The Ottoman Golden Age: 1453 to 1600

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.

Key dates

29 May 1453 — Mehmed II takes Constantinople.
11 August 1473 — Ottoman victory at Otlukbeli over Uzun Hasan and the Aq Qoyunlu.
1480 — Ottoman occupation of Otranto.
1514 — Battle of Chaldiran; Selim I defeats Shah Ismail.
1517 — Conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate; the caliphate passes to the Ottoman house.
1526 — Suleiman defeats the Hungarians at Mohács.
1566 — Death of Suleiman at Szigetvár.

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 Skanderbeg, Vlad the Impaler, and the Aq Qoyunlu confederation in eastern Anatolia. The decisive eastern campaign was the Battle of Otlukbeli on 11 August 1473, in which Mehmed II personally defeated the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan, ending the confederation’s threat to Ottoman Anatolia. Tursun Beg, the court historian who accompanied the army, captured something of the sultan’s ambition in his Tarih-i Ebü’l-Feth (c. 1479):

“He was a Caesar, an Alexander, a world-conqueror, and his armies were as the sands of the sea.” — Tursun Beg, Tarih-i Ebü’l-Feth (c. 1479)

The brief Ottoman occupation of Otranto in 1480 and the death of Mehmed II on 3 May 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 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. Under Bayezid, the empire fought several campaigns against the Mamluks in the south, laying the foundation for his son’s later conquest of Egypt, and against the Safavids on the eastern frontier.

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 hinge. 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 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.

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. I find Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream (2005) the most reliable single-volume narrative of the reign, although Gülru Necipoğlu’s The Age of Sinan (2005) is the essential starting point for the cultural history.

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. The poet Torquato Tasso, who was a small child when Lepanto was fought, later caught the dread the battle conjured:

“E vedi l’armi, onde il Signor superno / fa strazio del superbo e d’ogni crudo / Re di Babilonia, e di Menfi, e del Mauro.” — Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto XV (1581)

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 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 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 cultural life of the period, in poetry, architecture, and historical writing, set standards that the empire would live off for generations. Mimar Sinan’s Süleymaniye in Istanbul (1550–57) and Selimiye in Edirne (1568–74) became the reference points for Ottoman religious architecture; Sinan himself reportedly judged the Selimiye his masterwork, the one in which he equalled and exceeded the ancients. The court poets Baki and Fuzuli, the historian Celalzade Mustafa, and the geographer Piri Reis, whose 1513 map of the world is the oldest surviving Turkish map showing the Americas, gave the period a literary self-confidence to match its political. 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.