The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest, most extensive, and longest-lasting empires in the history of the world. It included most of the territories of the eastern Roman Empire and held portions of the northern Balkans and north Black Sea coast, areas that Byzantium had never ruled. Nor were these holdings ephemeral – the Ottoman Empire was born before 1300 and endured until after World War I. Thus, it began in the same century the powerful Sung state in China ended, in the era when Genghis Khan swept across the Euro-Asiatic world and built an empire from China to Poland while, in Europe, France and England were about to embark on their Hundred Years War. In west Africa the great Benin state was emerging while, in the Americas, the Aztec state in the valley of Mexico began its expansion, both events being nearly contemporaneous with the Ottomans’ emergence in Asia Minor. Born in medieval times, this empire of the Ottomans disappeared only very recently, within the memory of many people still living today. Large numbers of present-day citizens of the Ottoman successor states – such as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq – bear Ottoman personal names given to them by their parents and were educated and grew up in an Ottoman world. Thus, for many, this empire is a living legacy.

In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire shared the world stage with a cluster of other powerful and wealthy states. To their far west lay distant Elizabethan England, Habsburg Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire as well as Valois France and the Dutch Republic. More closely at hand and of greater significance to the Ottomans in the short run, the city states of Venice and Genoa exerted enormous political and economic power, thanks to their far-flung fleets and commercial networks linking India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and west European worlds. To the east were two great empires, then at their peak of power and wealth: the Safevid state based in Iran and the Moghul Empire in the Indian subcontinent. The Ottoman, Safevid, and Moghul empires reached from Vienna in the west to the borders of China in the east and, in the sixteenth century, all prospered under careful administrators, enriched by the trade between Asia and Europe. The three together likely held the balance of economic and political global power, at the very moment when Spain and Portugal were conquering the New World and its treasure. But China, in the midst of Ming rule, certainly was the most powerful and wealthy single state in the world at the time.

The Ottomans, in 1453, had destroyed the second Rome, Byzantium, that had endured for one thousand years, from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries. Through this act, the Ottoman state changed in status from regional power to world empire. As destroyer, the Ottoman Empire in some ways also was the inheritor of the Roman heritage in its eastern Byzantine form. Indeed, Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, explicitly laid down the claim that he was a caesar, a latter-day emperor, and his sixteenth-century successor, Süleyman the Magnificent, sought Rome as the capstone of his career. Moreover, the Ottoman rulers, having conquered the second Rome, for the next four hundred-plus years honored its Roman founder in the name of the capital city. Until the end of the empire, the city’s name – the city of Constantine – Konstantiniyye/ Constantinople – remained in the Ottomans’ official correspondence, their coins, and on their postage stamps, after these came into use in the nineteenth century. In some respects, the Ottomans followed certain Byzantine administrative models. Like the Byzantines, the Ottomans practiced a kind of caesaro-papism, the system in which the state controlled the clergy. In the Ottoman judiciary the courts were run by judges, members of the religious class, the ulema. The Ottoman sultans appointed these judges and thus, like their Byzantine imperial predecessors, exercised a direct control over members of the religious establishment. In addition, to give another example of Byzantine–Ottoman continuities, Byzantine forms of land tenure carried over into the Ottoman era. While the Ottomans forged their own unique synthesis and were no mere imitators of their predecessors, their debt to the Byzantines was real.

Other powerful influences shaped the Ottoman polity besides the Byzantine. The Ottoman Empire emerged out of the anarchy surrounding the Turkish nomadic movements into the Middle East after 1000 CE, population movements triggered by uncertain causes in their central Asiatic homelands. It was the last great Turco-Islamic state, following those of the Seljuks and of Tamerlane, born of the migration of the Turkish peoples out of central Asia westward into the Middle East and the Balkans. The shamanist beliefs of those nomads remained deeply embedded in the spiritual practices and world view of the Ottoman dynasty. Similarly, pre-Islamic Turkish usages remained important in Ottoman administrative circles, despite the later influx of administrative and legal practices from the Islamic world of Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. Ultimately, the Ottoman system should be seen as a highly effective blend of influences deriving from Byzantium, the Turkish nomads, and the Balkan states, as well as the Islamic world.

Shaped by others, the Ottomans in their turn affected the evolution and formation of many central, east, and west European states and the shaping of their popular imagination. If there is such a thing as the paranoid style in twentieth-century Soviet Russian politics, we have the Ottomans to thank, in large measure. For the Czarist Russian state based in Moscow the presence of a powerful Ottoman state long blocked the way to Black Sea and Mediterranean warm water ports. For centuries, the Ottomans were the single most important foreign enemies of the Russian state; czars and sultans fought against each other in a seemingly endless series of wars between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, until both disappeared. These wars had a powerful impact on the evolution and shaping of the emerging Russian power: the Muscovite state’s deep fears of powerful enemies on its southern (and western) flanks permanently marked its polity with a need to seek safety in expansion and domination. The Habsburg state on the Danube, for its part, came into existence amid profound regional confusion in order to check further Ottoman expansion northwards. The Vienna-based state became a center of resistance and, over time, acquired the role and identity as the first line of defense for central Europe because the various kingdoms further south in the Balkan peninsula all had failed to check the Ottomans. Without question, the Ottomans played a decisive role in the formation and subsequent evolution of the Habsburg state, defining its very nature.

Its geopolitical position, at the crossroads of the Asian, European, and African continents, thus gave the Ottoman state an important role to play in world history. This importance did not vanish after the military catastrophe of 1683 and the failing ability of the Ottomans to defend their territorial integrity. Indeed, Ottoman weakness prompted international instability among expanding neighbors jealous to lop off Ottoman lands or, at the least, prevent them from falling into the hands of rivals. This “Eastern Question” – who would inherit which territories once the Ottoman state vanished – provoked strife among the Great Powers of the age and became a leading issue of international diplomacy in the nineteenth century. In 1914, the failure to resolve the Eastern Question helped bring on the first great catastrophe of the contemporary age, World War I.

A far more positive reason to study the Ottoman Empire and assign it an important place in world history concerns the tolerant model of administration that it offered during most of its existence. For a contemporary world in which transportation and communication technologies and the migrations of peoples have brought about an unparalleled confrontation with difference, the Ottoman case warrants careful study. For centuries the Ottoman hand rested lightly on its subject populations. The Ottoman political system required its administrators and military officers to protect subjects in the exercise of their religion, whether Islam, Judaism, or Christianity in whatever variation – e.g. Sunni, Shii, Greek or Armenian or Syriac Orthodox or Catholic. This requirement was based on the Islamic principle of toleration of the “People of the Book,” meaning Jews and Christians. These “people” had received God’s revelation, even if incompletely and imperfectly; therefore, the Ottoman Islamic state had the responsibility to protect them in the exercise of their religions. Without question, these legal protections did fail. Christian and Jewish subjects sometimes were persecuted or killed because they did not share the Islamic faith of the state apparatus. But such actions were violations of the bedrock principle of toleration – a high standard to which the state expected and required adherence. Such principles of toleration governed inter-communal relations in the Ottoman Empire for centuries. But, in the final years, there was mounting disharmony and inter-communal strife. For most of its history, however, the Ottoman Empire offered an effective model of a multi-religious political system to the rest of the world.