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Empire1299 – 1453 · 154 years

Ottoman Empire

A Turkish dynasty that ruled the eastern Mediterranean for six centuries — from a tiny frontier emirate to the largest Islamic empire of the modern era.

What it was

The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, conquered Egypt and the Hejaz in 1517, and at their 16th-century peak under Suleiman the Magnificent ruled from Algiers to Baghdad and from Yemen to the gates of Vienna. Defeat in WWI ended the dynasty in 1922.

Why it mattered

Borders the Ottomans drew, populations they moved, and institutions they built still define the politics of the Balkans, the Levant, and North Africa a century after their fall.

From Wikipedia

The Ottoman Empire, historically also known as the Turkish Empire, was a state that spanned much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th century to the early 20th century, centered in modern-day Turkey. It also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe between the early 16th and early 18th centuries.

Wikipedia: Ottoman Empire·CC BY-SA 4.0

Borders & accuracy

Reconstructed borders

Solid borders are reconstructed from canonical historical-basemap data or hand-crafted from scholarly atlases.

  • SOURCEhand-crafted from scholarly atlases
  • DETAILhand-traced-from:wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Ottoman_Empire
  • SNAPSHOT1453
  • POLITY TYPEstate

Wars of this empire51

Conflicts whose belligerents name this polity, best-documented first.

+ 27 more in the atlas.

Open in the atlas →Seeks the timeline to 1299 and fits the map to these borders.

19.5°,36.5° → 39.0°,44.0°WARS-ATLAS / EMPIRE / OTTOMAN-EARLY

Cite as: Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1453). War Atlas. https://waratlas.org/e/ottoman-early · Sources & methodology