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Essay on Ottoman Empire and society
Ottoman Empire is a dynastic state centered in what is now Turkey, founded in the late 13th century and dismantled in the early 20th century. At its height in the mid-1500s, at the end of the reign of Süleyman I, the Ottoman Empire controlled a vast area extending from the Balkan Peninsula to the Middle East and North Africa. The empire went into slow decline after Süleyman, and by the early 1900s it controlled only Asia Minor (the Anatolia region of present-day Turkey) and parts of the Balkans and the Middle East. The Ottomans lost even more territory during World War I (1914-1918). Allied troops occupied the empire from the end of the war until 1922, when nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) drove them out; Kemal abolished the empire later that year and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
The Ottoman state and its society rested on a lot of institutions. In creating these institutions, the Ottomans drew on the experiences of previous Muslim empires, as well as their own Turkish mores and ghazi standards. A lot of these institutions were tainted or tarnished over time, contributing in part to the empire’s decline. The Ottomans’ ancestors, 11th-century Turkish intruders from Central Asia, brought with them the belief that leadership was a divine right bestowed on a chosen family.
This went against the established Islamic practice of elected leadership, the model for which was the selection of Abu Bakr as Islam’s first caliph, or successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Osman and his descendants ruled in an unbroken chain down to the abolition of the sultanate by Mustafa Kemal in 1922.There were two additional concepts that accompanied Ottoman practices of progression. One was that, up until the reign of Muhammad III (1595-1603), Ottoman princes were sent off to the provinces in the company of their tutors.......
