Despite his short reign, Selim I is famous for his massive military expansion of the Ottoman Empire, including Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and the Hejaz region (which included Mecca and Medina).

The Battle of Lepanto (1571) pitted the naval forces of the Ottoman Empire against a combined naval force led by the Spanish Hapsburg Empire. It resulted in victory for the "Holy League" forces of the Spanish and prevented further Ottoman expansion into the Mediterranean. 

The rise of the Ottoman Empire was swift. In the fifteenth century, under Mehmet II, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul) and shortly after pushed up as far as Bosnia in the Balkans (a country north of Greece). The whole of European Christendom began to grow wary and soon terrified of the Ottoman invasion as they continued up through the Balkans into central Europe, conquering modern-day Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Hungary, and other areas. But once the Ottomans made it to Budapest, they would struggle to get much further. They were repelled time and again by the forces of Christendom and the Hapsburg Empire of Austria at the city of Vienna or in the surrouding territory.

The Battle of Mohacs is a crucial point in the history of the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and the Kingdom of Hungary. The battle was fought in 1526 between the Kingdom of Hungary, led by Louis II, and the Ottoman Empire, led by Suleiman the Magnificent. It ended in defeat for the Hungarian forces and the loss of Hungarian independence for centuries and the extension of Ottoman rule into Central Europe.

The Ottoman Empire, led by Mehmed II, finally conquered Constantinople in 1453 C.E. bringing to an end the thousand year reign of the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine Empire emerged from the Eastern Roman Empire, which survived the fall of Rome in the fifth century. For hundreds of years the Byzantine Empire, and the city of Constantinople, was one of the most power and wealthy places in the world. However, with the Fall of Constantinople, the rise of the Ottomans as the preeminent power in the region was complete and the Byzantines were no more.

The “sick man of Europe” was a term first applied to the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century. At the time, the Ottoman Empire was suffering from extreme economic stagnation and had been, for some time, hemorrhaging territory to other empires in a series of disastrous wars. The term has since been used liberally to describe several failing European states and empires.

Much of British foreign policy in the latter decades of the nineteenth century was intended to combat Russian desires for territorial expansion. The British initially opposed the Russians in the Crimean War and then turned their attentions to bolstering the weakened Ottoman Empire against Russian occupation. The British were very fearful of the consequences to British hegemony if Russia was able to capture Istanbul, or any other important Ottoman city on the Mediterranean.

Janissaries were elite troops in the Ottoman army from the middle of the fourteenth century until the early nineteenth century. They were Christian boys kidnapped from the Balkans and Central Europe and raised to be members of a highly organized fighting force.

Afghanistan was conquered by the British in the nineteenth century, but due to its mountainous terrain and established history of guerrilla warfare against invading people, the British found it very difficult to hold the territory. It was an experience and challenge that would be repeated by the Russians and the Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Ottoman Empire was the dominant empire of the Middle East and North Africa for much of the Early Modern and Enlightenment period, but by the middle of the ninteenth century the influence of the Ottoman Empire had declined significantly. Many of the Balkan countries declared independence in the last few decades of the century, including Greece, and the Ottoman Empire was being propped up by the French and the British, who wanted to use the declining force as a buffer against Russian expansionist goals.