The ENTIRE History of the Ottoman Empire in 18 Minutes

Watch next: the other side of the wall in 1453, "Rome Didn't Fall in 476: The Byzantine Empire in 15 Minutes" -    • Rome Didn't Fall in 476: The Byzantine Emp...   It is a hot summer, around the year 1300, and you are a soldier in the army of the Byzantine Empire. Your orders sound easy: chase off a gang of horsemen who keep raiding the farms. Their leader is a man named Osman. Before long, your army is running back to the city. And that gang is about to rule for 600 years: 36 rulers, every one of them from Osman's family. This documentary explores the complete history of the Ottoman Empire, from Osman and his horsemen on the Byzantine frontier, the boy tax and the Janissaries, Timur and the Thunderbolt in 1402, the one-brother rule, Mehmed and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Suleiman the Magnificent, the first coffeehouses, the Cage, the traveler Evliya, the siege of Vienna in 1683, the Tulip Era, Lady Mary and the idea behind the vaccine, the end of the Janissaries, the sick man of Europe, Gallipoli and Mustafa Kemal, to the end of the sultanate in 1922, and the sword of Osman that still waits in Istanbul. Some visual scenes are recreated using AI to help bring the story of the Ottoman Empire to life while remaining faithful to the historical record. RESEARCH & EVIDENCE USED IN THIS VIDEO • Osman and the early Ottomans: no written page survives from his own lifetime, and the account of his dream of a tree was written down more than 100 years after he died; the long siege of the first big Byzantine town (some sources say nine years) • 36 rulers from one family, c.1300 to 1922, "longer than the United States has existed, twice over" • The sword of Osman: tied to the waist of each new sultan for almost 500 years; the 1918 ceremony is the only one ever filmed; the sword is in the palace treasury in Istanbul • The boy tax (devshirme) and the Janissaries: Christian boys taken from Balkan villages, trained, and the smartest made governors, generals and admirals; the sultan lining up on payday in a soldier's uniform; the corps growing from about 20,000 to more than 100,000; the 1622 killing of a teenage sultan; the 1826 destruction of the corps • 1402, Ankara: Timur captures the Thunderbolt (the iron cage told as legend); almost 11 years of civil war between his sons; the one-brother rule; 1595 and 19 brothers; the Cage • 1453: Mehmed at 21; a Hungarian engineer's cannon dragged by 60 oxen; the harbor chain and the ships dragged over the hill on greased logs; the fall of the city on 29 May; Hagia Sophia becomes a mosque; the word kiosk from the Turkish köşk • Suleiman, sultan from 1520 for 46 years, "the Lawgiver" to his own people; Hungary smashed in under two hours; Vienna 1529 and the cannons lost in the mud • Coffee: the first coffeehouse in Istanbul around 1555, two Syrian merchants, the bans that never lasted, coffeehouses in Venice and London a century later • Evliya, the traveler: more than 40 years, a 10-volume travel book • 1683: the second siege of Vienna ends in a single day when the king of Poland and his winged horsemen charge; the croissant story is not true; the peace treaty within 16 years that handed most of Hungary to Austria; the empire lasts 239 more years • The Tulip Era of the early 1700s and the old story that "tulip" comes from a word for turban • 1717: Lady Mary sees smallpox inoculation, has her own son treated and brings the idea to England; decades later an English doctor builds the first vaccine • 1853 "sick man" remark; railways, modern schools, equal laws on paper and the 1876 constitution; Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania break away • 1914 to 1922: the Ottomans join Germany's side; Gallipoli 1915 and eight months of defence; the Armenian genocide; Mustafa Kemal and the new government in Ankara; the sultanate abolished on 1 November 1922 and the last sultan leaving on a British warship If you enjoyed this story, subscribe, and tell us in the comments which story we should tell next: Mesoamerica, or the Islamic World? #OttomanEmpire #History #Istanbul #OttomanHistory #Suleiman