Ottoman Empire In 1683, when the Ottoman forces were besieging Vienna, the empire reached its high-water mark and then began its slow, steady decline after suffering a major defeat in this battle. Only very gradually did Europeans come to perceive it as the Sick Man of Europe, however, since it was still formidable enough to play an important role in the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War of 1854-56. This

Rise of the Secular Turkish Republic It was in 1923 that the Republic of Turkey appeared on the face of the globe. The Turks consider the preceding years i.e. 1919-1922 as the years of their struggle for independence. The Turkish state that was formed as a consequence of this struggle was a completely new republic despite the fact that various partition schemes were proposed by the triumphant Allies during and after

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the balance of economic strength had shifted entirely to western Europe and especially to Britain and France, which were then passing into the second stage of the industrial revolution that Turkey had hardly begun. The European powers would use their political and economic power to force the empire to allow its economy to be incorporated into the nineteenth-century liberal capitalist system. Free

The world would now be required to accept socialism, Leninism, and eventually Stalinism, as part of the European landscape. With the defeat of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire; the shift in the balance of power moved toward the only major participant not devastated on its own soil by war -- the United States. The U.S. grew in economic power after Versailles, assisting not only its former allies in rebuilding,

Kemal Ataturk Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey and its first elected president, was born as Mustafa on March 12, 1881 in Salonika or Thessaloniki, in Greece which was then under the Ottoman Empire. His father, Ali Reza Efendi, was a customs official who wanted his son's education to take place in a secular school. However, his father died while he was still a child. It was his mother Zubeyde Hanim

In the Nineteenth Century, Mahmud II and Abdulmecid promulgated reforms that gave to millet the sense it has always had to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Western scholars, diplomats, and politicians. The millet system furnished, degree of religious, cultural, and ethnic continuity within these communities, while on the other it permitted their incorporation into the Ottoman administrative, economic and political system. An ethnic-religious group preserved its culture and religion while being subject