The Ottoman Empire

In 1299, a Turkish warlord named Osman controlled a patch of territory in northwestern Anatolia barely larger than a modern county. His domain sat on the frontier of the dying Byzantine Empire, a borderland where Turkish nomads raided Christian settlements and Byzantine garrisons raided right back. Nothing about this minor principality suggested world-historical significance. Dozens of similar Turkish beyliks dotted Anatolia, each jostling for scraps of Byzantine and Mongol decline.

Within two centuries, Osman's descendants would rule from the Danube to the Euphrates. Within three, they would govern the largest and most administratively sophisticated state in the Western world. The Ottoman Empire lasted 623 years. It outlived the Byzantines, the Safavids, the Mughals, the Habsburgs. It survived plagues, civil wars, Mongol invasions, and a series of succession crises that would have destroyed any lesser state. Understanding how requires looking past the battles and sieges to the institutions underneath.

The early Ottomans succeeded because they were adaptive. They borrowed freely from the Byzantines, the Mongols, the Persians, the Arabs. They incorporated conquered peoples rather than exterminating them. They built a military machine of terrifying efficiency and then, crucially, built a bureaucracy to match it. Conquest is easy compared to governance. The Ottomans were good at both.