The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire F rom 1520 to 1566, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ruled one of the greatest Muslim states, an empire that included all the historic cities of Islam. Suleiman’s empire—the Sublime Porte, as it was called by Westerners—was a great world power, famed for its Janissaries, cavalry, and siege guns. Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, emerged as Islam’s cultural capital, defining religion, aesthetics, and letters. Suleiman’s architects redefined Islamic architecture, creating a skyline of mosques that set the standard for cities of the Middle East. Yet Ottoman power was hardly ordained. This course begins with the kaleidoscopic history of the Seljuk Turks, who built the first Muslim civilization in Asia Minor in the 11th and 12th centuries; the destructive Mongol invasions; and the unexpected emergence of the Ottoman sultans as heirs to Byzantium and the Abbasid caliphate under Mehmet the Conqueror and Selim the Grim in the 15 th and 16 th centuries. Stress is given to the achievements of high Ottoman civilization, imperial institutions, and great wars waged by sultans against the Habsburgs of Europe and the shahs of Iran. The latter wars, between Ottoman sultans and Iranian shahs, sharpened the divide between Sunni and Shiʽite Islam, thereby dictating allegiances across the Middle East to this day. Just as remarkable was the rapid imperial decline starting in the 18th century. This decline resulted not just from lurid harem politics of Topkapı, but from far more important fiscal and economic weaknesses and a failure to keep pace with military and technological changes in the West. In response to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to 1799, Sultan Selim III launched the first of a series of modern reforms. Reformers laid the groundwork for the future Turkish Republic, but their emphasis on modernization ironically undermined the traditional, multinational Ottoman Empire. The failure of the revolution of the Young Turks, along with military defeats in 1911 to 1914, deeply divided Ottoman society along ethnic, religious, and linguistic lines, leading to outbreaks of violence among Muslims and Christians. The Ottoman Empire thus fragmented under the impact of World War I.