97 Fun Facts About Ottoman Empire

Which Byzantine frontier region of Anatolia, home to the city of Nicaea, was the cradle of the Ottoman state?

Bithynia. A victory over a Byzantine army at Bapheus left its countryside open to Ottoman raiders, and its walled cities fell one by one in the decades that followed.

Which city did Orhan capture in 1326 and make the Ottoman capital?

Bursa surrendered in 1326 only after a blockade of years starved it out, because the early Ottomans had no siege engines to breach its walls.

Which Serbian prince led the army against Sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389?

Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic commanded the Christian coalition at Kosovo Polje on 15 June 1389 and was captured and executed after the battle, in which Murad I also died.

Which Turco-Mongol conqueror defeated the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402 and captured Sultan Bayezid I?

Timur (Tamerlane) routed Bayezid I at Ankara in July 1402 and kept him captive until he died the next year; the sultan's sons then fought each other for the throne for a decade.

Which sultan conquered Constantinople on 29 May 1453?

Mehmed II, in his early twenties, entered the city on 29 May 1453 and made it his capital, earning the epithet Fatih, 'the Conqueror'.

Which last ruler of Byzantium died defending his capital in 1453?

Constantine XI could have fled but chose to stay; he is said to have thrown off his imperial regalia and charged into the fighting, and no eyewitness account of his death survives.

How did Ottoman ships get past the chain barring Constantinople's harbour in 1453?

Hauled overland on greased logs: the sultan had a timber track laid over the hill behind Galata, and the ships' sudden appearance inside the harbour demoralised the defenders.

Before casting the Ottomans' giant siege cannon of 1453, the gunfounder Orban first offered his services to whom?

The Byzantine emperor could not meet Orban's price, so the Hungarian took his plans to the sultan, whose new bombards then battered the city's land walls for weeks.

Which practice did the Conqueror of Constantinople legalise to preserve the state?

Royal fratricide became law under the Conqueror: a new sultan could have his brothers killed on taking the throne, and in 1595 one had all nineteen of his strangled.

Which sultan's conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517 made the Ottomans guardians of Islam's holiest cities?

Selim I. In Cairo the sharif of Mecca sent him the keys to the holy city, a gesture on which later sultans built their claim to lead the whole Muslim world.

At which 1514 battle did the Ottomans defeat Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran?

Chaldiran, fought in August 1514, saw Ottoman cannon and muskets break a Safavid cavalry army that had no artillery; eastern Anatolia then passed under Ottoman rule.

By what epithet is Suleiman the Magnificent known in Turkish tradition?

Turks call Suleiman Kanuni, 'the Lawgiver', for codifying the empire's secular kanun laws during his 1520-1566 reign.

At which 1526 battle did Suleiman break the Kingdom of Hungary?

Mohacs, on 29 August 1526, saw Suleiman's army destroy the Hungarian host; King Louis II drowned while fleeing, and his empty throne was fought over by a Habsburg and an Ottoman-backed rival.

What did Suleiman's grand vizier do when the sultan died during the 1566 siege of Szigetvar?

Hid the death from the army: he feared the troops would give up, so he kept up the pretence for weeks while the fortress fell and the heir hurried to take the throne.

Which Catholic king allied with Suleiman against Austria and Spain, their forces jointly besieging Nice in 1543?

Francis I of France then lent his ally the port of Toulon, where the Ottoman fleet spent the winter of 1543-44 before sailing home.

Under what name is Hurrem Sultan, Suleiman's legal wife, better known in Europe?

Roxelana was seized as a girl by Crimean Tatar slave raiders and sold in Constantinople; Suleiman later broke with custom by freeing her and marrying her.

What name is given to the era when imperial consorts and mothers dominated Ottoman court politics?

The Sultanate of Women began with Hurrem's sway over Suleiman and peaked under Kosem Sultan, a regent for her son and grandson, who was strangled in 1651 on a rival's orders.

Which family of grand viziers dominated Ottoman government for much of the half-century after 1656?

The Koprulu viziers, beginning with Koprulu Mehmed Pasha in 1656, restored order and finances; under Fazil Ahmed the conquest of Crete was completed in 1669.

What does yeniceri, the Turkish word behind the name Janissary, mean?

'New soldier', or new troops, is the sense of yeniceri; raised as the sultan's own slave infantry, the corps later grew strong enough to depose and kill sultans.

What was the devshirme?

The devshirme was the forced levy of Christian boys for state service: taken mainly from the Balkans, they were converted and trained for the Janissaries or the palace, and many rose to grand vizier.

Which sultan abolished the Janissary corps in 1826?

Mahmud II had the rebellious Janissaries bombarded in their barracks in June 1826 and dissolved the corps, replacing it with a modern army.

At which 1571 naval battle did the Holy League's galleys under Don John of Austria crush the Ottoman fleet?

Lepanto broke the Ottomans' name for being unbeatable at sea, yet the victory changed less than it seemed: within a year the sultan had a fresh fleet of galleys at sea.

Which Polish king led the relief of Vienna in 1683, sweeping away Kara Mustafa Pasha's army?

John III Sobieski led the great cavalry charge of 12 September 1683 that broke the Ottoman lines before Vienna; Kara Mustafa was executed for the defeat.

Which Swedish king took refuge in the Ottoman Empire after Poltava in 1709?

Charles XII camped at Bender as the sultan's guest and drew him into war with Russia; in 1711 Peter the Great, surrounded on the River Pruth, had to hand back Azov to get away.

Ibrahim Muteferrika won a fatwa and the sultan's licence in 1727 to set up the first Turkish-language what?

Printing press. Religious works stayed off-limits to it, so the first book to come off the press, in 1729, was an Arabic-Turkish dictionary.

Which Egyptian governor was tasked with crushing the Wahhabi revolt, destroying the Emirate of Diriyah in 1818?

Muhammad Ali Pasha did the sultan's work in Arabia, then turned on him: in the 1830s his Egyptian army beat the Ottomans in Syria and Anatolia and had to be stopped by the European powers.

What nickname, credited to Tsar Nicholas I, stuck to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century?

The Sick Man of Europe: the tsar is said to have called the empire a sick man while sounding out a British ambassador on how to share out its lands once it died.

What was the name of the 1839 to 1876 reform period that modernised the Ottoman state?

The Tanzimat ('reorganisation') opened with the Gulhane Edict of 1839 and brought conscription, secular courts and the 1856 Reform Edict promising equality for non-Muslims.

Which American invention, shown to Sultan Abdulmecid in 1847, won its inventor an Ottoman decoration?

The telegraph. Two Americans living in Constantinople ran the demonstration at a Bosporus palace and asked that any reward go to the inventor, so Samuel Morse was sent a decoration set in diamonds.

Which sultan returned the Ottoman Empire to absolute rule soon after its first constitution of 1876?

Abdul Hamid II prorogued parliament in February 1878 and ruled by decree for thirty years, until the 1908 revolution forced him to restore the constitution.

Which island's administration did Britain take over in 1878 for backing the Ottomans at the Congress of Berlin?

Cyprus stayed Ottoman on paper under British administration until November 1914, when Britain annexed it outright because the two empires were now at war.

What became of most of the Ottoman fleet after the 1877-78 war with Russia?

Laid up in the Golden Horn: the sultan feared the navy would turn on him as it had on his uncle, so the ironclads his uncle had bought sat idle at anchor for the rest of his reign.

Which movement's 1908 revolution restored the Ottoman constitution?

The Young Turks, organised as the Committee of Union and Progress, forced the sultan to restore the 1876 constitution in July 1908 and later seized power in a 1913 coup.

On which side did the Ottoman Empire enter World War I?

The Ottomans joined the Central Powers alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, opening hostilities with a surprise bombardment of Russia's Black Sea ports on 29 October 1914.

Which strait did the Ottomans successfully defend in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16?

Ottoman forts and minefields on the Dardanelles repulsed the Allied fleet on 18 March 1915, and the Allied landings on Gallipoli were evacuated by January 1916.

Which Sharif of Mecca launched the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in June 1916?

Sharif Hussein bin Ali proclaimed the revolt at Mecca on 10 June 1916 after the McMahon correspondence; his sons Faisal and Abdullah led its armies.

Which 1916 secret agreement carved the Ottoman Middle East into British and French spheres?

Sykes-Picot gave France the Syrian coast and Britain Mesopotamia; it stayed secret until the Bolsheviks published it in late 1917, to the dismay of Britain's Arab allies.

Which armistice, signed aboard a British battleship in an Aegean harbour, ended the Ottoman Empire's First World War?

Mudros, on the island of Lemnos, saw the signing aboard HMS Agamemnon on 30 October 1918; its terms let the Allies occupy the forts on the Straits and demobilised the Ottoman army.

Which 1920 treaty carved up the Ottoman Empire, only to be overturned after the Turkish nationalists' victory?

Sevres was signed by the sultan's envoys in August 1920 but never ratified; the nationalists in Ankara fought on and won far better terms at Lausanne in 1923.

Which Ottoman institution outlived the sultanate, only to be abolished in March 1924?

The caliphate passed to a cousin of the last sultan, chosen by the Ankara assembly as a religious figurehead; less than a year and a half later it was abolished too and the whole dynasty exiled.

Who was the last Ottoman sultan?

Mehmed VI slipped out of his palace sixteen days after the sultanate was abolished and left Constantinople aboard the British battleship HMS Malaya; he died in exile at Sanremo in 1926.

What was the Ottoman millet system?

Self-rule for religious communities: Greek Orthodox, Jewish and other millets ran their own courts and schools under a religious head who answered to the sultan for their taxes and good order.

Which former corsair commanded the Ottoman fleet that beat Andrea Doria's Holy League at Preveza in 1538?

Barbarossa had made Algiers a pirate stronghold before the sultan named him grand admiral; his win at Preveza left the Ottomans masters of the eastern Mediterranean for three decades.

What was a tughra?

A sultan's calligraphic monogram, the tughra began under Orhan as little more than a signed name and grew more ornate with each reign; drawn at the head of a decree, it made the order the sultan's own.

What does Topkapi, the later name of the sultans' 'New Palace' in Constantinople, mean?

'Cannon Gate': Topkapi took the name from a seaside pavilion flanked by cannon, after centuries in which the sultans' residence was known simply as the New Palace.

Which palace replaced Topkapi as the sultans' main residence in the 1850s?

Dolmabahce outlived the dynasty that built it: after the sultans were exiled it became the Turkish president's Istanbul residence, and Ataturk died there in 1938.

Which chief architect designed the Suleymaniye and Selimiye mosques and more than 300 other structures?

Mimar Sinan was a devshirme recruit who spent decades as a Janissary engineer, throwing bridges across rivers on campaign, and became chief imperial architect only at about fifty.

Which Byzantine building strongly influenced the classical Ottoman mosque style?

The Hagia Sophia, Justinian's sixth-century domed church, set the model of a vast central dome with semi-domes that Ottoman architects followed from the 15th century.

Taqi al-Din's Constantinople observatory of 1577 is often compared with that of which European astronomer?

Tycho Brahe. Taqi al-Din's instruments were a match for the Dane's, but in 1580 the same sultan who had approved the observatory ordered it torn down.

Which Yemeni commodity made Cairo a major Ottoman trade centre in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Coffee from Yemen left by the Red Sea port of Mocha, which gave its name to the drink, and Cairo's merchants grew rich handling its onward trade to Constantinople and Europe.

Which hat did the Ottomans adopt in the 1820s in place of the turban?

The fez arrived as a modernising reform under a sultan remaking his army and officials on Western lines; a century later the Turkish republic banned it in turn.

The word 'Ottoman' is a European rendering of the name of which founder of the dynasty?

Osman I. Europeans took the word from the Arabic form of his name, Uthman, which is why 'Ottoman' has a t that the Turkish 'Osmanli' lacks.

Which Wallachian prince led a night attack on the camp of Constantinople's conqueror in 1462?

Vlad the Impaler failed to kill the sultan that night, but as he fell back he left a field of thousands of staked corpses to deter the Ottoman army from following.

What was the title of the governor who ruled an Ottoman eyalet?

The beylerbey, 'bey of beys', began as the title of an army's commander-in-chief; under the Ottomans it passed to the governors-general of the great provinces, who led their district beys to war.

Which English poet died at Missolonghi in 1824 after joining the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule?

Lord Byron paid from his own pocket to fit out the Greek fleet and died there of fever, mourned by the Greeks as a national hero.

Which country fought Tripoli, a regency under loose Ottoman rule, in 1801-05 rather than go on paying its corsairs tribute?

The United States sent its young navy to the Mediterranean, and a desert march on Derna by a handful of Marines gave their hymn the line 'to the shores of Tripoli'.

Akabi Hikayesi (1851), by Vartan Pasha and sometimes called the first Turkish novel, was printed in which script?

Armenian. Vartan Pasha wrote in Turkish but in his own community's alphabet, so the book stayed outside Turkish literary history until a transcription appeared in 1991.

Which 17th-century writer's Seyahatname is a landmark of Ottoman travel literature?

Evliya Celebi began by writing up his native Constantinople quarter by quarter, then in 1640 set off on some forty years of journeys that fill the ten volumes of his Seyahatname.

Which reforming sultan, deposed by the Janissaries in 1807, was also a gifted composer and ney player?

Selim III composed dozens of works and devised musical modes of his own; the Janissaries overthrew him because his new European-drilled army threatened their place.

Which flower gave its name to the pleasure-loving Ottoman era that a revolt ended in 1730?

The tulip. The court's craze for the flower named the era, and anger at such luxury fed the revolt of Patrona Halil, a Janissary and one-time bath attendant, which unseated the sultan.

Which Russian ruler forced the Ottomans to give up the Crimean Khanate in 1774, then annexed it in 1783?

Catherine the Great. The 1774 treaty also let Russia claim to protect the sultan's Orthodox Christians, a pretext it used to meddle in Ottoman affairs for the next century.

The Ottoman sultan who reigned 1389–1402 was called Yıldırım, meaning what?

'Thunderbolt' is said to have been earned by Bayezid I's dash in battle and the speed of his marches; he besieged Constantinople from 1394 and crushed a crusader army two years later.

At which battle on the Danube, on 25 September 1396, did the Ottomans rout a great crusading army?

Nicopolis was lost by pride: the French knights insisted on charging first, outran their Hungarian support and were destroyed when the sultan threw in his reserves.

Which sultan came out of retirement to win the Battle of Varna in 1444?

Murad II had abdicated in favour of his 12-year-old son months earlier; recalled, he routed the crusaders at Varna on 10 November 1444, where King Wladyslaw III of Poland and Hungary was killed.

Which Hungarian commander broke the Ottoman siege of Belgrade in 1456?

John Hunyadi broke the siege on 22 July 1456 and died of plague weeks later; the noon bell the Pope had ordered as a call to pray for the defenders turned into a memorial of their victory.

Stephen the Great, who crushed an Ottoman army at Vaslui in 1475, ruled which principality?

Moldavia. Stephen had stopped paying the sultan's tribute, and when an army came to punish him he destroyed it at Vaslui; the Pope hailed him as an 'athlete of Christ'.

Which Albanian noble deserted the Ottomans in 1443 and fought them until his death in 1468?

Skanderbeg (Gjergj Kastrioti) deserted during the Battle of Nis in November 1443, seized Kruje, and repelled repeated Ottoman sieges until his death in January 1468.

Which Italian town did the Ottomans capture in August 1480 as a bridgehead for conquests in Italy?

Otranto fell to Gedik Ahmed Pasha's fleet in August 1480; by tradition some 800 townsmen were beheaded for refusing to convert, and Naples won the town back the following year, after the sultan's death.

Prince Cem, a rival for the Ottoman throne, fled in 1482 to which island's knights, who kept him as a paid hostage?

Rhodes. The Knights welcomed Cem as a guest, then took the sultan's gold to hold him in France and passed him on to the Pope; he died in Naples in 1495, still a captive.

Which sultan welcomed the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 to settle in Ottoman cities?

Bayezid II is said to have mocked Ferdinand as a king who impoverished his own realm to enrich the sultan's; many of the refugees settled in Salonica.

Who was Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565?

Jean de Valette held Malta through a siege that lasted the whole summer of 1565; the fortified capital begun the next year, Valletta, bears his name.

Which city's present Old City walls were built on the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1530s?

Jerusalem's ruined defences were rebuilt for Suleiman in about five years, with 34 towers and seven gates, and they are the walls that still ring the Old City today.

Which sultan commissioned the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, built between 1568 and 1575?

Selim II ordered the mosque from his chief architect, who called it his masterpiece; its dome spans about 31 metres, and the sultan died in 1574 before its completion.

Which Ottoman mosque in Istanbul has six minarets?

The Blue Mosque, named for its blue Iznik tiles, was the first Ottoman mosque given six; legend has it the sultan paid for a seventh minaret at Mecca to quiet the critics.

Which sultan banned tobacco smoking in Constantinople on pain of death in the 1630s?

Murad IV had smokers put to death in the capital and even on campaign, and shut the wineshops as nests of sedition, though he was a notoriously hard drinker himself.

Which city did the Ottomans retake from Safavid Iran in 1638 after a forty-day siege?

Baghdad was retaken in 1638 by an army the sultan led in person; the peace signed the next year fixed an Ottoman-Persian frontier that the border of Iraq and Iran still largely follows.

Which Ottoman admiral drew a world map in 1513 that shows the Atlantic coasts of the newly found Americas?

Piri Reis drew on a chart by Columbus that is now lost, which is why the surviving fragment of his map, kept in the Topkapi Palace library, is so prized.

What does Kafes, the palace quarters where heirs were kept under guard, literally mean?

Kafes means 'the Cage': from the early 17th century princes were confined in these apartments instead of being executed, which left several later sultans unprepared to rule.

Which 17th-century sultan, deposed and strangled in 1648, had palace rooms lined with sable fur?

Ibrahim I grew up shut away in the palace in fear of the executioner; as sultan his mania for furs and the taxes raised to feed it turned the Janissaries and the clergy against him.

Which republic held Candia, on Crete, through an Ottoman siege of more than twenty years before yielding it in 1669?

Venice gave up the city on terms in September 1669, after one of the longest sieges on record, and kept only three small island fortresses off the Cretan coast.

What was a timar in the early Ottoman Empire?

A land grant in return for military service, the timar was how a state short of coin paid its sipahi cavalry: each man collected a district's taxes and rode to war when called.

The akçe, the chief Ottoman coin for centuries, was struck from which metal?

Silver. The name probably comes from ak, 'white', for the metal's colour; over the centuries its weight was cut again and again, until the little coin was worth a fraction of what it had been.

Ottoman Turkish was mostly written in a variant of which script?

Ottoman Turkish used the Perso-Arabic script, with extra letters for Turkish sounds, until the republic adopted the Latin alphabet in 1928.

What title did the mother of the reigning Ottoman ruler hold?

Valide sultan, 'mother sultan', ranked above every other woman of the palace, and when the ruler was a child or unfit she could govern in his name, as Kosem and Turhan did.

What name did the Ottomans give to the 1826 disbanding of the Janissary corps?

The Auspicious Incident (Vaka-i Hayriye) of June 1826 saw the mutinous Janissaries shelled in their Etmeydani barracks; thousands were killed and the corps was dissolved by decree.

Which sultan's 1867 tour of Western Europe was the first ever made by an Ottoman ruler?

Abdulaziz accepted Napoleon III's invitation to the 1867 world's fair and went on to London and Vienna; no other sultan ever travelled abroad except at the head of an army.

Which English monarch sent the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court?

Elizabeth I wanted the sultan as an ally against Catholic Spain, and their letters made common cause of Protestant and Muslim scorn for 'idolaters'.

At which 1827 battle did British, French and Russian ships destroy an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet?

Navarino, on 20 October 1827, saw the allied squadrons under Admiral Codrington destroy most of the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at anchor; the last great battle under sail, it saved the Greek revolt from collapse.

Which November 1853 naval rout by Russia pushed Britain and France toward the Crimean War?

Sinop saw a Russian squadron destroy an Ottoman flotilla at anchor in its own harbour; within weeks British and French warships entered the Black Sea, and in March both powers declared war on Russia.

The 1856 peace that ended the Crimean War was signed in which city?

Paris hosted the peace of 30 March 1856, which guaranteed Ottoman territory and closed the Black Sea to all warships; within fifteen years Russia had torn up that clause and was rebuilding its fleet.

Which 1878 treaty with Russia created a large autonomous Bulgaria?

The Treaty of San Stefano, signed on 3 March 1878, created a 'Greater Bulgaria' reaching the Aegean; Britain and Austria-Hungary forced its revision at Berlin that July.

The Hejaz railway from Damascus was meant to reach Mecca but never got beyond which holy city?

Medina was reached in 1908 and the last 400 km to Mecca were never laid; in the Arab Revolt, raiders wrecked so much of the track that the southern line never ran again.

Which present-day country did Italy seize from the Ottoman Empire in the war of 1911-12?

Libya. Italy took the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and the sultan signed them away in October 1912 because a far more dangerous war had just broken out in the Balkans.

Which of the Three Pashas who ran the empire from 1913 was Minister of War?

Enver Pasha became Minister of War in 1914 and took the empire into the war on Germany's side; he died fighting the Red Army in Central Asia in 1922.

After the First Balkan War, which region was the only European land left to the Ottomans?

Only Eastern Thrace behind the Enos-Midia line, with Constantinople, remained Ottoman under the May 1913 Treaty of London; Edirne was recovered when Bulgaria turned on its allies that summer.

Which composer ended a 1780s piano sonata with a 'Rondo alla Turca' that imitates Ottoman Janissary bands?

Mozart was echoing the mehter, the bands whose drums and cymbals marched with Ottoman armies; when the corps they belonged to was abolished in 1826, the bands went with it.

What natural disaster let the Ottomans seize Gallipoli, their first lasting foothold in Europe, in 1354?

An earthquake on 2 March 1354 threw down Gallipoli's walls and its people fled; Orhan's son Suleyman Pasha marched in, rebuilt the defences and settled Turkish families there for good.