On October 29, 1923, the Republic of Turkey was established with Ankara as its capital and Mustafa Kemal as first president. This followed the successful Turkish War of Independence. One year earlier, on November 1, 1922, the Grand National Assembly (the Turkish national parliament), abolished the Ottoman Sultanate, forcing the Sultan Mehmed VI to abdicate and leave for exile abroad. The Ottoman Empire ended, and 600 years of Ottoman dynastic rule came to an end. In March 1924, the Caliphate was abolished, and Turkey transitioned into a secular, democratic state, which it is to this day.
(Taken from The Ottoman Empire – Wars of the 20th Century – Volume 3)
History The imperial Islamic power known as the Ottoman Empire has its origin as one of many semi-independent Turkish tribal states (called beyliks) that formed during the breakdown and collapse of the Seljuk Turkish Empire. Founded by Osman I (whose name was anglicized to Ottoman and from whom the empire derived its name), the Ottoman beylik achieved sovereignty from the Seljuk Sultanate in 1299. With the influx of large numbers of Ghazi warriors (both Muslims and Christians) into his beylik, Osman built an army hoping to expand his domain at the expense of the tottering Byzantine Empire* situated to the west of his beylik.
In 1324, the Ottomans captured Bursa, where they established their new capital; Bursa’s fall also ended the Byzantine Empire’s presence in Anatolia. On Osman’s death in 1326, the succession of Ottoman rulers, first by Osman’s son Orhan, continued to expand the emerging empire. In 1387, Thessalonica was taken, marking the Ottomans’ first entry into Europe (via the southeast), a presence that would last, except for a brief pause, for six centuries. Further expansion into Balkan Europe continued during the second half of the 1300s with the defeats of the Serbian and Bulgarian empires, and annexation of sections of what comprise modern-day Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania.
In 1402, Ottoman power was briefly eclipsed when Tamerlane, the Turkic-Mongol conqueror, invaded Anatolia. Bayezid, the Ottoman ruler, was captured by Tamerlane in battle, starting a turbulent period in the Ottoman court known as the Ottoman Interregnum. After an eleven-year power struggle among Bayezid’s sons for succession to the throne, Mehmed I prevailed and became the new sultan. With its leadership crisis resolved, the Ottomans resumed their campaign in Europe, recapturing parts of the Balkans that had been lost during the interregnum.
By the mid-fifteenth century, Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital, had been surrounded by Ottoman territories. In early April 1453, the Ottomans launched an attack on the city, starting a six-week siege on the nearly impregnable fortress that was protected by two layers of defensive stone walls. On May 29, 1453, the walls were breached, and Constantinople fell. The Ottomans then moved their capital to Constantinople.
Constantinople’s fall sent shock waves across Western Europe, which at that time was made up of many small rival Christian kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, and which all feared falling under Muslim rule. The Ottomans advanced further into Europe with the invasion of lands that comprise present-day Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania. Other conquests also were made in parts of modern-day Hungary and Romania. The invasion of Greece began with the capture of Athens in 1458; by the end of the century, most of the Greek mainland had been taken. By the first quarter of the sixteenth century, nearly all of the Balkans and some sections of eastern and central Europe were under Ottoman control. However, two attempts (in 1529 and 1532) to take Vienna failed, which were resisted by the combined forces of the Habsburg monarchy of Austria and its Christian allies.
Under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottomans reached the height of their power. In Anatolia, other Turkish beyliks were defeated, making the Ottoman Sultan the master of Asia Minor. Suleiman’s forces also advanced into western Asia and northern Africa, incorporating more territories to those previously won under the previous rulers, Mehmed II and Selim I. In the east, Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) also was taken, while in the south, the Ottomans advanced into the Arabian Peninsula.
Ottoman expansion continued up to the mid-seventeenth century. By then, the empire extended from Baghdad to Algeria and from the Caucasus to eastern Europe. The Ottomans owed much of their military success to their Janissary Army, an elite corps made up of professional soldiers. At its peak and like the Byzantine Empire before it, the Ottoman Empire was the wealthiest state in Europe, since its strategically located capital of Constantinople allowed the Ottomans to control the main trade routes of the Silk Road that connected Europe and Asia. Furthermore, peace prevailed in conquered lands, as the Ottoman Empire did not carry out forced conversion to Islam, but allowed its subjects to freely practice their own faiths. As well as diversity in religion, the empire also contained many ethnicities, cultures, and languages, an aspect that ultimately would contribute to the Ottomans’ fall.
In May 1683, a major Ottoman offensive in Vienna was defeated by the Holy League, an alliance of the Habsburg, German, and Polish forces. This defeat marked the farthest extent of the Ottoman advance into Europe and the start of the empire’s decline.
Then in the 1600s onward, Western Europe made rapid advances in the development of science and technology, leading to the production of stronger weapons. The West also became wealthy; starting in 1498 when the Portuguese discovered the sea route to Asia, the Ottoman Empire’s monopoly on the Silk trade ended. Furthermore, Europe’s discovery and development of the New World brought enormous riches to the emerging Western European empires.
At the same time, the Ottoman Empire experienced a long period of stagnation, where its economy floundered, bureaucratic corruption prevailed, and a rising inward-looking, Islam-centered element in government resisted the demands to carry out reforms.
Then, wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against the Austrian Empire, and especially against the rising Russian Empire, revealed for the first time, the weakening Ottoman power. In the Crimean War of 1853-1856, British and French forces intervened to prevent the Russians from seizing large parts of Ottoman territory, including Constantinople itself.
Then after its defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Ottoman Empire was forced to allow Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro to achieve their independences, while Bulgaria, though remaining under Ottoman rule, became de facto sovereign with its own government. Some fifty years earlier, in 1832, Greece had won its own war of independence, which ended four centuries of Ottoman rule. By the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire was referred to disparagingly as the “sick man of Europe”, since it was unable to defend its territories against attacks by European powers.
The Ottoman demise came following World War I, where the Ottoman Empire emerged as a spent power after throwing its support behind the Central Powers, which likewise was defeated in the war. As a result, the Ottoman Empire lost all its remaining colonies and was itself partitioned by the victorious Allied Powers. Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal (whose surname “Ataturk” was added later), then emerged and began the Turkish War of Independence (separate article), which established the modern state of Turkey, consisting of the Turkish heartland of Anatolia as well as eastern Thrace, a sliver of land in the European mainland.