The Ottoman Empire and its long shadow

You asked whether these countries "engaged with the Ottomans." The honest answer is bigger than that: for about four hundred years, almost every country in this book was the Ottoman Empire. To understand the region you have to understand the empire that shaped it and the way its collapse set the modern stage.

Where the Ottomans came from

The Ottomans began around 1300 as a small Turkish principality in northwest Anatolia, one of many that filled the gap left by the declining Byzantine and Seljuk states. They were named after their founder, Osman. Over two centuries they grew into a major power. The turning point was 1453, when Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, ending the thousand-year Byzantine Empire and making the city (later called Istanbul) his capital.

Under Selim I (ruled 1512 to 1520) and his son Suleiman the Magnificent (ruled 1520 to 1566) the empire reached its height. Selim defeated the Egyptian Mamluks in 1516 and 1517, bringing Syria, the Levant, Egypt, and the Arabian holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Ottoman rule. From then on the Ottoman sultan also claimed the title of caliph, leader of the world's Sunni Muslims.

How the empire was run

The Ottomans governed a huge, diverse territory for centuries, which required a flexible system:

  • Provinces and local elites. Distant regions were run through local governors and notable families, who collected taxes and kept order on the sultan's behalf. Real local power often stayed with established families, a pattern still visible in Levantine politics today.
  • The millet system. Religious communities (Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews, and others) were organised into self-governing millets that handled their own family law, schools, and worship under their own leaders. This let many faiths coexist for centuries, though non-Muslims had a lower legal status and paid a special tax.
  • The military. Early on, the elite Janissary corps, infantry often raised from Christian-born boys converted to Islam, made the Ottoman army one of the strongest in the world.

Don't be confused: Ottoman, Turkish, Muslim. The Ottoman Empire was led by a Turkish dynasty and its court language was heavily Turkish, but it ruled Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Slavs, Jews, and many others. Being "Ottoman" was about being a subject of the sultan, not about being ethnically Turkish. Modern Turkey is the empire's successor state but is far smaller and very different.

Slow decline

From the late 1600s the empire stopped expanding and gradually lost ground to rising European powers and to Russia. By the 1800s it was so financially and militarily strained that European diplomats called it "the sick man of Europe." Reform efforts known as the Tanzimat modernised the army, law, and administration, and a brief constitutional period followed, but the empire kept shrinking, especially in the Balkans.

In 1908 a group of reformers, the Young Turks, seized power and pushed modernisation and, increasingly, Turkish nationalism. That nationalism strained the old multi-ethnic bargain that had held the empire together.

World War I and the catastrophes of the end

The Ottomans entered World War I (1914 to 1918) on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and lost. Several events from these years still shape the region:

  • The Armenian Genocide (from 1915). During the war, the Ottoman government deported and killed large numbers of its Armenian population. The great majority of historians and many governments classify this as a genocide, with deaths commonly estimated in the range of one million or more. The modern Turkish state acknowledges mass deaths and wartime atrocities but rejects the term "genocide" and disputes the framing and figures. This remains one of the most sensitive topics in Turkish politics and diplomacy.
  • The Arab Revolt (1916). Encouraged by Britain (the episode romanticised in the story of "Lawrence of Arabia"), some Arab leaders, led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca, rose against Ottoman rule in hope of an independent Arab kingdom.
  • The secret carve-up. As the previous chapter noted, Britain and France had already agreed in Sykes-Picot (1916) to divide the Arab lands between themselves, and Britain had separately promised support for a Jewish national home in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration, 1917). The Arabs who revolted did not get the unified independent state many expected.

The shadow the Ottomans left

When the empire was abolished in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924, it left marks that the rest of this book keeps running into:

  • The borders. Many modern frontiers are lines drawn by Britain and France over former Ottoman provinces, sometimes with a ruler and a map, which is why some look oddly straight and cut across communities.
  • Mixed societies. The millet system helped leave behind countries with many faiths living side by side, most visibly in Lebanon and Syria.
  • Local power families. Notable families empowered as Ottoman intermediaries often became the political dynasties of the new states.
  • A shared memory. Across the Arab world the Ottoman centuries are remembered in very mixed ways, from a lost age of Islamic unity to a period of foreign Turkish rule, and these feelings still color politics between Turkey and its neighbours.

Don't be confused: the caliphate did not survive into modern states. When people today talk about restoring "the caliphate," they are referring to this abolished institution. No current country in this book is a caliphate. The extremist group ISIS claimed to revive one in 2014; it was not recognised by mainstream Muslims and was militarily destroyed.

Next, the faiths that the Ottoman system held together, and that still define communities across the region. 👉