Quotes About Ottoman Empire

Fear of Russian expansionism was at the heart of the Porte's policy. The Turkish ambassador told Deedes that if the Allies won the war, they would cause or allow the Ottoman Empire to be partitioned, while if Germany won the war, no such partition would be allowed to occur. That was why the Porte had become pro-German… (Enver did not mention that, in addition, Germany had given a written guarantee to protect Ottoman territory…)

The Ottoman Empire was in decline, held back from modernization by a conservative Muslim priesthood.

Propelled to search for pockets of religious freedom, the Spanish exiles made their way to various corners of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, including Constantinople, Salonika, and Sarajevo. By the mid-sixteenth century, Constantinople had 50,000 Jews, a mix of Spanish exiles, native Jews known as Romaniot, Italians, and Ashkenazim who were organized into scores of religious communities

I am no historian, but Hungary is a country which has never known democracy - and by that, I mean not a democratic political system, but an organic process which has mobilised the entire country's society. In the case of Hungary, this development was blocked by the growth of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century.

Only because of the strength of a coalition of European armies at the battle of Vienna in 1683 did Europe avoid Ottoman rule.

Depuis la dernière guerre, la ruine de l'indépendance temporelle des musulmans est un fait accompli. L'empire ottoman est démembré et ses dirigeants ont réduit le calife turc à n'avoir plus d'autorité que sur le domaine spirituel. Ce grand événement n'est-il pas le signe que l'évangélisation des musulmans, si longtemps retardée, va pouvoir commencer ? (Écrits Mémorables I, p. 50)

So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

There was never a political entity of that name until 1821, when Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire raised

when Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire raised the flag of revolution

We see people in the Middle East begin to have dreams of new Ottoman Empire where everyone will be subjected to some of what we've seen happen in those countries where we helped bring about an Arab Spring that's turned into a Winter Nightmare.

For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the "Sick Man" of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcass.

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben.

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. Other

For all the pious sloganeering that accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and Christianity. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire…. Had not… Mehmed the Conqueror toppled the Byzantines and seized Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own…

The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.

You (AKP) are very hard on C.U.P. when you wish, you can even say that "C.U.P. ideology has brought tyranny to this land". But when it is about the Armenians you can be even more pro-Enver than Enver or pro-Talat than Talat. I am truly amazed. (Referring to the 2 leaders, Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha of Committee of Union and Progress which was the de-facto ruler of Ottoman Empire during events of mass killings and deportations of Armenians.)

There exists in the Middle East a state, Syria, that emerged from the decisions of a Franco-British diplomatic duo whose job was to divide the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.

What would later become modern Greece was at the time a backward and isolated province of the Ottoman Empire with few towns, far removed from all this intellectual ferment.

The Greek state arose as a self-conscious outpost of European modernity in what may have been an illustrious place in the ancient world but was in the opening of the nineteenth century an obscure, economically backward corner of the Ottoman Empire.

Yemen was, in the years prior to World War I, the 'Vietnam' of the Ottoman Empire, but not that of Egypt. In Yemen, Egypt attained its political goals. The republic survived.

Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Turks have long admired the sultan, Mehmet II, for his military triumphs, especially his capture of Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, in 1453.

Celebrating historic triumphs is a favorite pastime for many Turks. Tales of how Turkic peoples emerged from Central Asia, crossed the steppes to Anatolia, established the Ottoman Empire and ruled for centuries over large swaths of Europe and Asia are the subject of countless legends, poems and books.

On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.