Ottoman Empire

(Today part of: Turkey, Greece, central Serbia, parts of Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, Israel, Cyprus)

The defeat of the Ottomans at the siege of Vienna (1683) was a turning point in the centuries-long struggle between Christianity and Islam. Immediately afterwards, a Holy League was formed under the auspices of the Pope - an alliance of Poland, the Habsburg Monarchy and Venice, and the aim of each member was to reclaim the territories in Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean that had been overrun by the Ottomans during the earlier centuries. The Habsburg Imperial Army, whose conquests reached the border with the Ottoman Empire on the Sava and Danube, had the most success. The Christian War's "liberation wars" occurred almost simultaneously with the beginnings of profound changes in Western imagination of both nature and government.

The power of the Ottoman Empire has been around since the 18th century in constant decline. Apart from the frequent changes at the state summit and corruption, due to the unlimited power of religion in the Muslim world, there has been no scientific progress compared to European Christian states where rulers, enlightened absolutists, actively supported the development of science. The European path to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was based on the Christian principle of separation of Church and State, while, unlike the Bible, the Koran insists on the inseparability of the law of God and of every authority established on Islamic grounds. Also, free-Muslims began to rise: tax leaseholders worked for their own pockets and gradually lost control of the peripheral parts of the Empire. However, apart from the aforementioned internal reasons, the Empire was threatened with the disintegration of its vast territory in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Mediterranean and due to the ambitions of rival major powers, mainly Great Britain, Russia and, to a lesser extent, France, which caused an almost permanent crisis - the so-called . the eastern question, which will take until the end of World War I.