Founded in ca. 1300, within less than a century the Ottoman state had become the dominant power in Asia Minor and a major political player in the Balkans, having swallowed the tsardom of Bulgaria and reduced Serbia to vassalage.
With the conquest of Constantinople (1453), the Ottoman sultans claimed the rights to the Roman-Byzantine heritage, and with the conquests of Syria, Egypt, and the Hejaz (1516-1517), they stepped into the footprints of Arab caliphs.
In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman state acted as the protector of Sunni Muslims from Spain and Maghreb to Gujarat and Sumatra, acting as the arch-adversary of the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms in the age of their colonial expansion. At the same time, the Ottomans conquered most of Hungary, reducing the Austrian Habsburgs to a tributary status, established a border with Poland in the Ukrainian steppes to the north of the Black Sea, and added Rhodes, Cyprus, and a number of minor Greek islands to their holdings in mainland Greece. Many an Italian humanist observed the Ottoman state with awe mixed with admiration, praising its military effectiveness, budgetary wealth, and the principles—albeit somewhat idealized—of meritocracy applied in administering the empire. To Indian Muslims, the padshahs of distant Rum (i.e., the “emperors of Rome,” as Ottoman rulers were referred to in India) had acted as champions of Sunni Islam, before the Great Mughals—Akbar and especially Aurangzeb—claimed the championship of the Muslim world for themselves.1The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long been perceived in historiography as the ages of Ottoman decline, and scholars competed to establish a fixed date as a “point of no return” from which there was already no way back from the trajectory leading to the empire's ultimate demise in 1922. Various dates have been proposed, such as the Ottoman naval defeat at Lepanto (1571), the Ottoman- Habsburg treaty at Zsitvatorok (1606), the second failed siege of Vienna (1683), the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), and, finally, the Ottoman-Russian treaty at Kuchuk Kaynardja (1774).
Today, historians rather stress the endurance of the Ottoman state in the era of climatic disasters and global economic crisis in the seventeenth century, its partially successful financial reforms (the introduction of the malikane system; more on this later), and the fact that Ottoman failures were partly relative, resulting not so much from their own shortcomings, but from the challenge of such “military machines” as Russia and—to a lesser degree—Austria, in which military1 Farooqi 1989, 16, 65-69, 118, 200-201; Mukhia 2004, 60-61.
Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, The Ottoman Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0026. prowess was attained at the cost of human welfare and through mass drilling of peasant “cannon fodder.” Still, even in this era, the Ottomans attained a number of military successes, including the triumph over Tsar Peter I on the Prut River (1711), the successful war with Austria of 1737-1739, and—perhaps the most striking—the victory over Napoleon at the walls of Acre in 1799.
The nineteenth century was marked by a race of Ottoman elite reformers against the waves of nationalism which internally weakened the empire's integrity, and against the forces of West European and Russian imperialisms, envisioning a partition and/or economic subjection of the sultan's lands. Characteristic of this period is the saying of Ali Pasha, one of the leading nineteenth-century Ottoman reformers: “our speed is limited by the fear of making the boilers burst.”[1818]
The race was ultimately lost due to numerous reasons, but its course and results are nowadays more appreciated than for the most of the bygone twentieth century. The seeds of modernization, planted in the era of tanzimat (lit. “reforms”), are partly responsible for the economic success of present-day Turkey. Also, the founders of the Turkish Republic, established in 1923, were graduates of the school system established in the late Ottoman Empire.
More on the topic Founded in ca. 1300, within less than a century the Ottoman state had become the dominant power in Asia Minor and a major political player in the Balkans, having swallowed the tsardom of Bulgaria and reduced Serbia to vassalage.:
- Except for the fact that it was the seat of an Ottoman serasker (governor) and the major listening post on the Ottoman Empire’s sensitive northern frontier, Bender, a dusty, provincial town on the Dniester, had little to distinguish it.
- In the course of just 75 years, the Spanish Empire went from being a leading transoceanic political entity to being a second-ranked player.1
- Humble Beginnings and the Rise of the Ottoman State
- The core of the Russian Empire was the small principality of Moscow, ruled over in the thirteenth century by a minor branch of the Rurikid dynasty.
- Political Power
- Disaster and Recovery as Proof of the State’s Maturity; “Classical” Ottoman Institutions
- A major theme in the history of the 20th century has been the struggle of nations against empires.
- 9 Reasserting Imperial Power? Britain and East Asia in the 1930s
- The Ottoman Fiscal-Military State in Comparative Perspective
- Across East Asia, 1500-1800 was a time of sweeping political, social and economic change.
- War, State and the Privatisation of Violence in the Ottoman Empire
- Nineteenth-century Western navies’ interactions in the Asia-Pacific region
- § INASMUCH as state-sponsored reform of Islamic family law can be understood as part of nation- and state-building projects (Kandiyoti 1991), mobilizations by social groups for legal reform are also eminently political.
- Reforming the Sharita Courts at the Close of the Ottoman Empire: an Ottoman Project in the Spirit of Western Colonialism