shrank mainly because of political strife. Migration was also important. Many Russian and Austria-Habsburg takeovers brought refugees into the empire, and since the 19th century many Muslims from the Balkans moved to present-day Turkey. These people are called Muhacir.

Main article: Languages of the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Turkish was the official language of the empire. It was an Turkic language strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic. Persian was mainly used by educated people, and Arabic was used for Islamic prayers. Because few people could read, ordinary people often hired scribes to communicate with the government. Many non-Muslim groups, such as Greeks and Armenians, spoke only Turkish. Sunni Islam was the main religion, and the official school of Islamic law was Hanafi. From the early 16th century to the early 20th century, the Ottoman sultan was also the caliph, the religious leader of the Muslim world. Many sultans followed Sufism and Sufi orders. Non-Muslims, mostly Christians and Jews, lived in the empire throughout its history. They had limited freedoms and paid higher taxes, but they could govern their own community affairs through the millet system. Members of the Rum Millet were led by the Ecumenical Patriarch, and Ottoman Jews were led by the Ottoman Chief Rabbi. The Armenians had their own leaders as well. Some modern scholars see the millet system as an early example of religious pluralism. The share of Muslims grew from 60% in the 1820s to 76% in the 1890s. By 1914, about 19.1% of the population was non-Muslim, mostly Jewish and Christian Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian.

Culture

Main article: Culture of the Ottoman Empire

Main article: Education in the Ottoman Empire Main article: Ottoman literature Main article: Media of the Ottoman Empire Main article: Ottoman architecture Further information: Ottoman illumination and Ottoman miniature Further information: Ottoman music Main article: Ottoman cuisine

The Ottomans took in the traditions, art, and institutions of the lands they conquered and gave them new forms, creating a distinctive Ottoman culture. Turkish was the main literary language, but Persian was often used to show the empire's grand image. Most slaves in Ottoman society worked as household servants. A child of a slave was born a slave, unless the male owner acknowledged the child as his own, in which case the child became free by law. Female slaves were still sold in the Empire as late as 1908. Pressure from Western European countries in the 19th century led to efforts to limit the Ottoman slave trade, but slavery was never abolished in the Empire. In the 16th century, the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and the Abu'l-Khayrid Shibanids of Central Asia were all bilingual in Persian and Turkic. Each millet ran its own schools, so education was largely divided by religion and ethnicity.

Poetry was the dominant form of Ottoman writing. Ottoman Divan poetry was highly ritualised and symbolic, and most of it was lyric in nature, especially gazels. Famous examples include Leyli and Majnun by Fuzuli, and the Seyahatnâme by Evliya Çelebi, an outstanding travel book. Until the 19th century, Ottoman prose contained no fiction. The first novel published in the empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 The Story of Akabi. French newspapers and magazines were also common, especially in Constantinople, and French literature was the major Western influence on Ottoman writing in the late 19th century. Ottoman architecture grew from Seljuk Turkish architecture and Byzantine and Iranian influences. The most important architect of the classical period was Mimar Sinan, whose works include the Süleymaniye Mosque. Ottoman miniatures, painted for manuscripts, were heavily influenced by Persian art, and the art of carpet weaving was especially important in the empire. Ottoman classical music was an important part of the education of the Ottoman elite, and some sultans, such as Selim III, were composers themselves. Traditional Turkish wrestling, Turkish archery, and horseback riding were among the main sports. In the 19th century, football matches in Constantinople led to the creation of European-style sports clubs, such as Galatasaray Sports Club (1905) and Fenerbahçe Sports Club (1907).

Science and technology

Main article: Science and technology in the Ottoman Empire

Over the course of Ottoman history, the Ottomans built many libraries, which held translated books from other cultures as well as original manuscripts. Much of this interest grew in the 15th century. Sultan Mehmet II ordered Georgios Amiroutzes, a Greek scholar from Trabzon, to translate the geography book of Ptolemy for Ottoman schools. Ali Qushji, an astronomer, mathematician and physicist from Samarkand, became a professor in two madrasas. He spent only two or three years in Constantinople before he died, but his writings and his students still influenced Ottoman thinkers.

Taqi al-Din built the Constantinople observatory of Taqi ad-Din in 1577 and used it until 1580. Its main purpose was probably astrology rather than astronomy, and it was destroyed in 1580 after a group of religious leaders opposed it. Taqi al-Din also experimented with steam power in Ottoman Egypt in 1551. Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu wrote the first surgical atlas, and the Ottoman Empire is credited with inventing several surgical tools, such as forceps, catheters, and scalpels and lancets.