Imperial Ottoman

History · In depth

The Ottoman Golden Age: 1453 to 1600

The Ottoman golden age from the conquest of Constantinople to the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, covering Mehmed II, Selim I, and the high culture of the classical empire.

The conquest of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 is the conventional dividing line between the rise and the golden age of the Ottoman Empire. For the next century and a half, the empire was the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Three sultans, Mehmed II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent, set the pattern; the institutions they created shaped the empire until its end. The broader narrative of Ottoman history is set out in the main overview.

Mehmed II and the making of a capital

Mehmed II came to the throne in 1451 determined to take Constantinople. The campaign, planned over two years, culminated in the fall of Constantinople, which is treated in detail elsewhere. The immediate political consequences were enormous. The Greek Orthodox patriarch was reinstated under Ottoman authority, an arrangement that would become the basis of the millet system. The Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque, a model for the conversion of churches across the empire.

Mehmed also laid out the institutional foundations of the mature state. He reorganized the central bureaucracy, regulated the devshirme, and codified the kanun, the sultan’s secular law, alongside the sharia. He also expanded the empire beyond the former Byzantine world. He annexed Trebizond in 1461, the last Greek successor state, and he campaigned repeatedly against the Albanian hero Skanderbeg, the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, and the Aq Qoyunlu confederation in eastern Anatolia. The brief Ottoman occupation of Otranto in 1480 and the death of Mehmed II in 1481 marked the end of the conquest period proper.

The rebuilding of Istanbul was the largest urban project of the fifteenth century. The Topkapi Palace, the seat of government for the next four centuries, was constructed in the 1460s on the tip of the old acropolis, overlooking the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. The Fatih Mosque complex, with its külliye of eight madrasas, a hospital, a caravanserai, and a bath, was built on the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles and established the model for later Ottoman religious foundations. The Grand Bazaar, begun in the 1460s, grew into one of the largest covered markets in the world.

Bayezid II and the consolidation of the conquests

Bayezid II, who succeeded his father after a brief civil war, is often called the Pious Sultan. His reign was less dramatic than his father’s, but it consolidated the conquests and stabilized the empire’s finances. The most important external event of his reign was the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain following the Alhambra Decree of 1492. Bayezid welcomed the Sephardic refugees, who became a vital commercial class in the Ottoman cities. The pattern of Jewish and Muslim refuge in the Ottoman Empire would be repeated with later migrations from Hungary and Russia.

Bayezid also faced the early Safavid challenge. The Safavid order in Ardabil had been converting Turkmen tribes in eastern Anatolia to a militant Shi’i Islam, and the resulting unrest led to the Battle of Otlukbeli in 1473, in which the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan was defeated. Under Bayezid, the empire fought several campaigns against the Mamluks in the south, laying the foundation for his son’s later conquest of Egypt.

The internal politics of Bayezid’s reign were not entirely peaceful. The contest between his sons, especially Korkut and Selim, foreshadowed the long tradition of fraternal conflict that would recur in Ottoman history. The support of the Janissaries for Selim, who promised them continued pay and prestige, was decisive in the civil war of 1511 to 1512. Selim’s victory marked the beginning of a more militarily aggressive phase of Ottoman policy.

Selim I and the eastern expansion

Selim I, called the Grim, came to the throne in 1512 after a brief civil war and began an aggressive program of expansion. In 1514, he defeated the Safavid shah Ismail at the Battle of Chaldiran, opening eastern Anatolia to Ottoman control. The defeat of the Mamluks in 1516, in the battle of Marj Dabiq, and again in 1517, in the battle of Ridaniya, brought Syria, Egypt, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Ottoman rule.

The conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate was a turning point of the first order. It gave the Ottoman sultan the title of caliph, an office that had not previously been part of the Ottoman claim. It transferred the Red Sea ports, the pilgrimage routes, and the trade of the Indian Ocean to Ottoman administration. It also incorporated a large non-Turkish and non-Sunni population, an integration challenge that the empire addressed through the millet system.

The acquisition of the caliphate was a political act of the first order. The Mamluk sultans had long claimed a vague sort of authority over the holy cities, and the transfer of the title to the Ottoman house gave the new rulers a religious prestige that extended across the Muslim world. The title would be used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a tool of pan-Islamic policy, and it would be the focus of the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. The conquest of Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz, in combination with the fall of Constantinople a generation earlier, gave the Ottoman house a near-monopoly of the historic seats of Islamic political authority.

Suleiman the Magnificent

Suleiman succeeded his father in 1520 and reigned until his death in 1566. The combination of his personal qualities and the strength of the institutions he inherited made his reign the high point of the empire. He is known in Turkish as Kanuni, the Lawgiver, and in the West as the Magnificent.

Suleiman inherited a state that was already large and well-governed, and he used it to project Ottoman power in three directions: into Central Europe, into the Mediterranean, and into the Indian Ocean. The capture of Belgrade in 1521, the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and the unsuccessful first siege of Vienna in 1529 marked the northern limit of Ottoman expansion in the west. In the east, the long Ottoman-Safavid war of 1532 to 1555 ended with the Peace of Amasya, which fixed the eastern frontier along the line of Lake Van and the Caucasus.

In the Mediterranean, Suleiman appointed Hayreddin Barbarossa, the famous pirate-admiral, to command the Ottoman navy. Under Barbarossa and his successors, the North African ports of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli became Ottoman regencies, and the corsair state based on Algiers became a standing challenge to Spanish and Italian shipping. The war with the Holy League culminated in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, a Christian victory celebrated in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, but the Ottomans rebuilt their fleet within a year and took Tunis back from Spain in 1574.

Suleiman was also a legislator. The kanun-name, the codified body of secular law associated with his name, remained the basic legal text of the empire for centuries. The system organized the central bureaucracy, the provincial administration, and the timar cavalry into a coherent whole. It established the principle that the sultan was the source of all law, even as the ulema continued to interpret the sharia in the religious courts.

The classical age of Ottoman culture

The classical age of Ottoman high culture is associated with Suleiman’s reign, although many of its institutions and works were created before and after. The architect Mimar Sinan, who served as chief imperial architect from 1539 to 1588, designed the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and dozens of other buildings that set the standard for Ottoman architecture for centuries. The literary achievements of the period include the works of the poet Baki, the historian Celalzade Mustafa, and the geographer Piri Reis, whose Kitab-ı Bahriye is one of the great portolan atlases.

The Ottoman classical style in calligraphy, miniature painting, and carpet weaving has been studied for its distinctive combination of Persian, Arab, and Turkish elements. The court language was a highly Persianized Ottoman Turkish, written in a modified Arabic script, and the central bureaucracy developed its own chancery tradition that endured until the nineteenth century. The famous Surname-i Vehbi, the illustrated account of the circumcision festival of Murad III in 1582, is one of the great monuments of Ottoman manuscript art.

The patronage of the arts and learning extended well beyond the court. The pious foundations of wealthy statesmen and provincial governors supported libraries, schools, and hospitals in cities across the empire. The Şehzade Mosque, the Süleymaniye complex, and the Atik Valide Mosque in Istanbul are among the most ambitious architectural projects of the period, and they were financed by the foundations of the sultans, their wives, and their chief officials.

The institutions of the classical age

The institutions of the classical age were the foundation of Ottoman power. The devshirme and the Janissary corps provided a standing infantry that was not dependent on the goodwill of local notables. The timar system of land grants for cavalry tied the army to the land and prevented the formation of large local power bases. The imperial diwan, the council of ministers that advised the sultan, developed a sophisticated practice of consultation and decision.

The religious establishment was equally elaborate. The ulema, the corps of scholars and jurists, was organized under a hierarchy culminating in the şeyhülislam, the chief mufti. The pious foundations (vakıf) funded mosques, madrasas, hospitals, soup kitchens, and caravanserais throughout the empire. By the seventeenth century, pious foundations held perhaps a quarter of the empire’s cultivated land.

The economy of the golden age was among the largest and most developed in the world. Istanbul, with perhaps half a million inhabitants in the mid-sixteenth century, was one of the largest cities in the world. The Ottoman manufacturing sector produced silk, cotton, wool, leather, and metalwork in large quantities, and the empire’s trade with Europe, Persia, and India was a major source of bullion and luxury goods. The copper and silver coinage issued by the central mints circulated widely in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

The high water mark

The high water mark of Ottoman power came in the late sixteenth century. The empire controlled the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, the Crimea, and much of Hungary. The Ottoman army was the largest in Europe, and the navy was the strongest in the Mediterranean. The empire’s revenues and population were larger than those of any contemporary European state.

The strains, however, were already visible. The long wars of the late sixteenth century were fought at great expense. The influx of American silver via Europe caused inflation that hurt the timar cavalry. The Janissary corps, originally a small elite, had grown large and undisciplined. The political influence of the harem, the queen mothers, and the palace eunuchs, especially the chief black eunuch, had grown enormously. The empire that Selim II, Murad III, and their successors inherited was already in many respects different from the one Suleiman had built.

By the time of Mehmed III’s death in 1603, the long crisis that would lead to the empire’s partial collapse was already beginning. The dynasty, however, would survive for another three centuries, and the institutional and cultural achievements of the golden age would shape the life of the empire to the end. The long decline and reform of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the eventual end of the Ottoman Empire, would be shaped in turn by the ambitions and institutions built during this era. The dynasty itself, founded by Osman I and brought to greatness in the period described in the rise of the Ottoman Empire, reached its high water mark in the reigns of Mehmed II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent. The long arc of Ottoman power that began in this period eventually reached Hungary, where the Battle of Mohács of 1526 was its most dramatic moment, and the long crisis that followed ended in the territorial losses recorded in the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699.