Turkish (Civ5)/Civilopedia

The "Ottoman Turks" first became known to Western Europe in 1227 AD when the tribe migrated into the Seljuk kingdom in Anatolia. Their chieftain Ertugrul would found a principality amid the decaying Seljuk lands in western Anatolia. His son Osman (for whom the kingdom was named by Europeans) and grandson Orhan would greatly expand the empire. Militarily sophisticated, by 1362, these Turks would cross the Dardanelles strait into the last vestiges of the Byzantine Balkans. The Turks became a great power when, in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II captured Byzantium, renaming it Istanbul and making it his capital. The Ottoman Empire would become the largest and longest lasting one of the Middle Ages.
Having taken Constantinople, seat of Orthodox Christianity, Mehmed displayed his political acumen by meeting with the Orthodox patriarch Gennadios. Although the empire would be Muslim, in exchange for tolerance and maintaining its holdings and authority, the Orthodox Church agreed to accept Ottoman authority in all things secular. The Christians within the empire became supporters of the regime and even joined the Ottomans in their efforts against the Catholic West.
Following the fall of Constantinople, the Turks began an unrelenting effort to expand westward and southward. They overran the Balkans, spread across the Levant and Egypt, dominated the Eastern Mediterranean. Their sea-borne trade routes reached across the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean seas and, via the Red Sea, reached the Indian Ocean and the Orient. Expansion into Europe was not halted until the Turkish defeats at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1532. Thwarted, they turned to the conquest of the North African coast. By 1566, the Turkish Empire stretched from Bagdad to Budapest to Algiers to Mecca.
During this period of expansion, the Ottomans were blessed with a long series of able and enlightened sultans, from Mehmed through Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent. Religious tolerance of Orthodox Christianity and Judaism brought economic and intellectual benefits. The cultural traditions and social institutions of the polyglot empire blended to insure a golden age of art and science. Free education in madrasas, expanding literacy, and patronage by the ruling elite made the empire more stable and peaceful than the Western kingdoms.
But by the 1600s, the empire would begin its long decline. The rise of Muscovite Russia and the Mongol onslaught from the east would end Ottoman efforts to spread into Catholic Europe. In the Mediterranean, a coalition of Catholic powers led by Philip II of Spain would end Turkish dominance at Lepanto in 1571. The influx of wealth from the New World made Europe less reliant on the trade routes to and through the Ottoman Empire. Despite the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, the Turks would never again threaten Christian Europe.