From Osman to Bayezid
Osman I led one of many Turkish frontier states on the Byzantine border around 1299. His son Orhan took Bursa, and by the 1360s the Ottomans had crossed into Europe and made Edirne a capital. Murad I won at Kosovo in 1389 but was killed there.
Bayezid I, called Yildirim (the Thunderbolt), crushed a crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, then was captured by Timur at Ankara in 1402. Eleven years of civil war followed among his sons.
Constantinople
Mehmed II was 21 when he besieged Constantinople in 1453. His engineers cast giant cannon, and his men dragged ships over a hill into the Golden Horn to get around the harbour chain. The city fell on 29 May after 53 days. Mehmed turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, made the city his capital and resettled it with Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Selim I and the caliphate
Selim I defeated the Safavid Shah Ismail at Chaldiran in 1514, then turned on the Mamluks. Marj Dabiq in 1516 and Ridaniya in 1517 gave him Syria, Egypt and the Hijaz. The Ottoman sultan became Servant of the Two Holy Mosques, and the last Abbasid caliph of Cairo was taken to Istanbul. Later sultans claimed the title of caliph.
Suleiman the Magnificent
Suleiman (1520 to 1566) took Belgrade, destroyed Hungary's army at Mohacs in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529. His admiral Barbarossa ruled the Mediterranean after Preveza in 1538. At home he was called Kanuni, the Lawgiver, and his architect Sinan built the Suleymaniye Mosque.
The army and the state
Ottoman strength rested on the devshirme, which took Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them and trained them as Janissary soldiers or palace officials. Some rose to the very top, such as the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. The timar system gave cavalrymen the revenue of land in return for service, and the sultan's council, the divan, met in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.
Decline and reform
The second siege of Vienna failed in 1683, and the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 gave up Hungary. Russia took the Crimea in 1783. Reformers such as Selim III, Mahmud II, who destroyed the Janissaries in 1826, and the Tanzimat ministers tried to modernise the state.
Abdulhamid II (1876 to 1909) used the caliphate to rally Muslims worldwide and built the Hijaz Railway to Madinah.
How the last caliphate ended
The Ottomans joined the First World War on Germany's side in 1914. Despite victories at Gallipoli and Kut, they lost Iraq, Palestine and Syria, and Sharif Hussein's Arab Revolt turned the Hijaz against them. After the war Britain and France divided the Arab provinces. Mustafa Kemal's nationalists abolished the sultanate in 1922, declared a republic in 1923 and abolished the caliphate on 3 March 1924.
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