The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was a Turkish Islamic state founded around 1299 in Anatolia that grew, over the following two centuries, into one of the largest and longest lived empires in world history, ruling at its height over southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa from its capital at Constantinople, captured in 1453. Governed by a sultan who combined political and religious authority, the empire built an elaborate administrative and military system, including the famous Janissary corps of elite soldiers, and presided over a genuinely diverse population of Muslims, Christians and Jews organized into semi autonomous religious communities called millets. Ottoman power peaked in the sixteenth century under Suleiman the Magnificent, when its armies reached the gates of Vienna, and the empire remained a major force in European and Middle Eastern politics for centuries afterward, gradually losing territory and influence from the eighteenth century onward before its final dissolution after the First World War.