Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans are one of the greatest and most powerful civilizations of the modern period. Their glory in the sixteenth century represents one of the heights of human creativity, optimism, and artistry. The empire they built was the largest and most influential of the Muslim empires of the modern period, and their culture and military expansion crossed over into Europe. Not since the expansion of Islam into Spain in the eighth century had Islam seemed poised to establish a European presence as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like that earlier expansion, the Ottomans established empire over European territory and established Islamic traditions and culture that last to the current day (many of the Muslims in Eastern Europe - Bosnia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Rumania, Macedonia are the last descendants of the Ottoman presence in Europe).

The Ottoman empire lasted until the twentieth century. While historians like to talk about empires in terms of growth and decline, the Ottomans were a force to be reckoned with, militarily and culturally, right up until the break-up of the empire in the first decades of the 1900's. The real end to the Ottoman culture came with the secularization of Turkey after World War II along European models of government. The transition to a secular state was not an easy one and its repercussions are still being felt in Turkish society today; nevertheless, secularization represents the real break with the Ottoman tradition and heritage.

Mehmet II and the fall of Constantinople

The Ottomans arose in Anatolia in the west of Turkey; these Western Turks were called the Oghuz. They had come primarily as settlers during the reign of the Seljuks in Turkey (1098-1308).

The Ottomans ruled a small military state in western Anatolia by 1300, about the time the Seljuk state was crumbling apart. This small state was in conflict with several other small Muslim states, each competing with each other for territory. By 1400, the...