The Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic empire founded in Asia Minor by the Turkish leader Osman I (1259-1326). In 1453 it captured Constantinople.
The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the 16th century under Suleiman the Magnificent, comprising the territory that we know as modern Turkey, Syria, Hungary, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, parts of Greece and the Balkans.
The Empire then gradually declined with Russia and the European powers dismembering its territories during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The final collapse coming at the end of World War I and the founding of the modern secular state of Turkey by Kemal Ataturk.
The Ottoman Empire (Part 1)
The Ottoman Centuries (by Lord Kinross)
Ottoman Centuries
Amazon Price: $12.89 (as of 09/06/2008)
That this book has remained in print since at least the mid-1970s and has survived the author for more than twenty-five years should tell you something of its quality. In the fourteenth century, the Ottomans began to fill the power vacuum left by an increasingly ineffectual Byzantium. In 1453, the Sultan's troops captured Constantinople and converted the basilica to a mosque: there followed centuries of military supremacy and expansion, culminating in Suleiman the Magnificent's unsuccessful seige of Vienna in 1529. Sadly for the Turks (and happily for others), the Ottoman state never stopped trying to be the world's most successful feudal system: this was all well and good for medieval times, but the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras largely passed the Sultanate by, and by 1878, the Tsar dubbed it the "sick man of Europe." The patient expired in 1922. Kinross, an avid admirer and disciple of Edward Gibbon, is generous in providing rich, sometimes bloody, details of the Seraglio's inner workings, including the liberal use of the "Imperial Bowstring" (which was used by every new ruler to garrot any of his siblings who posed as potential usurpers). My only criticism of Kinross is his repetition of the "And It Was All Downhill From Here" mantra: he first chants it when the Venetians defeated an Ottoman galley-fleet at Lepanto (1571); it is then applied to every subsequent assasination or defeat.
The Ottoman Empire (article)
At the height of its power (16th-17th century), it spanned three continents, controlling much of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It stretched from the Strait of Gibraltar (and, in 1553, the Atlantic coast of Morocco beyond Gibraltar) in the west to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf in the east, and from the edge of Austria, Hungary and parts of Ukraine in the north to Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen in the south. The Ottoman Empire contained 29 provinces, in addition to the tributary principalities of Moldavia, Transylvania, and Wallachia.
The empire was at the centre of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. With Constantinople (Istanbul) as its capital city, and lands during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent which largely corresponded to the lands ruled by Justinian the Great exactly 1000 years earlier, the Ottoman Empire was, in many respects, an Islamic successor to the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Numerous traditions and cultural traits of this previous empire (in fields such as architecture, cuisine, music, leisure and government) were adopted by the Ottomans, who elaborated them into new forms. These cultural traits were later blended with the characteristics of the ethnic and religious groups living within the Ottoman territories, which resulted in a new and distinctively Ottoman cultural identity.
Source: Wapedia
Ottoman Empire in 1683
The Ottoman Empire (Part 2)
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