ENTRANCE TO DOLMA-BAGTCHE PALACE
This palace, on the shore of the Bosphorus, was built and inhabited by Abdul-Medjid (1839-1861), is beautifully decorated in the interior and has a splendid throne room.
History.—The Osmanlis or Ottoman Turks sprang from a small clan of the Oghuz, who assisted the Seljûk sultan of Iconium, early in the thirteenth century, to resist the Mongol avalanche.
In the fourteenth century, the Turks under Osmân or Othmân conquered the Seljûk kingdom, and became known as Osmânlis or Ottomans. By 1336 they pushed their way to the Hellespont; under Murâd I. (Amurath) they occupied Adrianople and Philippopolis, received homage from the kings of Servia and Bulgaria, and practically held all the Balkan peninsula except Constantinople, which, after much fighting, fell before Mohammed II. in 1453. In the same century they conquered Albania, Greece, and the Crimea; and in the sixteenth century Syria, Egypt, Tunis, Hungary, and South Russia, and had wars with the Russians, Persians, and Venetians.
Their star began to decline in the seventeenth century; in 1682 they were driven back from Vienna, and lost Hungary, Transylvania, and Podolia. In the eighteenth century the Russians were their most successful enemies, wresting from them the territories from the Dniester to the Caspian. Greece attained independence in 1828, though Egypt failed to throw off its allegiance. The Crimean war (1854-1857) was fought in aid of the Turks against the Russians.
The next great crisis was the Russian war of 1877-1878. The worst Armenian massacres were in 1895-1896. Turkey held her own against Greece in 1897.
Abdul Hamid was deposed and constitutional government nominally established in 1908. But unrest and intrigue still prevent settled conditions.
Until the disastrous war of 1912-1913 with the States of the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Servia, and Montenegro) the European dominions of Turkey extended westwards to the Adriatic and northwards to Bosnia-Herzegovina (Austria). Under the Treaty of London in 1913 the northwest portion of Turkey was a line drawn from Enos, in the Ægean, to Midia, in the Black Sea, thus excluding Adrianople, which had capitulated to the Bulgarians after a prolonged siege.
During the second Balkan war (Bulgaria against the other members of the Balkan States) Turkey took advantage of the military difficulties of Bulgaria and reoccupied Adrianople, thus recovering a considerable portion of the province of that name. In 1911-1912 Turkey lost the remaining portion of her African possessions through the occupation by Italy of Tripoli and Cyrenaica, which were ceded under the Treaty of Ouchy(1912).