When did the Ottoman Empire exist?

The Ottoman Empire existed 1299–1922. On this map it is drawn 1305–1923.

How large was the Ottoman Empire?

At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Ottoman Empire covered about 4.3 million km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.

Europe · High and late Middle Ages

Ottoman Empire

1299–1922

See it on the map → Wikipedia ↗

Existed: 1299–1922
Shown on the map: 1305–1923
Peak area: 4.3M km²
Region: Europe

Overview

The Ottoman Empire (Ottoman Turkish Devlet-i ʿAliyye-i ʿOsmâniyye, "the Sublime Ottoman State"; Turkish Osmanlı Devleti/İmparatorluğu) was a Turkish empire that at its height spanned southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. It grew from a small frontier beylik at Söğüt in Bithynia into one of the most enduring and powerful states in world history, and its dynasty embodied the Sunni caliphate from the 16th century. Its area is estimated at roughly 1.2 million km² in 1481, some 3.4 million km² in 1521, and about 5.2 million km² at its 1683 peak, with a population of perhaps 22 million around 1600.

The founding and the "1299" problem

By convention the Ottoman state is dated from 1299, the traditional accession of Osman I (Osman Gazi, l. c. 1258–1326). This date is a later convention with no contemporary documentation: the earliest Ottoman narrative chronicles date only to the 15th century, more than a hundred years after the events, and were written to legitimise the dynasty. Paul Wittek's "ghazi thesis" (formulated 1937–1938 in The Rise of the Ottoman Empire) held that the driving force of Ottoman state-building was the ideology of gaza (holy war against Christian Byzantium), resting his case largely on two pieces of evidence—a 1337 Bursa inscription styling Orhan "ghazi, son of ghazi," and the verses of the early-15th-century poet Ahmedi. This became the "textbook orthodoxy" until the 1980s. It has since been heavily challenged: Rudi Paul Lindner (Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, 1983) argued for a tribal, predatory, religiously heterodox early state; Cemal Kafadar (Between Two Worlds, 1995) offered a nuanced synthesis in which gaza was one flexible factor among several in a "predatory confederacy" that included Christians and Muslims alike; and Heath Lowry (The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, 2003) subjected Wittek's two proofs to close scrutiny and found them inadequate. The debate (also involving Köprülü, Gibbons, İnalcık, Jennings, Imber, and Káldy-Nagy) remains unresolved; this report treats 1299 as a conventional, not documented, date.

Institutions

The mature Ottoman state rested on distinctive institutions. The devşirme ("collection," the "blood tax"), developed under Murad I, periodically levied Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam, and trained them: the ablest became elite salaried infantry, the Janissaries (yeniçeri, "new soldiers," the sultan's household troops), or entered the palace bureaucracy as governors, judges, and ministers—a loyal kapıkulu ("slaves of the Porte") class with no hereditary local ties. Alongside them the timar–sipahi system was a form of military feudalism: the sultan granted land revenues (timars, larger ziamets) to cavalrymen (sipahis) in exchange for military service, the sipahis remaining the base of power of the old Turkish notables. Provincial administration was hierarchical: eyalet (beylerbeylik, under a beylerbey) → sanjak (under a sanjakbey; sanjak/liva means "flag/standard," the banner around which the district's cavalry mustered) → kaza/kadılık (under a kadı) → nahiye. Central government revolved around the imperial council, the Divan, presided over increasingly by the Grand Vizier, the sultan's chief minister. Non-Muslim subjects were organised under the millet system: recognised religious communities (Greek Orthodox/Rum, Armenian Apostolic, Jewish) governed their own family law, courts, schools, and worship under religious leaders (patriarchs, chief rabbi) personally accountable to the sultan—an arrangement that combined communal autonomy with centralised control. Law combined the religious sharia with the sultan's secular kanun (dynastic law codes, epitomised by Suleiman "the Lawgiver").

Rise and crossing into Europe

Orhan (r. c. 1323/4–1362) took Bursa (1326), organised the first regular troops, and married into the Byzantine imperial family. The crossing into Europe is itself disputed: Ottoman forces under Orhan's son Süleyman Pasha seized the fortress of Tzympe (Çimpe) on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1352, and after an earthquake shattered the walls of nearby Gallipoli (Gelibolu), took the town itself in 1354 (a few sources give 1356 owing to a Byzantine calendar issue), establishing a permanent European bridgehead. Thus 1352 (Tzympe) and 1354 (Gallipoli) are both defensible "crossing" dates; this report treats the 1354 fall of Gallipoli as the decisive foothold. Murad I (r. 1362–1389) conquered Thrace, took Adrianople (Edirne) as capital, subdued the Balkan Christian rulers, and won the Battle of Kosovo (15/28 June 1389), in which both Murad and the Serbian prince Lazar were killed.

Bayezid, Timur, and the Interregnum

Bayezid I ("the Thunderbolt," r. 1389–1402) crushed a crusade at Nicopolis (1396) but was catastrophically defeated and captured by Timur (Tamerlane) at the Battle of Ankara (28 July 1402), dying in captivity. Timur restored many beyliks, and the empire fractured in the Ottoman Interregnum (1402–1413), a civil war among Bayezid's sons ended by Mehmed I (r. 1413–1421), who reunified the state.

Conquest of Constantinople and classical apogee

Mehmed II "the Conqueror" (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481) took Constantinople on 29 May 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire and making the city (Istanbul) the Ottoman capital; he then absorbed the remaining beyliks and Balkan states. Selim I ("the Grim," r. 1512–1520) defeated the Safavids at Chaldiran (1514) and conquered the Mamluk Sultanate (1516–1517), bringing Syria, Egypt, and the Hejaz—and with them the guardianship of Mecca and Medina and the mantle of the Sunni caliphate—under Ottoman rule. Suleiman the Magnificent (Kanunî, "the Lawgiver," r. 1520–1566) took Belgrade (1521) and Rhodes (1522), won the Battle of Mohács (1526) destroying the Hungarian kingdom, and besieged Vienna in 1529 (unsuccessfully). Under Suleiman the empire reached a cultural and legal apogee, and the chief court architect Mimar Sinan (c. 1490–1588) created its classical architecture—the Şehzade and Süleymaniye mosques in Istanbul and, above all, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1575), whose vast single dome is often regarded as the summit of Ottoman architecture.

The long transformation and decline

The naval defeat at Lepanto (1571) checked Ottoman sea power in the Mediterranean (though Cyprus was retained). The second siege of Vienna (1683) failed disastrously and was followed by the loss of Hungary, sealed at the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699). From the late 18th century the empire lost ground to Russia and Austria and to Balkan nationalisms; the Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876), promulgated under Abdülmecid I and Abdülaziz, modernised law, administration, taxation, and the army, aiming above all to preserve the state. The Young Turk Revolution (1908) restored the 1876 constitution and parliament. The empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers (11 November 1914).

The Armenian Genocide

During the First World War, in 1915–1916, the Ottoman government (under the Committee of Union and Progress) carried out the systematic deportation and mass killing of its Armenian population—the Armenian Genocide. Estimates of the death toll vary: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that "at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide," while many scholars place total Armenian deaths across 1915–1918 in the range of 1.3 to 1.5 million. The scholarly consensus is unambiguous that this constituted genocide; it is treated as such here. It must also be recorded as a political fact that the Turkish state continues officially to deny the genocide, a denial rejected by the great majority of historians and genocide scholars.

End

Defeat in 1918 led to partition and Allied occupation. The Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) won the War of Independence; the sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922 (the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Istanbul on 17 November 1922 aboard HMS Malaya), the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, and the caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924, the last caliph Abdülmecid II being deposed and the Osmanoğlu family exiled. The empire's legacy—administrative, legal, architectural, and demographic—shaped the modern Balkans, Middle East, and Turkey.

Common questions

What was the Ottoman Empire?: The Ottoman Empire (Ottoman Turkish Devlet-i ʿAliyye-i ʿOsmâniyye, "the Sublime Ottoman State"; Turkish Osmanlı Devleti/İmparatorluğu) was a Turkish empire that at its height spanned southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. It grew from a small frontier beylik at Söğüt in Bithynia into one of the most enduring and powerful states in world history, and its dynasty embodied the Sunni caliphate from the 16th century.
When did the Ottoman Empire exist?: The Ottoman Empire existed 1299–1922. On this map it is drawn 1305–1923.
How large was the Ottoman Empire?: At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Ottoman Empire covered about 4.3 million km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Who ruled the Ottoman Empire?: Orhan (r. c. 1323/4–1362) took Bursa (1326), organised the first regular troops, and married into the Byzantine imperial family.

Sources

This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each beylik, khanate and principality as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, museum and academic sources (the Baku Presidential Library on the Shirvanshahs, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Armenian Genocide) and the historiography of early Ottoman state formation (Wittek, Lindner, Kafadar, Lowry). The article this entry is anchored on:

Wikipedia — Ottoman Empire en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

This entry was last updated 27 September 2026.

This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made

Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.

Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).

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