![]() ![]() However, in May 1453, after a seven-week-long siege, Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, led by Sultan Mehmed II, henceforth known as “Mehmed the Conqueror.” The city was renamed “Istanbul,” and the famous cathedral, Hagia Sophia, was turned into a mosque. Despite these setbacks, the Byzantine Empire managed to thrive both culturally and economically. Over the years Constantinople was besieged by Arabs, Persians, and Russians, and in 1204 the city was sacked and destroyed by members of the Fourth Crusade. Rather, miraculously, when the western part of the empire fell apart in the fifth and sixth centuries, the eastern part survived. ![]() In the year 330 of the Common Era, emperor Constantine had moved the capital to the eastern city that came to carry his name. As far as the Byzantine Empire is concerned, it claimed a legacy that went right back to the Roman era. Before long they came to completely surround the Byzantines - now reduced to the size of little more than the city of Constantinople itself. After having conquered most of their neighbors, the Ottomans moved across the Bosporus and into Europe in the early fifteenth century. While they ruled much of North Africa and the Middle East, they ruled much of Europe too - the Balkans in particular and large parts of Eastern Europe.įirst founded in 1299, the Ottoman Empire began as one of many small states on the territory of what today is Turkey. Although the Turks too were Muslim and called themselves a “caliphate” - the Ottoman Caliphate, 1517-1924 - their capital was the former Greek city of Constantinople. Altogether there were thirty-six Ottoman sultans. Remarkably, the same dynasty, the Osmans, was in charge of the empire from Osman I in the thirteenth century until the last sultan, Mehmed VI, in the twentieth. The Ottomans were Turks with their origin in Central Asia, and they spoke Turkish, not Arabic. The empire which rose to replace the Abbasids as leaders of the Muslim world were the Ottomans. ![]()
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