The Ottoman Empire Killed Rome — Then Killed Itself

This is the empire that killed Rome. Not the Rome of four hundred seventy-six that fell to barbarians. But the last Roman Empire, the eastern half

that survived another thousand years behind unbreakable walls.

In the spring of fourteen fifty-three, the Ottomans finally broke those walls and ended the Roman story for good. And then, six centuries

later, this same empire did something no army ever managed to do to it. It destroyed itself, in barely twelve years.

Because the thing that made it unstoppable was the same thing that doomed it.

The Ottomans were a machine built for one purpose, conquest, and a machine built only to expand cannot survive the day it stops moving.

So let's start the countdown. It begins with almost nothing.

Around the year thirteen hundred, on the shrinking edge of a dying Byzantium, there is a frontier warlord named Osman. He leads a small band of Turkish raiders in the hills of northwestern Anatolia. He has a legend, not a kingdom.

The story goes that he dreamed of a tree growing from his body to shade the whole world. By some accounts he was founded around the year twelve ninety-nine, but that date is really a later legend, not a document.

What we can point to is a battle, around thirteen oh one, where Osman's raiders crush a Byzantine army. That is the moment the raiders become conquerors.

His son Orhan takes the city of Bursa in the thirteen twentys and gives the state its first capital. And then they do something no one expects.

They cross the water into Europe. In thirteen fifty-four they seize Gallipoli, a permanent foothold on the European shore. They plant a capital at Edirne in Thrace. They are standing on European soil a full hundred years before

they take Constantinople. But how does a band of frontier raiders build an army that terrifies all of Christendom? Here is the answer, and it is one of the strangest ideas in the history of war.

Every so often, Ottoman officials ride into a Christian village in the Balkans. They take the boys. Boys from Albania, from Bosnia, from Serbia, from Greece, mostly in their teens.

The boys are marched away from their mothers, converted to Islam, and trained for the sultan's service. And here is the part nobody tells you.

The most feared soldiers in Europe were kidnapped Christian children. They became the janissaries, an elite standing infantry, the first professional army

the continent had seen since Rome. By law, these men were technically the sultan's slaves. And yet a slave-boy taken from a village could rise all the way to grand vizier and run the empire. The Ottoman war machine was

built out of its own captured children. With that machine, the sultans drive deeper into Europe.

In thirteen eighty-nine, on a plain called Kosovo, the Ottoman army meets a Serbian-led alliance for the fate of the Balkans. The battle is savage, and by the end the Serbian resistance is broken. But in the middle of that field, Sultan

Murad the First is killed. The victorious sultan lies dead on

the ground he has just won. Even so, the outcome holds.

After Kosovo, the Ottomans are the masters of southeastern Europe. The countdown ticks on. But the countdown almost ends before it truly begins.

In fourteen oh two, a new conqueror comes storming out of the east. His name is Timur, and he is a whirlwind. At the Battle of Ankara

he shatters Sultan Bayezid the First and takes him prisoner. Think about that. The only Ottoman sultan ever captured by an enemy.

Bayezid dies in captivity the next year. And the empire tears itself apart, as his sons fight an eleven-year civil war for the throne.

For over a decade, the Ottomans nearly cease to exist.

A century before their peak, they stare into the grave.

Then a son named Mehmed the First stitches the empire back together and is remembered as its second founder. The countdown resets. And it points straight at those thousand-year-old walls.

twenty-nine May fourteen fifty-three. The sultan is Mehmed the Second, and he is twenty-one years old. In front of him stand the Theodosian Walls, finished a thousand years before, never broken. Behind those walls,

the defenders are desperately few. By most estimates, only a few thousand men, many of them Italian allies from Genoa and Venice. Outside the walls waits an Ottoman army of tens of thousands.

But numbers were never what cracked Constantinople. The real weapon was a machine. A cannon-founder named Orban, a Hungarian, had first offered his services to

the Byzantines. They could not pay him. So he built his monster

for the sultan instead. Accounts describe a bronze bombard on the order of eight or nine meters long, hurling stone balls weighing several hundred kilograms. It was so vast it could only be fired a handful of times

a day, needing hours to cool. But around it roared dozens of smaller guns, firing again and again. Together they battered the walls faster than the defenders could rebuild them. For roughly seven or eight weeks

the pounding went on. And then the walls that had stood for a thousand years came down. The last Roman emperor, Constantine the Eleventh, died

fighting in the final assault. By tradition he threw off his imperial robes to die as an ordinary soldier, and his body was never certainly found. The eleven-hundred-year Roman story ended in that morning.

And a new capital was born. Constantinople was now the seat of the Ottoman sultans. For a century after, the empire only rises.

Under Selim the First, nicknamed the Grim, it explodes outward. First he turns east, against the rival Safavid Persians.

In fifteen fourteen, at a place called Chaldiran, his guns tear the Persian cavalry apart. The victory secures his eastern frontier and

frees his hand to strike south. And then, in barely a year, from fifteen sixteen to fifteen seventeen, he swallows the Mamluk Sultanate whole. Syria, Egypt, and the holy land of the Hejaz

all fall under Ottoman rule. And with them come Mecca and Medina, the holiest cities of Islam. The sultan now claims the caliphate itself,

leadership of the Sunni Muslim world. Then comes the golden age. Under Suleiman, the man Europe called the Magnificent, the empire reaches its peak. His own people called him Kanuni, the

Lawgiver, for the code of law he built. He ruled at least around twenty-five million subjects across three continents. At its height the empire sprawled over five million square kilometers.

And Suleiman wastes no time turning that power on Europe. In fifteen twenty-one he storms Belgrade, the great fortress guarding the road

into central Europe. The next year, in fifteen twenty-two, he takes the island of Rhodes and clears its Christian knights from the eastern

sea. Belgrade opens the road to Hungary, and beyond Hungary lies Vienna. In fifteen twenty-six, at Mohács, Suleiman destroys the entire army of the King of Hungary in about two hours.

The young king drowns fleeing the field, and the medieval Kingdom of Hungary simply ceases to exist. Three years later, Suleiman is at the gates of Vienna

itself. This is the high-water mark, the deepest the Ottoman tide will ever reach into western Europe. But behind all that glory, the palace

hid something dark. The Ottomans had a law of fratricide. When a new sultan took the throne, he was permitted to have his own brothers

killed, to prevent civil war. For the good order of the world, the law said.

In fifteen ninety-five, a sultan named Mehmed the Third took the throne and had nineteen of his brothers and half-brothers strangled with silk bowstrings. By some accounts the youngest was a boy of about eleven.

Later, they stopped killing the princes and started caging them instead. Rival heirs were locked for life inside the palace harem, cut off from the world. So some sultans reached the throne after spending decades sealed

away in a gilded cage, knowing nothing. An empire at its peak was quietly

poisoning its own future rulers. Now the countdown turns the other way.

In fifteen seventy-one, a Christian fleet meets the Ottoman navy at Lepanto and destroys it. It is the first great naval defeat, a shock across

the empire. But it does not stick. The Ottomans rebuild their whole fleet within about a year and keep Cyprus anyway.

The real turning point comes in the autumn of sixteen eighty-three. Once again an Ottoman army is at the gates of Vienna. The grand vizier Kara Mustafa is certain the city

will fall. And then, over the hills, comes a relief army led by the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski.

Down the slope charges his cavalry, the winged hussars, in what is often called the largest cavalry charge in history. The Ottoman army is shattered. The siege breaks.

And this time the tide does not just pause. It reverses, for good. By the treaty that follows in sixteen

ninety-nine, the Ottomans hand Hungary to the Habsburgs.

For the first time in their history, they sign as a defeated, shrinking power.

The terror of Europe has begun to retreat. And the retreat becomes a long, grinding

bleed. By the eighteen hundreds, the empire has a cruel new nickname.

The label is usually traced to the Russian tsar, Nicholas the First, who in eighteen fifty-three called the empire a sick man. The terror of Europe was now the sick man of Europe.

Province after province breaks away. Greece wins its independence, an early piece torn from the map. The empire tries desperately to save

itself by changing. In eighteen twenty-six the sultan turns

on his own janissaries. When the old corps mutinies against reform, thousands of them are killed in a single violent purge. The elite that had conquered Constantinople

is wiped out to make room for a modern army. Then come the Tanzimat reforms, a genuine attempt to remake the empire along European lines, with new laws and equality

for all subjects. But the reforms come too late, and cost too much. By eighteen seventy-five the empire is bankrupt, defaulting

on its enormous European loans. And soon a European-run debt administration is seizing Ottoman revenues to pay foreign creditors.

The empire that once dictated terms to Europe now can't even control its

own money. By now a new generation has stopped waiting on the sultan. In nineteen oh eight, a movement of young officers, the Young Turks, forces the old ruler to restore the constitution he had suspended.

The next year they depose him outright, and Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second is stripped of his throne. The sultan now sits under men who no

longer truly obey him. An empire trying to reform itself has instead started deposing its own rulers. And then, in a single generation,

the whole thing collapses. In nineteen twelve, a coalition of small Balkan states goes to war with the Ottomans.

In a matter of weeks, they drive the empire out of almost all its remaining European land. Provinces held for over five hundred years are gone almost

overnight. Two years later, the empire makes one last fatal gamble. It enters the First World War on the side of Germany.

At Gallipoli in nineteen fifteen, Ottoman forces repel a massive Allied assault, and a young officer named Mustafa Kemal wins fame in the defense.

But the war is tearing the empire apart from the inside.

Encouraged by Britain, the Arabs rise in revolt and its Middle Eastern provinces slip away. And in the same terrible years, the Ottoman

government carries out the Armenian genocide, the mass deportation

and killing of its Armenian population, with deaths estimated on

the order of a million or more. By the autumn of nineteen eighteen, it is

over. The Ottomans sign an armistice and the Allies move to carve up what remains. But out of the wreckage rises Mustafa Kemal.

He fights a war of independence against the partition and wins a Turkish state from

the ruins. And then comes the final image of a six-hundred-year empire.

On one November nineteen twenty-two, the assembly in Ankara abolishes the sultanate. Days later, the last sultan, Mehmed the Sixth,

quietly slips out of Constantinople, into exile, aboard a British warship.

Two years after that, the caliphate itself is abolished and the last caliph sent

away. The dynasty that Osman began around the year thirteen hundred was

finished. And the Republic of Turkey rose in its place.

So think about the whole arc. Rome fell, and stayed fallen.

The eastern half survived a thousand years more, until the Ottomans ended it in one morning in fourteen fifty-three. An empire that had literally

outlasted and destroyed Rome then took itself apart in barely twelve years. The countdown that started with a single warlord's dream ended

with a lone sultan sailing away on someone else's ship.

It was never really beaten by Europe. It was beaten by the day it stopped moving.

If you want to see how the next great empire rose, a glittering civilization that built a city on a lake and then fell to a few hundred strangers in barely two years, subscribe, because next time on Greatest Empires, we

tell the story of the Aztecs.