Atlas of the Sultans

Regional borders. The shading is derived from Natural Earth 1:10m administrative boundaries: each of the 2,034 provinces, governorates and islands in the area was assigned individually to the historical geography of Ottoman provinces (eyalet/sancak) — Turkey's 81 provinces, Romania's 42 counties, Libya's 22 districts and the Greek islands were matched one by one. Because administrative units tile the land without gaps, no gaps appear between regions and the coastlines are real. The price is that modern provinces do not fit historical borders exactly. Places that never came under Ottoman rule — Najd, the Rub' al Khali, the deep Sahara, inner Sudan, Hadramawt, Venetian Dalmatia — were deliberately left out. Eastern Georgia (the kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti, Tbilisi) is counted for 1578–1612, since it was taken in 1578 and ceded to the Ottomans by the Treaty of Ferhad Pasha (1590). Regional units can still be larger than the event: a region is shaded in full from the year its main centre was taken, and outlying fortresses may have fallen a few years earlier or later (İznik, for instance, lies in the same unit as Bursa and is shaded from 1326, although it was taken in 1331). Large regions have therefore been split to the scale of events: Bithynia (Söğüt–Bilecik, Bursa–İznik, İzmit), Germiyan (Germiyan, Teke–Hamid, Ankara), Rum (Rum, Canik, Malatya), Serbia (Morava, Smederevo, Belgrade), the Morea (Morea, Athens, Euboea), the Aegean islands (Lesbos, Chios, Cyclades), Macedonia (Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Kosovo), Thessaly and Ioannina, Albania (north and south), Dobruja (north and south), Akhaltsikhe and Batumi, and Hungary (Buda, Eger, Kanizsa, Nové Zámky). Habsburg Hungary, which never came under Ottoman rule (Győr, Vas, Veszprém, Borsod), is left out; Oradea and the Debrecen area (Partium) count from 1541 as part of Transylvania.

Area figures and the measure used. What is measured here is land area: sea, inland water and “spheres of influence” are not counted. The value of Turkey's 23 regions is the sum of actual provincial areas, which is why the last row gives 779,000 km² — the Turkish General Directorate of Mapping's provincial dataset gives a total of 780,043 km² for Turkey, a match within 0.1%. (The projected area used in international comparisons is 783,562 km²; the true surface area including lakes and relief is 814,578 km².) For the other regions a historical estimate was used rather than modern provincial area, because in the desert modern provincial borders extend far beyond actual Ottoman control. Since every territorial change is dated to the year, figures are read from the real year-by-year curve; a sultan's gains are not counted as if all were held at the same time. Results: 5.06 million km² in 1683, and the largest extent of about 5.57 million km² between 1590 and 1603 (under Murad III and Mehmed III). Comparative studies of empire size give the Ottoman peak as about 5.2 million km² (1683) (Taagepera 1997, p. 498); the results agree with that magnitude. Vassals are counted by a single rule: tributary states with military obligations to the Ottomans (Danubian Bulgaria from 1371, Lazar's Serbian principality from 1389 (the Serbian Despotate after 1402), Wallachia, Moldavia, the Crimean Khanate, Transylvania) and the North African provinces (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli) count as full territory from the year their dependence began; states that merely paid tribute (the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), Ragusa, the Kingdom of Bosnia before 1463) and places dependent only on the Crimean Khanate (inner Circassia) are not counted. Vassals are subtracted when that dependence lapsed and added again when it was restored (Serbia and Wallachia drop out in 1402 and return in 1413; Dobruja returns in 1419). Gains and losses follow the same rule: both count in the year they actually happened. A region is added in the year it actually came under Ottoman rule and subtracted in the year it left Ottoman rule for good: the year an occupation that was never reversed began, independence was declared or vassalage was broken in practice. A treaty year applies only where the treaty itself brought the actual handover (Batumi 1878, Thessaly 1881). Places that passed to foreign administration and stayed Ottoman only on paper are subtracted when foreign rule began: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and the Principality of Bulgaria in 1878, Egypt and the Abyssinian coast attached to it in 1882, autonomous Crete in 1898, the Dodecanese in 1912. The same rule applies to earlier centuries: most of Hungary and the Croatian lands fell before Karlowitz (1699), between 1685 and 1690 (Nové Zámky 1685, Buda 1686, Transylvania, Slavonia and the Morea 1687, Lika 1689, Kanizsa 1690); Azov 1696, Timișoara 1716, Belgrade 1717, Crimea 1771, Ochakiv 1788, Budjak 1806, Akhaltsikhe and the Morea 1828, central Greece 1829; in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 Romania, Serbia, Northern Dobruja and Kars in 1877. Places evacuated after a treaty count as Ottoman until the year they were evacuated (Euboea 1833). Places occupied during a war and later recovered (Belgrade 1688–1690, Athens 1687–1688, the Russian occupations of Wallachia and Moldavia) are not subtracted. Al-Hasa passed to Ibn Saud in 1913; in the First World War most of the Hejaz is subtracted in 1916 with the Arab Revolt (Medina held out until January 1919) and Baghdad–Basra in 1917. The remaining Arab provinces, Kars, Ardahan, Batumi and Akhaltsikhe (recovered in 1918), Antep and Hatay are subtracted in the year of the Armistice of Mudros (1918); Kars was actually retaken by the Ankara government in 1920 and Antep in 1921. Sèvres (1920) was never ratified.

Why it does not say 19.9 million km². The figures 19,902,191 km² (1595) and “24 million km² including spheres of influence” (1699), often circulated in Turkey, are not from any state publication; they are usually traced to Yılmaz Öztuna's popular histories (especially Başlangıcından Zamanımıza Kadar Türkiye Tarihi) and are wrongly attributed to the State Archives on social media. As the edition and page could not be verified for this atlas, the figure is cited only as a widespread claim. They are inconsistent as land area: 19.9 million km² is larger than Russia (17.1 million) and about 13% of all land on Earth, so they evidently include seas, nominal claims and protectorates. No official table giving territory sultan by sultan was found in publications of the Turkish Historical Society, the Directorate of State Archives or Ministry of Education textbooks; the site therefore makes its own calculation with a clearly defined measure (land area), and every region's value can be traced in the table.

Colours, battles and portraits. Held territory is green, gained is yellow, lost is red with hatching; a region gained and lost within the same reign appears as red with yellow hatching. The hatching is a second channel: because lost regions are hatched, they stay distinguishable from the green held territory even with red–green colour blindness. Each territorial change is listed with the battle, campaign or treaty that brought it. Battles are marked on the map with red dots and treaties with blue ones. The portraits are public-domain works from Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons — the sultan series of the Veronese school, Bellini, Vanmour, John Young and Kapıdağlı, and Ottoman miniatures. Birth years not known precisely are marked with ~.

Titles. Osman and Orhan are called "bey" in this atlas; they are included in the count, but the labels say "rule" and "accession". The title "sultan" for the Ottoman ruler first appears in Orhan's Bursa inscription of 1337 (Şehadet Mosque) and becomes established under Murad I; from Murad I on the atlas says "sultan". Because in the early period the chief vizier did not yet bear the later title of grand vizier (vezir-i âzam / sadrazam), the atlas says "vizier" up to the reign of Murad II. The title of caliph was used for Ottoman rulers before 1517 as well; it appears in documents of the reigns of Murad I, Bayezid I and Mehmed II. The account of a formal transfer of the caliphate in 1517 became widespread only later.

Periods. The periods are named after the units of the history curriculum of Turkey's Ministry of National Education (Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli, 2024): From Principality to State (1299–1453), The Ottoman World Power (1453–1683), The Ottomans in a Changing World (1683–1789), The Ottomans in Transformation (1789–1908) and The Ottomans in the Spiral of Wars (1908–1918). The curriculum ends in 1918, and 1918–1922 is taught in the course on the history of the Turkish Revolution; the atlas extends the last period to the abolition of the sultanate (1922). Each sultan is placed in the period in which most of his reign fell. The older textbook division into Foundation, Rise, Stagnation, Decline and Dissolution is no longer used; present-day historians regard the notions of "stagnation" and "decline" as contested. The periods are shown here only as a guide.

Tributary states and neighbours. States that paid tribute to the Ottomans but were not ruled directly are not counted in the land area; on the map they are shown separately in light green with a dashed edge: the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) 1373–1402 and 1424–1453 (the Treaty of Gallipoli of 1403 lifted the tribute for a time), the Despotate of the Morea 1447–1460, the Empire of Trebizond 1456–1461, the Kingdom of Bosnia c. 1428–1463 and Venetian Cyprus 1517–1570. These are the years in which tribute began and in which the region was annexed or the dependence ended; sources may differ by a year or two on the start. Borders of neighbouring states are drawn as thin dashed lines. On lands that the Ottomans ruled at some point, these borders were researched year by year at province level: which state held each province before and after Ottoman rule (the Anatolian beyliks, the Mamluks, the Balkan kingdoms, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Habsburgs, Russia and the states founded between 1878 and 1923) is based on the relevant articles of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam and on the border clauses of peace treaties. Where a province was split between several rulers, the one holding most of it is shown, so these borders follow province lines and are approximate. Borders outside these lands come from A. Ourednik’s historical-basemaps dataset (GPL-3.0); they have not been checked against the criterion used in this atlas and are drawn not for every year but for the nearest earlier map year (1300, 1400, 1492, 1500, 1530 … 1938).