Six centuries across three continents — from a frontier principality to one of history's great empires.
Last reviewed on 3 June 2026.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the longest-lasting empires in history, enduring for more than six centuries from roughly 1299 until 1922. At its height it spanned three continents, reaching across south-eastern Europe, western Asia and North Africa, and binding together a vast mosaic of peoples, faiths and languages under a single dynasty.
It began as a small frontier principality on the edge of the declining Byzantine world and grew into a Mediterranean and Middle Eastern superpower whose sultans claimed the title of caliph. Its capital, Constantinople — today's İstanbul — became one of the great cities of the early modern age. This article traces that long arc: its frontier origins, its conquests and golden age, the machinery that held it together, and the slow decline that ended in the founding of the Turkish Republic.
The empire takes its name from Osman I (Osman Gazi), the chieftain of a small Turkic frontier principality, or beylik, in north-western Anatolia around the year 1299. His followers were among the many warrior bands operating along the unstable borderland between the shrinking Byzantine Empire and the fragmented Anatolian emirates that had emerged after the collapse of the Seljuks of Rum.
These frontiersmen drew on the gazi tradition — the ideal of the warrior who fights to expand the frontiers of Islam. The location of Osman's beylik, pressed up against Byzantine territory, gave it an unusual opportunity for growth, attracting fighters, herders and settlers drawn to the prospect of land and plunder on an active frontier.
Under Osman's son Orhan, the beylik became a recognisable state. The Ottomans captured the wealthy city of Bursa in 1326, making it an early capital and the seat of the dynasty's first mosques, tombs and markets. By the mid-fourteenth century the Ottomans had crossed the Dardanelles into Europe, and Edirne (Adrianople) in Thrace served as a forward capital from which campaigns into the Balkans could be launched.
Bursa and Edirne — the first Ottoman capitals
Bursa, taken in 1326, became the dynasty's earliest seat. Edirne, in eastern Thrace, served as the European capital for nearly a century before the conquest of Constantinople.
The fourteenth century saw rapid expansion. Murad I extended Ottoman rule across much of the Balkans, defeating a Serbian-led coalition at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where he was killed. His son Bayezid I, nicknamed Yıldırım ("the Thunderbolt"), pressed the empire's frontiers further and crushed a major crusading army at Nicopolis in 1396.
Then came a near-fatal crisis. In 1402 the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) defeated and captured Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara. The empire fractured into a civil war among Bayezid's sons, a period known as the Interregnum, which lasted until Mehmed I reunited the realm around 1413. Remarkably, the Ottoman state survived this shattering blow and resumed its expansion within a generation.
The defining moment came under Mehmed II, remembered as Fatih Sultan Mehmed — "the Conqueror." In 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks, his forces breached the great walls of Constantinople and took the city. The fall of Constantinople ended the Byzantine Empire, which had endured in some form for over a thousand years, and gave the Ottomans a magnificent imperial capital astride the route between Europe and Asia.
The early sixteenth century brought the empire to a new scale of power. Selim I ("the Grim") turned eastward and southward, defeating the Safavids of Persia and then conquering the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516–17, bringing Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Ottoman rule. With control of the Hijaz, the Ottoman sultans assumed the prestige of guardianship over the holiest sites of Islam, and the dynasty increasingly emphasised its claim to the caliphate.
It was under Selim's son Süleyman I — known in the West as Süleyman the Magnificent and to his own subjects as Kanuni, "the Lawgiver" — that the empire reached the summit of its territory, wealth and cultural achievement. Süleyman reigned from 1520 to 1566, campaigning in Hungary, taking Belgrade and Rhodes, and besieging Vienna in 1529. At home he reorganised and codified the empire's secular law, earning the title by which Turks still remember him.
His reign was also an age of extraordinary building. The imperial architect Mimar Sinan shaped the skyline of the capital with mosques of perfect proportion, above all the great Süleymaniye complex, while the sultans governed from the Topkapı Palace overlooking the meeting of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara. Ottoman poetry, miniature painting, calligraphy and ceramics flourished alongside the architecture.
Conquered the Mamluk lands, bringing Syria, Egypt and the holy cities under Ottoman rule and reinforcing the dynasty's claim to the caliphate.
The height of Ottoman territory and culture. As "Kanuni" he codified secular law; his campaigns reached the gates of Vienna.
The chief imperial architect whose mosques, including the Süleymaniye, defined classical Ottoman architecture for centuries.
At the centre of the state stood the sultan, an absolute ruler whose government came to be known to Europeans as the Sublime Porte — a translation of the gate of the grand vizier's offices, through which imperial business passed. Real day-to-day administration often rested with the grand vizier and an experienced bureaucracy.
One of the empire's most distinctive institutions was the devshirme, a levy of boys, mostly from Christian families in the Balkans, who were taken into imperial service, converted to Islam and trained for the army or the administration. The most famous product of this system was the Janissary corps, the sultan's elite standing infantry, which for centuries was among the most formidable military forces in the world.
Ottoman society was organised in part through the millet system, under which recognised religious communities — Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews and others — managed many of their own affairs in matters such as law, education and worship, under their own religious leaders. This arrangement allowed a remarkably diverse population to be governed without the wholesale imposition of a single legal code on everyone.
Geography made the empire a hinge of world trade. Sitting astride the land and sea routes linking Europe, Asia and Africa, Ottoman ports and caravan cities handled the flow of silk, spices, grain and silver. The search by European powers for sea routes that bypassed Ottoman-controlled lands was itself one of the spurs to the age of exploration.
Absolute monarch and, from the sixteenth century, caliph of Islam
The central government, led in practice by the grand vizier
Elite standing infantry recruited through the devshirme
Self-governing religious communities within the empire
Historians have long debated when, and how sharply, Ottoman power began to wane. A traditional turning point is the failed second siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman army was routed by a relief force including Polish cavalry under Jan Sobieski. The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 confirmed the loss of Hungary and marked the first major Ottoman cession of European territory.
Over the following two centuries the empire steadily lost ground to a rising Russia and to the Habsburgs, and watched provinces such as Greece, Serbia and the Romanian principalities break away or gain autonomy as nationalism spread through the Balkans. By the nineteenth century European statesmen were openly referring to the empire as the "Sick Man of Europe," whose eventual partition they assumed they would one day arrange.
The Ottomans responded with an ambitious programme of modernisation. The Tanzimat reforms, launched in 1839, sought to remake the state along more centralised, European lines: reorganising the army, finances, law and education, and proclaiming the legal equality of all subjects regardless of religion. A short-lived constitution was promulgated in 1876. These reforms transformed parts of the empire but could not fully reverse its strategic decline or quiet the nationalist movements straining against imperial rule.
In 1908 the Young Turk Revolution forced the restoration of the constitution and brought the Committee of Union and Progress to the centre of power. The following years were turbulent: the empire lost almost all its remaining European lands in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and it entered the First World War in 1914 on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The war proved catastrophic. Despite a celebrated defence at Gallipoli, the empire's armies were exhausted, its Arab provinces lost, and its eastern regions devastated; this period also saw the mass deportations and killings of Armenians, widely recognised as genocide. The Armistice of Mudros in 1918 brought defeat, and Allied powers moved to occupy and partition Ottoman territory, a scheme set out in the harsh Treaty of Sèvres.
Out of the ruins rose a national resistance movement in Anatolia led by Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk. The Turkish War of Independence drove out occupying and invading forces and led to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which recognised the borders of a new Turkey. The Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate in 1922, proclaimed the Republic in 1923, and abolished the caliphate in 1924 — ending more than six centuries of Ottoman rule.
The constitution is restored and the Committee of Union and Progress rises to dominate Ottoman politics.
The empire joins the Central Powers, beginning the war that would prove fatal to the state.
The Armistice of Mudros ends Ottoman participation in the war; Allied occupation and partition follow.
A national movement under Mustafa Kemal resists occupation and secures the territory of modern Turkey.
The sultanate is abolished in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924, closing the Ottoman chapter of history.
The Ottoman Empire left a deep and lasting imprint far beyond the borders of modern Turkey. Its cuisine — kebabs, mezze, börek, baklava, coffee and a shared vocabulary of sweets and stews — remains common ground from the Balkans to the Levant. Its architecture, with the great domed mosque as its signature form, still defines skylines from Sarajevo and Sofia to Cairo and Jerusalem.
The Turkish language carries thousands of words and expressions from the Ottoman centuries, while Ottoman administrative and legal practice shaped the institutions of many successor states. Perhaps most consequentially, the empire's collapse and partition drew much of the modern map of the Middle East and the Balkans, fixing borders and creating tensions whose echoes are still felt today.
A shared culinary world of grilled meats, mezze and sweets stretching across the former Ottoman lands.
The classical domed mosque, the work of Sinan and his school, still shapes cities across three continents.
Modern Turkish and neighbouring languages preserve a rich Ottoman vocabulary in everyday speech.
The empire's partition drew many of today's borders in the Middle East and the Balkans.
The Ottoman Empire existed for more than six centuries, from roughly 1299 — the traditional date for the founding of Osman I's beylik — until 1922. At its peak it spanned south-eastern Europe, western Asia and North Africa. The sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924.
The empire is named after Osman I, a Turkic frontier chieftain whose small principality in north-western Anatolia emerged around 1299. It grew into a recognisable state under his son Orhan, who captured Bursa in 1326. The dynasty Osman founded ruled continuously until 1922.
The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks led by Sultan Mehmed II, who earned the title "the Conqueror." The conquest ended the Byzantine Empire and gave the Ottomans a magnificent imperial capital, today's İstanbul.
Süleyman I, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, presided over the empire at the height of its territory, wealth and culture. Known in Turkish as "Kanuni," the Lawgiver, for codifying its secular law, he was also a great patron of the arts and architecture, working with the architect Mimar Sinan.
The empire declined gradually over more than two centuries through military defeats, territorial losses, financial strain and rising nationalism among its peoples. Reform programmes such as the Tanzimat modernised parts of the state but could not reverse the trend. Defeat in the First World War led to occupation, partition and, after the Turkish War of Independence, the abolition of the sultanate in 1922.
Continue reading across the history and cities sections: