“Long live the Republic! “Long live Mustafa Kemal Pasha!” shouted Turkish legislators on October 29, 1923 after proclaiming a new form of government and swearing in Kemal Atatürk as the first president of the nascent country.
But while many celebrated, others still mourned the fall of the Ottoman Empire, one of the greatest superpowers humanity has ever known.
Today marks 100 years since the birth of Turkey and just over a century since the definitive fall of the Turkish Empire.
The final blow was dealt in November 1922, when the Grand National Assembly abolished the office of sultan, ending approximately 600 years of history of the Osmanli dynasty, the ruling family of the empire from its founding in 1299 until its dissolution.
The fall of the superpower, which rivaled the most powerful countries during several periods in history, was a tragedy for the Turks.
The Ottoman State It spread across three continents.reigning in what is now Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Macedonia, Romania, Syria, parts of Saudi Arabia, and the northern coast of Africa.
Many other countries such as Albania, Albania, Cyprus, Iraq, Serbia, Qatar and Yemen were also partially or fully Ottoman.
But in many of these nations the imperial legacy is so controversial that they prefer to forget it, while in others, such as Turkey is remembered with nostalgia and as a golden age that generates pride.
The Osmanli dynasty (or House of Osman) began with an opportunity that Osman I, who was leader of the Seljuk empire, did not miss. After realizing the weakness of his empire and neighboring Byzantium, Osman decided in 1299 to found his emirate in Anatolia, the territory now known as Turkey.
Thus he became the founder and first sultan of a Turkish state that would begin to expand shortly after and would cover more than 5 million km2.
The descendants of Osman, whose name is sometimes spelled Ottman or Othman and from which the term “Ottoman” came, ruled the powerful nation for six centuries.
The fall of Constantinople
However, Olivier Bouquet, professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern History at Paris Diderot University, highlights that in 1299 only a “Turkish State” was founded; The Empire would begin to take shape with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
With a symbolic entry into Constantinople, mounted on a white horse, Sultan Mehmed II ended a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire and subsequently ordered the murder of a large part of the local population, forcing the rest into exile.
He then repopulated the city by bringing people from other parts of the Ottoman territory.
Mehmed II too changed the name of Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbulthe “city of Islam,” and dedicated himself to rebuilding it.
In this way, the city became not only the political and military capital of the empire, but also, due to its position at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, an important world commercial center.
The economic strength that the empire would take was largely due to Mehmed II’s policy of encouraging the increase in the number of merchants and artisans in his state.
He encouraged many merchants to move to Istanbul and establish businesses there. Later rulers continued this policy.
The recipe for success
Apart from the fact that maximum power was only transferred to one person, avoiding rivalries, Bouquet explains that the empire was successful for several other reasons, one of the main ones being its character as a fiscal-military state.
“It was a State in which the extraction of resources from fiscal wealth was linked to military conquest, which had the objective of acquiring new wealth and making more taxes enter in a centralized manner,” he tells BBC Mundo.
Another driving element of the empire, according to the historian, was its military strength.
The Ottoman army’s attacks were rapid and had specialized forcessuch as the famous elite corps of the Janissaries, who guarded the sultan, and the sepoys, a feared troop of elite cavalry who in peacetime were in charge of collecting taxes.
The highly centralized bureaucracy of the empire that allowed it to organize the distribution of its wealth, the fact that it was inspired and united by Islam and that the entire society had the same ruler as a reference also played an important role.
“It was a multi-denominational society and in theory there was no forced conversion (to Islam), but in fact there was. There was a policy of Islamization in certain territories,” says Bouquet.
The Ottomans were also known for their pragmatism.: They took the best ideas from other cultures and made them their own.
Suleiman the Magnificent
One of the best-known sultans of the empire was Suleiman the Magnificent, who reigned between 1520 and 1566 and made his State cover the Balkans and Hungary, reaching the gates of the Roman city of Vienna.
Although in the West he is remembered as “the Magnificent” and in the East as “the Lawgiver”, Suleiman had other titles that were as exaggerated as they were surprising.
These include “Allah’s deputy on Earth,” “Lord of the Lords of this world,” “Possessor of the necks of men,” and “Refuge of all people throughout the world,” among many others that denote his importance.
One of its most controversial names was “Emperor of East and West,” who is seen by historians as a direct challenge to the authority of Rome which, at that time, was surpassed by the Ottoman one.
Although the empire would reach its maximum territorial extent later, the period of Suleiman the Magnificent is considered in the West as a golden era for the Ottomans, in which a large number of successful military campaigns were carried out.
The empire that wanted to be universal
The name “Emperor of the East and West” also makes it clear that The Ottoman Empire saw and considered itself as the only one, with no other equal or similar.
“In the eyes of the Ottoman sultans, there was no other emperor besides the Ottoman sultan,” explains historian Olivier Bouquet.
According to him, the idea of a universal empire comes from the Byzantine heritage and Islam.
“They wanted to conquer all the territories where men and women lived,” he says. “All countries located outside ‘the territories of Islam’ (Dar al-Islam) had a calling to be conquered.”
This is one reason that explains the long duration of the Ottoman Empire: His navy had no limits in the conquest of territories, which advanced for centuries.
“And the empire begins to weaken the moment the conquests become difficult or stop,” adds Bouquet.
The beginning of the end
A first event that weakened the superpower that the Ottoman State had become was its defeat in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which it faced the Holy League, a military coalition made up of Catholic States and led by the Spanish Monarchy. and a group of territories of what is now Italy.
It was one of the bloodiest battles humanity had seen since ancient times. and ended Ottoman military expansion in the Mediterranean.
There the fortunes of the empire ended and a long and progressive decline began in the centuries that followed.
Several Miscalculations added to the political and economic instability of Istanbul at the beginning of the 20th century ended up crumbling an empire whose shine was already tarnished.
The first of them was the First Balkan War (1912-1913), in which he faced the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia), which, supported by Russia, sought to expel the Ottomans from their lands. .
Military inferior, The Ottoman Empire lost the war and with it all its territories in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople. and its surroundings.
Historians remember this defeat as a “humiliating” episode for the Ottomans and another turning point.
The final blow
The remaining Ottoman territories were going through a bad economic time, due to the development of other trade routes, growing commercial rivalry with America and Asia, and rising unemployment.
They also faced the expansionist ambitions of European powers such as Great Britain and France.
Furthermore, tensions between different religious and ethnic groups had increased. Armenians, Kurds and Greeks, among other peoples, felt increasingly oppressed by the Turks.
With all those problems, Istanbul embarked on a new war against a powerful alliance led by France, the British Empire, the United States and Russia.
The victory of the allies in the Middle East during the First World War (1914-1918) was one of the triggers of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, which already had its days numbered.
After this event, the French mandate in Syria and British mandates in Iraq and Palestine were created, as planned, all under the supervision of the League of Nations (the body that preceded the UN.
The Ottomans were unaware that in 1917, in the middle of the war, France and Great Britain had already secretly agreed to divide their territories with the Sykes-Picot treaty..
That same year, the Balfour Declarationa document in which the British government promised the Jewish people a “home” in the region of Palestine, which was also part of the empire.
The nascent state: Türkiye
Officially, The empire ceased to exist on November 1, 1922, when the office of sultan was abolished.
A year later the Republic of Türkiye was born.
After leading a republican revolution, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, considered “the father of modern Turkey”became its first president.
The last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed VI, feared being killed by revolutionaries and had to be evacuated from Istanbul by British guards.
He ended up exiled in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, in the seaside resort of San Remo, the same place where the division of his empire had been agreed.
There he died four years later, so poor that Italian authorities confiscated his coffin until debts to local merchants were paid.
Meanwhile, the nascent republic left its imperial aspirations behind and relied on Kemalism, an ideology implemented by Atatürkwho defended republicanism, populism , nationalism, secularism, statism and reformism.
Many historians claim that the secularism of modern Turkey is a “great” legacy of the Ottoman Empire.
Neo-Ottomanism
On the other hand, the Ottoman Caliphate briefly continued as an institution in Turkey, although with greatly reduced authority, until it too was abolished on March 3, 1924.
Currently the view that the defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War ended their empire is contested by some who claim that its fall is the fault of the West.
“The idea of Western responsibility (in the fall of the empire) has been taken up for several years by the Ankara regime and the current president of the Turkish Republic (Recep Tayyip Erdogan),” says historian Olivier Bouquet.
And in recent years, the sense of nostalgia that some in Turkey feel for the Ottoman era has fueled the resurgence of so-called neo-Ottomanism.
It is an Islamist and imperialist political ideology that, in its broadest sense, advocates honor Turkey’s Ottoman past and increase Turkish influence in regions that were under Ottoman rule.
For many decades, the leaders of modern Turkey strove to distance themselves from the imperial legacy and Islam with the intention of projecting a more “Western” and “secular” face.
But since his rise to power, Erdogan has made no secret of his nostalgia for his country’s Ottoman past and its Islamic heritage.
Evidence of this was the controversial conversion in 2020 of Hagia Sophia – which Atatürk had converted into one of the most iconic museums in Istanbul – into a mosque.
Similarly, Erdogan has repeatedly demonstrated his admiration for Selim I, a sultan who led one of the greatest expansions of the Ottoman Empire.
After winning a constitutional referendum in 2017, which greatly expanded his powers, he made his first public appearance at the tomb of the former Ottoman sultan.
And, more recently, he decided to name one of the bridges built over the famous Strait of Istanbul, on the Bosphorus, after him.
“The Ottoman Empire disappeared, but there is a neo-Ottomanism that has developed (…) there are many more references to the Ottoman Empire today than there were at the end of the 20th century,” concludes Bouquet.
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