Ottoman Empire
Islamic empire centered on Anatolia and the Balkans, c. 1299–1922
Also known as: Ottoman Empire, Sublime Porte, The Ottomans, Turkey (to 1922)
The Ottoman Empire was founded by Osman I in north-western Anatolia at the close of the thirteenth century, conquered Constantinople in 1453, and dominated the Middle East and the Balkans until its collapse in the First World War. Quigley treats the Ottoman state across his corpus chiefly in two registers: in The Evolution of Civilizations as the late-stage Universal Empire phase of Islamic Civilization, and in Tragedy and Hope as the diplomatic and territorial subject of the nineteenth-century "Eastern Question" and of the 1914–1922 settlement that produced the modern Republic of Turkey, the mandates of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan, and the Greek-Turkish population exchanges.
Foundation and Expansion: 1299–1683
Quigley's narrative of Ottoman foundation follows the gazi tradition: a frontier Anatolian Turkish polity, organized around mounted military bands fighting on the Byzantine frontier, gradually absorbing rival Anatolian beyliks, crossing into Europe in the 1350s, and culminating in Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The classical expansion ran through the reigns of Selim I (1512–1520, conquering Syria, Egypt, and the Holy Cities), Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566, the first siege of Vienna in 1529), and the long seventeenth-century decline that turned on the failed second siege of Vienna in 1683. The Evolution of Civilizations uses the Ottoman case as one of his clearer illustrations of how a Universal Empire — established by a successful instrument of expansion (the timar-supported sipahi cavalry) — became progressively rigid as the instrument transitioned into a self-reproducing institution incapable of further structural innovation.
The Quigley Framing: Islamic Civilization in Universal Empire
For Quigley the Ottoman Empire is the institutional vehicle of the Universal-Empire stage of Islamic Civilization. In The Evolution of Civilizations the Ottoman state is the answer to the question of which polity successfully imposed a single political framework on the post-Abbasid Islamic world. The relevant comparison is to Rome: a peripheral, militarily innovative society conquers the older civilization core, imposes a single legal-administrative order, and then enters a long Decay during which technical and economic capacities atrophy as institutional rigidity accumulates. Quigley dates the Ottoman peak to the sixteenth century and the Decay to the long seventeenth century onward; Western pressure (Russian, Austrian, French, British) from the eighteenth century onward is the external pressure exposing the institutional rigidity, not its primary cause.
The Eastern Question, 1774–1914
Tragedy and Hope treats the long "Eastern Question" — what would replace the Ottoman state in its European territories — as one of the central themes of nineteenth-century European diplomacy. The 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (Russian claim to protect Orthodox Christians in the Empire), the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Bulgarian crisis of 1875–1878 and the Treaty of Berlin (1878), the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896, the Young Turk revolution of 1908, the Bosnia annexation crisis of 1908, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 — all are episodes in the long unwinding of Ottoman authority. Quigley's index summarises: "Berlin, Congress and Treaty of, 1878, 118-20, 219" (T&H 1327). His framing of the period is that the great Powers competed to inherit territory and influence as the Ottoman state contracted, with the Russian and Austrian Empires the principal land-power claimants and Britain, France, and Germany the principal maritime-commercial claimants.
1914–1923: Collapse and Successor States
Ottoman entry into the First World War on the Central Powers' side in November 1914, the disasters of Sarıkamış, Gallipoli (a defensive Ottoman victory), the loss of Baghdad in 1917 and Damascus and Aleppo in 1918, the Armistice of Mudros (October 1918), the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920), and the Turkish War of Independence under Mustafa Kemal (1919–1922) form the central narrative of the Empire's last decade. Quigley discusses these episodes substantially in Tragedy and Hope and in Weapons Systems and Political Stability — the Gallipoli campaign being a recurring example in his analysis of the relationship between weapons systems and tactical outcomes. The Lausanne Treaty (July 1923) replaced Sèvres and recognized the Republic of Turkey, with population exchanges defining its ethno-religious composition. The other Ottoman territories — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, the Hejaz — became British and French mandates under the League of Nations system.
Legacy in the Quigley Argument
The Ottoman dissolution is one of Quigley's textbook examples of the structural pattern he elaborates in The Evolution of Civilizations: a Universal Empire, once it ceases to be capable of further institutional adaptation, persists for centuries as a hollow political form before being either invaded by an external civilization (the Western powers in this case) or shattered into successor states. The Republic of Turkey, established by Kemal in 1923, represents in Quigley's framing the unusual case of a successor state actively undertaking Westernization — adopting the Latin alphabet (1928), the Swiss civil code, secular education, women's suffrage (1934), and parliamentary government — as a deliberate civilizational reorientation. The other successor regions remained, in Quigley's reading, sites of continuing instability through the entire twentieth century — a pattern he traces through the Egyptian revolution of 1952 (T&H 1072), the Suez crisis of 1956 (T&H 1076), and the broader history of Arab-Israeli conflict.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 22 Quigley
Ottoman Empire [first surface in T&H, in the context of Balkan history].
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 111 Quigley
Caliph, 111-12, 117.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 118 Quigley
Berlin, Congress and Treaty of, 1878, 118-20, 219.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 240 Quigley
Bulgaria… Treaty of Neuilly (1919), 267, 274; in Macedonia (IMRO), 276.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1068 Quigley
Egypt, history, 1068-83.
- evolution-of-civilizations Quigley
The Ottoman state… as the Universal Empire stage of Islamic Civilization.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
Gallipoli and the late-Ottoman defensive system illustrate the relationship between weapons systems and tactical outcomes.