Ah, yes, the Ottoman Empire; a land of proud history, unique furniture, and criminally underappreciated Assassin's Creed sequels. Between its rise in the 1300s and its dissolution after the first world war the Ottomans have been around for a good long while and they spanned a lot of the Mediterranean in the interim. Early modern Europeans refer to them as the sick man of Europe as a Polite way of saying just die already. But as we'll see that lasting portrayal of weakness and seemingly perpetual decline Really misses the point. So, to find out what makes the Ottomans more than just a sick man, let's do some history. Early Ottoman history is notoriously murky because they didn't do a lot of writing until they stopped moving their capital every thirty years and properly settled down But it all started with this one guy named Osman who had a very apocryphal but nonetheless Interesting dream of a tree growing out of him and covering the entire world in it's shade. Which is some pretty hardcore foreshadowing see Osman was the leader of a small Anatolian tribe left in the messy Post-Mongol power vacuum. And as far as his descendants are concerned, their empire started with him. which is why we call it Osmanli, or Ottoman. He and his son Orhan got to conquering and pushed North West to Bursa and then across the Hellespont to Edirne- -the last of which remained the Ottoman capital for nearly a century Now, when it came to holding on to their lands the aging Byzantine Empire had the grip strength of an arcade claw machine. And no one demonstrated that than the Fourth Ottoman sultan Yıldırım the Thunderbolt Bayezid earned his awesome nickname by doubling the empire in a decade! THIS is your empire. And THIS is your empire, unyielded in Bayezid. Yeah. and speaking of Sultan Yıldırım Bayezid I should say that my pronunciations have been cleared by my very Turkish college roommate emre so I'm doing my best here but anyway as you can see the early Ottoman Empire was perfectly bisected between Anatolia and Remilia by a once mighty but now tiny and insignificant town called Constantinople, yeah So after the combined forces of Europe sacked the city 200 years earlier while on their way to a crusade that they never even started Constantinople was a shell of its former self They tried to recruit allies to bail them out, but it didn't really work. Even an ottoman force at the gates of Constanza No, couldn't compel the Europeans to break their reputation for legendarily poor teamwork Luckily for the Byzantines this quasi Mongol guy tamerlane joint Anatolia and through the Ottomans into a brief Kerfuffle of Sultan las' civil warring notably the only big civil war in their whole six hundred year long history which shocks me and if you think that's absurd get a load of why it's the only one so you see the official practice for avoiding succession crises like this in the future was state sanctioned fratricide which sounds really stupid because it it is but It worked though So I have no choice but to file this under history's greatest ideas that were just dumb enough to work So with that sorted out in the Empire Reconstituted the Ottomans directed their attention back to Constantinople The so-called red apple of Christendom besides being the one strategically non Ottoman speck on the map the conquest of the city carried huge secular and religious prestige it also provided a strategic center between their split holdings in Anatolia and Remilia, and it had a built-in source of income from black sea trade sultan mehmet ii really wanted constantinople to surrender But they didn't so he sacked it with insane siege weaponry and a ten-to-one Army size advantage mehmet made conquering the most historically impregnable city in europe look easy as Congratulations venice added the ottomans to the official Constantinople conquerors club where they mostly just shared history means back and forth Thankfully Although lots of the city was destroyed the famous Byzantine Church of Hagia Sophia survived and the Sultan was so awestruck by it that he ordered its conversion to a mosque to preserve it as a result Aya sophia as it's known in turkish is still standing today The ottomans may have been conquerors, but they were keenly aware of the historical legacies They were inheriting along with the city of constantine EA and speaking of Istanbul. Let's clear up those names Constantinople II before and after the conquest was known to the Ottomans as Costantini which likewise means city of Constantine in Arabic and it's state. Is that for most of the empire? Unofficially people called it the city and Greek phrases about being in or going to the city Translated as steenbok li turned into what? We now know as Istanbul for convenience I'll be referring to it as he stumble from here on out even though that wasn't really its official name until the 1920s with Istanbul Incorporated Mehmet the Conqueror lived up to his name by pushing out in all directions even getting the Ottomans a foothold on Crimea in addition to their Aegean and Anatolian Holdings They quickly figured out that the Europeans weren't really is tied to their religious fervor as they claimed and were much more interested in fighting each other So the Ottomans played enemies against each other and conquered piecewise unmet by any wall of pan-european Defense and they got themselves a really nice domain out of it between their natural resources and control over key trading routes They had a doubly advantageous position for most of their history at this point their biggest rival was the Republic of Venice who held strategic trading posts across the Mediterranean like Cyprus and Crete in part things to their Massive Navy, but at the same time Venice was also the ottomans closest trading partners So when they weren't squabbling over Islands, they were making each other fabulously rich. It was a fruitful if tense Relationship and it happened in large part because of the Ottoman geography and both parties willingness to cooperate across religious lines It's largely due to this partnership that we ever got the Renaissance as trade brought back Classical Greek and Roman works preserved by Muslim scholars in addition to the piles of cash that funded new artworks in Italy I met ii Loved his classics and thought of himself as a new age Alexander But truth be told he wasn't all that far off in terms of lasting historical significance And I'm talking a lot about the Sultan's here because the Ottoman government was pretty dependent on their head honcho being You know an empire aside from local governments most Administration relied solidly on the Sultan and his small army of Vizier Zin bureaucrats speaking of armies He also had a notoriously badass personal guard called the Janissaries who were supposed to serve the Sultan at all times but in the long run they had a Suspicious amount of input into who did and did not become the next Sultan That was a problem the Ottomans never quite solved Sultan Bayezid the Second didn't do much in comparison to his old man Mehmet But then Selim the first shows up and boom. He conquers Egypt in Syria in no time flat. You can imagine the collective Oh That the Europeans were making use of that one And this was a big deal because with the Egyptian Mamluks Sultan had defeated and the entire eastern Mediterranean under their belt No one could go east or west without crossing the Ottomans But there was another option south and this is where their actual biggest trading rival shows up Portugal situated on the opposite end of the Mediterranean the Portuguese figured out how to get access to the Indian Ocean by sailing around Africa since the Ottomans had controlled the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf they had a similarly advantageous route to key markets They tried digging a Suez Canal and later 1500s, but they didn't have the right technology for it so Oh Well also the back and forth between the Ottomans and Venice was still going on, but it settled down when the Sultan's found much much bigger fish to fry the Ottomans also had beef with the south of it Persians to the east but that's not the biggest deal in the long run and Speaking of enemies who didn't put up much of a fight the Pope called for a crusade when the Ottomans took the holy lands But come on. This is medieval Europe, of course, nothing happened, but then Selim dies and it's through them on time, baby So let me take a minute to explain my excited excited Ness at this because this is honestly pretty exciting Suleiman the Magnificent aka the lawgiver reigned from 1520 to 1566 and he is the coolest Sultan Call me basic all you want but I know what I'm about in addition to codifying secular and religious law to make the justice system fairer and more efficient He went on 13 campaigns in pretty much every direction Europe was convinced that Suleiman was using cheat codes because the game looked like it was way too easy for him to win He also sorted out some trade deals with the Portuguese which before then had been rather Messier and involved a lot more cannons So he fixed the laws expanded the empires solidified a gigantic source of revenue from Indian Ocean trade and things were looking pretty dang good for most the reign of Suleiman was without a doubt the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire and it's because of this ridiculous trade money that he was able to Go all-out on building projects in art admission to the strong colors and bold designs of silks manuscript paintings and unreasonably gorgeous calligraphy Suleiman commissioned Hundreds of mosques and other buildings across the Empire the most famous examples are from the architect Mimar Sinan on whose work set the tone For centuries of Ottoman architecture that man really knew his geometry, but let's get back to the batter hand it's After Suleiman's death that the general perception of the Ottoman starts to shift towards that sick man idea And I hope I can explain in the rest of this video why the truth is more? Nuanced than that the big obvious moment that people point to of oh, hey Look now they're really in decline is the Battle of Lepanto where the combined forces of Venice Spain Genoa and the Pope banded together In literally the only instance of substantive European cooperation in the entire Renaissance But they succeeded in stopping the Ottomans for pushing any further westward The battle was a loss for the Ottoman Navy But since the European alliance promptly fell apart the second the battle ended there was no follow-up and the Ottomans happily kept Everything that they had already honestly not a terrible outcome Although this famous battle signifies abroad ends to Ottoman conquest. I think it's short-sighted to say that it signaled The Empire's decline after Lepanto. They still had their trade networks. They still had their government They were still producing beautiful art and they happily held on to lots of their territory without any threat of civil war They had some rebellions some client kingdoms came and went here and there and there was some business with Vienna that didn't go anywhere But aside from a few fuzzy frontiers The Mediterranean core of the Empire was very stable for another two and a half centuries After the Golden Age modern scholars have started filing this period under stagnation, but I feel like even that has a negative connotation I personally prefer to describe the Ottoman Empire as chilling in the 1516 and 1700s and I honestly don't think there's anything wrong with that I kind of feel like I'm on a body image campaign, like stop stigmatizing empires they come in all shapes and sizes, but they do This is a really good example of that Anyway, I'll share a couple fun stories from this period and then I'll hop forward to wrap this all up so in the early 1600 Sultan Ahmet rated the state treasury to build a new Imperial mosque nicknames the Blue Mosque for the abundance of rare Persian aquamarine stone decorating the interior legend goes that after the mosque was built some French traders were very impressed and when they went home They told all of their friends about zip utiful tel quasi eat Turkish stone So with time the word till Kwas or turquoise simply referred to that bright blue color Found inside ahmet's mosque, and I generally think it's a gorgeous building when I saw person it absolutely blew me away And on the other side of that you have Sultan Murat the fourth who banned alcohol and coffee and then would go bar-hopping At night in disguise in search of lawbreakers if he found one He was surprisingly reveal his true identity and then gleefully behead them So you win some you lose some also some pirates of his captured Iceland for a hot minute Which is like 17 different layers of confusing but again I'm jumping ahead because the 1700s are mostly just Russia and Austria flexing their muscles and pushing down on the northern Ottoman border and Persia still poking around the eastern Front every once in a while, but internally things were still doing well overall the problem Was that a general apathy towards reform kept the Ottomans half a century behind the rest of Europe in terms of Technology scholarship and military training so it's the 1800s where their problems come to a head all at once and stuff actually starts going tangibly downhill for the Ottomans You remember how earlier I was saying that it would have been really easy to stand up to the Ottomans if you're up properly teamed Up. Yeah, so this is exactly when that happens and unsurprisingly it worked really well the big threats this time around came from the West as the Napoleonic Wars were spilling out all across Europe France rolled through Egypt and Britain followed shortly behind with the result being that Egypt became Semi-independent turning into a vassal state rather than a fully fledged Ottoman territory after that France Russia and England helped Greek revolutionaries gain independence and then France yonk tell G RIA in the confusion then in 1878 another war with Russia saw 50% of the Balkans go poof, England officially swiped Egypt for themselves in 1882 and Italy colonized Libya in 1912 the same year that Serbia Bulgaria and Greece swept up the rest of the Balkans at this point It's really just a big European game of hey, let's partition the Ottomans Whoo, and as you can see It's really after 1870 that the proverbial stick man started dramatically coughing into that handkerchief on the one hand It wasn't all terrible as there were a handful of economic military legal social and technological reforms that helped modernize the empire through the 1800s as a side note this period saw the Refinement of a centuries-old technique of water painting called a blue in what's really reverse watercolor artists transferred dyes into a pool using special tools to create shapes out of and ultimately transfer the image onto a piece of paper the effective produces gives it the nickname paper marbling and it is gorgeous The best part is Abreu is still widely practiced today But returning to my earlier point pretty pictures usually can't save an empire and the fact that them sort of keeping pace is news proves the point a little bit So let's wrap this up after the Ottomans allied with Germany and the Central Powers in the First World War and promptly lost the post-war sykes-picot agreement Between Britain and France carved up the Levantine and Arabian Territories confining the Ottomans to Anatolia under strict supervision of the Allies the Turks proceeded to fight back against the Allied powers in the Turkish War of independence which ended with Mustafa Kemal atatürk and the Republican People's Party Officially caning the Ottoman Empire and founding the modern Republic of Turkey and having fun with the Turkish words Sue me, and that's the Ottoman Empire It had a really long run and I would say a pretty solid one at that while it's a fascinating story in general it's useful because it addresses how we see decline the Ottomans had a rise a peak which turned into a long plateau and then a Sharp fall at the very end It's crucial to our understanding of history that we recognize the possibility of unconventional historical trajectories Like for instance how there can be a middle ground between Golden Age and horrible collapse The Ottomans are a great example of how an empire with good geography and solid economics can spend over two centuries doing the impossible Sitting back and chilling out Thank you all so much for watching and as the credits roll and we take a moment to appreciate our wonderful patrons I like to leave you with a beautiful instrumental rendition of a very famous Turkish song called goon deuce gadget There's a link to a full version in the description But as you can see by the time stamp, I've successfully strung this video out to 14 minutes and 53 seconds So that's the meme I'm out
