The Ottoman Empire: From Constantinople to Vienna

29 May 1453

For more than a thousand years, the walls of Constantinople had protected the capital of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. In the spring of 1453 the 21-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II surrounded the city by land and sea. His army used huge cannons to batter the walls, and his engineers moved ships overland on greased rollers into the city's harbour. On 29 May 1453 the city fell. Mehmed made it his capital, and the great church of Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

For Christians in Europe, the fall was a shock. For the Ottomans, it confirmed their place as heirs to Rome and leaders of the Islamic world. Same event, two perspectives.

From frontier state to world empire

The Ottoman state began around 1300 as a small principality in northwest Anatolia, named after its founder Osman. By 1650 it ruled southeastern Europe, Anatolia, much of the Arab world and North Africa.

• Mehmed II ("the Conqueror") took Constantinople (1453) and expanded in the Balkans.
• Selim I defeated the Safavids at Chaldiran (1514) and conquered the Mamluk Sultanate (1516 to 1517), adding Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Ottoman sultans increasingly presented themselves as caliphs, leaders of Sunni Muslims (the story that the title was formally handed over to Selim in 1517 is a later invention).
• Suleiman I (ruled 1520 to 1566), called "the Magnificent" in Europe and Kanuni ("the Lawgiver") by Ottomans, took Belgrade (1521) and Rhodes (1522), won at Mohács in Hungary (1526), and besieged Vienna (1529) without taking it.

How the empire was run

• The sultan held supreme power. Below him the grand vizier led the government and the imperial council (divan).
• The devshirme ("collection"): every few years, officials took boys from Christian families, mostly in the Balkans, converted them to Islam and trained them. The most able became palace officials and even grand viziers; others joined the Janissaries, the sultan's elite infantry, early users of firearms. These men were legally the sultan's slaves (kul), yet they could hold enormous power. For the families, losing a son was often a painful loss, although some families saw a path to advancement.
• The timar system: cavalrymen (sipahis) received the right to collect taxes from farmland in return for military service. This paid for the army without a cash salary.
• Law: the sultan's laws (kanun) worked alongside Islamic law (sharia). Suleiman's reputation as "Lawgiver" came from organizing these laws.

The two broad groups were the askeri ("military" class: soldiers, officials and religious scholars, the ulema, who were exempt from most taxes) and the reaya ("flock": the taxpaying majority of every religion). Unlike Europe's hereditary nobility, many top Ottoman positions were held by men recruited through the devshirme, who could not pass their offices to their sons.

A multi-religious empire

The empire included Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, Jews and others. Following Islamic law, Christians and Jews were protected peoples (dhimmi): they paid a special tax (jizya) and accepted limits (for example, on building new places of worship), but they could practise their religion and their communities ran many of their own affairs, such as marriage and religious law, through their own leaders. Historians later called this arrangement the millet system, though it became formal mostly in the 1800s.

When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, Sultan Bayezid II allowed many of them to settle in Ottoman cities such as Istanbul and Salonica (Thessaloniki), where Sephardic Jewish communities flourished.

Perspective check: this was not equality in the modern sense. Non-Muslims were second-class subjects. But compared with much of Europe at the time, where religious minorities were often expelled or forced to convert, the Ottoman system allowed considerable religious coexistence.

Trade, wealth and culture

Istanbul grew into one of the largest cities in Europe or Asia. The empire controlled key trade routes between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and taxed goods passing through. The chief architect Mimar Sinan (died 1588) designed hundreds of buildings, including the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, completed in 1557. Women of the imperial family could hold real power: Suleiman's wife Hürrem Sultan advised him and paid for mosques, schools and soup kitchens; in the 1600s, queen mothers (valide sultan) such as Kösem Sultan ruled on behalf of young sultans.

Rivals: Habsburgs, Venice and the Safavids

The Ottomans fought the Habsburgs (rulers of Spain and Austria) on land and at sea, and sometimes cooperated with France against them: a reminder that religion did not decide every alliance. In 1571 a Christian alliance, the Holy League, destroyed most of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Europeans celebrated it as a turning point. Yet the Ottomans rebuilt their fleet within about a year and kept Cyprus, which they had just taken from Venice. A grand vizier reportedly told a Venetian envoy that taking Cyprus had cut off an arm, while Lepanto had only shaved the Ottomans' beard; the story may be embellished, but it captures the Ottoman view.

In the east, the Ottomans fought long wars with the Shi'a Safavid empire of Iran (next lesson).

"Decline" or transformation?

Older histories said the Ottoman Empire began to decline after Suleiman died in 1566. Many historians now reject this. They point out that the empire kept growing in places (Cyprus, 1571; Crete, conquered by 1669) and survived until 1922. They describe the 1600s as a transformation: power shifted from the sultan to the grand viziers, the palace and the Janissaries; tax-farming replaced the timar system; and the army adapted. This is a good example of historiography: historians' interpretations change as they ask new questions and use new sources, such as Ottoman tax and court records instead of European diplomats' reports.