ABSTRACT
Until recently, military history has been a missing piece in wider discussions of the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa, especially in languages easily accessible to most students of the subject in Western Europe and the Americas. As Thierry Gongora (1997) points out, the lack of scholarly attention to the subject is a glaring problem given the centrality of military power and military culture to the history of state formation in the region. Of the studies on the subject produced in recent years, the majority focus on some aspect of the over six-hundred-year history of the Ottoman Empire and the legacies of its collapse. Emerging around 1300 in northwest Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire expanded gradually in the first century of its existence. After about 1450, territorial acquisition increased in volume and speed and, at its greatest extent at the end of the seventeenth century, it stretched from the imperial center in Istanbul across North Africa to the coast of Algeria and reached into southeastern Europe, almost to Vienna (which the Ottoman military failed to capture in 1683). Among land-based empires of its kind, the Ottoman Empire was remarkable both for its strength and its longevity. In one form or another, it remained a major world power until 1923, when, following defeat in the First World War, its boundaries were reduced to the core of the empire in Anatolia and the Ottoman sultan was deposed in the subsequent formation of the Republic of Turkey.
