Overview of the Ottoman Empire

Within the 14th and early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire ruled over Southeastern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. The Turkoman tribal chieftain Osman I founded it around the end of the 13th century in the town of Söğüt (modern-day Bilecik Province) in northwestern Anatolia. After crossing into Europe in 1354, the Ottoman beylik was turned into a transcontinental empire with the conquest of the Balkans. With Mehmed the Conqueror's conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire. The Ottoman Empire reached its pinnacle of power and affluence under Suleiman the Magnificent reign and the highest development of its governance, social, and economic systems. At the start of the 17th century, the Empire had 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some were eventually subsumed by the Ottoman Empire, while others were given varying degrees of autonomy over the ages. For six centuries, the Ottoman Empire was at the centre of exchanges between the Eastern and Western civilizations, with Constantinople (now Istanbul) as its capital and control over areas around the Mediterranean Basin. Following the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Empire was supposed to have entered a period of decline, but most academic historians no longer hold this view. Through the 17th and much of the 18th centuries, the Empire maintained a flexible and robust economy, society, and military. However, the Ottoman military system slipped behind that of its European rivals, the Habsburg and Russian empires, during a long period of peace from 1740 to 1768. As a result, the Ottomans suffered significant military defeats in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Following the London Protocol in 1830 and the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, the successful Greek War of Independence ended with decolonization. This and other setbacks pushed them to embark on the Tanzimat, a sweeping reform and modernization program. Despite significant territory losses, particularly in the Balkans, where several new republics arose, the Ottoman state grew far stronger and more organized during the nineteenth century. In the New Turk Rebellion of 1908, the Committee of Union and Progress founded the Second Constitutional Era, transforming the Empire into a constitutional monarchy with competitive multi-party elections. A few years later, in the 1913 coup d'état, the newly radicalized and nationalistic Union and Progress Party took control of the country, establishing a one-party system. The CUP joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers, intending to break free from the diplomatic isolation that had led to the Empire's recent territorial setbacks. While the Empire managed to hold its own during the conflict, it was beset by internal strife, particularly with the Arab Revolt in its Arabian possessions. During this time, the Ottoman authorities committed genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Resulting the collapse of the Empire and the occupation of part of its territory by the Allied Powers in World War I, the Empire was partitioned, and its Middle Eastern holdings were divided between the United Kingdom and France. The success of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkish War of Independence against the occupying Allies resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in the Anatolian heartland and the end of the Ottoman monarchy.

The name Ottoman is a historical Anglicization of Osman I, the Empire's founder and ruler of the governing House of Osman, often known as the Ottoman dynasty. Osman's name was a Turkishized version of the Arabic name Uthmn. The Empire was known in Ottoman Turkish as Devlet-i ʿAlīye-Yi ʿOsmānīye, which meant "The Supreme Ottoman State," or Osmānlı Devleti. It is acknowledged as Osmanlı İmparatorluğu or Osmanlı Devleti in modern Turkish. In the fourteenth century, the Turkish name Osmanlı originally referred to Osman's tribe supporters. The term was later coined to designate the Empire's military and administrative elite. However, when applied to urban, educated people, the name " Türk" was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population and was considered a derogatory slur. An educated, town-residence Turkish-speaker who was not a member of the military-administrative class would commonly refer to himself as an Osmanlı nor as a Türk, but rather as an Rūmī or "Roman," signifying a resident of the ancient Byzantine Empire's area in the Balkans and Anatolia. Other Muslim peoples throughout the Empire and beyond used the word Rūmī to refer to Turkish speakers. This phrase began to lose favour when referring to Ottoman Turkish speakers around the end of the seventeenth century. Instead, it came to be linked with the Empire's Greek population, a meaning it still carries in Turkey today. The terms Ottoman Empire, Turkish Empire, and Turkey were frequently interchanged in Western Europe, with Turkey became increasingly popular in formal and informal settings. When the newly founded Ankara-based Turkish government adopted Turkey as the sole official's name in 1920–1923, the paradox was legally terminated.

Rise

Anatolia was fragmented into a patchwork of independent Turkish princes known as the Anatolian Beyliks as the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum fell in the 13th century. One of these beyliks, in the province of Bithynia on the Byzantine Empire's border, was led by Osman I, a Turkish tribal chieftain of unknown origins from whom the name Ottoman was derived. Many, though not all Osman's early followers, converted to Islam, including Turkish tribal tribes and Byzantine renegades. By conquering Byzantine settlements along the Sakarya River, Osman expanded his principality's jurisdiction. Osman's ascendancy was aided by a Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302. Orhan, Osman's son, took Bursa in northwestern Anatolia in 1326, establishing it as the Ottoman state's new capital and displacing Byzantine rule. In 1387, the Venetians were defeated, and the key port city of Thessaloniki was devastated. In Kosovo, the Ottoman conquest in 1389 effectively ended Serbian control in the region, allowing the Ottomans to expand into Europe. The Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 for the Bulgarian Tsardom of Vidin, often regarded as the Middle Ages' final large-scale crusade, failed to halt the triumphant Turks' march. Bayezid's sons fought over succession in the following civil war, known as the Fetret Devri, which lasted from 1402 to 1413. It came to an end when Sultan Mehmed I ascended to the throne and restored Ottoman control.

Development and Peak

Mehmed the Conqueror, Murad II's son, reorganized the polity and military and seized Constantinople on 29 May 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire. In exchange for accepting Ottoman control, Mehmed enabled the Eastern Orthodox Church to keep its autonomy and land. The bulk of the Orthodox people considered Ottoman control preferable to Venetian rule due to tensions between western European kingdoms and the eventual Byzantine Empire. Ottoman progress on the Italian peninsula was hampered by Albanian resistance. The Ottoman Empire experienced a period of expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Empire thrived under the leadership of a succession of dedicated and capable Sultans. It prospered economically due to its control of the primary overland commercial routes connecting Europe and Asia. By conquering Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran in the Battle of Chaldiran, Sultan Selim I (1512 to 1520) dramatically enlarged the Empire's eastern and southern borders. By overcoming and seizing the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, Selim I established Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt and maintained a naval presence on the Red Sea. Following the Ottoman expansion, the Portuguese Empire and the Ottoman Empire competed to become the region's dominating power.

Stagnation and Reform

Inflation and the rapidly rising costs of warfare, affecting Europe and the Middle East, but the Ottoman Empire under increasing strain in the second part of the sixteenth century. These tensions culminated in a series of crises around 1600, putting enormous strain on the Ottoman administration. In reply to these challenges, the Empire underwent a series of changes to its political and military structures, allowing it to successfully adjust to the changing conditions of the seventeenth century while remaining dominant militarily and economically. As a result, most academics today dispute the concept that the mid-twentieth century was a period of stagnation and decline, which was originally held by historians of the time.

Decline and Modernization

The government's sequence of constitutional reforms throughout the Tanzimat period (from 1839 to 1876) resulted in a very modern conscripted army, banking system reforms, homosexuality decriminalization, the replacement of religious law with secular law, and guilds with modern manufacturers. In Istanbul, the Ottoman Ministry of Post was formed in 1840. In 1847, American inventor Samuel Morse was granted an Ottoman patent for the telegraph by Sultan Abdülmecid, who tested the new device. The Constitution, known as the Kanûn-u Esâsî, marked the end of the reformist phase. The Empire's First Constitutional era lasted only a few years. The parliament lasted only two years before being suspended by the Sultan. Because of their superior educational levels, the Empire's Christian population began to overtake the Muslim majority, causing significant hostility. In the year of 1861, there were around 571 primary and 94 secondary educational institutes for Ottoman Christians, with a total of 140,000 students, much outnumbering the number of Muslim students in school simultaneously, who was hampered even more by the amount of time spent learning Arabic and Islamic theology. According to author Norman Stone, the Arabic alphabet, in which Turkish was written until 1928, was ill-suited to portray the sounds of the Turkish language, which is a Turkic rather than Semitic language, posing a further challenge for Turkish children. As a result of their greater educational levels, Christians could play a larger part in the economy, as seen by the increase in the importance of families like the Sursock family. Ethnic Greeks held five hundred twenty-eight of Istanbul's 654 wholesale enterprises in 1911. Christians and Jews were able to get protection from European consuls and citizenship in many situations, meaning they were exempt from Ottoman legislation and were not subject to the same economic laws as their Muslim counterparts.

Defeat and Dissolution

The Ottoman Empire's defeat and dissolution (1908–1922) began with the Second Constitutional Era, a period of hope and promise marked by the Young Turk Revolution. Under the Ottoman parliament, it reinstated the Ottoman constitution of 1876 and introduced multi-party politics with a two-stage electoral system (electoral legislation). The Constitution gave hope to the Empire's subjects by allowing them to modernize the state's institutions, resurrect its strength, and enable it to stand up to outside powers. Its guarantee of liberties intended to alleviate intercommunal tensions and make the Empire a more peaceful place. Instead, this period became known as the Empire's final fight.

Several historians, including British historian Edward Gibbon and Greek historian Dimitri Kitsikis, have argued that after Constantinople fell, the Ottoman state took over the Byzantine (Roman) state's machinery. The Ottoman Empire was essentially a continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire disguised as a Turkish Muslim empire. The Ottoman kingdom was founded on "a Byzantine-Balkan bedrock with a veneer of the Turkish language and the Islamic religion," according to American historian Speros Vryonis. According to American historians Heath Lowry and Kitsikis, the early Ottoman state was a predatory confederacy open to both Byzantine Christians and Turkish Muslims, whose primary goal was to obtain booty and slaves rather than to spread Islam, and that it was only later that Islam became the Empire's primary characteristic. Others have followed the lead of Austrian historian Paul Wittek. He emphasized the early Ottoman state's Islamic orientation, describing it as a "Jihad state" dedicated to expanding the Muslim world. Many historians, lead by Turkish historian Mehmet Fuat Köprülü in 1937, promoted the Ghazi thesis, which saw the early Ottoman state as a continuation of the nomadic Turkic tribes' way of life, which had migrated from East Asia to Anatolia via Central Asia and the Middle East on a much greater scale. They claimed that Persia was the source of the Ottoman state's most significant cultural effects. British historiographer Norman Stone recommended many continuities between the Eastern Roman and Ottoman empires, such as Byzantium's zeugarion tax becoming the Ottoman Resm-i çift tax. The Ottoman timar system evolved from the pronoia land-holding system, which linked the amount of land one possessed with one's ability to produce cavalry. The Ottoman estimation for land, the dönüm, was the same as the Byzantine stremma. Although Sunni Islam was the state religion, the Eastern Orthodox Church was funded and controlled by the Ottoman state. In exchange for accepting that authority, the Eastern Orthodox Church became the Ottoman Empire's greatest landowner. Despite the parallels, Stone believed that one significant difference was that the timar system's land grants were not initially hereditary. Even after timar land grants became inheritable, land ownership in the Ottoman Empire remained exceedingly precarious, with the Sultan having the power to revoke land awards at any time. According to Stone, the uncertainty of land ownership deterred Timariots from seeking long-term development of their property, leading them to pursue a policy of short-term exploitation, which had negative consequences for the Ottoman economy. The majority of Ottoman Sultans practised Sufism and followed Sufi orders, believing that Sufism was the only road to God. The state-backed Sufi religious domination came into play since jurisprudence and shariah were state affairs. Non-Sufi Muslims and Arabs in the Hejaz were ignored and denied any position.

The Ottoman Empire's state organization was a system with two primary components, the military administration and the civil administration, before the changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Sultan was the system's highest-ranking official. Local administrative entities were based on the features of the region under the civil system. The clergy was under the power of the state. In Ottoman administrative circles, several pre-Islamic Turkish traditions that had survived the incorporation of administrative and judicial systems from Islamic Iran remained relevant. The state's principal purpose, according to Ottoman ideology, was to defend and enlarge Muslim lands, as well as to ensure stability and harmony inside its borders, all within the context of orthodox Islamic practise and dynastic sovereignty. As a dynastic institution, the Ottoman Empire, or the House of Osman, was unsurpassed in size and duration in the Islamic world. Only the House of Habsburg in Europe had an unbroken line of sovereigns from the same family who governed for such a long time and such a long period, from the late 13th to the early 20th century. The Ottoman dynasty originated in Turkey. Since he was seen as a threat to the state by his adversaries, the Sultan was ousted eleven times and replaced by another sultan of the Ottoman dynasty, either the prior Sultan's brother, son or nephew. Only two efforts to depose the ruling Ottoman dynasty in Ottoman history were successful, indicating a political system that could handle its revolutions without causing unneeded instability for a long time. As a result, Mehmed VI, the final Ottoman sultan, was a direct patrilineal descendant of Osman I, the first Ottoman sultan, unprecedented in Europe and the Islamic world. The Imperial Harem's main goal was to assure the birth of male heirs to the Ottoman throne and the continuance of the Ottoman sultans' direct patrilineal descent. Starting with Murad I, the sultans claimed their highest position in Islam, the caliphate founded as the Ottoman Caliphate. Though he did not always exert absolute power, the Ottoman sultan, pâdişâh or "lord of kings," served as the Empire's sole regent and was regarded as the embodiment of its governance. The Imperial Harem was one of the Ottoman court's most powerful institutions. The Valide Sultan was in charge. The Valide Sultan would occasionally become engaged in state politics. In what was known as the "Sultanate of Women," the Harem's women practically ruled the state for a period. The sons of the former Sultan were always chosen as new sultans. The palace school's robust educational system was designed to weed out unfit prospective heirs and build support among the ruling class for a inheritor. The palace schools, which would also teach the state's future administrators, were not one-track affairs. First, the Madrasa (Medrese) was established for Muslims to educate academics and government officials following Islamic tradition. The Medrese's financial load was shared by vakifs, allowing children from low-income households to progress to higher social levels and earn more money. The second route was the Enderûn, a free boarding school for Christians that annually recruited 3,000 pupils from Christian boys aged eight to twenty from one in every forty homes in Rumelia or the Balkans, a procedure known as Devshirme (Devşirme). Despite being the absolute monarch, the Sultan's political and executive powers were delegated. Several advisors and ministers gathered around a council known as Divan to manage the state's politics. When the Ottoman Empire was still a Beylik, the Divan was made up of the tribe's elders. Military officials and local elites such as religious and political experts were later added to the group's membership. Beginning in 1320, a Grand Vizier was chosen to take on some of the Sultan's tasks. With nearly unrestricted powers of appointment, dismissal, and monitoring, the Grand Vizier had great independence from the Sultan. Sultans began to withdraw from politics in the late 16th century, and the Grand Vizier became the country's de facto ruler. Local governors operated autonomously and even in opposition to the ruler on numerous occasions throughout Ottoman history. The Ottoman state became a constitutional monarchy after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. The Sultan's executive powers had lapsed. Representatives from the provinces were chosen to establish a parliament. The representatives constituted the Ottoman Empire's Imperial Government. Even the Empire's diplomatic correspondence, which was initially conducted in the Greek language to the west, reflected this diverse governance. The Tughra were the Ottoman Sultans' calligraphic monograms, or signatures, of which there were 35. They were carved on the Sultan's seal and bore the Sultan's and his father's names. "Ever triumphant," a proclamation and prayer, was also found in most. Orhan Gazi was the first to own one. A form of Ottoman-Turkish calligraphy was born from the ornately stylized Tughra.

In the late 14th century, the Ottoman Kingdom was divided into provinces, fixed territorial entities with governors selected by the Sultan. The Eyalet, also known as Pashalik or Beylerbeylik, was the administrative region of a Beylerbey and was divided into Sanjaks. The Tanzimat reforms included the passage of the "Vilayet Law" in 1864, which established the Vilayets. The 1864 law formed a hierarchy of administrative entities, replacing the old eyalet system with the vilayet, liva/sanjak, Kaza, and village council, to which the 1871 Vilayet Law added the nahiye.

The Ottoman government purposefully followed a program of developing successive Ottoman capitals, Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul, into important commercial and industrial centres, believing that merchants and artisans were essential in creating a new city. To this goal, Mehmed and his successor Bayezid fostered and welcomed Jewish migration from various parts of Europe to Istanbul and other port cities such as Salonica. After the Reconquista, Jews suffered persecution from their Christian counterparts in numerous countries of Europe, including Spain. The newcomers appreciated the Turks' tolerance. The Ottoman economic mind was closely linked to the Middle Eastern basic concepts of state and society, in which the ultimate goal of a state was the consolidation and extension of the ruler's power, and the way to achieve it was to obtain rich resources of revenue by making the productive classes prosperous. The ultimate goal was to enhance state revenues without jeopardizing subject wealth to avoid the rise of social unrest and maintain the old social structure. During the early modern period, the Ottoman economy grew rapidly, with notably strong growth rates in the first half of the eighteenth century. Adjusted for inflation, the Empire's annual income doubled between 1523 and 1748. The Ottoman Empire developed the treasury and chancery more than any other Islamic government, and they were the preeminent organization among all its contemporaries until the 17th century. As a distinct group, partially highly trained ulama, this organization established a scribal bureaucracy known as "men of the pen," which grew into a professional body. Many great Ottoman leaders owe their success to the efficacy of this expert financial body. According to modern Ottoman studies, the introduction of new sea channels created a shift in relations between the Ottoman Turks and central Europe. The loss of the Ottoman Empire's importance as Western Europe created ocean routes that bypassed the Middle East and the Mediterranean might be seen as a equivalent to the failure of the Ottoman Empire itself. The Anglo-Ottoman Treaty, also identified as the Treaty of Balta Liman, which opened Ottoman markets to English and French competitors directly, would be considered one of the turning points in this process. The state fulfilled basic economic functions in the Empire by building commercial centres and routes, encouraging citizens to expand the extent of cultivated land in the country, and facilitating international trade through its dominions. However, the state's financial and political interests were paramount in all of this. Ottoman administrators could not comprehend the value of the dynamics and principles of the capitalist and mercantile economies evolving in Western Europe because of the social and political environment.

Counting the houses in Ottoman tithe registers and multiplying this number by 5 yielded an estimate of 11,692,480 for the Empire between 1520 and 1535. The population of the 18th century was smaller than that of the 16th century for unknown causes. Because the first census, taken in 1831, was solely intended to register potential conscripts, an estimated 7,230,660 is considered a significant undercount. Ottoman territory censuses did not begin until the early nineteenth century. Official census results from 1831 onwards are available. However, the censuses did not include the entire population. The 1831 census, for example, only counted men and did not cover the entire Empire. Estimates of population number and dispersion for previous periods are based on documented demographic tendencies. By 1800, however, it had risen to roughly 25–32 million, with around 10 million in European provinces, 11 million in Asian provinces, and around 3 million in African provinces.

The European provinces had larger population densities, which were twice as high as Anatolia, quadrupling the population density of Iraq and Syria and five times that of Arabia. Life expectancy at the end of the Empire was 49 years, compared to the mid-twenties in Serbia at the start of the 19th century. Epidemic diseases and famine wreaked havoc on society and shifted demographics. Around one-sixth of Egypt's population perished from plague in 1785, and Aleppo's population was decreased by 20% in the 18th century. Between 1687 and 1731, six famines struck Egypt alone, with the last famine in Anatolia occurring four decades later. The growth of steamships and railroads resulted in the concentration of residents that resulted in the emergence of port cities. Between 1700 and 1922, urbanization increased, with towns and cities expanding. They became more appealing to live in and work in as health and sanitation improved. Salonica, Greece's port city, expanded from 55,000 in 1800 to 160,000 in 1912, and zmir, Turkey's port city, grew from 150,000 in 1800 to 300,000 by 1914.

On the other hand, several areas experienced population declines. Due to political instability, Belgrade's population dropped from 25,000 to 8,000 people. Economic and political migrations impacted the Empire as a whole. For example, the annexation of the Crimean and Balkan areas by Russia and Austria-Habsburg resulted in huge influxes of Muslim refugees, with 200,000 Crimean Tartars fleeing to Dobruja. Approximately 5–7 million immigrants rushed into the Ottoman Empire between 1783 and 1913, with at least 3.8 million from Russia. Some migrations left enduring legacies, such as political tensions between empires, while others had centrifugal consequences, with simpler demographics arising from heterogeneous communities. The loss of artisans, merchants, manufacturers, and agriculturists had an economic impact. A huge number of Muslims from the Balkans have emigrated to modern-day Turkey since the 19th century. Muhacir is the name given to these people. Half of Turkey's urban population was derived from Muslim refugees from Russia by the time the Ottoman Empire fell apart in 1922.

The Ottomans absorbed parts of the nations' traditions, art, and institutions and gave them new dimensions in their conquered areas. The Ottoman Turks took many customs and cultural elements from past empires and evolved them into new forms, culminating in a new and distinctively Ottoman cultural identity. Although Turkish was the Ottoman Empire's literary language of choice, Persian favoured projecting an imperial image. Slavery existed in Ottoman civilization, with the majority of slaves working as domestic workers. Agricultural slavery, such as that found in the Americas, was relatively uncommon. Unlike other forms of slavery, slaves were not considered movable property under Islamic law, and the offspring of female slaves were born legally free. As late as 1908, female slaves were still sold throughout the Empire. Western European countries pressed the Empire to abolish the practice during the nineteenth century. Various Sultans attempted to curb the Ottoman slave trade throughout the 19th century, but slavery had centuries of religious support and sanction. Therefore it was never abolished in the Empire. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the plague was a severe scourge in Ottoman society. "There were 37 major and minor plague epidemics reported in Istanbul between 1701 and 1750, and 31 between 1751 and 1801." As a result, the Ottomans inherited Persian bureaucratic culture and practices. The sultans also contributed significantly to the development of Persian literature. Each millet in the Ottoman Empire built a schooling system for its citizens. As a result, education was mostly split along ethnic and religious lines, with few non-Muslims attending Muslim schools and vice versa. The majority of institutions that did serve people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds taught in French or another language.

Throughout Ottoman history, the Ottomans amassed a sizable library collection, complete with original manuscripts and translations of various civilizations. The 15th century saw a surge in interest in both local and foreign texts. Sultan Mehmet II commissioned Georgios Amiroutzes, a Greek scholar from Trabzon, to transcribe Ptolemy's geography book and make it available to Ottoman educational institutions. Ali Qushji, a Samarkand-born astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who became a professor in two madrasas and affected Ottoman circles by his writings and the activity of his pupils, although only spending two or three years in Constantinople before his death, is another example. In 1577, Taqi al-Din erected the Taqi al-Din observatory in Constantinople, where he conducted observations until 1580. He computed the eccentricity of the Sun's orbit as well as the apogee's annual motion. The observatory's principal aim was probably certainly astrological rather than astronomical, which led to its demolition in 1580 due to a religious party opposing its usage for that reason. In Ottoman Egypt, he experimented with steam power, describing a steam jack propelled by a crude steam turbine in 1551. Ibrahim Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci, an Ottoman scholar, translated Noël Duret's 1637 French astronomical treatise into Arabic in 1660. Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu was the first surgical atlas and the Islamic world's final significant medical encyclopaedia. Although his work was mostly based on Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi's Al-Tasrif, Sabuncuoğlu contributed several new ideas. For the first time, female surgeons were also depicted. Since then, the Ottoman Empire has been attributed to the invention of various surgical devices, including forceps, catheters, scalpels, lancets, and pincers. Meshur Sheyh Dede, an Ottoman watchmaker, made an example of a watch that measured time in minutes in 1702. Egypt began using steam engines for industrial manufacturing in the early 19th century, with ironworks, textile industry, paper mills, and hulling mills adopting the technology. The appropriate economic conditions existed in Egypt, according to economic historian Jean Batou, for the use of oil as a viable energy source for its steam engines later in the 19th century. Through his translations of Western books, Ishak Efendi conveys contemporary Western scientific concepts and advancements to the Ottoman and wider Muslim worlds and constructed an appropriate Turkish and Arabic scientific terminology.

Turkish wrestling, hunting, Turkish archery, horseback riding, equestrian javelin throw, arm wrestling, and swimming were the most popular activities among Ottomans. With the growing popularity of football matches in 19th century Constantinople, European style sports clubs were founded. According to the timeline, the top clubs in Constantinople were Beşiktaş Gymnastics Club, Fenerbahçe Sports Club, Galatasaray Sports Club and MKE Ankaragücü. Karşyaka Sports Club, Altay Sports Club, and Turkish Fatherland Football Club, afterwards Ülküspor of zmir, were created in other areas.