Imperial Ottoman

History · Complete overview

The History of the Ottoman Empire: A Complete Overview

A complete overview of Ottoman history from its founding c. 1299 to its dissolution in 1922, covering origins, rise, golden age, decline, reform, and lasting legacy.

The Ottoman Empire endured for more than six centuries, a span of time during which it reshaped the politics, religion, and culture of three continents. At its height in the sixteenth century, it controlled lands from the gates of Vienna to the foothills of the Caucasus, from the Crimea to the Red Sea, and from the steppes of Central Asia to the Atlantic shores of Morocco. Its capital, Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, was arguably the most important city in the early modern world. To read Ottoman history is to follow the long arc of Eurasian history from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Origins and the founding beylik

The Ottomans emerged from the fragmentation of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia during the late thirteenth century. As the Seljuk state crumbled under Mongol pressure, Turkic nomadic warriors under Ertuğrul established a small polity on the frontier between the Byzantine Empire and the Turkmen pastoral lands of western Anatolia. His son, Osman I, is traditionally regarded as the founder of the dynasty that would bear his name, and the year of his accession, around 1299, is conventionally taken as the beginning of Ottoman history.

Osman and his followers belonged to the gazi tradition of frontier warriors who fought in the name of Islam against the Byzantine Empire. Their motives blended genuine religious zeal with the practical incentives of plunder, land grants, and social mobility. The early Ottoman state was less an empire than a mobile confederation of warriors, holy men, and migrating Turkmen families, held together by a charismatic leader and the promise of reward.

In the generation after Osman’s death, the Ottomans began to develop the institutions that would carry them forward. His son Orhan captured the Byzantine city of Bursa in 1326, making it the first major Ottoman capital. A short time later, the Ottomans acquired Nicaea and Nicomedia, opening up the Sea of Marmara to their raiders. Orhan’s reign also saw the first Ottoman use of infantry organized on the feudal iqta’ principle and the establishment of the devshirme levy that would later supply the human material of the Janissary corps. By the time of Orhan’s death around 1362, the principality had crossed into Europe and had become the dominant Turkish state in the region.

Expansion in the fourteenth century

The early Ottoman leaders expanded their territory in three directions: against the Byzantines in northwestern Anatolia, against other Turkish beyliks in the interior, and across the Dardanelles into Europe. The crossing into Europe, traditionally dated to 1354, was a turning point. Within a few years, the Ottomans had seized the strategic peninsula of Gallipoli and used it as a base for raids into Thrace. The capture of Adrianople (Edirne) in 1369 moved the Ottoman capital into Europe, where it would remain.

Throughout the late fourteenth century, the Ottomans fought a series of inconclusive wars against a coalition of Balkan states, most notably at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The victory there, won or claimed against a coalition of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, and Hungarians, has often been read as a decisive moment in Balkan history, although the true consolidation of Ottoman rule in the region took generations. The famous defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, inflicted by the Central Asian conqueror Timur, briefly shattered the empire. Sultan Bayezid I was captured, and the empire descended into a decade-long civil war known as the Ottoman Interregnum.

The interregnum was a near-death experience. The European possessions held in many cases, but the Anatolian beyliks reasserted their independence, and the empire lost the eastern and central Anatolian territories it had absorbed in the 1380s and 1390s. The Greek cities of the Aegean reverted to Venetian or local control. The empire’s survival owed much to the ability of Mehmed I, who reunified the state in 1413, to balance the competing claims of his brothers and to rebuild a working administration.

Recovery and the path to Constantinople

The empire was reunified under Mehmed I and, more decisively, Murad II. By the 1430s, the Ottomans had recovered their Balkan possessions and were pressing against Hungary and the remnants of the Byzantine state. The Byzantine Empire, by then reduced to a few square miles around Constantinople, depended increasingly on European aid. The fall of the city seemed inevitable to many observers, but the famous Theodosian walls had held for nearly a thousand years, and the city was defended by the latest in late medieval artillery and by the legendary incendiary known as Greek fire.

The decisive moment came in 1451, when Mehmed II ascended the throne at the age of nineteen. He spent the next two years preparing an enormous army and an unprecedented siege train, including a massive bronze bombard cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban. The fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire and announced the Ottoman state as a world power. The event sent shockwaves through the Christian world and contributed to the Portuguese push around Africa in search of alternative trade routes to Asia.

Mehmed II and the consolidation of an empire

Mehmed II, later known as the Conqueror, spent the next three decades transforming his conquest into a sustainable empire. He annexed the Greek despotate of Trebizond in 1461, completing the absorption of the former Byzantine world. He attacked the Albanian leader Skanderbeg, the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, and various Italian maritime colonies. In 1480, Ottoman forces took Otranto in southern Italy, briefly holding a bridgehead on the peninsula, and two years later, Turkish raiders under the future Sultan Bayezid II reached the gates of Verona.

The Conqueror also built the institutional foundations of the mature Ottoman state. He reorganized the army, formalized the devshirme levy, and codified a system of religious and legal authority that fused Islamic jurisprudence with the practical needs of a multi-confessional empire. The patriarch of the newly established Greek Orthodox millet was a direct subordinate of the sultan, a pattern that would be extended to other religious communities. He rebuilt the city of Istanbul on a monumental scale, with the Topkapi Palace, the Fatih Mosque complex, and the Grand Bazaar all dating from his reign.

The great expansion, 1453 to 1600

The century and a half following the conquest of Constantinople was the period of maximum Ottoman power, a phase often labelled the Ottoman golden age. Three sultans in particular shaped this era: Selim I, who between 1512 and 1520 conquered eastern Anatolia, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; and his son Suleiman the Magnificent, whose long reign from 1520 to 1566 saw the empire reach its largest territorial extent.

The conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517 gave the Ottoman sultan the titles of caliph and Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, lending a religious authority that extended well beyond the empire’s borders. It also transferred control of Egypt, the Levant, the Hejaz, and the North African ports to Ottoman rule. Selim’s successor inherited a state that spanned three continents and dominated the eastern Mediterranean.

Under Suleiman, the empire projected power into the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and Central Europe. Ottoman armies took Belgrade in 1521, defeated the Hungarians decisively at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and laid siege to Vienna in 1529. In the Mediterranean, admirals such as Hayreddin Barbarossa and Turgut Reis created a North African corsair state under Ottoman suzerainty, contesting the trade routes that had made the Italian maritime republics wealthy. The celebrated Süleymanname manuscripts and the works of the architect Mimar Sinan in Istanbul, Edirne, and elsewhere mark the high point of Ottoman classical culture.

The sixteenth century was not, however, an unbroken sequence of victories. The Safavid dynasty in Iran remained a persistent rival, and the long Ottoman-Safavid wars drained resources on the eastern frontier. The naval defeat at Lepanto in 1571, inflicted by a Holy League fleet under Don John of Austria, was a serious blow, though the Ottomans rebuilt their navy within a year and took Tunis back from Spain in 1574. The cost of these long wars contributed to the inflationary pressures that began to erode the timar system of land grants in the late sixteenth century.

The age of crisis, 1600 to 1700

After the death of Suleiman, the empire entered a long period of relative decline that historians have variously called the Sultanate of Women, the era of the declining sultanate, or the age of crisis. The earlier practice of sultans leading armies in person gave way to a harem politics of queen mothers and grand viziers, while the Janissary corps grew increasingly corrupt and resistant to reform. The devshirme levies, once a way of bringing fresh blood into the military, became hereditary. The timar cavalry system, on which Ottoman land power had been built, eroded as fiefs were converted into tax farms.

Externally, the Ottomans faced a series of reverses. The empire lost its naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean to the Portuguese and was unable to project decisive force against the Safavids. A series of wars with the Habsburgs led to the loss of Hungarian territory after the recapture of Buda only briefly, and the high-water mark of Ottoman central European expansion was reached in 1664 with the inconclusive Battle of Saint Gotthard. A generation later, the Treaty of Karlowitz of 26 January 1699 forced the Ottomans for the first time to cede large and permanent European territories to their enemies: Hungary, Transylvania, and most of Croatia passed to Habsburg control, Podolia to Poland, and the Morea to Venice.

The long conflict that ended at Karlowitz, the Great Turkish War of 1683 to 1699, also witnessed the second and final Ottoman siege of Vienna, which was lifted in September 1683 by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski. The Polish cavalry charge of that day, in which the largest single cavalry charge in history allegedly took place, has often been seen as a symbolic turning point in Ottoman fortunes. The wars of the late seventeenth century made it clear that the empire was increasingly on the defensive.

Reform and reorganization, 1700 to 1800

The eighteenth century was a period of partial recovery, deep internal crisis, and halting reform. The Tulip Period (1718–1730) under Sultan Ahmed III saw an opening to European ideas, the establishment of the first Ottoman printing press, and the growth of a small Francophone elite around the embassy in Pera. It ended abruptly in 1730 with a Janissary-led revolt in Istanbul.

The most successful sultans of the period were military reformers. Mahmud I and his successors restored fiscal discipline and reasserted central control over rebellious pashas. Mustafa III and his grand vizier Koca Ragıp Pasha modernized the army along European lines. The decisive ruler, however, was Selim III, whose Nizam-ı Cedid, the New Order, of the 1790s aimed to create a modern European-style infantry alongside the existing Janissary corps. The Janissaries revolted, deposed Selim in 1807, and exposed the limits of piecemeal reform.

In the provinces, local dynasties asserted effective independence. In Egypt, the Albanian officer Muhammad Ali established a hereditary khedivate that would last until 1952. In the Balkans, semi-autonomous pashas such as Ali Pasha of Ioannina built their own power bases. On the Black Sea, the Circassian and Abkhazian principalities remained barely integrated. Yet the central state survived, in part because of the resilience of the Islamic and Ottoman administrative institutions and in part because of the diplomatic value of the caliphate for Muslim populations under European colonial rule.

The century also saw the steady growth of Russian power. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, ending the first Russo-Turkish war of Catherine the Great, gave Russia the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, the right of navigation in the Black Sea, and the cession of the Crimea. The treaty was a milestone in what later became known as the Eastern Question, the diplomatic and political struggle over the future of the Ottoman state.

The empire of the nineteenth century

The nineteenth century was, in many ways, the most painful period of Ottoman history. The empire was forced to confront the full force of European industrial and military superiority, and its responses ranged from the courageous to the catastrophic.

Two long wars dominated the early part of the century. The first, with Russia, ended in the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), in which the Ottomans lost Bessarabia. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832), supported by Britain, France, and Russia, led to the creation of an independent Greek state and the formal recognition of Greek autonomy. The Egyptian crisis that culminated in the Convention of London (1840) ended Muhammad Ali’s attempt to carve out a new empire, but it also revealed the depth of Ottoman dependence on European support.

The most ambitious reform effort was the Tanzimat, a series of edicts issued between 1839 and 1876 that aimed to remake the empire along European legal and administrative lines. The reforms abolished tax farming, established a system of secular courts, codified commercial and criminal law, and declared the legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims. The Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856 extended these principles in the wake of the Crimean War. The reforms were real, but they were also controversial, generating a conservative backlash that took the form of pan-Islamism and eventually of the Young Ottoman movement.

The Crimean War (1853–1856), in which the Ottomans fought alongside Britain, France, and Sardinia against Russia, was a turning point of another kind. It was the last great war in which the Ottomans participated as a major power, and it was followed by a series of large foreign loans that brought the empire into the grip of European banks. The Public Debt Administration established in 1881 became a symbol of Ottoman financial subordination. By the end of the century, more than a third of state revenue was committed to servicing the foreign debt.

The late nineteenth century also saw the loss of the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. The Congress of Berlin in 1878, following the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 to 1878, recognized the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, and granted Austria-Hungary the right to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Bulgarian principality became autonomous, and Eastern Rumelia was joined to it in 1885. The loss of the Balkans was the most visible sign of the empire’s transformation into a predominantly Anatolian state.

The end of empire, 1900 to 1922

The early twentieth century was a period of escalating crisis. Sultan Abdulhamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, used pan-Islamism and the prestige of the caliphate to bind the empire’s Muslim populations together, but his autocratic rule also created deep opposition among army officers, students, and intellectuals. The result was the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908, which forced the sultan to restore the 1876 constitution.

The revolution, however, did not save the empire. The Committee of Union and Progress, the dominant faction in the new politics, was torn between liberal, nationalist, and authoritarian tendencies. The Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, and the long struggle with Armenian revolutionaries in Anatolia exhausted the empire. The Sublime State entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914, hoping to recover lost territory and to break the European encirclement.

The war itself was a disaster. Gallipoli, the 1915 attempt by the Allies to force the Dardanelles, was repulsed with heavy casualties on both sides, but the empire was invaded from every direction. The British and Arab forces captured Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Damascus between 1917 and 1918. The Caucasus front collapsed. By the armistice of 30 October 1918, the empire had lost four-fifths of its territory and a great part of its population.

The post-war settlement was driven from Ankara by Mustafa Kemal, the general who had led the defence of Gallipoli. The Grand National Assembly he established in 1920 rejected the Treaty of Sèvres, the Allies’ first attempt to partition Anatolia, and won a new war against Greek, French, and Armenian forces between 1919 and 1923. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 fixed the borders of the new Turkish state.

On 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Istanbul on a British warship. Less than two years later, on 3 March 1924, the assembly abolished the caliphate itself, expelled the Ottoman dynastic family, and formally closed the door on the Ottoman state. The Republic of Turkey, declared on 29 October 1923, was a self-conscious break with the Ottoman past, and yet it inherited much of its administrative practice, its civil law, and its self-understanding.

Economy, society, and culture across the centuries

The Ottoman economy was, for most of its history, one of the largest in the world. The empire sat at the crossroads of the major trade routes between Europe and Asia, and the city of Istanbul, with its position on the Bosphorus, was the natural hub of overland and maritime commerce. The capitulations, the trade agreements with European powers, became increasingly onerous from the seventeenth century onward, but they were also a sign of how thoroughly Ottoman commerce was integrated with the world economy.

The timar system, which assigned the revenue of agricultural land to cavalry soldiers in return for service, was the backbone of the Ottoman military and the basic unit of rural administration. By the seventeenth century, the timar had been largely replaced by tax farming (iltizam), and the landed cavalry had been replaced by standing infantry. The pious foundations (vakıf) funded mosques, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, and caravanserais throughout the empire, and by some estimates they held as much as a quarter of the empire’s cultivated land at the peak of their power.

Ottoman society was famously multi-confessional and multi-ethnic. The millet system, in which non-Muslim communities governed their own internal affairs under their religious leaders, allowed Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and others to maintain a measure of communal autonomy. The devshirme levy, which recruited Christian boys for service in the Janissary corps and the palace, was both a tool of social mobility and a source of resentment among subject populations. The harem, the imperial household, was both a domestic establishment and a political institution of the first order.

Ottoman high culture blended Turkish, Persian, and Arab elements in distinctive ways. Ottoman Turkish, the language of the court, was heavily Persianized in vocabulary and written in a modified Arabic script. The classical poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the hands of poets such as Baki, Nefi, and Nedim, reached a level of refinement that has rarely been matched. The miniature painting, calligraphy, and carpet weaving of the period have been studied for their distinctive fusion of styles. The architecture of Mimar Sinan, from the Süleymaniye in Istanbul to the Selimiye in Edirne, set a standard that would dominate Ottoman building for centuries.

The Janissaries, the household, and the army

The Janissary corps, the elite infantry of the Ottoman state, was one of the most formidable military institutions of the early modern world. Originally drawn from the devshirme levy, the corps grew from a small palace guard in the fourteenth century into a fighting force of tens of thousands by the seventeenth. The Janissaries were quartered in their own barracks (the odunluk), received a regular salary, and were subject to a strict discipline. They were forbidden to marry until they left the corps, and they were trained to use firearms from the late fourteenth century onward. The corps played a central role in the great Ottoman victories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the fall of Constantinople and the Battle of Mohács.

By the seventeenth century, the Janissaries had become a hereditary caste, increasingly corrupt and resistant to reform. Their involvement in politics, especially in the deposition of sultans, became a regular feature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The abolition of the corps in 1826 by Sultan Mahmud II, the Auspicious Incident, was a defining moment of the modernizing reforms. The destruction of the corps cleared the way for the creation of a European-style army and the centralization of state power.

The Janissaries were only one part of a much larger military establishment. The timar cavalry, the sipahi, formed the backbone of Ottoman land power from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The household cavalry of the Porte, the sipahi of the household, provided the central reserve. The provincial forces, the sekban and the sarica, were employed in long sieges and counter-insurgency campaigns. The artillery corps, the topçu, was organized in the fifteenth century and was one of the most developed in the world. The whole system was paid for by the timar and the vakıf, and the whole system came under increasing strain as the seventeenth century wore on.

Provincial government and the millet system

The Ottoman provinces were administered by beylerbeyis, or governors-general, and by sanjaks, or sub-provincial governors, in a system that combined military, fiscal, and judicial authority in the same hands. The eyalet system, with its further subdivision into sanjaks and nahiyes, was the basic structure of provincial government from the late fourteenth century until the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms. The most important provinces, including Egypt, Baghdad, and the Yemen, were governed as separate units with their own administrative traditions.

The millet system, the arrangement by which non-Muslim communities governed their own internal affairs under their religious leaders, was one of the most distinctive features of Ottoman governance. The Greek Orthodox millet, the Armenian millet, and the Jewish millet each had its own hierarchy, its own courts, and its own system of taxation. The system was a practical response to the multi-confessional character of the empire, and it allowed the Ottoman state to govern a vast and diverse population with a relatively small bureaucracy. The system has been both praised and criticized by modern historians, but it remained the basic framework of Ottoman confessional relations until the nineteenth century.

The integration of the Arab provinces after the conquest of the Mamluks in 1517 was one of the great challenges of the golden age. The Arab lands retained their own administrative traditions, their own legal schools, and their own religious establishments. The Ottoman governors of Egypt, Iraq, and the Yemen were often drawn from the local elite, and the relationship between Istanbul and the provinces was a constant negotiation between central authority and local autonomy. The Sharif of Mecca, the guardian of the holy cities, was a particularly important figure, and the careful management of the Sharifian family was a central concern of Ottoman policy until the Arab Revolt of 1916.

Diplomacy and the European state system

The Ottoman state entered the European diplomatic system gradually, and on its own terms. From the fifteenth century, the empire signed commercial agreements (the capitulations) with Venice, Genoa, France, England, and the Dutch Republic, granting extraterritorial privileges to foreign merchants in return for trading access. The capitulations were originally a normal part of premodern diplomacy, but they became increasingly burdensome as the European powers used them to extend their commercial and political influence. By the eighteenth century, the capitulations had become a symbol of Ottoman subordination to European interests.

The first permanent Ottoman embassies in European capitals were established in the late eighteenth century, as part of the reform impulse of the period. The embassy in London was established in 1793, the embassy in Paris in 1794, and the embassy in Berlin in 1795. The embassies were small, and the ambassadors were often drawn from the Greek or Armenian communities that served as intermediaries with the European powers. The growth of the embassy system was a sign of the new equality of the European state system, but it was also a sign of the empire’s need for European support against Russia.

The Eastern Question, the diplomatic and political struggle over the future of the Ottoman state that dominated the nineteenth century, was in many ways a continuation of trends that had been visible since the Treaty of Karlowitz. The question became acute in the 1820s, with the Greek War of Independence, and it remained acute until the final dissolution of the empire in 1922. The major European powers, including Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and later Germany, all had interests in the Ottoman succession, and the resulting rivalries shaped the diplomacy of the period.

The empire in the age of revolution

The long nineteenth century was, in many respects, an age of revolution for the Ottoman state. The empire was forced to confront not only European industrial and military superiority but also the new political ideas of the period, including nationalism, liberalism, and constitutionalism. The response of the Ottoman state, the Tanzimat and the later reforms, was an attempt to reconcile the Islamic and Ottoman traditions with the requirements of the modern world.

The Greek War of Independence was the first major nationalist challenge to Ottoman rule. The revolt, which began in 1821, was supported by European philhellenes and by the Russian Empire, and it led to the establishment of an independent Greek kingdom. The Greek example was followed by the Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian national movements, all of which achieved autonomy or independence in the course of the nineteenth century. The Armenian national movement, which developed in the 1870s and 1880s, was the most difficult for the Ottoman state to absorb, and it led to the violent events of 1894 to 1896 and 1915.

The late Ottoman state was also shaped by the new political ideas of the Arab provinces. The Arab intellectual revival of the nineteenth century, the Nahda, was a movement of literary, journalistic, and political reform. The Arab political societies that emerged in the 1900s, including the Ottoman Arab Congress of 1913 and the secret societies of Cairo and Damascus, were the forerunners of the Arab nationalist movements that would dominate the post-Ottoman Middle East. The long decline and reform of the eighteenth century had given way, in the nineteenth, to a much more rapid process of political mobilization that the empire could not contain.

Cultural memory and modern historiography

The memory of the Ottoman Empire has been a contested subject in every modern state that emerged from its territories. In Turkey, the official ideology of the early Republic presented the Ottoman centuries as a period of decline, religious obscurantism, and imperial corruption. The reforms of Mustafa Kemal were presented as a clean break with the past. In the Arab world, the memory of the empire has been more mixed, combining nostalgia for the cosmopolitanism of the late Ottoman period with criticism of Ottoman centralization and the use of the caliphate as a tool of pan-Islamic policy. In the Balkans, the memory of Ottoman rule has been more sharply negative, often drawing on the national narratives of the nineteenth century.

The modern historiography of the Ottoman Empire has been transformed since the middle of the twentieth century. The older narrative of decline, which dominated Ottoman studies for generations, has been replaced by a more nuanced picture of a state that adapted, reformed, and survived for six centuries. The work of historians such as Halil İnalcık, Suraiya Faroqhi, and Cemal Kafadar has emphasized the flexibility of Ottoman institutions, the diversity of Ottoman society, and the long-term character of Ottoman adaptation. The empire is now seen less as a static and traditional state and more as a complex and dynamic system that responded, often successfully, to the challenges of early modernity.

The legacy of the Ottoman centuries is still being worked out in the modern Middle East. The territorial boundaries of the modern states of the region, from Iraq to Lebanon to Libya, were largely drawn in the period between 1918 and 1923, and they reflect the administrative divisions of the late Ottoman period. The legal traditions of many successor states, including the Turkish civil code of 1926, drew on Ottoman and European models. The Arabic, Turkish, and Persian literary traditions that intersected in Istanbul for centuries remain a shared inheritance. To read the history of the Ottomans is, in the end, to be reminded that the modern Middle East is the product of long historical processes, and that the Ottoman centuries are central to those processes.

Legacy

The Ottoman legacy is global. In the Balkans, in the Levant, in Egypt and Iraq, in the Caucasus and the Crimea, the Ottoman centuries left a deep imprint in language, religion, law, architecture, and food. The Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Jewish communities that survive in the former Ottoman lands bear the marks of the millet system, in which non-Muslim communities governed their own internal affairs. The Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary traditions intersected in Istanbul for centuries, producing a cosmopolitan high culture that the modern Turkish state has only recently begun to rediscover.

In the wider Muslim world, the memory of the Ottoman caliphate has been an object of both nostalgia and debate. Movements as different as the Khilafat in British India and the Arab nationalism of the interwar period were shaped by the question of what the caliphate meant. The modern Republic of Turkey, the Arab states that emerged from the empire, and the diasporic communities of Europe all, in different ways, are heirs to the Ottoman centuries.

To read the history of the Ottomans is, finally, to be reminded that empires are made and unmade by the long interplay of institutions, ideas, geography, and accident. Six centuries of history cannot be reduced to a single narrative, but they offer some of the richest material in the human record. The rise of the empire, the golden age, the long decline and reform, and the final end of the Ottoman Empire are the four periods into which historians most commonly divide the story.

The Ottoman legacy is global. In the Balkans, in the Levant, in Egypt and Iraq, in the Caucasus and the Crimea, the Ottoman centuries left a deep imprint in language, religion, law, architecture, and food. The Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Jewish communities that survive in the former Ottoman lands bear the marks of the millet system, in which non-Muslim communities governed their own internal affairs. The Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary traditions intersected in Istanbul for centuries, producing a cosmopolitan high culture that the modern Turkish state has only recently begun to rediscover.

In the wider Muslim world, the memory of the Ottoman caliphate has been an object of both nostalgia and debate. Movements as different as the Khilafat in British India and the Arab nationalism of the interwar period were shaped by the question of what the caliphate meant. The modern Republic of Turkey, the Arab states that emerged from the empire, and the diasporic communities of Europe all, in different ways, are heirs to the Ottoman centuries.

To read the history of the Ottomans is, finally, to be reminded that empires are made and unmade by the long interplay of institutions, ideas, geography, and accident. Six centuries of history cannot be reduced to a single narrative, but they offer some of the richest material in the human record. The rise of the empire, the golden age, the long decline and reform, and the final end of the Ottoman Empire are the four periods into which historians most commonly divide the story.