On the morning of May 29, 1453, the walls of Constantinople finally gave way after a fifty-three-day siege. The Eastern Roman Empire — the last direct institutional heir of Rome, which had governed continuously from Constantinople since 330 CE — ceased to exist. Sultan Mehmed II, twenty-one years old, rode through the Theodosian Walls and made his way to the Hagia Sophia, the great sixth-century cathedral that had been the symbolic center of Orthodox Christianity for nearly a millennium. He converted it to a mosque before the day was out. Then he did something deliberate and historically significant: he declared himself "Kayser-i Rum" — Caesar of Rome. He was not announcing the empire's destruction. He was announcing its succession.

The Ottoman Empire that Mehmed II expanded through that gate would go on to rule three continents for the next four and a half centuries. At its height under his great-great-grandson Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), it stretched from the gates of Vienna in the west to the Persian border in the east, from the Crimea and Hungary in the north to Yemen and the Somali coast in the south. It encompassed the Arabian Peninsula and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Anatolian heartland, the entire Fertile Crescent, the Nile valley, and the Maghreb. This was not a European empire projecting power overseas. It was a continental empire of extraordinary diversity — dozens of ethnicities, three major religions, scores of languages — governing itself through institutions that were in many respects more sophisticated and tolerant than anything contemporary Europe could offer.

The Ottoman Empire was, for most of its existence, the most powerful state in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. It controlled the major overland trade routes between Europe and the East. Its armies twice reached the walls of Vienna (1529 and 1683). Its navy dominated the eastern Mediterranean until the Battle of Lepanto (1571), and even that defeat did not dislodge Ottoman naval power for long. And yet the empire is primarily remembered in Western historiography through the lens of its decline — the "sick man of Europe," the Armenian Genocide, the collapse that produced the modern Middle East. Understanding what the Ottoman Empire actually was, at the height of its power and during the long complexity of its transformation, is essential to understanding the contemporary world.

"The Ottoman system was not based on the idea that all subjects were equal, but rather that all communities could find a recognized and protected place within the imperial order." — Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600 (1973)

Key Definitions

The Ottoman Empire (Osmanli Devleti) was a Sunni Muslim dynastic state founded around 1299 in northwestern Anatolia by Osman I, a Turkic tribal leader, and dissolved in 1922 following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I and the Turkish War of Independence. At its greatest extent it covered approximately 5.2 million square kilometers. The Ottoman state was a sultanate — ruled by successive sultans of the Osmanli dynasty — and from 1517 onward, its rulers also held the title of Caliph, claiming spiritual leadership over Sunni Muslims worldwide.

The millet system was the Ottoman framework for managing religious minority communities. From the Greek word for "nation" (borrowed into Ottoman Turkish), millets were autonomous religious communities with their own legal and administrative structures for matters of personal status — marriage, inheritance, education, internal disputes. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople, the Armenian Patriarch, and the Chief Rabbi each governed their respective communities in these domains. This was not liberal tolerance in any modern sense: the system explicitly ranked Muslims above non-Muslims, imposed the jizya (a special tax on non-Muslim subjects), and excluded non-Muslims from the military and certain state offices. But it preserved religious pluralism at a moment when Catholic Europe was burning heretics and expelling Jews.

Multi-Ethnic Governance: The Millet System and Fiscal Flexibility

The practical success of the Ottoman system lay in its pragmatic management of diversity. Istanbul — Constantinople refounded as the Ottoman capital — became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. After the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492, Sultan Bayezid II actively invited Sephardic Jewish refugees to settle in Ottoman territories; by the sixteenth century, Salonica (modern Thessaloniki) had a Jewish majority and was a major center of Ottoman trade and textile production. In Alexandria, Cairo, Aleppo, and Baghdad, Ottoman governance layered over existing urban hierarchies without necessarily destroying them.

The millet system's administrative genius was its devolution of the costs of governance to community leaders while preserving the sultans' fiscal and military claims. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch administered a vast network of churches, schools, and courts for Orthodox Christians across Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces. Armenian merchants connected Ottoman trade networks to Persia and Central Asia. Jewish physicians, translators, and financiers staffed the upper levels of Ottoman administration. The Chief Rabbi negotiated tax rates for Jewish communities across the empire. Each millet maintained its own courts, charities, and educational institutions, reducing the administrative burden on the central state while keeping communal hierarchies invested in Ottoman stability.

At the local level, Ottoman fiscal flexibility operated through the ayan — provincial notables, often large landowners or merchants, who served as intermediaries between the central state and local populations. The ayan collected taxes, maintained order, and provided military contingents in exchange for a share of fiscal revenues and formal recognition of their status. This arrangement was efficient but generated a structural tension: the most powerful ayan could use their local bases to extract concessions from the center or, in periods of Ottoman weakness, to operate with near-autonomous authority. By the eighteenth century, figures like Ali Pasha of Janina and Muhammad Ali of Egypt had accumulated power that rivaled the sultan's in their own domains. The 1808 Deed of Alliance (Sened-i Ittifak) between Sultan Mahmud II and the ayan was often compared by Ottoman historians to the English Magna Carta — an acknowledgment that central authority had limits.

The Devshirme System: Power Through Conversion

The Ottoman system solved a problem that plagued all pre-modern empires: how to staff a loyal central administration without becoming captive to hereditary aristocratic families whose interests diverged from the dynasty's. The devshirme, meaning "collection" in Turkish, was their solution. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, Ottoman officials periodically collected boys — typically between 8 and 18 years old — from Christian villages in the Balkans and Anatolia. These boys were taken from their families, converted to Islam, educated in palace schools, and formed into an elite corps of administrators and soldiers entirely dependent on the sultan for their status and lives.

The logic was elegant and brutal. A devshirme recruit had no family connections, no noble lineage, no inherited property, and no alternative source of power beyond royal favor. He could be elevated to the highest offices in the empire — including grand vizier, the chief administrative officer — or executed at the sultan's whim, with no clan to avenge him and no property to dispute. The Janissaries, the elite infantry corps that formed the backbone of Ottoman armies, were recruited entirely through the devshirme system until the seventeenth century. By the sixteenth century, most grand viziers were devshirme recruits of Christian Balkan origin. Ibrahim Pasha, who served as grand vizier under Suleiman the Magnificent until his execution in 1536, was of Greek origin. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who served three sultans as grand vizier from 1565 to 1579 and is widely considered one of the most capable Ottoman statesmen, was born into a Serbian family in Bosnia.

This system was, as the historian Leslie Peirce has observed, meritocratic within an extraordinarily violent logic. The devshirme recruit who survived the palace schools and rose through military or administrative service could attain wealth, power, and prestige that would have been impossible in the village of his birth. The Christian communities from which boys were taken developed complex and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the system: it was a loss and a grief, but also a path to power, and some families reportedly bribed officials to have their sons selected.

The devshirme system contained the seeds of its own transformation. By the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Janissaries had begun to marry, acquire property, and enroll their own sons in the corps — exactly the hereditary transmission the system had been designed to prevent. The Janissaries became a conservative political force, resistant to military modernization and capable of deposing sultans who threatened their privileges. Sultan Mahmud II, who had spent years carefully building an alternative military force, moved against them in 1826. In what Ottoman chronicles called the "Auspicious Incident" (Vaka-i Hayriye), Mahmud ordered the new troops to fire on the Janissary barracks when the corps revolted against his reforms. Thousands of Janissaries were killed, the survivors dispersed, and the corps abolished — clearing the way for the Tanzimat era of Ottoman modernization.

The Conquest of Constantinople and Its Consequences

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was one of the most consequential events of the fifteenth century, with ramifications extending far beyond the military defeat of a declining Byzantine state. For European Christendom, it was a civilizational shock. The city that had been the symbolic guardian of Christianity's eastern frontier, the repository of classical Greek scholarship, and the greatest city in the European world had fallen to Muslim armies. Pope Nicholas V called for a crusade; nothing came of it, but the event galvanized European consciousness and generated decades of apocalyptic literature.

For the overland trade routes connecting Europe to the lucrative markets of Asia — silk, spices, dyes, and luxury goods — the conquest created new realities. The Ottoman control of Constantinople and, through the later sixteenth century, of the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, did not block trade entirely; the Ottomans were pragmatic about commerce and taxed it rather than prohibiting it. But it increased costs, introduced new uncertainties, and powerfully motivated European maritime powers to seek oceanic alternatives. The Portuguese had already begun their Atlantic and African coastal explorations before 1453, but the fall of Constantinople accelerated the urgency of the search for sea routes to Asia. Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage to India via the Cape of Good Hope was not solely caused by Ottoman control of overland routes, but the motivation is documented in Portuguese court records and contemporary chronicles.

Mehmed II's claim to the title of Caesar of Rome was more than rhetoric. He collected Greek and Latin manuscripts, commissioned a biography of Alexander the Great, employed Italian humanist scholars, and positioned the Ottoman sultanate as the legitimate continuation of Roman imperial authority in the East. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch was reinstated in Constantinople — not as a concession to Christianity but as a demonstration of Ottoman capacity to govern diverse subjects. This political theology, which presented the Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign of a multi-religious empire, informed Ottoman diplomacy and self-presentation for centuries.

The Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 is the most contested and consequential episode of the Ottoman Empire's final decades. It represents one of the first systematic efforts by a modern state to eliminate an entire ethnic and religious community within its borders, and it prefigured the genocides of the twentieth century in both method and scale.

The context was the catastrophic loss of territory in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, in which the Ottoman Empire lost virtually all its European possessions and experienced the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from formerly Ottoman territories. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, known as the "Young Turks"), which had seized effective control of the Ottoman government in a 1913 coup, developed an ideology of ethnic Turkish nationalism that stood in sharp contrast to the multi-ethnic Ottomanism the empire had historically practiced. Armenian Christians, concentrated in eastern Anatolia and possessing cultural and commercial ties to Russia, were increasingly viewed by CUP ideologists as a fifth column in the context of war with Russia.

The trigger was the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Sarikamish in January 1915, in which Russian forces inflicted a catastrophic defeat on Ottoman armies. The CUP leadership attributed the defeat in part to alleged Armenian collaboration with Russia. In April 1915, beginning with the arrest and deportation of Armenian community leaders in Constantinople, the government launched a systematic program of deportation of Armenians from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert. The deportations were organized through the Special Organization (Teskilat-i Mahsusa), a paramilitary unit that coordinated killings along the deportation routes. Men were typically killed outright; women, children, and the elderly were forced on death marches through the Syrian desert without adequate food, water, or shelter.

Scholarly estimates of the death toll range from approximately 600,000 to 1.5 million people. The most widely cited figure among genocide scholars is approximately 1 to 1.2 million deaths. Contemporary documentation comes from multiple independent sources: German diplomatic cables (Germany was an Ottoman ally and had military advisors with Ottoman forces), American consular reports, the accounts of relief workers, and survivor testimonies collected in subsequent decades. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr.'s memoir, published in 1918, provides detailed contemporaneous accounts of conversations with CUP leaders that constitute some of the most direct documentary evidence.

The question of whether the events meet the legal definition of genocide under the 1948 UN Convention has been answered affirmatively by the overwhelming consensus of genocide scholars and recognized by over thirty countries, including the United States (formally in 2021), France, Germany, Canada, and the European Parliament. The Turkish state's official position — that the deaths resulted from wartime displacement, disease, and intercommunal violence rather than systematic extermination, and that the death toll is substantially overstated — is rejected by mainstream scholarship but remains politically significant.

Legacy in the Modern Middle East

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire produced the political geography of the modern Middle East in ways that continue to generate conflict. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 — the secret Anglo-French partition of anticipated Ottoman territories — drew the lines that would eventually become the borders of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan. These borders had no relationship to the Ottoman provincial structure, to existing political communities, or to the distribution of ethnic and religious populations. They were instruments of Anglo-French strategic convenience, and they created states with fatal internal contradictions.

Iraq, assembled from three Ottoman provinces (Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra) by British mandate administrators, grouped Kurds, Arab Sunnis, and Arab Shia into a single state with no prior political unity and a British-imposed Hashemite monarchy. Syria and Lebanon were divided between French and British spheres in ways that separated populations with strong regional ties and created artificial entities requiring authoritarian management to hold together. The Lebanese confessional system — the formal allocation of governmental positions among religious communities according to the 1932 census — was a French mandate creation that institutionalized sectarian identity as the basis of political participation and has generated recurrent crises ever since.

The Ottoman Caliphate, which had provided a framework of Islamic legitimacy for Ottoman rule since 1517, was abolished by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in March 1924, one year after the formal dissolution of the sultanate. The abolition created what scholars have called a "legitimacy vacuum" in Sunni Islamic political thought: for the first time in the modern era, there was no universally recognized Caliph. Various attempts to fill this vacuum — by the Saudi state, by pan-Arab nationalist movements, and most recently by the Islamic State's declaration of a caliphate in 2014 — can be read partly as responses to the institutional rupture of 1924.

The Ottoman legacy is also contested in contemporary Turkey, where the AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pursued a foreign policy sometimes described by analysts as "neo-Ottoman" — seeking to project Turkish influence across former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa. The conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a museum back to a mosque in 2020 was a symbolic act that explicitly invoked the 1453 conquest. Whether this represents a coherent imperial project or a domestic political maneuver leveraging Ottoman nostalgia remains debated.

Conclusion

The Ottoman Empire endured for over six centuries by solving, repeatedly and pragmatically, the fundamental problem of how to govern enormous diversity. The millet system preserved communal autonomy. The devshirme created a meritocratic administrative corps loyal to the dynasty rather than to hereditary elites. The carefully negotiated relationship between the central state and provincial notables maintained fiscal extraction without triggering permanent revolt. These solutions had costs — the devshirme's violence, the millet's hierarchical ordering of religions, the periodic massacres of Janissary corps that had become obstacles to reform — but they sustained a multi-continental empire for longer than almost any comparable polity in history.

The empire's collapse was neither inevitable nor rapid. It unfolded over a century of military defeats, territorial losses, financial dependency, and nationalist pressures from within, culminating in the catastrophic choices of World War I that destroyed what remained. The borders, sectarian tensions, and unresolved questions of legitimacy left by that collapse remain among the most consequential inheritances of the imperial age.

References

  • Aksan, V. H. (2007). Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged. Longman/Pearson.
  • Akcam, T. (2006). A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Metropolitan Books.
  • Balakian, P. (2003). The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. HarperCollins.
  • Finkel, C. (2005). Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1923. John Murray.
  • Inalcik, H. (1973). The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  • Kayali, H. (1997). Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918. University of California Press.
  • Makdisi, U. (2000). The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. University of California Press.
  • Morgenthau, H. (1918). Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Doubleday.
  • Peirce, L. P. (1993). The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press.
  • Quataert, D. (2000). The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. Cambridge University Press.
  • Shaw, S. J., & Shaw, E. K. (1977). History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (2 vols.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Straus, S. (2015). Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa. Cornell University Press.

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Ottoman Empire Mehmed II Constantinople Suleiman the Magnificent millet system Armenian Genocide Atatürk Middle East history

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Ottoman Empire and how large was it?

The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest, most durable, and most consequential empires in world history, lasting from approximately 1299 — when Osman I established a small principality in northwestern Anatolia — to 1922, when the last sultan was deposed following World War I and the Turkish War of Independence. At its height under Suleiman the Magnificent in the mid-sixteenth century, the empire stretched from Algeria and Morocco in the west to the borders of Persia in the east, from Hungary and Crimea in the north to Yemen and the horn of Africa in the south. It encompassed the entirety of the modern Middle East, North Africa, southeastern Europe (the Balkans), and Anatolia — a total of roughly 5.2 million square kilometers and a population of perhaps 15 to 20 million people. Three continents, dozens of ethnicities, three major religions, and scores of languages fell under Ottoman rule. The empire was the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean for over four centuries, controlling the major trade routes between Europe and Asia, collecting tribute from Venice and other commercial powers, and representing the principal military rival of the Habsburg Empire in Europe. Its longevity is itself remarkable: the Ottoman state outlasted every other major polity of the fifteenth century and adapted, albeit imperfectly, to the challenges of industrialization, nationalism, and European imperial expansion before finally collapsing under the combined pressures of World War I and nationalist revolution.

How did the Ottomans govern a multi-ethnic empire?

The Ottoman Empire governed one of the most ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse polities in pre-modern history through a combination of direct administration, religious autonomy, fiscal negotiation, and selective incorporation of elites. The most distinctive administrative institution was the millet system (millet means 'nation' or 'community' in Ottoman Turkish), under which recognized non-Muslim religious communities — Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, and Jews — were granted substantial autonomy to govern their own internal affairs according to their own religious law. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople, the Armenian Patriarch, and the Chief Rabbi administered personal status matters (marriage, divorce, inheritance, education) for their communities, collected taxes, and were held responsible to the Ottoman state for their communities' order. This was not liberal pluralism in the modern sense: non-Muslims paid the jizya (a poll tax), faced certain restrictions, and were subject to occasional discrimination and violence. But by the standards of early modern governance — when religious minorities in European states were routinely expelled or massacred — the millet system provided a form of structured accommodation that allowed Ottoman cities like Istanbul, Salonica, and Alexandria to become extraordinarily cosmopolitan centers of trade and culture. The system was supplemented by a flexible fiscal administration that often worked through existing local elites rather than imposing uniform central bureaucracy, and by the incorporation of provincial notables (ayan) who wielded increasing power as central authority weakened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What was the devshirme system?

The devshirme (literally 'collection' or 'levy' in Ottoman Turkish) was one of the most unusual institutional arrangements in Ottoman governance: a periodic levy of young boys — predominantly from Christian families in the Balkans — who were taken from their communities, converted to Islam, trained in Ottoman palace schools, and channeled into either the Janissary infantry corps or the imperial administrative and household service. Boys selected by devshirme were initially slaves of the sultan, legally speaking — they had no family ties or inherited wealth, owned nothing, and were entirely dependent on the sultan's favor. This was simultaneously a form of forced recruitment and a path to extraordinary power: the grand vizier (the empire's chief minister), the commanders of the Janissary corps, and the governors of major provinces were frequently devshirme graduates. At its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the devshirme system provided the Ottomans with a remarkably meritocratic — within its own violent logic — administrative elite. Because these men had no hereditary claim to their positions, no family networks to advance, and no independent power base, they were theoretically loyal solely to the sultan. In practice, the Janissaries became a hereditary caste in the seventeenth century as they began passing their positions to their own sons and admitting Muslim-born Turks, losing their original character. The corps became a conservative, factional power in Istanbul, making and breaking sultans, until Mahmud II finally dissolved them in the 'Auspicious Incident' of 1826. The devshirme system ended in the seventeenth century, but it shaped Ottoman governance for its crucial formative centuries.

What was the significance of the conquest of Constantinople?

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, under Sultan Mehmed II, was one of the most consequential events of the early modern period, marking a genuine rupture in the history of Eurasia. Constantinople had been the capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire since Constantine I founded it in 330 CE, making it the longest-lived imperial capital in world history and the center of Orthodox Christianity. Its fall ended over a thousand years of Roman imperial continuity. Mehmed II, who was twenty-one years old at the conquest, consciously drew on this symbolic weight: he called himself 'Caesar of Rome' (Kayser-i Rum), transferred imperial regalia, and understood his triumph as the legitimate succession to universal empire rather than its destruction. The fall had immediate and lasting geopolitical consequences. It closed or threatened the overland trade routes that had connected Western Europe to Asian markets through Constantinople — the Silk Roads that brought spices, silk, and luxury goods from China, India, and the Middle East. This was not, as older textbooks claimed, the sole or even primary cause of European maritime exploration, but it was a significant accelerant: the Portuguese search for a sea route around Africa and Columbus's westward voyage were both partly motivated by the desire to bypass Ottoman-controlled land routes. The loss of Constantinople also sent a shock through European Christendom that reinvigorated crusade ideology and fear of Ottoman expansion, shaping European politics for the next two centuries. For Islam, it represented a triumph of the first order — the fulfilment of a prophetic tradition regarding the great city's eventual Muslim conquest.

What was the Armenian Genocide?

The Armenian Genocide refers to the systematic mass killing, deportation, and destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire carried out primarily between 1915 and 1923, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians — roughly two-thirds of the Ottoman Armenian population. The genocide was organized and implemented by the Committee of Union and Progress (the 'Young Turks'), who had seized power in the empire and led it into World War I on the German side. In April 1915, following the Ottoman military defeat at the Battle of Sarikamish and the Russian advance into eastern Anatolia, the government used alleged Armenian collaboration with Russia as justification for mass deportations of Armenian communities from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert. The deportations were conducted in conditions designed to kill: deportees were marched for hundreds of miles without food or water, subjected to massacre by irregular forces and the Special Organization, and denied basic necessities. The mass killing was accompanied by forced conversions, abduction of women and children, destruction of Armenian cultural and religious institutions, and the systematic expropriation of Armenian property. The historical consensus among genocide scholars and the vast majority of historians is clear: these events constitute genocide under the UN's 1948 definition. The Turkish state has consistently denied this characterization, acknowledging mass death but attributing it to wartime conditions, communal violence, and disease rather than deliberate policy — a position at odds with the documentary evidence including Ottoman government records. The genocide's recognition or denial remains a live political issue affecting Turkish-Armenian relations and Turkey's relationships with Western governments.

What is the Ottoman Empire's legacy in the modern Middle East?

The Ottoman Empire's legacy in the modern Middle East is profound and contested, shaping everything from the region's political borders to its sectarian tensions and its relationship with European power. The most direct legacy is the system of states and borders created by the post-World War I settlement, particularly the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which Britain and France secretly divided the anticipated Ottoman Arab territories between themselves, and the subsequent League of Nations mandates that formalized European imperial control. The borders drawn by colonial administrators frequently ignored existing ethnic, religious, and tribal communities, lumping together populations with little sense of shared national identity (as in Iraq, which combined Sunni Arab, Shia Arab, and Kurdish populations) while dividing natural communities across new frontiers. These artificial borders have been a source of instability throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributing to the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The Ottoman administrative system, which had governed through religious communities under the millet framework, left behind patterns of sectarian politics that colonial administrators reinforced and that persist today in Lebanon's confessional system, Iraq's ethno-sectarian power-sharing, and Syria's Alawite-dominated state. The collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate — abolished by Atatürk in 1924 — created a legitimacy vacuum in Sunni Islam that various movements, from the Muslim Brotherhood to ISIS, have attempted to fill. The Ottoman period is also sometimes invoked nostalgically as a model of ordered multi-ethnic coexistence, though historians debate how accurately this characterizes the empire's actual record.

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