Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did the Ottoman Empire begin?
The foundation and rise of the Ottoman Empire is a period of history that started with the emergence of the Ottoman principality in c.1299, and ended with the conquest of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. This period witnessed the foundation of a political entity ruled by the Ottoman Dynasty in the northwestern Anatolian region of Bithynia, and its transformation from a small principality on the Byzantine frontier into an empire spanning the Balkans and Anatolia. For this reason, this period in the empire's history has been described as the Proto-Imperial Era.[1] Throughout most of this period, the Ottomans were merely one of many competing states in the region, and relied upon the support of local warlords and vassals to maintain control over their realm. By the middle of the fifteenth century the Ottoman sultans were able to accumulate enough personal power and authority to establish a centralized imperial state, a process which was brought to fruition by Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451-1481).[2] The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 is seen as the symbolic moment when the emerging Ottoman state shifted from a mere principality into an empire, marking a major turning point in its history.[3]
The late period of the Byzantine Empire as a small state begins with the Palaiologos dynasty, which was particularly threatened by the advances of the Ottoman Empire and the economic influence of Venice and Genoa. An empire weakened in part through civil war suffered a severe blow when Thessalonica was captured in 1430, and finally fell to the Ottomans (Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and of Mistras in 1461). The Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), founded in the wake of the Fourth Crusade, also forms a part of Byzantine history.
Faisal, Hussein's third son, played an active role in the revolt as commander of the Arab army while the overall leadership was placed in the hands of his father. The idea of an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire was first conceived by Abdullah. Only after gradual and persistent nudging did Abdullah convince his father, the conservative Sharif of Mecca, to move from the idea of home rule of a portion of Arabia within the Ottoman Empire to complete and total independence of the entire Empire's Arab provinces. Hussein recognized the necessity of breaking away from the Empire in the beginning of 1914 when he realized that he would not be able to complete his political objectives within the framework of the Ottomans. To have any success with the Arab revolt, the backing of another great power was crucial. 
European merchants active in the Ottoman Empire are by far the most highly studied aspect of Ottoman commerce, a fact which has frequently caused their importance to be exaggerated. European merchants were by no means dominant in the empire during this period,[35] and far from imposing their will upon the Ottomans, they were required to accommodate themselves to the terms which the Ottomans set for them.[36] These terms were defined in a series of trade agreements known as the "capitulations" (Ottoman Turkish: ʿahdnāme),[nb 3] which granted Europeans the right to establish mercantile communities in specified Ottoman ports and to pay a lower rate of tariff on their goods. European communities were except from regular taxation and were given judicial autonomy with regard to personal and family issues. All commercial disputes were to be settled in the empire's Sharia courts, until the 1670s when they were granted the right to appeal major cases directly to Istanbul, where they could be argued by their resident ambassadors.[38] Capitulations were granted first to the French (1569), then the English (1580), and finally to the Dutch (1612).[39] The arrival of Western European traders in the Levant, dubbed the "Northern Invasion", did not result in their takeover or domination of Mediterranean commerce,[40] but it did usher in certain changes. Venice in particular suffered from heavy competition, and its commercial presence declined significantly, particularly after 1645, when the Ottomans and Venetians went to war over Crete.[41] The English were by far the most successful European merchants in the empire during the seventeenth century, and they benefited from friendly relations between the two states. The Ottomans exported raw silk and imported cheap woolen cloth, as well as tin necessary for the production of military armaments.[42]
The Ottomans had not yet developed their own financial system in line with London and Paris. Since the beginning of the 18th century, the government was aware of the need for a reliable bank. The Galata bankers as well as the Bank of Constantinople did not have the capital or competence for such large undertakings. As such, Ottoman borrowings followed the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem.
The establishing structure (Ruling institution of the Ottoman Empire) of the Ottoman Empire (13th century) was an Islamic state in which the head of the Ottoman state was the Sultan. The social system was organized around millet. Millet structure allowed a great degree of religious, cultural and ethnic continuity to non-Muslim populations across the subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire and at the same time it permitted their incorporation into the Ottoman administrative, economic and political system. The Ottoman-appointed governor collected taxes and provided security, while the local religious or cultural matters were left to the regional communities to decide. On the other hand, the sultans were Muslims and the laws that bound them were based on the Sharia, the body of Islamic law, as well as various cultural customs. The Sultan, beginning in 1517, was also a Caliph, the leader of all the Sunni Muslims in the world. By the turn of the 19th century the Ottoman ruling elite recognized the need to restructure the legislative, military and judiciary systems to cope with their new political rivals in Europe. When the millet system started to lose its efficiency due to the rise of nationalism within its borders, the Ottoman Empire explored new ways of governing its territory composed of diverse populations.
Armenia's most crippling problem was its dispute with its neighbor to the west, the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had killed as many as 1.5 million Armenians during the Armenian Genocide. Although the armies of the Ottoman Empire eventually occupied the South Caucasus in the summer of 1918 and stood poised to crush the republic, Armenia resisted until the end of October, when the Ottoman Empire capitulated to the Allied powers. Though the Ottoman Empire was partially occupied by the Allies, and while being invaded by Franco-Armenian forces of the Cilicia Campaign, the Turks did not withdraw their forces to the pre-war Russo-Turkish boundary until February 1919 and maintained many troops mobilized along this frontier.
In 1355 the Serbian Empire was dissolved and several Albanian principalities were formed including the Balsha, Kastrioti, Thopia and Shpata as the major ones.
In the late 14th and the early 15th century the Ottoman Empire conquered parts of south and central Albania. The Albanians regained control of their territories in 1444 when the League of Lezhë was established, under the rule of George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero. The League was a military alliance of feudal lords in Albania forged in Lezhë on 2 March 1444, initiated and organised under Venetian patronage with Skanderbeg as leader of the regional Albanian and Serbian chieftains united against the Ottoman Empire. The main members of the league were the Arianiti, Balšić, Dukagjini, Muzaka, Spani, Thopia and Crnojevići. For 25 years, from 1443–1468, Skanderbeg's 10,000 man army marched through Ottoman territory winning against consistently larger and better supplied Ottoman forces. Threatened by Ottoman advances in their homeland, Hungary, and later Naples and Venice – their former enemies – provided the financial backbone and support for Skanderbeg's army. By 1450 it had certainly ceased to function as originally intended, and only the core of the alliance under Skanderbeg and Araniti Comino continued to fight on. After Skanderbeg's death in 1468, the sultan "easily subdued Albania," but Skanderbeg's death did not end the struggle for independence, and fighting continued until the Ottoman siege of Shkodra in 1478–79, a siege ending when the Republic of Venice ceded Shkodra to the Ottomans in the peace treaty of 1479.
Ottoman supremacy in the west Balkan region began in 1385 with their success in the Battle of Savra. Following that battle, the Ottoman Empire established the Sanjak of Albania covering the conquered parts of Albania, which included territory stretching from the Mat River in the north to Chameria in the south. In 1419, Gjirokastra became the administrative centre of the Sanjak of Albania. Beginning in the 14th century, the Ottomans expanded their empire from Anatolia to much of the Balkans (Rumelia).
This treaty was a success for the Ottoman Empire, as vast areas had been annexed. However, the new status quo did not last for long. Abbas I, who now used the time and resources as a result of the peace on the main front with the Ottomans, would successfully deal with the other issues (amongst which, the Uzbeks and the revolts), and bided for a suitable moment to regain his possessions. When the Ottoman Empire was engaged with the Jelali revolts, he was able to regain most of his losses, which the Ottoman Empire had to accept in the Treaty of Nasuh Pasha, 22 years after this treaty.
For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. Not only did Armenians read this Turkish in Armenian script, so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish. This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. When the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script but in the Turkish language. From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
Many twentieth-century scholars argued that power of the Ottoman Empire began waning after the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566, and without the acquisition of significant new wealth the empire went into decline, a concept known as the Ottoman Decline Thesis. Since the late 1970's, however, historians increasingly came to question the idea of Ottoman decline, and now there is a consensus among academic historians that the Ottoman Empire did not decline.
In 1876, the Young Ottomans had their defining moment when Sultan Abdul Hamid II reluctantly promulgated the Ottoman constitution of 1876 (), the first attempt at a constitution in the Ottoman Empire, ushering in the First Constitutional Era. Although this period was short-lived, with Abdul Hamid II ultimately suspending the constitution and parliament in 1878 in favor of a return to absolute monarchy with himself in power, the influence of the Young Ottomans continued until the collapse of the empire. Several decades later, another group of reform-minded Ottomans, the Young Turks, repeated the Young Ottomans' efforts, leading to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and the beginning of the Second Constitutional Era.
Beginning in the late 15th and early 16th century, the Ottoman and Safavid Empires started to fight for influence over the Caucasus. Many Caucasian peoples grew wary of both sides, and attempted to play one side off against the other. The rivalry was embodied by both the struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam and the regional conflict of the two empires. The only major success for either side was the conversion of the Azerbaijanis by the Persians to Shia Islam. Originally, relations with Russia was seen as a possible balance to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, and a pro-Russian camp in Chechen politics formed (there were also pro-Ottoman and pro-Persian camps; each viewed their favored empire as the least bad of the three). In reality, the most favored empire from the beginning was the Ottoman Empire, but that did not mean the Chechens were not wary of a potential Ottoman attempt at conquering them. Any hope towards positive relations with Russia ended in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when tensions with the Cossacks escalated and Russia began trying to conquer the Caucasus, starting with Georgia. After this point, many Chechens sealed, forever, their preference towards Istanbul against Isfahan and Moscow by converting to Sunni Islam in an attempt to win the sympathy of the Ottomans. However, they were too late- the Ottoman Empire was already well into its period of decline and collapse, and not only was it no longer willing to assist Muslims (especially newly converted people, who were viewed as "less Muslim" than peoples with a long Islamic heritage), but it was no longer able to even maintain its own state. Hence, the rivalry between Turkey and Persia became more and more abstract and meaningless as the threat of conquest by Russia and being pushed out of their lands or even annihilated by the Cossacks grew and grew.
In 1475, the Ottomans imprisoned Meñli I Giray for three years for resisting the invasion. After returning from captivity in Constantinople, he accepted the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, Ottoman sultans treated the khans more as allies than subjects. The khans continued to have a foreign policy independent from the Ottomans in the steppes of Little Tartary. The khans continued to mint coins and use their names in Friday prayers, two important signs of sovereignty. They did not pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire; instead the Ottomans paid them in return for their services of providing skilled outriders and frontline cavalry in their campaigns. Later on, Crimea lost power in this relationship as the result of a crisis in 1523, during the reign of Meñli's successor, Mehmed I Giray. He died that year and beginning with his successor, from 1524 on, Crimean khans were appointed by the Sultan.
Nevertheless, border disputes between Persia and the Ottoman Empire did not end. Between 1555 and 1918, Persia and the Ottomans signed no less than 18 treaties that would re-address their disputed borders. The exact demarcation according to this treaty would permanently begin during the 19th century, essentially laying out the rough outline for the frontier between modern day Iran and the states of Turkey and Iraq (the former Ottoman-Persian border until 1918, when the Ottoman Empire lost its territories in the Middle East following their defeat in World War I.) Nevertheless, according to Professor Ernest Tucker, the Zuhab treaty can be seen as the "culmination" of a process of normalisation between the two that had commenced with the Peace of Amasya. As opposed to any other Ottoman-Safavid treaty, the Zuhab treaty proved to be more "resilient", and it became a "point of departure" for almost all further agreements on a diplomatic level between the two neighbors.
In the 1850s, the modern theatre was founded in the Ottoman Empire by an Armenian theatre company. As Muslims did not consider acting a suitable profession, the first actors in the Ottoman Empire was Christian Armenians, and the stigma of the profession was especially the case for females, the actresses received a higher salary than their male colleagues, and they could also continue their careers undisturbed after the Armenian theater monopoly was abolished in the Ottoman Empire in 1879; after this point, male Armenian actors found competition from Muslim Turkish male actors, while no Muslim Turkish female actor ever performed on stage before 1919. She and her college Arousyak Papazian are mentioned by the historian Mikael Nalbandian as two pioneers in deifying prejudices by performing on stage. As such, they became publicly visible women in Muslim Ottoman Empire in a period when the female members of the audience had to watch their plays behind screens. Aghavni Papazian was also historical as the first actress to have performed in Iran, when she appeared on stage in Tabriz. This was, however, before a Christian Armenian audience; the Muslim audience in Tabriz and Iran did not see the performance of an actress until 1888, and in the case of Teheran, not until the performance of Madame Golofin and Madame Babian in 1897.
As Bedross Der Matossian from Columbia University describes, for about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian script. Not only did Armenians read Armeno-Turkish, but so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. The Armenian script was also used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. Also, when the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script, but in the Turkish language. From the end of the 19th-century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
Growth halted when Mongol warlord Timur (also known as ""Tamerlane"") captured Bayezid I in the Battle of Ankara in 1402, beginning the Ottoman Interregnum. This episode was characterized by the division of the Ottoman territory amongst Bayezid I's sons, who submitted to Timurid authority. When a number of Ottoman territories regained independent status, ruin for the Empire loomed. However, the empire recovered, as the youngest son of Bayezid I, Mehmed I, waged offensive campaigns against his ruling brothers, thereby reuniting Asia Minor and declaring himself sultan in 1413.
Around this time the Ottoman naval fleet developed, such that they were able to challenge Venice, a naval power. They also attempted to reconquer the Balkans. By the time of Mehmed I's grandson, Mehmed II (ruled 1444–1446; 1451–1481), the Ottomans could lay siege to Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. A factor in this siege was the use of muskets and large cannons introduced by the Ottomans. The Byzantine fortress succumbed in 1453, after 54 days of siege. Without its capital the Byzantine Empire disintegrated. The future successes of the Ottomans and later empires would depend upon the exploitation of gunpowder.
It faced and was defeated by the Allied Powers that had formed around the Triple Entente. The Powers' origin was the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879. Despite having nominally joined the Triple Alliance before, Italy did not take part in World War I on the side of the Central Powers; the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria did not join until after World War I had begun, even though the Ottoman Empire had retained close relations with both Germany and Austria-Hungary since the beginning of the 20th century.
It has pleased western historians to write of a decline of the Ottoman Empire as though a stable and uncontested polity of that name once existed. The borders did expand and contract but they were always dynamic and always in "question" right from the beginning. The Ottoman Empire was created from the lands of the former eastern Roman Empire on the occasion of the latter's violent demise. The last Roman emperor died fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of his capital, Constantinople, overwhelmed by the Ottoman military, in May, 1453. The victors inherited his remaining territory in the Balkans.
Ottoman's did not see a chance of these new states to stand against new Russia. These new Muslim states needed support to be emerged as viable independent states. In order to consolidate a buffer zone with Russia (both for the Empire and these new states), however, Ottomans needed to expel the Bolsheviks from Azerbaijan and the North Caucasus before the end of war. Based on 1917 negotiations, Enver concluded that Empire should not to expect much military assistance from the Muslims of the Caucasus as they were the one in need. Enver also knew the importance of Kars—Julfa railroad and the adjacent areas for this support. Goal was set forward beginning from 1918 to end of the war.
This period of early Ottoman rule will be long remembered as Sarajevo's golden age. The 16th century was its peak, when nearly the whole city area (that would last until the late 19th century) was built. During the 17th century, Sarajevo didn't expand, although its population continued to grow. Its residents lived luxuriously, and Sarajevo was the richest city in the West Balkans after Dubrovnik. However the 17th century also brought the start of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. With the defeats at Vienna, the empire grew weaker, and along with the empire as a whole did its various regions. Although Sarajevo would remain prosperous until the very end of the 17th century, the latter half of it proved to be the beginning of the end.
The Ottoman ayan (singlular: ayn) were local notables or dynasts that maintained different extents of administrative control over swaths of land in the Ottoman Empire from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. These dynasts held significant autonomy from the central Ottoman government but did not challenge the state. Though the title could only be earned by Muslims, their leadership was secular. This elite class consisted of, “Wealthy merchants, heads of Janissary garrisons, leaders of important craft guilds, those who had bought the right to collect taxes for the government in Istanbul, and those who supervised the distributions of wealth generated by, and the maintenance of, pious endowments.” Ultimately, their presence was a part of a greater decentralizing trend experienced in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the 16th century, one which would come to define the Empire’s structure until its fall in the early 20th century.
The Ottoman public debt was a term which dated back to 24 August 1855, when the Ottoman Empire first entered into loan contracts with its European creditors shortly after the beginning of the Crimean War. 
The Greek Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople were considered by the Ottoman governments as the ruling authorities of the entire Orthodox Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, whether ethnically Greek or not. Although the Ottoman state did not force non-Muslims to convert to Islam, Christians faced several types of discrimination intended to highlight their inferior status in the Ottoman Empire. Discrimination against Christians, particularly when combined with harsh treatment by local Ottoman authorities, led to conversions to Islam, if only superficially. In the 19th century, many "crypto-Christians" returned to their old religious allegiance.