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The Ottoman Empire
 

Acele işe şeytan karişir!

 

 

The   Devil  interferes  with  hurried  work.

 

 

A Child's View of: The Ottoman Empire Declines

By 1600 A.D., the Ottoman Empire had reached its height. Istanbul was among the most prosperous and beautiful cities on Earth. They had conquered vast stretches of territory, and had learned to rule it successfully.

From this point on, the empire gradually began to decline.

In 1683, King John III Sobieski from Poland led his armies in defeating the armies of the Ottomans in Vienna. This crushing defeat marked the end of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
 

 King John III Sobieski of Poland

 

In 1856, Sultan Abdul-Mejid I attempted to reform his empire in an effort to save it. He issued a decree known as the Hatt-I Humayun. This decree granted the rights of citizenship to everyone living within the empire, and attempted to create more freedoms for all his people, while improving economic growth.

These efforts were unsuccessful and eventually led to his son being overthrown. Within just a few years the Ottoman Empire would collapse.

 

The Ottoman Empire

(Ottoman Turkish: دَوْلَتِ عَلِيّهٔ عُثمَانِیّه Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osmâniyye, Turkish: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu),

 

sometimes referred to as the Turkish Empire or simply Turkey, was an empire founded by Oghuz Turks under Osman Bey in north-western Anatolia in 1299.

With the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453, the Ottoman state was transformed into a transcontinental hyperpower.

 

During the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most powerful states in the world – a multinational, multilingual empire, controlling much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.
At the beginning of the 17th century the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states, some of which were later absorbed into the empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries.
With Constantinople as its capital and control of vast lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the centre of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for over six centuries.
It was dissolved in the aftermath of World War I; the collapse of the empire led to the emergence of the new political regime in Turkey itself, as well as the creation of modern Balkan and Middle Eastern states.

 

                                                         NAME

 

The word "Ottoman" is a historical Anglicisation of the name of Osman I, the founder of the Empire and its sole ruling dynasty, the House of Osman (also known as the Ottoman dynasty).
In Ottoman Turkish, the empire was referred to as Devlet-i ʿAliyye-yi ʿOsmâniyye or alternatively Osmanlı Devleti (عثمانلى دولتى).
In Modern Turkish, it is known as Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ("Ottoman Empire") or Osmanlı Devleti ("The Ottoman State").
In some Western accounts, the two names "Ottoman" and "Turkey" were often used interchangeably.
This dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–23, when the Ankara-based Turkish regime favoured Turkey as a sole official name, which had been one of the European names of the state since medieval times.

HISTORY

 

Rise (1299–1453)

 

Upon the demise of the Turkish Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, precursor of Ottomans, in 1300s, Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of independent, mostly Turkish states, the so-called Ghazi emirates.
One of the Ghazi emirates was led by Osman I (1258 – 1326), from which the name Ottoman is derived. Osman I extended the frontiers of Turkish settlement toward the edge of the Byzantine Empire.
It is not well understood how the Osmanli came to dominate their neighbours, as the history of medieval Anatolia is still little known.

In the century after the death of Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans.
The Ottoman victory at Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe.

Another army (of Hungarian and Wallachian forces) attacked the Turks, but was again defeated by Murad II at the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire entered a period of expansion. The Empire prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective Sultans. It also flourished economically due to its control of the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia.

Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566)

 

Sulieman the Magnificent captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered the southern and central parts of the Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Ottoman–Hungarian Wars, and, after his historical victory in the Battle of Mohács in 1526, he established Turkish rule in the territory of present-day Hungary (except the western part) and other Central European territories.
He then laid siege to Vienna in 1529, but failed to take the city.
 In 1532, he made another attack on Vienna, but was repulsed in the Siege of Güns.
Transylvania, Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia, became tributary principalities of the Ottoman Empire.
In the east, the Ottoman Turks took Baghdad from the Persians in 1535, gaining control of Mesopotamia and naval access to the Persian Gulf.

By the end of Suleiman's reign, the Empire's population totaled about 15,000,000 people extending over three continents.
Plus, the Empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea.

Revolts and Revival (1566–1683)

 

 

The effective military and bureaucratic structures of the previous century came under strain during a protracted period of misrule by weak Sultans. The Ottomans gradually fell behind the Europeans in military technology as the innovation that fed the Empire's forceful expansion became stifled by growing religious and intellectual conservatism.
But in spite of these difficulties, the Empire remained a major expansionist power until the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which marked the end of Ottoman expansion into Europe.

The conquest of Crete completed in 1669 and expansion into Polish southern Ukraine, with the strongholds of Khotyn and Kamianets-Podilskyi and the territory of Podolia ceding to Ottoman control in 1676.

This period of renewed assertiveness came to a calamitous end in May 1683 when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a huge army to attempt a second Ottoman siege of Vienna in the Great Turkish War of 1683–1687. The final assault being fatally delayed, the Ottoman forces were swept away by allied Habsburg, German and Polish forces spearheaded by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna.
The alliance of the Holy League pressed home the advantage of the defeat at Vienna, culminating in the Treaty of Karlowitz (26 January 1699), which ended the Great Turkish War.
The Ottomans surrendered control of significant territories, many permanently.

<sup>The Austro-Russian–Turkish War, which was ended by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, resulted in the recovery of Serbia and Oltenia, but the Empire lost the port of Azov to the Russians. After this treaty the Ottoman Empire was able to enjoy a generation of peace, as Austria and Russia were forced to deal with the rise of Prussia.


Educational and technological reforms were made, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as the Istanbul Technical University.</sup>
 

Decline and Modernization (1828–1908)

During the Tanzimat period (1839–1876), the government's series of constitutional reforms led to a fairly modern conscripted army, banking system reforms, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the replacement of religious law with secular law and guilds with modern factories.
The Ottoman Ministry of Post was established in Istanbul on 23 October 1840.

Samuel Morse received his first ever patent for the telegraph in 1847, which was issued by Sultan Abdülmecid who personally tested the new invention.

Following this successful test, installation works of the first telegraph line (Istanbul-Adrianople-Şumnu) began on 9 August 1847.

Thanks to:

Wikipedia

&

World History for Kids

http://www.donaldbrittonconrad.com/