Ottoman Empire
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The Ottoman Empire, also known as Turkey or the Turkish Empire, was a state centred in modern-day Turkey that at its height spanned much of southeastern Europe, western Asia and North Africa. It grew out of a beylik, or principality, founded in northwestern Anatolia around 1299 by the Turkoman leader Osman I. His successors expanded across Anatolia and into the Balkans, turning the small kingdom into a transcontinental empire. In 1453 Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire and making the city his capital; under Selim I the sultans later claimed the title of caliph. Ruling over diverse peoples for six centuries, the empire granted its confessional communities, or millets, varying degrees of autonomy under Islamic law, and reached the height of its power under Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century. Historians generally date its decline from the failed Second Siege of Vienna in 1683, though its economy, society and military remained resilient into the eighteenth century. Technological and territorial setbacks, rising nationalism after the French Revolution and the loss of Balkan provinces followed. Nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms reorganised the state, and in 1876 it briefly experimented with constitutional monarchy before returning to absolute rule under Abdul Hamid II. Allied with the Central Powers in World War I, it was partitioned and replaced by the Republic of Turkey in 1922–1923.