The Ottoman Empire

Osman to Atatürk, 1299–1922

One family ruled for six hundred years. It began as a frontier lordship of Turkish horsemen in north-western Anatolia, took Constantinople in 1453, reached Vienna, Baghdad, Cairo and Mecca under Selim I and Süleyman, and held on as a reforming, shrinking empire until the First World War broke it. The Grand National Assembly in Ankara abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922 and the caliphate sixteen months later.

Hijri dates, as the Ottomans kept them

The Ottoman chroniclers dated by the hijri calendar, and so do this timeline’s key events: Constantinople fell on 20 Jumada al-Awwal 857, which the app draws on Tuesday 29 May 1453, and the traditional founding year is 699 AH, which ran from late September 1299 into September 1300. The app’s hijri is the tabular calendar, which can sit a day off the sighted month the Ottomans lived by, so where the two disagree the item keeps the other side’s date and its note gives the hijri one.

European events before 1582 carry Julian dates, as their own records give them: Mohács was fought on 29 August 1526 Julian, which the proleptic Gregorian calendar would call 8 September. Later events are Gregorian.

How to read it

• Bands for seven eras, from the rise to the dissolution, for the sultans who changed the empire most, and for sieges, wars and the genocide.

• Tags to follow one thread: battles, sieges, diplomacy, reform, religion and civilians.

• The map runs from Vienna to Mecca and from Baghdad to Malta: the empire at its height spanned three continents.

The main narrative follows Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream, Halil İnalcık on the classical age, Donald Quataert and Erik-Jan Zürcher on the last two centuries, and Ronald Grigor Suny on the Armenian genocide.