The Ottomans, named after the founder of the dynasty, Osman (d. 1324), were one of many Turkic Anatolian emirates or principalities that emerged in the late 13th-century power vacuum caused by the Mongols’ obliteration of the empire of the Rum Seljuks.
Most important in terms of the influence over the Ottomans were the Seljuks, a group of Oguz warriors that apparently entered the Middle East in the tenth century. The Seljuks rose originally as mercenary guards in the service of the Karahanids.
Later they acted to defend towns in Horasan and Transoxania against nomads and military adventurers. And, finally, they assumed the role of protectors of the later Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad against threats to their dominions. In 1055 the real founder of the Seljuk dynasty, Tugrul Bey, forced the Abbasid caliph to make him protector of orthodox Islam and to recognize him as sultan, or temporal ruler.
The Ottoman state had emerged, c. 1300, in western Asia Minor, not far from the modern city of Istanbul. In a steady process of territorial accretion, this state had expanded both west and east, defeating Byzantine, Serb, and Bulgarian kingdoms as well as Turkish nomadic principalities in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Mamluk sultanate based in Egypt. The expansion continued until the late 17th century, the last significant conquest being Podolia (at that time, a province of Poland-Lithuania, nowpart of the Ukraine) in 1672. Expansion turned a small chiefdom of semi-nomadic pastoralists into a bureaucratic world-empire extended over three continents.
By the seventeenth century it held vast lands in west Asia, North Africa, and southeast Europe. In 1529 and again in 1683, Ottoman armies pressed to conquer Habsburg Vienna.
During the last decades before it disappeared in 1922 the Ottoman Empire existed without the European provinces that for centuries had been its heart and soul. In its last days, but only then, it fairly could be called an Asiatic, Middle Eastern power.
The Ottoman Empire
