Ottoman Empire Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
97 free Ottoman Empire trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Ottoman Empire trivia quiz spans six centuries, from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia to the abolition of the sultanate in 1922. The easy questions are the ones every history student meets: who founded the dynasty, which city fell in 1453, which sultan was called the Magnificent and what nickname Europe gave the empire in its decline. From there it moves into the mechanics of Ottoman power: the devshirme child levy, the Janissaries, the grand viziers, the harem and the title of caliph. The harder end is for history buffs and pub-quiz specialists: Timur's capture of Bayezid at Ankara, the ships dragged over greased logs into the Golden Horn, the giant cannon Basilica, Roxelana and the Sultanate of Women, the Kopruluvizierate, Sobieski at Vienna, Charles XII as an Ottoman guest, the printing press of 1726, Samuel Morse's Ottoman patent, the fleet left to rot in the Golden Horn and the exact dates the sultanate and caliphate were abolished. Architecture, cuisine and science get their questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the empire, its sultans and its battles before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Byzantine Empire, Turkey and World War I quizzes next.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Byzantine frontier region of Anatolia, home to the city of Nicaea, was the cradle of the Ottoman state?
Bithynia
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.
Q 02Which city did Orhan capture in 1326 and make the Ottoman capital?
Bursa
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.
Q 03Which Serbian prince led the army against Sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389?
Lazar Hrebeljanovic
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.
Q 04Which Turco-Mongol conqueror defeated the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402 and captured Sultan Bayezid I?
Timur
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.
Q 05Which sultan conquered Constantinople on 29 May 1453?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II, in his early twenties, entered the city on 29 May 1453 and made it his capital, earning the epithet Fatih, 'the Conqueror'.
Q 06Which last ruler of Byzantium died defending his capital in 1453?
Constantine XI
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.
Q 07How did Ottoman ships get past the chain barring Constantinople's harbour in 1453?
Hauled overland on greased logs
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.
Q 08Before casting the Ottomans' giant siege cannon of 1453, the gunfounder Orban first offered his services to whom?
The Byzantine emperor
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.
Q 09Which practice did the Conqueror of Constantinople legalise to preserve the state?
Royal fratricide
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.
Q 10Which sultan's conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517 made the Ottomans guardians of Islam's holiest cities?
Selim I
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.
Q 11At which 1514 battle did the Ottomans defeat Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran?
Chaldiran
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.
Q 12By what epithet is Suleiman the Magnificent known in Turkish tradition?
The Lawgiver
Turks call Suleiman Kanuni, 'the Lawgiver', for codifying the empire's secular kanun laws during his 1520-1566 reign.
Q 13At which 1526 battle did Suleiman break the Kingdom of Hungary?
Mohacs
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.
Q 21Which sultan abolished the Janissary corps in 1826?
Mahmud II
Mahmud II had the rebellious Janissaries bombarded in their barracks in June 1826 and dissolved the corps, replacing it with a modern army.
Q 22At which 1571 naval battle did the Holy League's galleys under Don John of Austria crush the Ottoman fleet?
Lepanto
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.
Q 23Which Polish king led the relief of Vienna in 1683, sweeping away Kara Mustafa Pasha's army?
John III Sobieski
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.
Q 14What did Suleiman's grand vizier do when the sultan died during the 1566 siege of Szigetvar?
Hid the death from the army
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.
Q 15Which Catholic king allied with Suleiman against Austria and Spain, their forces jointly besieging Nice in 1543?
Francis I
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.
Q 16Under what name is Hurrem Sultan, Suleiman's legal wife, better known in Europe?
Roxelana
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.
Q 17What name is given to the era when imperial consorts and mothers dominated Ottoman court politics?
The Sultanate of Women
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.
Q 18Which family of grand viziers dominated Ottoman government for much of the half-century after 1656?
The Koprulu
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.
Q 19What does yeniceri, the Turkish word behind the name Janissary, mean?
New soldier
'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.
Q 20What was the devshirme?
The forced levy of Christian boys for state service
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.
Q 24Which Swedish king took refuge in the Ottoman Empire after Poltava in 1709?
Charles XII
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.
Q 25Ibrahim Muteferrika won a fatwa and the sultan's licence in 1727 to set up the first Turkish-language what?
Printing press
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.
Q 26Which Egyptian governor was tasked with crushing the Wahhabi revolt, destroying the Emirate of Diriyah in 1818?
Muhammad Ali Pasha
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.
Q 27What nickname, credited to Tsar Nicholas I, stuck to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century?
The Sick Man of Europe
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.
Q 28What was the name of the 1839 to 1876 reform period that modernised the Ottoman state?
Tanzimat
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.
Q 29Which American invention, shown to Sultan Abdulmecid in 1847, won its inventor an Ottoman decoration?
The telegraph
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.
Q 30Which sultan returned the Ottoman Empire to absolute rule soon after its first constitution of 1876?
Abdul Hamid II
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.