The Ottoman Empire: Heir to Byzantium

The empire of the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia was one of the largest and longest-lived realms of the late Middle Ages.

From the 11th century onward, Western Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East were beset by Turkish invaders. First, came the Seljuk Turks. They usurped power from the Arabs in the Middle East, but soon faded. The next wave, the Ottomans, proved more durable. Arriving in western Anatolia (modern day Turkey) in the 13th century, they slowly moved westward, absorbing the Seljuks and eroding the Byzantine Empire. By 1453, the year the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, fell, only the city remained of the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople now became the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul.

The Ottoman Empire continued to expand, eating up most of Eastern Europe, where it created enemies like the subject of this week's article, Vlad the Impaler. It clashed with the Mongol khanates in the east and Christianity in the West. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was the largest realm in Europe. The Ottoman sultans conquered Egypt and exerted nominal control over all of the North African Barbary States (Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco), save only Morocco. At the height of the Empire's expansion, an Ottoman sultan stood before the gates of Vienna in Austria not once, but twice-in 1529 and 1683.

However, the sieges of Vienna became the watershed for the Empire. After the second siege failed, the Empire began to weaken and recede. By the 19th century, the once formidable Ottoman Empire had become "the sick old man of Europe". Other European states deliberately kept it alive rather than allow it to disintegrate into a dangerous chaos of warring states. But WWI killed it off when the Empire joined the losing side, allying with Germany. By 1923, it had completely lost everything but Anatolia and become the Republic of Turkey, with its current borders.

Part of what destroyed the Ottoman Empire began as one of its great strengths. The millet system gave nominal autonomy to religious minorities. They governed themselves under their own religious customs and laws, acknowledging the Ottoman government as their ultimate ruler. This served to placate these communities and to keep them from uniting to overthrow the Empire. But it also fostered differences in law, custom and culture that made it difficult in the 19th century to organize an infrastructure against the now much more centralized governments of Western Europe. What started off as a great way to run an empire in the Middle Ages eventually became obsolete in the Modern era.