What was the Ottoman Empire?
In 1453 cannon fire ended the Middle Ages in Constantinople. For 600 years the Ottomans ruled the bridge between Europe and Asia — and taxed everything crossing it.
Last updated: October 2026
One empire sat astride the world’s most valuable real estate — the straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the land bridge between Europe and Asia — and made a six-century career out of charging rent on geography.
The Ottoman Empire began as one small principality among many on the edge of the crumbling Byzantine Empire. Its founder, Osman I, led a Turkic frontier beylik in north-western Anatolia in the late thirteenth century; the empire conventionally dates its founding to around 1299. Osman's successors turned a borderland war-band into a state: they captured Bursa in 1326, crossed into Europe, took Adrianople — Edirne — and by the late fourteenth century ruled much of the Balkans. The Ottomans expanded not only by conquest but by co-option, absorbing local elites, marrying into Balkan dynasties and offering Christian nobles a place in a pragmatic, multi-religious order.
The empire's defining moment came in 1453, when the twenty-one-year-old Sultan Mehmed II besieged and conquered Constantinople, the thousand-year capital of Byzantine Christianity. With giant cannon cast by the Hungarian founder Urban, Ottoman forces breached walls that had held since antiquity, and Mehmed made the city his capital, repopulating it with Muslims, Christians and Jews and endowing it with mosques, markets and schools. The fall of Constantinople sent a shock through Europe and closed a chapter of history: the Roman Empire, in its eastern form, was over, and a new imperial capital — Istanbul — took its place.
Under Süleyman the Magnificent, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, the empire reached its greatest extent: Hungary and the gates of Vienna in the west, Baghdad and Tabriz in the east, Egypt and North Africa in the south, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which made the sultan the guardian of Islam's holiest places. Ottoman fleets sailed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, challenging the Portuguese from the Horn of Africa to India. Süleyman's court was a centre of art and letters, and his alliance with Francis I of France against the Habsburgs — a Muslim sultan allied with a Catholic king — scandalised Europe and reshaped its politics.
Süleyman was called "the Lawgiver" in Ottoman tradition, and his reign systematised law, taxation and land tenure. The court architect Mimar Sinan raised the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and hundreds of other buildings across the empire, giving Ottoman architecture its classical form. But the golden age also carried the seeds of later trouble: the price revolution driven by American silver, the rising cost of war, and a succession system that pitted princes against one another in fratricidal competition.
The Ottoman Empire governed diversity through institutions that Europe would take centuries to imitate. Under the millet system, religious communities — Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews and others — ran their own family law, education and welfare under their own leaders, paying taxes to the sultan in return for protection. The devshirme system recruited Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them, educated them at the palace school, and raised some to the highest offices of the empire, including grand vizier. The empire's tolerance was pragmatic rather than principled, and it had brutal limits, but it allowed a vast mosaic of peoples to live under one sovereignty for centuries.
Trade was the empire's lifeblood. Istanbul sat at the junction of Europe and Asia; Aleppo, Cairo and Bursa were among the great commercial cities of the early modern world. Coffee, which reached Istanbul in the sixteenth century, gave the world the coffeehouse, and Ottoman coffee culture spread to Europe. The empire controlled the spice routes, collected customs from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, and supplied Europe with grain, leather, silk and carpets. When Atlantic trade and new sea routes began to bypass the Mediterranean, the empire's commercial centrality slowly eroded — one of the long causes of its relative decline.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought military reverses: the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, the loss of Hungary, and the rise of Russia as a rival on the Black Sea. European diplomats began calling the empire the "sick man of Europe", a phrase that underestimated its resilience. The nineteenth century brought the Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and after: equality before the law for all subjects regardless of religion, modern ministries, secular courts, a constitution in 1876 and a parliament. Reformers sought to save the empire by remaking it as a modern, centralised, constitutional state.
But reform could not hold the empire together against nationalism and great-power rivalry. Greece won independence in 1830; Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria followed; Egypt slipped under British control in 1882. In 1908, the Young Turks seized power, restoring the constitution and promising a new era, but their government led the empire into the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, in which Ottoman authorities systematically killed and deported Armenians, remains one of the defining crimes of the twentieth century and a subject of ongoing international dispute over recognition and terminology.
Defeat in 1918 brought partition. The Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 carved the empire's Arab provinces into mandates under Britain and France and left a rump Turkish state under occupation. Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, led a war of independence from Anatolia, rejected Sèvres, and won a new settlement at Lausanne in 1923. The sultanate was abolished in 1922, the caliphate in 1924, and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923 with Ankara as its capital. The empire that had begun as a frontier beylik six centuries earlier was gone.
The Ottoman legacy endures across three continents: in the borders drawn from its provinces, in the cuisines, music and architecture of the Balkans and the Middle East, in the Turkish language and the republic that succeeded it, and in the unresolved memories of its peoples — including the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian communities that suffered its final violence. To study the Ottoman Empire is to study how a multi-religious, multi-ethnic state held together for six hundred years, and why it ultimately could not.
No city embodies the Ottoman Empire like Istanbul. Capital of the Byzantine Empire as Constantinople, it became the Ottoman capital in 1453 and remained so until 1922 — nearly five centuries. Mehmed II repopulated it, endowed it with covered markets like the Grand Bazaar, and built mosques, palaces and schools. Under Süleyman, the architect Sinan gave it its skyline: the domes of the Süleymaniye and the Blue Mosque still dominate the Golden Horn. The city was also the symbol of imperial diversity: Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews, Levantines and European merchants lived side by side, governed under the millet system. When the Turkish Republic made Ankara its capital in 1923, Istanbul ceased to be the seat of power — but it remains Turkey's largest city and the empire's living monument.
- Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire.
- Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan.
- Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ottoman Empire" and "Süleyman the Magnificent".
- Topkapı Palace Museum and the Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul — surviving monuments of the classical age.