Imperial Ottoman

History · Complete overview

The History of the Ottoman Empire: A Complete Overview

A complete overview of Ottoman history from c. 1299 to 1922, covering origins, rise, golden age, crisis, reform, and dissolution.

The Ottoman Empire endured for more than six centuries, and at its height in the sixteenth century it controlled lands from the gates of Vienna to the foothills of the Caucasus, from the Crimea to the Red Sea, and from the steppes of Central Asia to the Atlantic shores of Morocco. Its capital, Istanbul, was for a time the largest city in Europe and arguably the most important in the early modern world. Few states have had a longer or more varied career; the Ottomans fought the French at the siege of Malta in 1565, supplied silver to Ming China through Iran, and survived the discovery of the New World and the rise of the fossil-fuel state. I have tried in what follows to write a narrative that respects the modern scholarship, principally the work of Halil İnalcık, Suraiya Faroqhi, Caroline Finkel, and Cemal Kafadar, and that avoids the older “decline” cliché the field has spent forty years dismantling.

Key dates

  • c. 1299 — Osman I establishes the principality of Söğüt, the conventional founding of the Ottoman state.
  • 1326 — Bursa, the first Ottoman capital, is captured by Orhan.
  • 29 May 1453 — Mehmed II takes Constantinople; the Byzantine Empire ends.
  • 29 August 1526 — Suleiman defeats the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács.
  • 26 January 1699 — The Treaty of Karlowitz forces the first major Ottoman cession of European territory.
  • 1 November 1922 — The Grand National Assembly in Ankara abolishes the sultanate.

Origins and the founding beylik

The Ottomans emerged from the fragmentation of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia during the late thirteenth century. As the Seljuk state crumbled under Mongol pressure, Turkic nomadic warriors under Ertuğrul established a small polity on the frontier between the Byzantine Empire and the Turkmen pastoral lands of western Anatolia. His son, Osman I, is traditionally regarded as the founder of the dynasty that would bear his name, and the year of his accession, around 1299, is conventionally taken as the beginning of Ottoman history. Cemal Kafadar, in Between Two Worlds (1995), has shown how much of the early “Osman” story was constructed in the fifteenth century from older Turkic frontier epic, principally the Battalname and the Danişmendname, and how cautious we should be with the chronicles of Aşıkpaşazade and Oruç Bey, both written more than a century after the events they claim to record.

Osman and his followers belonged to the gazi tradition of frontier warriors who fought in the name of Islam against the Byzantine Empire. Their motives blended genuine religious zeal with the practical incentives of plunder, land grants, and social mobility. The early Ottoman state was less an empire than a mobile confederation of warriors, holy men, and migrating Turkmen families, held together by a charismatic leader and the promise of reward. The Ahi brotherhood of Anatolian craft-guilds, and the dervish milieu around figures like Hacı Bektaş Veli and the memory of Baba İlyas, gave that confederation a religious vocabulary it would carry for centuries.

In the generation after Osman’s death, the Ottomans began to develop the institutions that would carry them forward. His son Orhan captured the Byzantine city of Bursa in 1326, making it the first major Ottoman capital. A short time later, the Ottomans acquired Nicaea and Nicomedia, opening up the Sea of Marmara to their raiders. Orhan’s reign also saw the first Ottoman use of infantry organized on the iqta’ principle and the establishment of the devshirme levy that would later supply the human material of the Janissary corps. By the time of Orhan’s death around 1362, the principality had crossed into Europe and had become the dominant Turkish state in the region.

Expansion in the fourteenth century

The early Ottoman leaders expanded in three directions: against the Byzantines in northwestern Anatolia, against other Turkish beyliks in the interior, and across the Dardanelles into Europe. The crossing into Europe, traditionally dated to 1354, was a hinge. Within a few years, the Ottomans had seized Gallipoli and used it as a base for raids into Thrace; Lala Şahin Pasha’s capture of Adrianople (Edirne) in 1369 moved the Ottoman capital into Europe, where it would remain.

Throughout the late fourteenth century, the Ottomans fought a series of inconclusive wars against Balkan coalitions, most notably at the Battle of Kosovo on 15 June 1389. The victory there, won or claimed against a coalition of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, and Hungarians, has often been read as a decisive moment in Balkan history, although the true consolidation of Ottoman rule took generations. The famous defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara on 28 July 1402, inflicted by the Central Asian conqueror Timur, briefly shattered the empire. Sultan Bayezid I was captured, and the empire descended into a decade-long civil war known as the Ottoman Interregnum.

The interregnum of 1402 to 1413 was a near-death experience. The European possessions held in many cases, but the Anatolian beyliks reasserted their independence, and the empire lost the eastern and central Anatolian territories it had absorbed in the 1380s and 1390s. The Greek cities of the Aegean reverted to Venetian or local control. The empire’s survival owed much to the ability of Mehmed I, who reunified the state in 1413, to balance the competing claims of his brothers and to rebuild a working administration.

Recovery and the path to Constantinople

The empire was reunified under Mehmed I and, more decisively, Murad II. By the 1430s, the Ottomans had recovered their Balkan possessions and were pressing against Hungary and the remnants of the Byzantine state. The Byzantine Empire, by then reduced to a few square miles around Constantinople, depended increasingly on European aid. The fall of the city seemed inevitable to many observers, but the Theodosian walls had held for nearly a thousand years, and the city was defended by the latest in late medieval artillery. (Greek fire is sometimes said to have been available in 1453; John Haldon has argued that limited stockpiles may have survived, but the traditional view that the secret had been lost is still defensible.)

The decisive moment came in 1451, when Mehmed II ascended the throne at the age of nineteen. He spent the next two years preparing an enormous army and an unprecedented siege train, including a massive bronze bombard cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban. Doukas, the Byzantine historian who lived through the fall, captures something of the dread:

“The sultan, having spent the winter in Adrianople, came to the city in the spring of 1453, bringing with him a great host of men, an innumerable multitude of soldiers, and a host of engines of war.” — Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium (c. 1462)

The fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire and announced the Ottoman state as a world power. The conquest contributed, indirectly, to the Portuguese push around Africa in search of alternative trade routes to Asia, and it gave the new sultan the symbolic and strategic capital of unmatched importance.

Mehmed II and the consolidation of an empire

Mehmed II, later known as the Conqueror, spent the next three decades transforming his conquest into a sustainable empire. He annexed the Greek despotate of Trebizond in 1461, completing the absorption of the former Byzantine world, and on 11 August 1473 won the decisive Battle of Otlukbeli against the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan, settling the long contest with the Turcoman dynasties of eastern Anatolia. He attacked the Albanian leader Skanderbeg, the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, and various Italian maritime colonies. In 1480, Ottoman forces under Gedik Ahmed Pasha took Otranto in southern Italy, briefly holding a bridgehead on the peninsula, and the threat of further Ottoman expansion was one of the pressures that prompted Pope Sixtus IV to call for a crusade.

The Conqueror also built the institutional foundations of the mature Ottoman state. He reorganized the army, formalized the devshirme levy, and codified a system of religious and legal authority that fused Islamic jurisprudence with the practical needs of a multi-confessional empire. The patriarch of the newly established Greek Orthodox millet was a direct subordinate of the sultan, a pattern that would be extended to other religious communities. He rebuilt the city of Istanbul on a monumental scale, with the Topkapi Palace, the Fatih Mosque complex, and the Grand Bazaar all dating from his reign.

The great expansion, 1453 to 1600

The century and a half following the conquest of Constantinople was the period of maximum Ottoman power, a phase often labelled the Ottoman golden age. Three sultans in particular shaped this era: Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481), Selim I (r. 1512–1520), and Suleiman (r. 1520–1566). Selim conquered eastern Anatolia, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, and the Hejaz between 1514 and 1517; Suleiman’s long reign saw the empire reach its largest territorial extent.

The conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517 gave the Ottoman sultan the titles of caliph and Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, lending a religious authority that extended well beyond the empire’s borders. It also transferred control of Egypt, the Levant, the Hejaz, and the North African ports to Ottoman rule. Under Suleiman, the empire projected power into the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and Central Europe. Ottoman armies took Belgrade in 1521, defeated the Hungarians decisively at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and laid siege to Vienna in 1529. In the Mediterranean, admirals such as Hayreddin Barbarossa and Turgut Reis created a North African corsair state under Ottoman suzerainty, contesting the trade routes that had made the Italian maritime republics wealthy. The celebrated Süleymanname manuscripts, the works of the architect Mimar Sinan in Istanbul and Edirne, and the writing of Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli mark the high point of Ottoman classical culture.

The sixteenth century was not an unbroken sequence of victories. The Safavid dynasty in Iran remained a persistent rival, and the long Ottoman-Safavid wars drained resources on the eastern frontier. The naval defeat at Lepanto in 1571, inflicted by a Holy League fleet under Don John of Austria, was a serious blow, though the Ottomans rebuilt their navy within a year and took Tunis back from Spain in 1574. The cost of these long wars contributed to the inflationary pressures that began to erode the timar system of land grants in the late sixteenth century. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador who watched Suleiman’s army on the march, recorded an impression that has stuck with me:

“His army is, in respect of its maintenance, the most economical that I know of; and no army in our time is better provided with all the necessaries of life, or keeps better order on the march.” — Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Turkish Letters (1555)

The age of crisis, 1600 to 1700

After the death of Suleiman, the empire entered a long period that historians have variously called the Sultanate of Women, the era of the declining sultanate, or the age of crisis. The earlier practice of sultans leading armies in person gave way to a harem politics of queen mothers and grand viziers, while the Janissary corps grew increasingly corrupt and resistant to reform. The devshirme levies, once a way of bringing fresh blood into the military, became hereditary. The timar cavalry system, on which Ottoman land power had been built, eroded as fiefs were converted into tax farms. By 1600, the question that would dominate Ottoman politics for the next three centuries, “is the empire in decline or merely in a phase of painful adjustment?”, was already being asked.

Externally, the Ottomans faced a series of reverses. The empire lost its naval primacy in the Indian Ocean to the Portuguese and was unable to project decisive force against the Safavids. A series of wars with the Habsburgs culminated in the inconclusive Battle of Saint Gotthard in 1664, and a generation later the Treaty of Karlowitz of 26 January 1699 forced the Ottomans for the first time to cede large and permanent European territories: Hungary, Transylvania, and most of Croatia to Habsburg control, Podolia to Poland, and the Morea to Venice. The shock of Karlowitz, as Caroline Finkel observes in Osman’s Dream (2005), was the first moment at which a generation of Ottoman statesmen had to confront the possibility that the empire could not indefinitely hold the frontiers they had inherited.

The long conflict that ended at Karlowitz, the Great Turkish War of 1683 to 1699, also witnessed the second and final Ottoman siege of Vienna, lifted in September 1683 by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski. The Polish cavalry charge of that day has often been seen as a symbolic turning point in Ottoman fortunes. The wars of the late seventeenth century made it clear that the empire was increasingly on the defensive, but it is worth saying plainly that “on the defensive” is not the same as “finished,” and the recovery under the Köprülü grand viziers, together with the recovery of Belgrade in 1690, is part of the same story.

Reform and reorganization, 1700 to 1800

The eighteenth century was a period of partial recovery, deep internal crisis, and halting reform. The Tulip Period (1718–1730) under Sultan Ahmed III saw an opening to European ideas, the establishment of the first Ottoman printing press by İbrahim Müteferrika, and the growth of a small Francophone elite around the embassy in Pera. It ended abruptly in 1730 with the Patrona Halil Revolt, a Janissary- and ulema-led rising in Istanbul that has been rightly read by Suraiya Faroqhi as a turning point in the relationship between the palace, the Janissaries, and the urban poor.

The most successful sultans of the period were military reformers. Mahmud I and his successors restored fiscal discipline and reasserted central control over rebellious pashas. Mustafa III and his grand vizier Koca Ragıp Pasha modernized the army along European lines. The decisive ruler, however, was Selim III, whose Nizam-ı Cedid, the New Order, of the 1790s aimed to create a modern European-style infantry alongside the existing Janissary corps. The Janissaries revolted, deposed Selim in 1807, and exposed the limits of piecemeal reform.

In the provinces, local dynasties asserted effective independence. In Egypt, the Albanian officer Muhammad Ali established a hereditary khedivate that would last until 1952. In the Balkans, semi-autonomous pashas such as Ali Pasha of Ioannina built their own power bases. On the Black Sea, the Circassian and Abkhazian principalities remained barely integrated. The century also saw the steady growth of Russian power. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, ending the first Russo-Turkish war of Catherine the Great, gave Russia the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, the right of navigation in the Black Sea, and the cession of the Crimea — a milestone in what later became known as the Eastern Question, the diplomatic struggle over the future of the Ottoman state.

The empire of the nineteenth century

The nineteenth century was the most painful period of Ottoman history. The empire was forced to confront the full force of European industrial and military superiority, and its responses ranged from the courageous to the catastrophic.

Two long wars dominated the early part of the century. The first, with Russia, ended in the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), in which the Ottomans lost Bessarabia. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832), supported by Britain, France, and Russia, led to the creation of an independent Greek state. The Egyptian crisis of 1831 to 1840 ended Muhammad Ali’s attempt to carve out a new empire from Anatolia and Syria, but it also revealed the depth of Ottoman dependence on European support.

The most ambitious reform effort was the Tanzimat, a series of edicts issued between 1839 and 1876 that aimed to remake the empire along European legal and administrative lines. The Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane in 1839 declared the abolition of tax farming (iltizam) and the legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims; the change was not as clean as it sounded, and iltizam continued in modified form (mukataa) for decades, as Donald Quataert notes in The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (2000). The Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856 extended these principles in the wake of the Crimean War, in which the Ottomans fought alongside Britain, France, and Sardinia against Russia. The Crimean War was the last great war in which the Ottomans participated as a major power, and it was followed by a series of large foreign loans that brought the empire into the grip of European banks. The Public Debt Administration established in 1881 became a symbol of Ottoman financial subordination: by the end of the century, more than a third of state revenue was committed to servicing the foreign debt.

The late nineteenth century also saw the loss of the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. The Congress of Berlin in 1878, following the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 to 1878, recognized the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, granted Austria-Hungary the right to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina, and made the Bulgarian principality autonomous. The loss of the Balkans was the most visible sign of the empire’s transformation into a predominantly Anatolian state.

The end of empire, 1900 to 1922

The early twentieth century was a period of escalating crisis. Sultan Abdulhamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, used pan-Islamism and the prestige of the caliphate to bind the empire’s Muslim populations together, but his autocratic rule also created deep opposition among army officers, students, and intellectuals. The result was the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908, which forced the sultan to restore the 1876 constitution. The Committee of Union and Progress, the dominant faction in the new politics, was internally split; the Ahmed Rıza–Prince Sabaheddın rivalry between positivist centralism and liberal personalism has been read by Şükrü Hanioğlu as the central ideological fault-line of late Ottoman politics.

The revolution did not save the empire. The CUP, after its January 1913 coup, pursued forced centralization, accelerated modernization, and demographic homogenization, the last of these culminating in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians perished. The Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 exhausted the empire. The Sublime State entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914. The war was a disaster: the empire was invaded from every direction, and the British captured Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Damascus between 1917 and 1918. By the armistice of 30 October 1918, the empire had lost four-fifths of its territory and a great part of its population.

The post-war settlement was driven from Ankara by Mustafa Kemal, the general who had led the defence of Gallipoli. The Grand National Assembly he established in 1920 rejected the Treaty of Sèvres, the Allies’ first attempt to partition Anatolia, and won a new war against Greek, French, and Armenian forces between 1919 and 1923. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 fixed the borders of the new Turkish state. On 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate; the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Istanbul on a British warship. Less than two years later, on 3 March 1924, the assembly abolished the caliphate itself, expelled the Ottoman dynastic family, and formally closed the door on the Ottoman state. Halide Edib Adıvar, who fought at the front and addressed the new parliament in 1920, caught something of the moment in her memoir The Turkish Ordeal (1929):

“The new Turkey was being born of the spirit of sacrifice of her martyrs, and we felt that we were part of that great change.” — Halide Edib Adıvar, The Turkish Ordeal (1929)

Economy, society, and culture

The Ottoman economy was, for most of its history, one of the largest in the world. Istanbul, with perhaps half a million inhabitants in the mid-sixteenth century, was one of the largest cities in Europe; the empire’s trade with Persia, India, and Europe was a major source of bullion and luxury goods, and the copper and silver coinage issued by the central mints circulated widely. The timar system, which assigned the revenue of agricultural land to cavalry soldiers in return for service, was the backbone of the Ottoman military and the basic unit of rural administration. By the seventeenth century, the timar had been largely replaced by tax farming (iltizam), and the landed cavalry had been replaced by standing infantry and musket-armed retainers.

The pious foundations (vakıf) funded mosques, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, and caravanserais throughout the empire, and by some estimates they held as much as a third of the empire’s cultivated land at the peak of their power, a figure associated with the work of Ahmet Tabakoğlu and discussed at length by Halil İnalcık. Ottoman society was famously multi-confessional: the millet system, in which non-Muslim communities governed their own internal affairs under their religious leaders, allowed Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and others to maintain a measure of communal autonomy.

Ottoman high culture blended Turkish, Persian, and Arab elements in distinctive ways. Ottoman Turkish, the language of the court, was heavily Persianized in vocabulary and written in a modified Arabic script. The classical poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the hands of poets such as Baki, Nefi, and Nedim, reached a level of refinement that has rarely been matched; the miniature painting, calligraphy, and carpet weaving of the period have been studied for their distinctive fusion of styles. Evliya Çelebi, who spent forty years wandering the empire in the 1640s and 1670s, captured the variety of Ottoman society in a way no one else quite has:

“I, Evliya, the son of Derviş Mehemmed Zılli, was born in the year 1020 of the Hijra in the city of Kütahya. I travelled through the lands of the Ottomans for forty years, and I have seen forty countries and three hundred cities.” — Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, preface to Book I (c. 1640)

The Janissaries and the army

The Janissary corps, the elite infantry of the Ottoman state, grew from a small palace guard in the fourteenth century into a fighting force of tens of thousands by the seventeenth. The Janissaries were quartered in their own barracks, the Ocak, received a regular salary, and were forbidden to marry until they left the corps; they were converted to firearms under Murad II in the 1440s, with the decisive shift under Mehmed II. The corps played a central role in the great Ottoman victories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the victory at Mohács in 1526. By the seventeenth century, the Janissaries had become a hereditary caste, increasingly corrupt and resistant to reform; their involvement in politics, especially in the deposition of sultans, became a regular feature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The abolition of the corps in 1826 by Sultan Mahmud II — the Vaka-i Hayriye, the Auspicious Incident — was a defining moment of the modernizing reforms.

The Janissaries were only one part of a much larger military establishment. The timar cavalry, the sipahi, formed the backbone of Ottoman land power from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The household cavalry of the Porte provided the central reserve. The provincial forces, the sekban and the sarica, were employed in long sieges and counter-insurgency campaigns. The artillery corps, the topçu, organized in the fifteenth century, was one of the most developed in the world. Gábor Ágoston’s Guns for the Sultan (2005) has shown that Ottoman cannon-founding was a sophisticated industry, drawing on Hungarian, German, and indigenous expertise and supplying armies that campaigned from the walls of Vienna to the shores of the Indian Ocean.

Diplomacy and the European state system

The Ottoman state entered the European diplomatic system gradually, and on its own terms. From the fifteenth century, the empire signed commercial agreements (the capitulations) with Venice, Genoa, France, England, and the Dutch Republic. The capitulations were originally a normal part of premodern diplomacy, but they became increasingly burdensome as the European powers used them to extend their commercial and political influence. The first permanent Ottoman embassies in European capitals were established in the late eighteenth century, in London in 1793, in Paris in 1794, and in Berlin in 1795, a sign of the new equality of the European state system and of the empire’s need for European support against Russia.

The Eastern Question, the diplomatic struggle over the future of the Ottoman state that dominated the nineteenth century, became acute in the 1820s with the Greek War of Independence and remained acute until the final dissolution of the empire in 1922. Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans (2015) is the best single-volume account of how the Eastern Question ended in the trenches of Gallipoli and the burning of Smyrna.

Cultural memory and modern historiography

The memory of the Ottoman Empire has been a contested subject in every modern state that emerged from its territories. In Turkey, the official ideology of the early Republic presented the Ottoman centuries as a period of decline, religious obscurantism, and imperial corruption; the reforms of Mustafa Kemal were presented as a clean break with the past. In the Arab world, the memory of the empire has been more mixed, combining nostalgia for the cosmopolitanism of the late Ottoman period with criticism of Ottoman centralization. In the Balkans, the memory of Ottoman rule has been more sharply negative, often drawing on the national narratives of the nineteenth century.

The modern historiography of the Ottoman Empire has been transformed since the middle of the twentieth century. The older narrative of decline has been replaced by a more nuanced picture of a state that adapted, reformed, and survived for six centuries. The work of Halil İnalcık, Suraiya Faroqhi, and Cemal Kafadar has emphasized the flexibility of Ottoman institutions, the diversity of Ottoman society, and the long-term character of Ottoman adaptation. The empire is now seen less as a static and traditional state and more as a complex and dynamic system that responded, often successfully, to the challenges of early modernity. The question that divides the field now is not whether the empire declined, but what “decline” even means over a six-century span.

Further reading

  • Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
  • Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire: A Short History (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2009).
  • Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (London: John Murray, 2005).
  • Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  • Bruce Masters, The Arabs of the Ottoman Empire, 1516–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Frequently asked questions

When did the Ottoman Empire exist?

The conventional dates are 1299 (Osman I’s accession) to 1 November 1922 (the abolition of the sultanate by the Grand National Assembly), with the caliphate formally abolished on 3 March 1924. Some historians now prefer a shorter chronology, beginning with the conquest of Bursa in 1326.

Who founded the Ottoman Empire?

Osman I, the eponym of the dynasty, founded the principality of Söğüt on the Byzantine frontier in what is now Bilecik province, in the closing years of the thirteenth century. The early chronicles (Aşıkpaşazade, Oruç Bey) were written a century after his death and weave a good deal of legend into the record.

How big was the Ottoman Empire?

At its height under Suleiman, the empire covered roughly 5.2 million square kilometres and held perhaps 25 to 35 million inhabitants, making it one of the largest states of the early modern world. Modern estimates of Ottoman population in 1500 vary from 11 to 25 million, depending on what counts as a household.

When was the Ottoman Empire at its peak?

The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566) is usually given as the political and cultural peak. By the seventeenth century, the empire was on the defensive in central Europe and the Mediterranean, even as it retained formidable fiscal and military resources.

Why did the Ottoman Empire fall?

No single cause is enough. The most honest answer is that the empire lost for two centuries, against a coalition of European powers whose industrial and fiscal capacity outpaced it, while its own attempt to modernize from above could not keep up with the speed of the changes it was reacting to. The decision of 1914, to enter the First World War, is the last and most catastrophic of the strategic miscalculations.