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Look at modern Turkey, and now look at the map of the lands that were once under the hand of the Ottoman Empire. Three continents, from the walls of Vienna to the sands of Arabia, and tens of millions of subjects under a single power. Where did all this come from? By whose hands did they grow an empire whose very name made Europe shudder? How did a small nomadic tribe lost on the edge of someone else's empire grow into a force that dictated its will to half the known world? And why was the crescent that shines today on the domes of thousands of mosques never actually an Islamic symbol? The strangest thing is this: at the height of its power, the entire Christian world called this empire barbarian. And when it was all over, it
turned out that the barbarians healed with scalpels, wrote laws, and for six centuries held dozens of peoples and faiths under one roof. Let's figure out how this happened. Let's start with an uncomfortable truth. No one knows exactly how the Ottoman Empire was born. The Turkish historian Colin Imber said it honestly, "The origins of the Ottomans are a black hole where legend blends with reality, and every attempt to fill it gives birth to a new legend." The reason is simple. The first written records of the Ottomans' appearance were composed in the year 1476, 23 years after the fall of Constantinople. But the state itself arose around 1299.
Already in the year 1301, Byzantine chronicles note a with the army of a certain Osman, but the Ottomans' own records would appear only a century and a half later. So, these first 150 years we know only from other people's sources, mostly Byzantine ones. And in Asia Minor, those centuries were hot. From the east rolled in the Seljuk Turks, a people whose leaders had come out of the steppes of what is now Kazakhstan. They bit off land from Byzantium piece by piece and built a sultanate that for the Muslims of that time was a major power. But in the year 1243, the Mongols came knocking at their door. The sultan instantly became a vassal of the Mongol Khan and the Seljuk state crumbled into dozens of small principalities,
beyliks, which immediately tore into one another over power. It was in one of these beyliks that a man named Osman appeared. And here is the irony. For its very birth, the Ottoman Empire owes a great deal to the Mongols. First, they brought down the power of the Seljuks and cleared the ground. Second, the Mongols stopped their raids on Anatolia, considering it Byzantine land, and Byzantium was their ally. While the Khans held the east in their fist, Osman's little beylik quietly gathered strength. According to legend, Osman saw in a dream a crescent stretching from one edge of the earth to the other. He took it as a good omen and made the crescent the symbol of his dynasty. Later, this sign would become the symbol of all of Islam as a
counterpart to the Christian cross. Although curiously, not all Muslims agree with this. For Shia Iranians, any such image is pure paganism. And yet today, the crescent adorns the flags of many Muslim states, a sign that began with one dream of one bey. But a dream does not build empires, something else does. And what built the Ottoman state was the weakness of its neighbors. By that time, Byzantium did not even control its own borders. The Greeks were abandoning cities. The capital of Osman's father taken without a fight at all, together with a crowd of Greek peasants who went over to the Turks on their own. Why on their own? First, they feared raids and offered the Turks cooperation. Second, a
decaying Byzantium was strangling them with taxes that the Ottomans at first simply did not have. There were dozens of such crossings of Greek villages. And here is the important thing to understand. The Ottomans invented nothing new. As they expanded, they adopted the fashionable European ways. They taxed those of other faiths and declared them second-class people. Everything the Turks would later be accused of, they had borrowed from Europe itself. And by the time the Greeks realized it, it was too late. Some fled, some rebelled, but most resigned themselves and accepted Islam. What is interesting is that the Ottomans held no fierce hatred for the Byzantines.
They readily intermarried with the Greeks, acted as arbiters in their disputes, and often got their way through diplomacy alone, without any bloodshed. What turned the strength of the beyliks into an empire was the army. At first, it was cavalry, then infantry and Azap archers were added and in the 15th century the famous elite infantry appeared the janissaries. They were recruited from thousands of Christian boys trained from childhood and in time armed with firearms and sabers turning them into a fearsome force. Osman's son Orhan swept through Serbia and Bulgaria with fire and sword
and created the office of vizier the Sultan's chief helper. Now leaving for war the Sultan knew that back in the capital order would be kept for him and while a fragmented Europe fought itself the Ottoman state struck as a single fist with a firm central power. By the year 1396 the Ottomans had taken Bursa seized the key fortress of Zimpe occupied almost all of Thrace and Thessaloniki defeated the Serbs on the field of Kosovo and crushed a huge crusading army of Franks Hungarians and Venetians at Nicopolis. After such a victory Sultan Bayezid the first felt he was ready to take Constantinople itself but from the east a force was already approaching that would nearly wipe the Ottomans off the face of the earth.
That force was Tamerlane. In the summer of the year 1402 the armies of Bayezid and Tamerlane met near Ankara and the Ottomans lost. The Sultan himself was taken prisoner where he died. The state was left without a head. Bayezid's sons divided power and began to fight among themselves losing lands. Only in the year 1413 did Mehmed the first manage to gather the country back into a single whole. His heirs [clears throat] took up the task in earnest. Murad II defeated the Polish-Hungarian army and secured Ottoman power in the Balkans for centuries to come. And his son, Mehmed II, went further than anyone. To secure the throne, he introduced a
cruel law. A new sultan would execute all possible rivals. Because of this, the blood of their own brothers stained the hands of many rulers. A tradition they would abandon only 200 years later. But Mehmed had one all-consuming dream, Constantinople. They say that day and night, in the palace and outside it, he thought of only one thing, by what military cunning and what machines to take this city. The prophet Muhammad himself had once said that this city would surely be taken, and blessed would be the commander and the army that took it. Mehmed decided to become that commander. He built hundreds of ships, gathered a huge army, and in the year 1453, he fulfilled the prophecy.
Constantinople fell. But upon entering the city, the sultan was horrified. Of the once magnificent capital, only ruins remained. Collapsed walls, abandoned quarters, poverty, and despair. Centuries of decline had turned the great city into its own shadow, and Mehmed set about resurrecting it. He rebuilt its buildings, repopulated its empty districts, raised new mighty walls, took control of the passage of ships between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, and made Constantinople the capital of his empire. Here rose the magnificent Topkapi Palace, which had the Cannon Gate. and Every time the Sultan left his residence, a cannon shot thundered. The empire was reborn, and a golden age lay ahead of it.
The true flowering came under Sultan Selim the First and his son, Suleiman the Magnificent. From the year 1514 to 1534, the state experienced an unprecedented rise. The Ottomans utterly defeated the Safavids, who ruled Iran, and crushed the Egyptian Mamluks. And Egypt became part of the empire, opening the fleet's way into the Red Sea. In the north, the impregnable Belgrade fell. Most of Hungary and Croatia came under the Sultan's power, and Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania became vassal principalities. It all ended with the subjugation of Mesopotamia. In honor of these victories, Suleiman ordered the building of the Suleymaniye Mosque, one of the greatest shrines of Istanbul. It was raised by the great architect Sinan, who said this mosque
would stand forever. Over more than four centuries, the district has lived through dozens of earthquakes, and the Suleymaniye still stands. Suleiman knew how to do more than wage war. He himself was an exceptionally educated man, and unlike his warlike father, he began with peace. He freed a great many captives and established relations with Venice. He concluded a rare alliance, a Muslim empire and Christian France. The French king realized that, apart from old crusading grievances, he had no reason to hate the Turks and for 300 years the two states became allies. With their help the Ottomans took Nice and gained a foothold on Corsica. But Suleiman also waged much war. Over his reign he fought more than a dozen major
wars taking Iraq, the Kurdish lands and the island of Rhodes, the last stronghold of the Knights of St. John which held out for half a year. And Suleiman was also nicknamed the Lawgiver. Under him a full body of laws appeared in force for three centuries in which what mattered was not a person's origin but his abilities. And here is what breaks the familiar picture. Christians in power under the Ottomans were an ordinary thing and Christian peasants and craftsmen often lived more freely than their brethren in their own Christian Europe. By the end of Suleiman's reign the population of the empire had passed 15 million and its might struck terror into the whole continent. It seemed the empire was invincible but it was
precisely under Suleiman that the first crack appeared in its foundation. While Suleiman loved poetry and built mosques the eastern center of the empire froze in the manners of its great days while Europe raced ahead. Cannons, firearms, new tactics of battle. In his old age Suleiman himself withdrew from governing and at court a struggle for power began. Something else is telling. The first 10 sultans from Osman to Suleiman led their armies into battle themselves. But Suleiman's son Selim II became the first ruler who preferred to watch war from the side and in all his life never smelled gunpowder. And then
everything came crashing down at once. In the 1570s, the Catholic powers, Spain, Venice, Genoa, Malta, and Papal Rome, created the Holy League and for the first time defeated the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. The Turks recovered and even took Cyprus from Venice, but the old invulnerability was gone. Europe traded with the New World, found sea routes around, and Ottoman money began to lose its value. The empire remained agrarian, and its trade was carried on mostly by non-Muslims. In the 17th century, the Ottomans still gained lands. They took Crete, Yerevan, and Baghdad. But major victories became rare, and this stung the Sultan's pride. To win back
the favor of heaven, Sultan Ahmed I decided to build the most beautiful mosque in the world, the future Blue Mosque. When construction was finished, an unexpected scandal broke out. The mosque had six minarets, exactly as many as the chief shrine of Islam in Mecca. Many Muslims considered this sacrilege. The Ottomans found a clever way out. They paid for a seventh minaret for Mecca. So, the chief mosque once again became one of a kind, and the Blue Mosque remained one of the greatest masterpieces of the Islamic world. Corruption also ruined the Ottomans. A bribe was effectively legalized under the guise of a gift to the vizier. One could buy any office, and
the tax on bribes brought in up to 15 to 20% of the budget. A department was even set up to keep track of it. The army and the endless wars demanded money while progress remained somewhere behind. The turning point came in the year 1683 at Vienna, where the Ottomans suffered a crushing defeat. Their advance into Europe was halted forever. A new threat was rising, Russia. The Swedish king, Charles XII, defeated at Poltava, took refuge with the Ottomans and stubbornly urged the Sultan to start a war with the Russians. In the year 1711, the Ottomans did indeed win at the Pruth and won back Azov, but they could no longer hold back the overall pressure.
Azov became Russian again, then the empire kept losing Crimea, the northern Black Sea coast, its access to the seas. Catherine the II secured for Russia free passage through the Black Sea straits. For the Ottomans, this was a most severe blow to their prestige. The decline became so obvious that the Ottoman Empire was nicknamed the sick man of Europe. Even its faithful ally France still tried to support the Ottomans, for instance in the Crimean War, but this could no longer save the dying man. There was only one cure, reforms, but the empire's own elite set about killing reform. The reformer, Sultan Selim III, began to rebuild the army along European lines and was overthrown and killed by the Janissaries, who saw in the changes a threat to their
privileges. These once elite troops had turned into an uncontrollable cast that strangled any development. And in the year 1826, Sultan Mahmud II went to an extreme. He simply destroyed the Janissary Corps and began to build the army anew. But even this could no longer save the empire. The 19th century became a century of losses. In the year 1830, Greece broke away. After it, Serbia and Montenegro expanded their autonomy. Moldavia and Wallachia united into Romania, and Bulgaria gained its freedom. Cyprus went to Britain. Egypt became effectively British, and Tunisia was taken by France. Under pressure from society, in the year 1876, the Sultan was overthrown, and a
parliament was convened. But the new ruler, Abdul Hamid II, had barely accepted the constitution when he cast it aside and established a dictatorship. In response, the Young Turks rose under the slogan, "Turkey for the Turks." The revolution of the year brought back the constitution and turned the Sultan into a mere decoration. And then, catastrophe. Leaning on Germany, the empire was drawn into the First World War. The Turkish fleet attacked Russian Black Sea ports. On the Caucasus front, the army met with defeat, and the Young Turk leadership, fearing that the Armenians would support Russia, unleashed deportations and mass killings. Around 1 and 1/2 million people fell victim to the genocide. By the end of the war, only fragments
remained of the huge empire. Its lands were divided up among the victorious powers, and Anatolia itself was occupied by Allied troops. And then, a man who changed history stepped onto the stage, Mustafa Kemal, the future Ataturk. He raised the people for a war of independence, won back Anatolia in the year 1922, abolished the Sultanate, and a year later founded the Republic of Turkey and became its first president. He changed the alphabet, separated religion from the state, remade the country along Western lines, and forever drew a line under six centuries of Ottoman history. So, ended the empire that for six centuries was called barbarian, except that the barbarians healed the world with scalpels, forceps, and catheters,
gave more attention to science than medieval Europe, and held dozens of peoples and faiths under one rule. And the historians of the Renaissance called the Ottoman Sultan the true heir of the Roman emperors. For six centuries, dozens of languages and religions lived side by side under one crown, and the system worked. To call such a state a horde of savages is simply to believe those who wrote this history down. And one more thing at the end. In this entire video, I never once said the word Kurds. And yet, it was they who for centuries held the empire's eastern borders and were one of the pillars of the Sultan's power. And another thing, a good half of Ottoman statehood, the palace, the bureaucracy,
the very art of power, grew on a Byzantine foundation. One empire became the foundation for another, but that is a different story altogether.
