Krystle Braggs Wendi Laiter Corey Rosemon

Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans found themselves in frequent conflict with this empire. The Ottoman Empire was the largest and most stable political entity to arise in or near Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was the dominant political power in the Muslim world after 1516, when it administered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as well as Jerusalem, and arranged the safety of Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca. Its population had significant numbers of Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. And after the late fifteenth century, thousands of Jews from Spain. The Ottomans extended far more religious toleration to their subjects than existed anywhere in Europe.

Various laws and regulations applied to the persons who belonged to a particular millet rather than to a particular administrative territory. Non-Islamic persons in the empire (dhimmis) could practice their religion and manage their internal community affairs through their own religious officials. However, they were second-class citizens generally unable to rise in the service of the empire. Dhimmis paid a special poll tax (jizyah), could not serve in the military, and were prohibited from wearing certain colors.

Over the years, the often attained economic success because they possessed the highest level of commercial skills in the empire. The Ottoman dynasty also kept itself separated from the most powerful families of the empire by recruiting military leaders and administrative officers from groups whom the sultan believed would be personally loyal to them.

Christian boys were recruited and raised as Muslims and organized into elite military units. The most famous were the infantry troops called Janissaries. Islamic religious authorities played a significant role in the political, legal, and administrative life of the Ottoman Empire. From the late seventeenth century onward, the Ulama urged the sultans to conform o traditional life even as the empire confronted a rapidly changing and modernizing Europe.

Even after its naval defeat in 1571 at the Battle of Lepanto, the empire retained control of the eastern Mediterranean and lands bordering it. The Ottomans made their deepest military invasion into Europe in 1683, when they unsuccessfully besieged Vienna. Rivalries for power among army leaders and nobles, as well as their flagrant efforts to enrich themselves, weakened the effectiveness of the government.

Local elites in various provincial cities of the empire began to assert their own influence. They did not so much reject imperial authority but instead quietly renegotiated its conditions. In early 1699, the defeated Ottomans negotiated the treaty of Carlowitz, which required them to surrender significant territory lying at the heart of their empire in Europe, including Hungary and Habsburgs. This treaty meant not only the loss of territory but also of the revenue the Ottomans had long drawn from those regions.