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153-833: Previously, the Diet had been convened in different cities but, beginning in 1594, it met only in the town hall in Regensburg. On 20 January 1663, the Diet convened to deal with threats from the Ottoman Empire (the Turkish Question). Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Holy Roman Emperor had been formally bound to accept all decisions made by the Diet. Hence, out of fear that the Emperor would disregard

306-699: A calamitous end in 1683 when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a huge army to attempt a second Ottoman siege of Vienna in the Great Turkish War of 1683–1699. The final assault being fatally delayed, the Ottoman forces were swept away by allied Habsburg, German, and Polish forces spearheaded by the Polish king John III Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna . The alliance of the Holy League pressed home

459-500: A coup, but he did see the need for military mobilization. In 1883, a German military mission under General Baron Colmar von der Goltz arrived to train the Ottoman Army, leading to the so-called "Goltz generation" of German-trained officers, who played a notable role in the politics of the empire's last years. From 1894 to 1896, between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians living throughout the empire were killed in what became known as

612-496: A fairly modern conscripted army , banking system reforms, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the replacement of religious law with secular law, and guilds with modern factories. The Ottoman Ministry of Post was established in Istanbul in 1840. American inventor Samuel Morse received an Ottoman patent for the telegraph in 1847, issued by Sultan Abdülmecid , who personally tested the invention. The reformist period peaked with

765-549: A figure that vastly exceeded the number of Muslim children in school at the time, who were further hindered by the amount of time spent learning Arabic and Islamic theology. Author Norman Stone suggests that the Arabic alphabet, in which Turkish was written until 1928 , was ill-suited to reflect the sounds of Turkish (which is a Turkic as opposed to Semitic language), which imposed further difficulty on Turkish children. In turn, Christians' higher educational levels allowed them to play

918-508: A larger role in the economy, with the rise in prominence of groups such as the Sursock family indicative of this. In 1911, of the 654 wholesale companies in Istanbul, 528 were owned by ethnic Greeks. In many cases, Christians and Jews gained protection from European consuls and citizenship, meaning they were protected from Ottoman law and not subject to the same economic regulations as their Muslim counterparts. The Crimean War (1853–1856)

1071-687: A major center for its trade, contributing to its continued prosperity throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. Under Ivan IV (1533–1584), the Tsardom of Russia expanded into the Volga and Caspian regions at the expense of the Tatar khanates. In 1571, the Crimean khan Devlet I Giray , commanded by the Ottomans, burned Moscow . The next year, the invasion was repeated but repelled at

1224-454: A particular method or framework, the cumulative effect of the scholarship has demonstrated the empirical and theoretical invalidity of the decline thesis, and offered a portrayal of an internally dynamic Ottoman state and society. It has also established the comparability of the Ottoman empire to other - mainly European - societies and polities, and concomitantly revised the existing scheme of periodization." The 21st-century scholarly consensus on

1377-521: A sense of Turkish nationalism. In this period, the Ottoman Empire spent only small amounts of public funds on education; for example, in 1860–1861 only 0.2% of the total budget was invested in education. As the Ottoman state attempted to modernize its infrastructure and army in response to outside threats, it opened itself up to a different kind of threat: that of creditors. As the historian Eugene Rogan has written, "the single greatest threat to

1530-556: A sign of decline. One of the most enduring claims of the decline thesis was that of the weakness of the Ottoman military in the post-Suleimanic period. Supposedly, the once-feared Janissary Corps became corrupted as they increasingly earned privileges for themselves, gaining the right to marry, sire children, and enroll those children into the corps. Rather than maintaining strict military discipline, they began to take up professions as merchants and shopkeepers in order to supplement their income, thus losing their military edge. However, it

1683-595: A transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II , which marked the Ottomans' emergence as a major regional power. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566), the empire reached the peak of its power, prosperity, and political development. By the start of the 17th century, the Ottomans presided over 32 provinces and numerous vassal states , which over time were either absorbed into

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1836-459: A victory over the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), off southwestern Greece; Catholic forces killed over 30,000 Turks and destroyed 200 of their ships. It was a startling, if mostly symbolic, blow to the image of Ottoman invincibility, an image which the victory of the Knights of Malta over the Ottoman invaders in the 1565 siege of Malta had recently set about eroding. The battle

1989-401: Is an obsolete historical narrative which once played a dominant role in the study of the history of the Ottoman Empire . According to the decline thesis, following a golden age associated with the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566), the empire gradually entered into a period of all-encompassing stagnation and decline from which it was never able to recover, lasting until

2142-452: Is crucial, but so too is their temporary nature, as the Ottoman state was ultimately able to survive and adapt to a changing world. Also of increasing emphasis is the place of the Ottoman Empire in comparative perspective, particularly with the states of Europe. While the Ottomans struggled with a severe economic and fiscal downturn, so too did their European contemporaries. This period is frequently referred to as that of The General Crisis of

2295-635: Is now understood that janissary participation in the economy was not limited to the post-Suleimanic period. Janissaries were engaging in commerce as early as the fifteenth century, without any apparent impact on their military discipline. Furthermore, far from becoming militarily ineffective, the Janissaries continued to remain one of the most innovative forces in Europe, introducing the tactic of volley fire alongside and perhaps even earlier than most European armies. Even greater attention has been given to

2448-639: The Anatolian Beyliks . One of these, in the region of Bithynia on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, was led by the Turkish tribal leader Osman I ( d. 1323/4), a figure of obscure origins from whom the name Ottoman is derived. Osman's early followers consisted of Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine renegades, with many but not all converts to Islam. Osman extended control of his principality by conquering Byzantine towns along

2601-525: The Arab Revolt . During this period, the Ottoman government engaged in genocide against Armenians , Assyrians , and Greeks . In 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

2754-465: The Battle of Molodi . The Ottoman Empire continued to invade Eastern Europe in a series of slave raids , and remained a significant power in Eastern Europe until the end of the 17th century. The Ottomans decided to conquer Venetian Cyprus and on 22 July 1570, Nicosia was besieged; 50,000 Christians died, and 180,000 were enslaved. On 15 September 1570, the Ottoman cavalry appeared before

2907-728: The Bosporus Strait made it difficult to conquer. In 1402, the Byzantines were temporarily relieved when the Turco-Mongol leader Timur , founder of the Timurid Empire , invaded Ottoman Anatolia from the east. In the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Timur defeated Ottoman forces and took Sultan Bayezid I as prisoner, throwing the empire into disorder. The ensuing civil war lasted from 1402 to 1413 as Bayezid's sons fought over succession. It ended when Mehmed I emerged as

3060-665: The Bulgarian Tsardom of Vidin in 1396, regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages , failed to stop the advance of the victorious Ottomans. As the Turks expanded into the Balkans, the conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. The Ottomans had already wrested control of nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city, but the strong defense of Constantinople's strategic position on

3213-599: The Cape of Good Hope in 1488 initiated a series of Ottoman-Portuguese naval wars in the Indian Ocean throughout the 16th century. Despite the growing European presence in the Indian Ocean, Ottoman trade with the east continued to flourish. Cairo, in particular, benefitted from the rise of Yemeni coffee as a popular consumer commodity. As coffeehouses appeared in cities and towns across the empire, Cairo developed into

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3366-520: The Cape of Good Hope , bypassing Ottoman territories, had a far less significant impact on the Ottoman economy than had once been assumed. While earlier scholarship depicted the Portuguese as having established a near-monopoly on the movement of luxury goods, particularly spices, to Europe, in fact the Portuguese were only one of many actors competing in the Indian Ocean commercial arena. Even in

3519-545: The Constitution of the Ottoman Empire and brought in multi-party politics with a two-stage electoral system ( electoral law ) under the Ottoman parliament . The constitution offered hope by freeing the empire's citizens to modernise the state's institutions, rejuvenate its strength, and enable it to hold its own against outside powers. Its guarantee of liberties promised to dissolve inter-communal tensions and transform

3672-856: The Great Northern War of 1700–1721). Charles XII persuaded the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III to declare war on Russia, which resulted in an Ottoman victory in the Pruth River Campaign of 1710–1711, in Moldavia. After the Austro-Turkish War , the Treaty of Passarowitz confirmed the loss of the Banat, Serbia, and "Little Walachia" (Oltenia) to Austria. The Treaty also revealed that the Ottoman Empire

3825-545: The Greek revolt (1821–1829) that ultimately ended with the formal independence of Greece in 1830. It was a costly enterprise for Muhammad Ali, who had lost his fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. Thus began the first Egyptian–Ottoman War (1831–1833) , during which the French-trained army of Muhammad Ali, under the command of his son Ibrahim Pasha , defeated the Ottoman Army as it marched into Anatolia , reaching

3978-795: The Greeks declared war on the Sultan. A rebellion that originated in Moldavia as a diversion was followed by the main revolution in the Peloponnese , which, along with the northern part of the Gulf of Corinth , became the first parts of the Ottoman Empire to achieve independence (in 1829). In 1830, the French invaded the Deylik of Algiers . The campaign that took 21 days, resulted in over 5,000 Algerian military casualties, and about 2,600 French ones. Before

4131-506: The Hamidian massacres . In 1897 the population was 19   million, of whom 14   million (74%) were Muslim. An additional 20   million lived in provinces that remained under the sultan's nominal suzerainty but were entirely outside his actual power. One by one the Porte lost nominal authority. They included Egypt, Tunisia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Lebanon. As

4284-669: The Iberian Union . The Ottomans were holders of the Caliph title, meaning they were the leaders of Muslims worldwide. The Iberians were leaders of the Christian crusaders, and so the two fought in a worldwide conflict. There were zones of operations in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean , where Iberians circumnavigated Africa to reach India and, on their way, wage war upon the Ottomans and their local Muslim allies. Likewise,

4437-592: The Imperial Estates in the Diet, Regensburg had around 70 representatives ( Komitialgesandtern or Comitia ) from foreign states. The Emperor was represented by a Principal Commissioner ( Prinzipalkommissar ), a position that accrued to the Thurn und Taxis family from 1748. In its early years, the Perpetual Diet was a tool for consolidation of Habsburg power in the empire. However, by the middle of

4590-474: The Kafes system of succession, whereby dynastic princes no longer gained experience in provincial government before coming to the throne. Faulty leadership at the top led to decay in all branches of government: the bureaucracy ceased to function effectively, and the quality of their records worsened. The Ottoman military lost its strength and began to experience defeats on the battlefield. They ceased to keep up with

4743-708: The Köprülü era (1656–1703), effective control of the Empire was exercised by a sequence of grand viziers from the Köprülü family. The Köprülü Vizierate saw renewed military success with authority restored in Transylvania, the conquest of Crete completed in 1669, and expansion into Polish southern Ukraine , with the strongholds of Khotyn , and Kamianets-Podilskyi and the territory of Podolia ceding to Ottoman control in 1676. This period of renewed assertiveness came to

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4896-641: The Oriental Crisis of 1840 . Muhammad Ali had close relations with France , and the prospect of him becoming the Sultan of Egypt was widely viewed as putting the entire Levant into the French sphere of influence. As the Sublime Porte had proved itself incapable of defeating Muhammad Ali, the British Empire and Austrian Empire provided military assistance, and the second Egyptian–Ottoman War (1839–1841) ended with Ottoman victory and

5049-534: The Sakarya River . A Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 contributed to Osman's rise. It is not well understood how the early Ottomans came to dominate their neighbors, due to the lack of sources surviving. The Ghaza thesis popular during the 20th century credited their success to rallying religious warriors to fight for them in the name of Islam , but it is no longer generally accepted. No other hypothesis has attracted broad acceptance. In

5202-689: The Spanish garrison of Castelnuovo on the Adriatic coast ; the successful siege cost the Ottomans 8,000 casualties, but Venice agreed to terms in 1540, surrendering most of its empire in the Aegean and the Morea . France and the Ottoman Empire, united by mutual opposition to Habsburg rule, became allies. The French conquests of Nice (1543) and Corsica (1553) occurred as a joint venture between French king Francis I and Suleiman, and were commanded by

5355-546: The Timar System of land tenure which had sustained it fell into obsolescence, while the corrupt bureaucracy was unable to replace it with a functional alternative. Instead, tax-farming was introduced, leading to corruption and oppression of the peasantry, and agricultural decline. Ottoman economic and military backwardness was extenuated by their closed-mindedness and unwillingness to adopt European innovations, as well as an increasing disdain for practical science. Ultimately,

5508-512: The Treaty of Nasuh Pasha , which ceded the entire Caucasus, except westernmost Georgia, back into the possession of Safavid Iran . The treaty ending the Cretan War cost Venice much of Dalmatia , its Aegean island possessions, and Crete . (Losses from the war totalled 30,985 Venetian soldiers and 118,754 Turkish soldiers.) During his brief majority reign, Murad IV (1623–1640) reasserted central authority and recaptured Iraq (1639) from

5661-441: The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. This thesis was used throughout most of the twentieth century as the basis of both Western and Republican Turkish understanding of Ottoman history. However, by 1978, historians had begun to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of the decline thesis. After the publication of numerous new studies throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and the reexamination of Ottoman history through

5814-450: The 'impact of the West'; the third concerns the degree to which the Ottoman Empire was taken to be totally unique, operating according to its own rules and internal logic, rather than being integrated into a wider comparative framework of world history; while the fourth addresses the degree to which the decline thesis overlooked the local processes actually occurring in the Ottoman Empire during

5967-555: The 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe , between the early 16th and early 18th centuries. The empire emerged from a beylik , or principality , founded in northwestern Anatolia in c.  1299 by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I . His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into the Balkans by the mid-14th century, transforming their petty kingdom into

6120-417: The 18th century, it was largely "dysfunctional" and a "mere congress of diplomats" that produced "no important legislation in political and constitutional matters". The weak institution has been called "a bladeless knife without a handle", and, during the Diet's existence, the Empire increasingly became nothing more than a collection of largely independent states. The last action of the Diet, on 25 March 1803,

6273-399: The 1960s and 1970s. These theories provided an influential critique of the prevailing theory of modernization which was then popular among economists and political analysts, and had been the framework within which Ottoman economic history had been understood, exemplified above all by Bernard Lewis ' 1961 The Emergence of Modern Turkey . Modernization theory held that the underdeveloped world

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6426-406: The Arabic name ʿUthmān ( عثمان ). In Ottoman Turkish , the empire was referred to as Devlet-i ʿAlīye-yi ʿO s mānīye ( دولت عليه عثمانیه ), lit.   ' Sublime Ottoman State ' , or simply Devlet-i ʿO s mānīye ( دولت عثمانيه‎ ), lit.   ' Ottoman State ' . The Turkish word for "Ottoman" ( Osmanlı ) originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in

6579-668: The Balkan Peninsula during the Congress of Berlin , and in return, Britain assumed the administration of Cyprus in 1878. Britain later sent troops to Egypt in 1882 to put down the Urabi Revolt (Sultan Abdul Hamid II was too paranoid to mobilize his own army, fearing this would result in a coup d'état), effectively gaining control in both territories. Abdul Hamid II was so fearful of a coup that he did not allow his army to conduct war games, lest this serve as cover for

6732-553: The Balkans . Osman's son, Orhan , captured the northwestern Anatolian city of Bursa in 1326, making it the new capital and supplanting Byzantine control in the region. The important port of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in 1387 and sacked. The Ottoman victory in Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe. The Battle of Nicopolis for

6885-627: The CUP became increasingly radicalized and nationalistic, leading a coup d'état in 1913 that established a one-party regime. The CUP allied with the German Empire hoping to escape from the diplomatic isolation that had contributed to its recent territorial losses; it thus joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers . While the empire was able to largely hold its own during the conflict, it struggled with internal dissent, especially

7038-634: The Conqueror , reorganized both state and military, and on 29 May 1453 conquered Constantinople , ending the Byzantine Empire. Mehmed allowed the Eastern Orthodox Church to maintain its autonomy and land in exchange for accepting Ottoman authority. Due to tension between the states of western Europe and the later Byzantine Empire, most of the Orthodox population accepted Ottoman rule, as preferable to Venetian rule. Albanian resistance

7191-444: The Constitution, called the Kanûn-u Esâsî . The empire's First Constitutional era was short-lived. The parliament survived for only two years before the sultan suspended it. The empire's Christian population, owing to their higher educational levels, started to pull ahead of the Muslim majority, leading to much resentment. In 1861, there were 571 primary and 94 secondary schools for Ottoman Christians, with 140,000 pupils in total,

7344-454: The Diet's role by not calling sessions, it never dissolved and became a perpetual diet. Therefore, no final report of its decisions, known as a Recess , could be issued, and that of the preceding diet, issued in 1654, was dubbed the Youngest Recess  [ de ] . From 1663 until the 1684 Truce of Ratisbon (a former name of Regensburg in English), the diet gradually developed into a permanent body. In addition to envoys who represented

7497-400: The Empire or granted various degrees of autonomy. With its capital at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) and control over a significant portion of the Mediterranean Basin , the Ottoman Empire was at the centre of interactions between the Middle East and Europe for six centuries. While the Ottoman Empire was once thought to have entered a period of decline after the death of Suleiman

7650-482: The French invasion the total population of Algeria was most likely between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000. By 1873, the population of Algeria (excluding several hundred thousand newly arrived French settlers) had decreased to 2,172,000. In 1831, Muhammad Ali of Egypt revolted against Sultan Mahmud II due to the latter's refusal to grant him the governorships of Greater Syria and Crete , which the Sultan had promised him in exchange for sending military assistance to put down

7803-405: The Iberians passed through newly-Christianized Latin America and had sent expeditions that traversed the Pacific to Christianize the formerly Muslim Philippines and use it as a base to attack the Muslims in the Far East . In this case, the Ottomans sent armies to aid its easternmost vassal and territory, the Sultanate of Aceh in Southeast Asia. During the 1600s, the world conflict between

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7956-664: The Islamic clergy successfully objected under the grounds of theodicy . In 1754 the artillery school was reopened on a semi-secret basis. In 1726, Ibrahim Muteferrika convinced the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha , the Grand Mufti , and the clergy on the efficiency of the printing press, and Muteferrika was later granted by Sultan Ahmed III permission to publish non-religious books (despite opposition from some calligraphers and religious leaders). Muteferrika's press published its first book in 1729 and, by 1743, issued 17 works in 23 volumes, each having between 500 and 1,000 copies. In North Africa, Spain conquered Oran from

8109-413: The Janissary revolted . Selim's efforts cost him his throne and his life, but were resolved in spectacular and bloody fashion by his successor, the dynamic Mahmud II , who eliminated the Janissary corps in 1826. The Serbian revolution (1804–1815) marked the beginning of an era of national awakening in the Balkans during the Eastern Question . In 1811, the fundamentalist Wahhabis of Arabia, led by

8262-402: The Magnificent (1520–1566) captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered the southern and central parts of the Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Ottoman–Hungarian Wars , and, after his historic victory in the Battle of Mohács in 1526, he established Ottoman rule in the territory of present-day Hungary and other Central European territories. He then laid siege to Vienna in 1529, but failed to take

8415-404: The Magnificent, modern academic consensus posits that the empire continued to maintain a flexible and strong economy, society and military into much of the 18th century. However, during a long period of peace from 1740 to 1768, the Ottoman military system fell behind those of its chief European rivals, the Habsburg and Russian empires. The Ottomans consequently suffered severe military defeats in

8568-424: The Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe, as well as the voyages of discovery which brought Europeans to India, and led to a decline in the volume of trade passing through Ottoman ports. In addition, the Price Revolution led to the destabilization of Ottoman coinage and a severe fiscal crisis, which proved disastrous when paired with the rapidly rising costs of warfare. As the cavalry army of the Ottomans became obsolete,

8721-413: The Ottoman Caliphate and Iberian Union was a stalemate since both were at similar population , technology and economic levels. Nevertheless, the success of the Ottoman political and military establishment was compared to the Roman Empire , despite the difference in size, by the likes of contemporary Italian scholar Francesco Sansovino and French political philosopher Jean Bodin . In the second half of

8874-692: The Ottoman Empire "reverted to a medieval state, with a medieval mentality and a medieval economy – but with the added burden of a bureaucracy and a standing army which no medieval state had ever had to bear." Significantly, explanations of Ottoman decline were not limited to the empire's geopolitical position among world empires or to its military strength. The decline thesis was rooted in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conception of distinct "civilizations" as units of historical analysis, and thus explained Ottoman weakness with reference not only to its geopolitics but also defined it in social, economic, cultural, and moral terms. This all-encompassing notion of

9027-467: The Ottoman Empire gradually shrank, 7–9   million Muslims from its former territories in the Caucasus, Crimea , Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands migrated to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace . After the Empire lost the First Balkan War (1912–1913), it lost all its Balkan territories except East Thrace (European Turkey). This resulted in around 400,000 Muslims fleeing with the retreating Ottoman armies (with many dying from cholera brought by

9180-443: The Ottoman administrative apparatus. Historians now recognize that no such decline ever occurred. This change in record-keeping was attributable not to loss in quality, but to a change in the nature of land assessment, as the empire adjusted to the increasingly monetized economy characteristic of the seventeenth century. The assessment methods in use under Sultan Suleiman were well-suited to ensuring proper distribution of revenues to

9333-403: The Ottoman admirals Hayreddin Barbarossa and Dragut . France supported the Ottomans with an artillery unit during the 1543 Ottoman conquest of Esztergom in northern Hungary. After further advances by the Turks, the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand officially recognized Ottoman ascendancy in Hungary in 1547. Suleiman died of natural causes during the siege of Szigetvár in 1566. Following his death,

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9486-467: The Ottoman bureaucracy, not contraction or decline. These changes, contrary to the claims of earlier historians, do not seem to have led to widespread corruption or oppression to a degree greater than that observable among the Ottoman Empire's European contemporaries. The Ottomans, like other European states, struggled throughout the seventeenth century to meet rapidly rising expenses, but by its end were able to institute reforms which allowed them to enter

9639-432: The Ottoman economy, and used its position to ensure that European capital continued to penetrate the empire, often to the detriment of local Ottoman interests. The Ottoman bashi-bazouks suppressed the Bulgarian uprising of 1876, massacring up to 100,000 people in the process. The Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) ended with a decisive victory for Russia. As a result, Ottoman holdings in Europe declined sharply: Bulgaria

9792-414: The Ottoman monetary system," indicating that "the old thesis of continuous decline cannot be sustained." Far from declining, the first half of the eighteenth century was a period of significant expansion and growth for the Ottoman economy. Other supposed manifestations of Ottoman economic decline have also been challenged. The establishment by European merchants of new maritime trade routes to India around

9945-430: The Ottoman state came from Ottoman intellectuals themselves. Beginning much earlier, but greatly expanding during the seventeenth century, was the literary genre of nasihatname , or "Advice for Kings." This genre had a long history, appearing in earlier Muslim empires such as those of the Seljuks and Abbasids . Nasihatname literature was primarily concerned with order and disorder in state and society; it conceptualized

10098-406: The Ottomans became a weaker power and finally disappeared, every earlier difficulty they experienced becomes a "seed of decline," and Ottoman successes and sources of strength vanish from the record." The corollary of decline is the notion that the empire had earlier reached a peak, and this too has been problematized. The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent had been seen as a golden age to which all of

10251-460: The Ottomans from adopting European military innovations, it is now known that the Ottomans were receptive to foreign techniques and inventions, and continued to employ European renegades and technical experts throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In terms of productive capacity, the Ottomans were even able to surpass their European rivals during the seventeenth century. They maintained full self-sufficiency in gunpowder production until

10404-403: The Ottomans in comparative context with their neighbors, scholars have demonstrated that the multiple crises experienced by the Ottomans in the late sixteenth and early-to-mid seventeenth centuries can be seen as part of a wider European context characterized as the ' general crisis of the seventeenth century ', rather than a sign of uniquely Ottoman decline. The assumption that the Ottoman economy

10557-407: The Ottomans remained roughly equivalent with their European rivals throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theory that Ottoman cannon foundries neglected mobile field guns by producing oversized siege cannon at a disproportionate rate has been debunked by the military historian Gábor Ágoston. Despite the Orientalistic claim that an inherent conservatism in Islam prevented

10710-488: The Ottomans were said to be declining, although this has been rejected by many scholars. By the end of Suleiman's reign, the Empire spanned approximately 877,888 sq mi (2,273,720 km ), extending over three continents. The Empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea . The Empire was now a major part of European politics. The Ottomans became involved in multi-continental religious wars when Spain and Portugal were united under

10863-491: The Russian Empire (2 November 1914) and its allies France (5 November 1914) and the British Empire (5 November 1914) declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Also on 5 November 1914, the British government changed the status of the Khedivate of Egypt and Cyprus , which were de jure Ottoman territories prior to the war, to British protectorates . Ottoman Decline Thesis The Ottoman decline thesis or Ottoman decline paradigm ( Turkish : Osmanlı Gerileme Tezi )

11016-600: The Russian intervention, Sultan Mahmud II could have faced the risk of being overthrown and Muhammad Ali could have even become the new Sultan. These events marked the beginning of a recurring pattern where the Sublime Porte needed the help of foreign powers to protect itself. In 1839, the Sublime Porte attempted to take back what it lost to the de facto autonomous, but de jure still Ottoman Eyalet of Egypt , but its forces were initially defeated, which led to

11169-563: The Russians. After this treaty the Ottoman Empire was able to enjoy a generation of peace in Europe, as Austria and Russia were forced to deal with the rise of Prussia . Educational and technological reforms came about, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as the Istanbul Technical University . In 1734 an artillery school was established to impart Western-style artillery methods, but

11322-682: The Safavids. The resulting Treaty of Zuhab of that same year decisively divided the Caucasus and adjacent regions between the two neighbouring empires as it had already been defined in the 1555 Peace of Amasya. The Sultanate of Women (1533–1656) was a period in which the mothers of young sultans exercised power on behalf of their sons. The most prominent women of this period were Kösem Sultan and her daughter-in-law Turhan Hatice , whose political rivalry culminated in Kösem's murder in 1651. During

11475-514: The Seventeenth Century , and thus the difficulties faced by the Ottoman Empire have been reframed not as unique to them, but as part of a general trend impacting the entire European and Mediterranean region. In the words of Ehud Toledano , "In both Europe and the Ottoman empire, these changes transformed states and the ways in which military-administrative elites waged and funded wars. Coping with these enormous challenges and finding

11628-499: The Timar System had produced was becoming increasingly obsolete by the seventeenth century, and this transformation allowed the Ottomans to instead raise large armies of musket-wielding infantry, thereby maintaining their military competitiveness. By the 1690s, the proportion of infantry in the Ottoman army had increased to 50–60 percent, equivalent to their Habsburg rivals. In terms of armament production and weapons technology,

11781-521: The Turks, but was again defeated at the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448. According to modern historiography, there is a direct connection between the rapid Ottoman military advance and the consequences of the Black Death from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. Byzantine territories, where the initial Ottoman conquests were carried out, were exhausted demographically and militarily due to

11934-466: The advances of European military science, and consequently suffered territorial losses. As the Ottoman state and society was geared towards constant expansion, their sudden failure to achieve new conquests left the empire unable to adapt to its new relationship with Europe. Economically, the empire was undermined by the discovery of the New World and the subsequent shift in the economic balance between

12087-592: The advantage of the defeat at Vienna, culminating in the Treaty of Karlowitz (26 January 1699), which ended the Great Turkish War. The Ottomans surrendered control of significant territories, many permanently. Mustafa II (1695–1703) led the counterattack of 1695–1696 against the Habsburgs in Hungary, but was undone at the disastrous defeat at Zenta (in modern Serbia), 11 September 1697. Aside from

12240-543: The advent of the West; 3. the comparability of Ottoman state and society with their counterparts in the world in the same period; and 4. a logic, or a framework, alternative to decline and the Eurocentrism implied therein, that takes into account the phenomena of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries." The first two points pertain to the decline thesis' depiction of Ottoman state and society as being backward-looking, static, and essentially incapable of innovation prior to

12393-578: The al-Saud family, revolted against the Ottomans. Unable to defeat the Wahhabi rebels, the Sublime Porte had Muhammad Ali Pasha of Kavala , the vali (governor) of the Eyalet of Egypt , tasked with retaking Arabia, which ended with the destruction of the Emirate of Diriyah in 1818. The suzerainty of Serbia as a hereditary monarchy under its own dynasty was acknowledged de jure in 1830. In 1821,

12546-531: The appropriate responses through a sea of socio-economic and political changes is, in fact, the story of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman history. A remarkable adaptation to new realities, rather than decline and disintegration, was its main feature; it reflects the resourcefulness, pragmatism and flexibility in thought and action of the Ottoman military-administrative elite, rather than their ineptitude or incompetence. Thus, per Dana Sajdi: "Regardless of what one may think of an individual revisionist work, or

12699-432: The army of feudal cavalry that then made up the bulk of Ottoman forces. However, by the turn of the century, the need for cash to raise armies of musket-wielding infantry led the central government to reform its system of land tenure, and to expand the practice of tax farming , which was also a common method of revenue-raising in contemporary Europe. In fact, the seventeenth century was a period of significant expansion in

12852-489: The autonomous Deylik of Algiers . The Bey of Oran received an army from Algiers, but it failed to recapture Oran ; the siege caused the deaths of 1,500 Spaniards, and even more Algerians. The Spanish also massacred many Muslim soldiers. In 1792, Spain abandoned Oran, selling it to the Deylik of Algiers. In 1768 Russian-backed Ukrainian Haidamakas , pursuing Polish confederates, entered Balta , an Ottoman-controlled town on

13005-600: The border of Bessarabia in Ukraine, massacred its citizens, and burned the town to the ground. This action provoked the Ottoman Empire into the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 . The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774 ended the war and provided freedom of worship for the Christian citizens of the Ottoman-controlled provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. By the late 18th century, after a number of defeats in

13158-642: The century after Osman I, Ottoman rule had begun to extend over Anatolia and the Balkans . The earliest conflicts began during the Byzantine–Ottoman wars , waged in Anatolia in the late 13th century before entering Europe in the mid-14th century, followed by the Bulgarian–Ottoman wars and the Serbian–Ottoman wars in the mid-14th century. Much of this period was characterised by Ottoman expansion into

13311-418: The changes experienced by the Timar System during this era. The breakdown of the Timar System is now seen not as a result of incompetent administration, but as a conscious policy meant to help the empire adapt to the increasingly monetized economy of the late sixteenth century. Thus, far from being a symptom of decline, this was part of a process of military and fiscal modernization. The army of cavalry which

13464-448: The city of Kütahya within 320 km (200 mi) of the capital, Constantinople. In desperation, Sultan Mahmud II appealed to the empire's traditional arch-rival Russia for help, asking Emperor Nicholas I to send an expeditionary force to assist him. In return for signing the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi , the Russians sent the expeditionary force which deterred Ibrahim Pasha from marching any further towards Constantinople. Under

13617-634: The city. In 1532, he made another attack on Vienna, but was repulsed in the siege of Güns . Transylvania , Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia , became tributary principalities of the Empire. In the east, the Ottoman Turks took Baghdad from the Persians in 1535, gaining control of Mesopotamia and naval access to the Persian Gulf . In 1555, the Caucasus became partitioned for

13770-689: The civil strife, Austria-Hungary officially annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. The last of the Ottoman censuses was performed in 1914 . Despite military reforms which reconstituted the Ottoman Modern Army , the Empire lost its North African territories and the Dodecanese in the Italo-Turkish War (1911) and almost all of its European territories in the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The Empire faced continuous unrest in

13923-428: The concepts which had previously dominated Ottoman economic history, above all the notion of an "Oriental despotism" which supposedly inhibited economic development, and instead to examine the empire in terms of its gradual integration into the periphery of a newly emerging Europe-centered world system. Subsequent provincial studies highlighted the degree to which the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire

14076-525: The decline of Ottoman (and more widely, Islamic) civilization became the framework within which Ottoman history from the sixteenth century onward was understood. Dana Sajdi, in an article summarizing the critiques of the decline thesis written since the 1970s, identifies the following as the main points that scholars have demonstrated: "1. The changing nature and adaptability of Ottoman state and society; 2. indigenous or internal social, economic, and/or intellectual processes displaying signs of modernity prior to

14229-433: The decline thesis continues to maintain a strong presence in popular history , as well as academic history written by scholars who are not specialists on the Ottoman Empire. In some cases this is due to the continued reliance by non-specialists on outdated and debunked works, and in others to certain political interests benefiting from the continued perpetuation of the decline narrative. The first attributions of decline to

14382-430: The decline thesis. Many scholars, among them most notably Douglas Howard and Rifa'at Ali Abou-El-Haj, pointed out that these Ottoman writers' critiques of contemporary society were not uninfluenced by their own biases, and criticized earlier historians for taking them at face value without any critical analysis. Furthermore, "complaint about the times" was in fact a literary trope in Ottoman society, and also existed during

14535-655: The eastern and southern frontiers by defeating Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran , in the Battle of Chaldiran . Selim I established Ottoman rule in Egypt by defeating and annexing the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and created a naval presence on the Red Sea . After this Ottoman expansion, competition began between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottomans to become the dominant power in the region. Suleiman

14688-521: The eighteenth century with a budget surplus. In the words of Linda Darling, "Ascribing seventeenth-century Ottoman budgetary deficits to the decline of the empire leaves unexplained the cessation of these deficits in the eighteenth century." Having dispensed with the notion of decline, today's historians of the Ottoman Empire most commonly refer to the post-Suleimanic Period, or more widely the period from 1550 to 1700, as one of transformation. The role of economic and political crises in defining this period

14841-514: The empire into a more harmonious place. Instead, this period became the story of the twilight struggle of the Empire. Members of Young Turks movement who had once gone underground now established their parties. Among them " Committee of Union and Progress ", and " Freedom and Accord Party " were major parties. On the other end of the spectrum were ethnic parties, which included Poale Zion , Al-Fatat , and Armenian national movement organised under Armenian Revolutionary Federation . Profiting from

14994-544: The end of the Caucasian Wars , 90% of the Circassians were ethnically cleansed and exiled from their homelands in the Caucasus, fleeing to the Ottoman Empire, resulting in the settlement of 500,000 to 700,000 Circassians in the Ottoman Empire. Crimean Tatar refugees in the late 19th century played an especially notable role in seeking to modernise Ottoman education and in first promoting both Pan-Turkism and

15147-523: The end of the seventeenth century, and instead the word increasingly became associated with the Greek population of the empire, a meaning that it still bears in Turkey today. In Western Europe, the names Ottoman Empire, Turkish Empire and Turkey were often used interchangeably, with Turkey being increasingly favoured both in formal and informal situations. This dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–1923, when

15300-406: The entire chronological and geographical span of the empire can be judged." Instead, modern scholars take change to be a natural result of the empire's adaptation to the world around it, a sign of innovativeness and flexibility rather than decline. In reexamining the notion of political decline in the Ottoman Empire, historians first examined the nasihatname texts which had formed the backbone of

15453-408: The first place has come into question. The fact that sultans no longer personally accompanied the army on military campaigns is no longer criticized, but seen as a positive and necessary change resulting from the empire's transformation into a sedentary imperial polity. Leslie Peirce's research on the political role of women in the Ottoman dynasty has demonstrated the inaccuracy of the assumption that

15606-433: The first time between the Safavids and the Ottomans, a status quo that remained until the end of the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) . By this partitioning as signed in the Peace of Amasya , Western Armenia , western Kurdistan , and Western Georgia fell into Ottoman hands, while southern Dagestan , Eastern Armenia , Eastern Georgia , and Azerbaijan remained Persian. In 1539, a 60,000-strong Ottoman army besieged

15759-461: The fourteenth century. The word subsequently came to be used to refer to the empire's military-administrative elite. In contrast, the term "Turk" ( Türk ) was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population and was seen as a disparaging term when applied to urban, educated individuals. In the early modern period , an educated, urban-dwelling Turkish speaker who was not a member of

15912-769: The genre of decline to voice their own personal complaints. For instance, Mustafa Âli's belief that the empire was declining was in large part motivated by frustration at his own failure to achieve promotions and court patronage. The primary goal of the nasihatname writers, then, may have simply been to protect their own personal or class status in a rapidly changing world. One of the first references of Ottoman decline in Western historiography can be found in Incrementa atque decrementa aulae othomanicae completed in 1717 by Dimitrie Cantemir and translated in English in 1734. He

16065-418: The importance of the rapidly expanding bureaucracy is now particularly emphasized as a source of stability and strength for the empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing particularly upon the work of Linda Darling. Based largely on the work of Ariel Salzmann, the empowerment of regional notables in the eighteenth century has been reinterpreted as an effective form of government, rather than

16218-648: The independence of the Middle East" in the 19th century "was not the armies of Europe but its banks". The Ottoman state, which had begun taking on debt with the Crimean War, was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1875. By 1881, the Ottoman Empire agreed to have its debt controlled by the Ottoman Public Debt Administration , a council of European men with presidency alternating between France and Britain. The body controlled swaths of

16371-515: The last Venetian stronghold in Cyprus, Famagusta. The Venetian defenders held out for 11 months against a force that at its peak numbered 200,000 men with 145 cannons; 163,000 cannonballs struck the walls of Famagusta before it fell to the Ottomans in August 1571. The Siege of Famagusta claimed 50,000 Ottoman casualties. Meanwhile, the Holy League consisting of mostly Spanish and Venetian fleets won

16524-545: The late 16th and early 17th centuries. With the Empire's population reaching 30 million people by 1600, the shortage of land placed further pressure on the government. In spite of these problems, the Ottoman state remained strong, and its army did not collapse or suffer crushing defeats. The only exceptions were campaigns against the Safavid dynasty of Persia, where many of the Ottoman eastern provinces were lost, some permanently. This 1603–1618 war eventually resulted in

16677-487: The late 18th and early 19th centuries, culminating in the loss of both territory and global prestige . This prompted a comprehensive process of reform and modernization known as the Tanzimat ; over the course of the 19th century, the Ottoman state became vastly more powerful and organized internally, despite suffering further territorial losses, especially in the Balkans, where a number of new states emerged. Beginning in

16830-618: The late 19th century, various Ottoman intellectuals sought to further liberalize society and politics along European lines, culminating in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which established the Second Constitutional Era and introduced competitive multi-party elections under a constitutional monarchy. However, following the disastrous Balkan Wars ,

16983-589: The late eighteenth century, and with rare and brief exceptions were continually able to produce enough cannon and muskets to supply their whole armed forces as well as surplus stockpiles. According to Gábor Ágoston and Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman defeats in the 1683–99 and 1768–74 wars with the Habsburgs and Russia are best explained by the strain on logistics and communications caused by multi-front warfare rather than Ottoman inferiority in technology and armaments, as such inferiority, insofar as it existed at all,

17136-486: The late sixteenth century, Asian merchants utilizing the traditional Red Sea trade routes through Ottoman territory transported four times as many spices as those of Portuguese merchants, and until the early eighteenth century more silver specie continued to be imported into India via the traditional Middle Eastern routes than through the European-dominated Cape route. The loss of revenue which did occur

17289-526: The loss of the Banat and the temporary loss of Belgrade (1717–1739), the Ottoman border on the Danube and Sava remained stable during the eighteenth century. Russian expansion , however, presented a large and growing threat. Accordingly, King Charles XII of Sweden was welcomed as an ally in the Ottoman Empire following his defeat by the Russians at the Battle of Poltava of 1709 in central Ukraine (part of

17442-413: The mid-twentieth century above all by the works of H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, and Bernard Lewis , who adhered to a civilizational conception of Islamic decline while modifying it with the new sociological paradigm of Modernization Theory . These views came under increasing criticism as historians began to reexamine their own fundamental assumptions about Ottoman and Islamic history, particularly after

17595-401: The mid-twentieth century. However, the article is now highly criticized and no longer considered accurate by modern historians. Lewis' views were as follows: The first ten sultans of the Ottoman Empire (from Osman I to Suleiman the Magnificent ) were of excellent personal quality, while those who came after Suleiman were without exception "incompetents, degenerates, and misfits," a result of

17748-459: The military-administrative class typically referred to themselves neither as an Osmanlı nor as a Türk , but rather as a Rūmī ( رومى ), or "Roman", meaning an inhabitant of the territory of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. The term Rūmī was also used to refer to Turkish speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond. As applied to Ottoman Turkish speakers, this term began to fall out of use at

17901-515: The modern world and brought about economic stagnation. Dependency theory, in contrast, viewed modern-day underdevelopment as the product of the unequal global economic system gradually established by Europeans beginning in the early modern period, and thus saw it as the outcome of a historical process rather than a simple inability to adapt on the part of the non-Western world. Dependency theory, introduced into Ottoman history by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan and Çağlar Keyder, thus allowed historians to move beyond

18054-546: The need for greater numbers of Ottoman infantry equipped with firearms, resulting in a relaxation of recruitment policy. This contributed to problems of indiscipline and outright rebelliousness within the corps, which were never fully solved. Irregular sharpshooters ( Sekban ) were also recruited, and on demobilisation turned to brigandage in the Celali rebellions (1590–1610), which engendered widespread anarchy in Anatolia in

18207-421: The new conditions of the seventeenth century and remain powerful, both militarily and economically. Historians of the mid-twentieth century once characterised this period as one of stagnation and decline, but this view is now rejected by the majority of academics. The discovery of new maritime trade routes by Western European states allowed them to avoid the Ottoman trade monopoly. The Portuguese discovery of

18360-466: The newly established Ankara -based Turkish government chose Turkey as the sole official name. At present, most scholarly historians avoid the terms "Turkey", "Turks", and "Turkish" when referring to the Ottomans, due to the empire's multinational character. As the Rum Sultanate declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of independent Turkish principalities known as

18513-463: The occupying Allies, led to the emergence of the Republic of Turkey in the Anatolian heartland and the abolition of the Ottoman monarchy in 1922, formally ending the Ottoman Empire. The word Ottoman is a historical anglicisation of 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 in turn was the Turkish form of

18666-402: The period of the so-called "golden age" of Suleiman the Magnificent. For Ottoman writers, "decline" was a trope which allowed them to pass judgement on the contemporary state and society, rather than a description of objective reality. Thus, these works should not be taken as evidence of actual Ottoman decline. Other tropes of political decline, such as the notion that the sultans ruling after

18819-406: The plague, which facilitated Ottoman expansion. In addition, slave hunting was the main economic driving force behind Ottoman conquest. Some 21st-century authors re-periodize conquest of the Balkans into the akıncı phase , which spanned 8 to 13 decades, characterized by continuous slave hunting and destruction, followed by administrative integration into the Empire. The son of Murad II, Mehmed

18972-452: The post-Suleimanic period can thus be summarized as follows: Historians of the Ottoman Empire have rejected the narrative of decline in favor of one of crisis and adaptation: after weathering a wretched economic and demographic crisis in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire adjusted its character from that of a military conquest state to that of a territorially more stable, bureaucratic state whose chief concern

19125-492: The publication of Edward Said 's Orientalism in 1978. The most prominent writer on Ottoman decline was the historian Bernard Lewis , who argued that the Ottoman Empire experienced all-encompassing decline affecting government, society and civilization. He laid out his views in the 1958 article, "Some Reflections on the Decline of the Ottoman Empire", which developed into the mainstream opinion of Orientalist scholars of

19278-415: The reign of Suleiman I as the most perfect manifestation of this system of justice, and put forth the idea that the empire had since declined from that golden standard. These writers viewed the changes which the empire had undergone as an inherently negative corruption of an idealized Suleimanic past. However, it is now recognized that rather than simply describing objective reality, they were often utilizing

19431-471: The rest of the empire's history was to be compared. Such comparisons caused earlier researchers to see transformation and change as inherently negative, as the empire shifted away from the established norms of Suleiman's romanticized and idealized age. According to Jane Hathaway, this focus on the "golden age" had a distorting effect on its history: "a massive empire that lasted for over six centuries cannot have had an ideal moment and an ideal permutation by which

19584-578: The restoration of Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt Eyalet and the Levant . By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire was called the " sick man of Europe ". Three suzerain states – the Principality of Serbia , Wallachia and Moldavia – moved towards de jure independence during the 1860s and 1870s. During the Tanzimat period (1839–1876), the government's series of constitutional reforms led to

19737-572: The ruler as the embodiment of justice, whose duty it was to ensure that his subjects would receive that justice. This was often expressed through the concept of the Circle of Justice ( Ottoman Turkish : dāʾire-i ʿadlīye ). In this conception, the provision of justice by the ruler to his subjects would allow those subjects to prosper, strengthening the ruler in turn. Should this break down, society would cease to properly function. Thus, many Ottomans writing in this genre, such as Mustafa Âlî , described

19890-494: The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in favor of emphasis on the grand narrative of Ottoman decay and European superiority. In line with these points, a common criticism of the decline thesis is that it is teleological: that is to say that it presents all of Ottoman history as the story of the rise and fall of the empire, causing earlier historians to over-emphasize the empire's troubles and under-emphasize its strengths. According to Linda Darling, "because we know that eventually

20043-467: The sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire came under increasing strain from inflation and the rapidly rising costs of warfare that were impacting both Europe and the Middle East. These pressures led to a series of crises around the year 1600, placing great strain upon the Ottoman system of government. The empire underwent a series of transformations of its political and military institutions in response to these challenges, enabling it to successfully adapt to

20196-405: The so-called Sultanate of Women , in which female members of the dynasty exercised an unusually high degree of power, was in some way either a cause or a symptom of imperial weakness. On the contrary, Ottoman Valide Sultans , princesses, and concubines were successfully able to fortify dynastic rule during periods of instability, and played an important role in dynastic legitimization. Furthermore,

20349-483: The soldiers), and 400,000 non-Muslims fled territory still under Ottoman rule. Justin McCarthy estimates that from 1821 to 1922, 5.5   million Muslims died in southeastern Europe, with the expulsion of 5   million. The defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908—1922) began with the Second Constitutional Era , a moment of hope and promise established with the Young Turk Revolution . It restored

20502-440: The strength of the Ottoman domestic market. In earlier periods, Ottoman economic and fiscal downturn was associated above all with the catastrophic effects of the price revolution of the late sixteenth century. However, this economic downturn was not unique to the Ottomans, but was shared by European states as all struggled with the diverse pressures of inflation, demographic shifts, and the escalating costs of warfare. By placing

20655-673: The sultan and restored Ottoman power. The Balkan territories lost by the Ottomans after 1402, including Thessaloniki, Macedonia, and Kosovo, were later recovered by Murad II between the 1430s and 1450s. On 10 November 1444, Murad repelled the Crusade of Varna by defeating the Hungarian, Polish, and Wallachian armies under Władysław III of Poland and John Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna , although Albanians under Skanderbeg continued to resist. Four years later, John Hunyadi prepared another army of Hungarian and Wallachian forces to attack

20808-512: The terms of the Convention of Kütahya , signed on 5 May 1833, Muhammad Ali agreed to abandon his campaign against the Sultan, in exchange for which he was made the vali (governor) of the vilayets (provinces) of Crete , Aleppo , Tripoli , Damascus and Sidon (the latter four comprising modern Syria and Lebanon ), and given the right to collect taxes in Adana . Had it not been for

20961-411: The time of Suleiman I were less competent rulers, have also been challenged. The reigns of such figures as Ahmed I , Osman II , and Mehmed IV (among others) have been re-examined in the context of the conditions of their own respective eras, rather than by inappropriately comparing them with a mythical Suleimanic ideal. Indeed, the very notion of whether Suleiman's reign constituted a golden age in

21114-630: The use of previously untapped sources and methodologies, academic historians of the Ottoman Empire achieved a consensus that the entire notion of Ottoman decline was a myth – that in fact, the Ottoman Empire remained a vigorous and dynamic state long after the death of Suleiman the Magnificent. The decline thesis has been criticized as " teleological ", "regressive", " orientalist ", "simplistic", and "one-dimensional", and described as "a concept which has no place in historical analysis". Scholars have thus "learned better than to discuss [it]." Despite this dramatic paradigm shift among professional historians,

21267-574: The wars with Russia, some people in the Ottoman Empire began to conclude that the reforms of Peter the Great had given the Russians an edge, and the Ottomans would have to keep up with Western technology in order to avoid further defeats. Selim III (1789–1807) made the first major attempts to modernise the army , but his reforms were hampered by the religious leadership and the Janissary corps. Jealous of their privileges and firmly opposed to change,

21420-529: The years leading up to World War I , including the 31 March Incident and two further coups in 1912 and 1913 . The Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers and was ultimately defeated. The Ottoman participation in the war began with the combined German-Ottoman surprise attack on the Black Sea coast of the Russian Empire on 29 October 1914. Following the attack,

21573-455: Was a major obstacle to Ottoman expansion on the Italian peninsula. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire entered a period of expansion . The Empire prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective Sultans . It flourished economically due to its control of the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia. Sultan Selim I (1512–1520) dramatically expanded

21726-470: Was established as an independent principality inside the Ottoman Empire; Romania achieved full independence; and Serbia and Montenegro finally gained complete independence, but with smaller territories. In 1878, Austria-Hungary unilaterally occupied the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Novi Pazar . British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli advocated restoring the Ottoman territories on

21879-681: Was far less significant than had formerly been believed. It is now believed that the Ottoman military was able to maintain rough parity with its rivals until the 1760s, falling behind as a consequence of a long period of peace on its western front between 1740 and 1768, when the Ottomans missed out on the advances associated with the Seven Years' War . Early critiques of the decline thesis from an economic standpoint were heavily influenced by new sociological perspectives of dependency theory and world-systems analysis as articulated by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein in

22032-601: Was far more damaging to the Ottoman navy in sapping experienced manpower than the loss of ships, which were rapidly replaced. The Ottoman navy recovered quickly, persuading Venice to sign a peace treaty in 1573, allowing the Ottomans to expand and consolidate their position in North Africa. By contrast, the Habsburg frontier had settled somewhat, a stalemate caused by a stiffening of the Habsburg defenses. The Long Turkish War against Habsburg Austria (1593–1606) created

22185-413: Was followed in the nineteenth century, among others, by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall , who knew Ottoman Turkish and adopted the idea directly from Ottoman nasihatname writers. Internal decline was thus thought of as an appropriate means of explaining the Ottomans' external military defeats, and acted also as a justification for European imperialism . The notion of a declining Ottoman/Islamic civilization

22338-497: Was impoverished because its failure to follow Europe in advancing along a series of distinct stages of development (based on the model provided above all by France and Britain), which were assumed to be uniformly applicable to all societies. Historians seeking to identify the factors which prevented the Ottomans from achieving "modernization" turned to the stereotypes which formed the basis of the decline thesis: an Ottoman penchant for despotism and lethargy which inhibited their entry into

22491-410: Was made up for by the rise in the coffee trade from Yemen during the seventeenth century which, along with strong commercial ties with India, ensured the continued prosperity of Red Sea trade and of Cairo as a commercial center. Historians such as the above-mentioned Bernard Lewis once referred to the supposed fall in the quality of the empire's bureaucratic records as an indication of stagnation in

22644-477: Was on the defensive and unlikely to present any further aggression in Europe. The Austro-Russian–Turkish War (1735–1739), which was ended by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, resulted in the Ottoman recovery of northern Bosnia , Habsburg Serbia (including Belgrade), Oltenia and the southern parts of the Banat of Temeswar ; but the Empire lost the port of Azov , north of the Crimean Peninsula, to

22797-486: Was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. The financial burden of the war led the Ottoman state to issue foreign loans amounting to 5   million pounds sterling on 4 August 1854. The war caused an exodus of the Crimean Tatars , about 200,000 of whom moved to the Ottoman Empire in continuing waves of emigration. Toward

22950-611: Was the passage of the German Mediatisation , which reorganized and secularized the Empire. Following the approval of that final constitutional document, the Diet never met again and its existence ended with the dissolution of the Empire in 1806. Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire ( / ˈ ɒ t ə m ə n / ), also called the Turkish Empire , was an imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe , West Asia , and North Africa from

23103-407: Was thus used as a foil for Western Civilization , in which the "decadent" Ottomans were contrasted with the "dynamic" West. Islam (as an all-encompassing civilizational category) often came to be portrayed as the polar opposite of the West, whereby Western societies valued freedom, rationality, and progress while Islam valued servility, superstition, and stagnation. Such depictions were perpetuated in

23256-399: Was unable to recover from these crises was rooted both in the poor state of the field's knowledge of the Ottoman economy in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and also in how easily it seemed to fit with pre-existing ideas about Ottoman decline. However, subsequent research demonstrated that, in the words of Şevket Pamuk, the eighteenth century "was in fact a period of recovery for

23409-424: Was undergoing its own capitalist transformation independent of European economic penetration, which in turn facilitated the empire's integration into the world economy. Even following the empire's peripheralization, Ottoman manufacturing, long assumed to have collapsed in the face of European competition, is now understood to have grown and even flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, benefiting from

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