The Ottoman Empire, also known as the Turkish Empire, Ottoman Turkey or Turkey, is an empire founded in 1299 by Oghuz Turks under Osman I in northwestern Anatolia.

After conquests in the Balkans by Murad I between 1362 and 1389, the Ottoman sultanate is transformed into a transcontinental empire and claimant to the caliphate.

The Ottomans end the Byzantine Empire with the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire is a multinational, multilingual empire controlling much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the empire contains thirty-two provinces and numerous vassal states.

Some of these are later absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, while others are granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries.

With Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire is at the center of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries.

Following a long period of military setbacks against European powers, the Ottoman Empire gradually declines into the late nineteenth century.

The empire allies with Germany in the early twentieth century, with the imperial ambition of recovering its lost territories, joining in the First World War to achieve this ambition on the side of Germany and the Central Powers.

While the Empire is able to largely hold its own during the conflict, it is struggling with internal dissent, especially with the Arab Revolt in its Arabian holdings.

Starting before the war, but growing increasingly common and violent during it, major atrocities are committed by the Ottoman government against the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.

The Empire's defeat and the occupation of part of its territory by the Allied Powers in the aftermath of World War I results in the emergence of a new state, Turkey, in the Ottoman Anatolian heartland following the Turkish War of Independence, as well as the founding of modern Balkan and Middle Eastern states and the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.