Ottoman Sultans as Roman Heirs: Rumi Identity, Timur's Cage, the Tanzimat

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Educated Ottoman elites would have taken offense at being called Turks, a word they used for rural Anatolian peasants. They called themselves Osmanli, followers of the House of Osman, and Rumi, meaning Romans, heirs to Byzantine lands. Osman I built a frontier state around 1299 from Muslim tribes, Christian peasants and Byzantine renegades. His successors took Bursa in 1326, dominated the Balkans after Kosovo in 1389 and crushed a crusade at Nicopolis in 1396. Then Timur routed them at Ankara in 1402 and took Sultan Bayezid I captive in a cage, setting off an 11-year civil war. The timar land system and light Balkan taxes held the state together, and Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453.

Selim I roughly doubled the empire in the 1510s by annexing Mamluk Egypt and claiming the caliphate, and Suleiman the Magnificent turned the new trade wealth into naval power that reached the Indian Ocean. Modern historians reject the old story of slow decline. New World silver devalued the akce, the Long Turkish War of 1593 to 1606 forced the hiring of musket-armed sekbans, and their demobilization fed the Celali rebellions. The empire adapted, but decentralization strengthened local ayans while Europe centralized. Nationalism broke the millet system, the Tanzimat reforms failed to forge a shared Ottomanism, and the Committee of Union and Progress led the empire into World War I.

• Ottoman forces sent firearms and artillery to the Sultanate of Aceh in Indonesia to fight the Portuguese in the 1560s.
• Sultans were deposed 11 times, but always replaced from the same House of Osman during more than 600 years of unbroken male-line rule.
• The harem's concubines gave sultans many heirs with no foreign royal family able to claim the throne.
• By 1683 the empire still covered about 5.2 million square kilometers.
• Between the late 18th century and World War I, an estimated five to seven million Muslim refugees fled into the shrinking empire; the sultanate was abolished in 1922.