Ottoman Empire
Anatolia / Balkans / Middle East · 1299 – 1922
The Ottoman dynasty ruled an empire that, at its early-seventeenth-century peak, stretched from Algeria to the Persian Gulf and from Hungary to the Yemen — perhaps thirty-two million people across three continents. The dynasty's founder Osman I was originally the chief of a small Turkmen warband on the Byzantine frontier in northwestern Anatolia in the late thirteenth century. His descendants conquered Bursa, crossed into Europe in the 1350s, subdued the Balkans, and in 1453 captured Constantinople under Mehmed II — ending the thousand-year Byzantine Empire and giving the Ottomans a capital and an imperial ideology to inherit. The dynasty's classical apex was the reign of Süleyman I "the Magnificent" (1520–1566). His armies took Belgrade and Rhodes, decisively defeated the Hungarians at Mohács in 1526, besieged Vienna in 1529, conquered Baghdad in 1534, and made the Ottoman navy the dominant power in the Mediterranean. His judicial reforms — the kanun, the imperial codification of secular law alongside sharia — gave him the Turkish epithet Kanuni, the Lawgiver. His marriage to the Ukrainian slave concubine Hürrem Sultan transformed the Ottoman imperial harem from a women's quarter into the political center of the Topkapı Palace. Ottoman political succession was uniquely brutal among the great early-modern dynasties. From Mehmed II onward, the law of fratricide (kanunname) permitted a newly enthroned sultan to execute all of his brothers as a precaution against civil war — Mehmed III in 1595 had his nineteen surviving brothers strangled with silken bowstrings the day of his accession. The practice was replaced in the seventeenth century by the kafes (cage) system, in which potential heirs were confined in the palace under house arrest for decades until they were called to the throne; many of the later sultans came to power as middle-aged men who had never governed anything. The Ottoman dynasty's decline was visible from the second siege of Vienna in 1683, prolonged through three centuries of incremental territorial loss to Habsburgs, Romanovs, French, British, and the rising Balkan nationalisms, and ended in the post-First World War partition of the empire and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal in 1923. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, was deposed and exiled the previous year; the caliphate was abolished in 1924, ending six hundred and twenty-three years of Ottoman dynastic rule. The Osmanoğlu family continues today as a private house; the current head is Harun Osmanoğlu (b. 1932).
3 figures