The Ottoman Empire fell in stages over more than two centuries, from its defeat at Vienna in 1683 to the abolition of the sultanate on 1 November 1922, with the final collapse coming after its defeat in the First World War. At the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 it covered roughly 2.27 million km² across Europe, Asia and Africa, ruled from Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. Piece by piece it lost Hungary, the Black Sea coast, Greece, the Balkan principalities, Egypt and North Africa, then Libya and almost all its remaining European land in 1911–1913. The Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918 ended its war; the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 fixed the borders of a new Republic of Turkey, proclaimed in Ankara on 29 October 1923; and the caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924. Its Arab provinces became British and French mandates that grew into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine. Each loss was settled at a particular siege, battlefield or conference table, and the sections below visit them in order.
Bursa, Edirne and Constantinople: the Map That Was Lost
The empire took its name from Osman I, a frontier ruler in north-west Anatolia who died around 1323–24. His son Orhan captured Bursa in 1326 and made it the capital. From there the Ottomans crossed into Europe, made Edirne, the old Adrianople, their next capital, and took Thessaloniki from the Venetians in 1387. At Kosovo in 1389 an Ottoman army fought a Serbian-led coalition in a battle that killed both Sultan Murad I and Prince Lazar. On 29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege, Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople and made it his capital in place of Edirne. Selim I then annexed the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in 1517, and with it Cairo, the Levant and the Hejaz with its holy cities; his conquests led the sultans to adopt the title of caliph.
These early capitals are where the dynasty’s oldest monuments stand. In Bursa the Green Tomb, built after the death of Sultan Mehmed I in 1421, holds the sultan’s sarcophagus beside those of his children. By the end of the sixteenth century, the state built from these cities ruled the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arab Middle East and the North African coast as far as Algiers.
Vienna and Karlowitz, 1683–1699: Where the Retreat Began
Most historians now date the empire’s decline from Vienna rather than from Suleiman’s death. In 1683 Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a huge army to besiege the Habsburg capital for the second time. The final assault was delayed too long, and a relief force of Habsburg, German and Polish troops under the Polish king John III Sobieski swept the Ottomans away. The Holy League pressed its advantage for sixteen years. Another defeat at Zenta, in modern Serbia, on 11 September 1697 led to the Treaty of Karlowitz of 26 January 1699, by which the Ottomans surrendered large territories, much of Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia among them, many of them permanently.
Crimea and the Morea, 1774–1833: Russia, Greece and Muhammad Ali
The next frontier to give way was the Black Sea. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed on 21 July 1774 in a village now called Kaynardzha in Bulgaria, ended a war with Russia. The Crimean Khanate, a long-standing Ottoman vassal, was cut loose and effectively passed to Russia, and Russia gained the right to act as protector of the sultan’s Orthodox Christian subjects, a claim it used for repeated interventions.
Nationalism then took provinces from within. The Serbian revolution began in 1804, and Serbia’s autonomy under its own dynasty was recognised in 1830. The Greeks rose in 1821; after a British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian navy at Navarino in 1827, the Peloponnese, known then as the Morea, became the core of an independent Greece in 1830. The same year France invaded Algiers, beginning the loss of the North African coast. Egypt’s governor Muhammad Ali, who had lost his fleet at Navarino, rebelled in 1831, and his son Ibrahim Pasha marched as far as Kütahya, about 320 km from the capital, before Russian intervention stopped him.
Berlin, 1878: Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia and Nicosia Slip Away
The empire’s European map was redrawn at a congress in a foreign capital. After a Russian victory in the war of 1877–1878, the great powers met in Berlin under Otto von Bismarck, and the Treaty of Berlin, signed on 13 July 1878, recognised Romania, Serbia and Montenegro as independent states. Bulgaria became an autonomous principality, Eastern Rumelia an autonomous province, and Macedonia was handed back to the sultan. Austria-Hungary was allowed to occupy Bosnia and garrison the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, though Bosnia formally stayed Ottoman.
Britain took its price separately. Under the secret Cyprus Convention of 4 June 1878, Britain gained administrative control of Cyprus in return for supporting the Ottomans at Berlin. Four years later, in 1882, Britain occupied Egypt, which remained nominally an Ottoman vassal. By then the empire was bankrupt: it had defaulted on its public debt in October 1875, and from 1881 its revenues were partly controlled by the foreign-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration.
Tripoli, Salonica and Edirne, 1911–1913: the Last of Europe and Africa
In three years the empire lost almost everything it still held in Europe and Africa. Italy attacked on 29 September 1911 and seized the coast of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the future Libya, and occupied the Dodecanese islands; the war ended on 18 October 1912 with the Treaty of Ouchy. The Balkan League of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro attacked days before that peace was signed. The Greek army entered Thessaloniki, the Ottomans’ Salonica, on 8 November 1912, and Albania declared independence on 28 November 1912.
Edirne, the old second capital, held out under siege from 3 November 1912 until 26 March 1913, when Bulgarian and Serbian forces took it. The Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 confirmed the losses, though the Ottomans recaptured Edirne weeks later when the Balkan allies fought each other in the Second Balkan War. It is still Turkish today, the anchor of the small corner of Europe that Turkey kept.
Gallipoli, Kut and Mecca: the Fronts of 1915–1918
Allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, the Ottomans fought on fronts from the Dardanelles to the Persian Gulf. The Allies tried to force the straits by sea in March 1915 and then landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in April. After eight months and about 250,000 casualties on each side, they withdrew in January 1916, an Ottoman victory that made the reputation of a divisional commander, Mustafa Kemal. In Mesopotamia an 8,000-strong British Indian garrison surrendered at Kut, 160 km south of Baghdad, on 29 April 1916 after a siege of almost five months.
Inside the empire, the ruling Committee of Union and Progress carried out the Armenian genocide. On 24 April 1915 hundreds of Armenian leaders were arrested in Constantinople; an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were then sent on death marches towards the Syrian desert, and around one million were killed. Assyrians and Greeks were also targeted. In the south, Sharif Hussein bin Ali launched the Arab Revolt at Mecca on 10 June 1916 with British backing. British forces took Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, and Allied and Arab troops entered Damascus on 1 October 1918. Britain and France had already agreed in the Sykes–Picot Agreement of May 1916 how to divide the Arab provinces between them.
Mudros, Sèvres and Lausanne: Signing Away the Provinces
The war ended aboard a British battleship. The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918 on HMS Agamemnon in Moudros harbour on the Greek island of Lemnos. Ottoman garrisons outside Anatolia surrendered, Allied troops occupied Constantinople, and in May 1919 Greece landed at Smyrna, now İzmir. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, would have ceded large parts of Ottoman territory to Greece, Italy, France and Britain and created zones of occupation inside Anatolia itself, but it was never ratified. Mustafa Kemal led the Turkish National Movement from Ankara, defeated the Greek army and retook İzmir in 1922.
The settlement that stuck was signed in the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 24 July 1923. It set the new Turkish state’s borders in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace and confirmed the loss of the Arab provinces, which became League of Nations mandates: Syria and Lebanon under France, and Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan under Britain. A separate convention signed at Lausanne in January 1923 imposed a compulsory population exchange in which about 1.22 million Greek Orthodox Christians were expelled from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, and roughly 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece.
Dolmabahçe and Ankara, 1922–1924: Sultan and Caliph Removed
The last sultans governed from Dolmabahçe Palace on the European shore of the Bosphorus, which served as the empire’s main administrative centre from 1853 to 1887 and again from 1909 to 1922. Its construction had cost the equivalent of 35 tonnes of gold, a burden that fed the debts behind the 1875 default. The Ankara assembly abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922, and the last sultan, Mehmed VI, boarded the British warship HMS Malaya at the Tophane docks and left the country on 17 November. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with Ankara, not Istanbul, as its capital; how that inland town became the seat of government is told in our guide to Ankara, the capital of Turkey. The caliphate followed on 3 March 1924, and the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, went into exile, first in Switzerland and then in Nice, France.
The borders drawn in these years still define the region. The straits that the Allies failed to take in 1915 are now wholly Turkish, as our guide to the Dardanelles explains, and the mandate lines of 1920–1923 became the frontiers of modern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, while the British mandate in Palestine led directly to the conflict covered in our article on the birth of Israel and the Palestine conflict.