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 sultanate abolished. 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.

This page follows the episode act by act. Each section ends with the works it rests on, linked to their full entries in the bibliography, where you will also find the claims the episode treats as contested and the points where the record is genuinely uncertain. Where the page goes beyond what twenty-one minutes could carry, it 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. The episode says so explicitly rather than presenting it as history. 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.

Murad I died at Kosovo. That much is well attested; the manner of it is not, and several incompatible accounts survive, which is why the episode says only that he was struck down in his own camp.

What made that expansion sustainable was administrative rather than military. The devşirme was a levy of Christian boys from Balkan villages, converted, educated and placed in state service — the janissary infantry at one end of the range, the grand vizierate at the other. Legally these men, the kapıkulu, remained the sultan’s slaves. That word needs care: their status was not comparable to chattel slavery, and many rose to the highest offices in the state. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, born in Serbia and taken by the levy, governed the empire as grand vizier for fourteen years.

Both things are true at once. The system was coercive by design, and it produced an administrative elite with no hereditary power base, answerable only to the sultan — which is precisely why it worked.

Alongside it ran the timar: revenue rights over land granted to cavalrymen in exchange for military service rather than as heritable property. It funded a large army without a treasury large enough to pay one.

In 1402, near Ankara, Timur destroyed the Ottoman army and captured the sultan, Bayezid I. Bayezid died in captivity the following year; the circumstances are disputed in the sources. 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 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 dimensions usually given for Orban’s great bombard vary considerably between contemporary accounts, and the episode gives them as approximations rather than measurements.

Constantine XI is said to have discarded his imperial regalia and died fighting in the breach. It is the tradition, reported by several sources, and his body was never certainly identified.

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. Whether that claim was meant as genuine Roman continuity or as political theatre is a live argument among historians, and the episode leaves it open.

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 transformed the empire 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. But the reign is misnamed in English. Europe called him the Magnificent; in Turkish he is Kanunî, the Lawgiver, and that is the more informative title. The kanun was sultanic law issued alongside religious law, covering taxation, land tenure and criminal matters — the machinery by which a sprawling multi-confessional empire was actually administered.

Two other things belong to this period and are routinely left out of the narrative. Hürrem Sultan, known in Europe as Roxelana, moved from the harem to a position of genuine political authority, and the century that followed is sometimes called the Sultanate of Women — a period older accounts dismissed by treating harem women as politically passive, which they were not. And Mimar Sinan, chief imperial architect for half a century, built the mosque complexes that still define the skylines of Istanbul and Edirne.

Ottoman armies reached the walls of Vienna twice, and the two sieges are often collapsed into one story. The first, in 1529, was a late-season failure of supply and weather more than of arms. The second, in 1683, ended with a relief army breaking the siege — a charge frequently described as the largest cavalry action in history, though estimates of its size vary and the superlative is contested.

What followed matters more than the battle. Sixteen years of war against a Habsburg-led coalition ended 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, by formal agreement. That point is not disputed.

The standard story after Süleyman is decline, and recent scholarship has substantially challenged it. Much of the framework originates with Ottoman reform writers who argued that things had been better under Süleyman because that was the persuasive way to argue for change, and with nineteenth-century European historians who found a narrative of Oriental decay congenial. The alternative reading is that the empire was adapting rather than simply failing for much of this period. A twenty-one minute survey inevitably simplifies, and the episode’s framing — a long retreat rather than a collapse — is an attempt to respect that.

The reform programme was real and it was a response to military pressure. 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 and rebuilt the army on European lines. The Tanzimat — “reorganisation” — ran from 1839 to 1876 and went much further: legal equality for non-Muslim subjects, codified commercial law, conscription, secular schools, a modern tax administration, and in 1876 a constitution and parliament.

The reforms were also destabilising, because legal equality dismantled the arrangement that had held a multi-confessional empire together without offering the communities involved a compelling reason to stay in it. Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution in 1878 and ruled personally for three decades. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored it; by 1913 the Committee of Union and Progress was governing as a dictatorship.

Nicholas I of Russia is said to have called the empire the sick man of Europe. The attribution is traditional rather than documented — it appears in later reports rather than in a verifiable quotation.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 removed almost all remaining Ottoman territory in Europe within a year. The empire entered the First World War alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary in late 1914. It held at Gallipoli in 1915 and lost almost everywhere else. In the same year 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.

The episode does not cover it directly — a twenty-one minute survey of six centuries leaves a great deal out. It is set down here because an account of the empire’s final decade that passed over it would be an incomplete one, and because this page exists to carry what the film could not.

The Armistice of Mudros ended Ottoman participation in October 1918 and Allied forces occupied Constantinople. The Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal fought the resulting partition — imposed at Sèvres — to a different settlement at Lausanne. The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922, the Republic of Türkiye was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, and the caliphate on 3 March 1924.

The empire’s traces are easier to find than its ruins. Coffee reached western Europe largely through Ottoman coffeehouses, and with it a social institution: a public room where men of different ranks sat and argued, which European authorities distrusted for the same reasons Ottoman ones had.

Tulips travelled the same way, from the Ottoman court into Dutch horticulture and back again — the empire had its own speculative fashion for them, the Lâle Devri or Tulip Era of the early eighteenth century.

The heavier inheritance is on the map. Many borders in the modern Middle East run where the empire was cut apart, and the episode describes them as scars. That is a widely held view and a simplification of a longer process: the wartime agreements, the mandates that followed, and decades of post-independence change all shaped the lines that exist now.