The Fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman capture of the city in 1453 under Sultan Mehmet II, marks the opening of a major phase of Ottoman expansion. The book places it within a broader argument about how political institutions and later disruptions shaped divergent paths of development: the conquest established Constantinople as the Ottoman capital, while the empire’s subsequent reach and governing arrangements influenced societies across the Middle East and North Africa.

The Conquest and Ottoman Expansion

In 1453, the Ottomans captured Constantinople and made it their capital. The event is presented not as an isolated military episode but as the start of a larger imperial expansion. During the rest of the fifteenth century, Ottoman rule extended across large parts of the Balkans and most of the rest of what is now Turkey.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, that expansion reached across the Middle East and North Africa. By the death of Sultan Süleyman I in 1566, the empire stretched from Tunisia through Egypt to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula and what is now Iraq. The conquest thus serves as the chronological point of departure for an account of Ottoman power that grew far beyond the city itself.

Imperial Rule and Its Limits

The book characterizes the Ottoman state as absolutist: the sultan was accountable to few and shared power with none. Formally, all land belonged to the state, and taxation on land and agricultural production, together with the spoils of war, supplied the government’s main revenues. These arrangements made Ottoman rule extractive, but the empire’s ability to impose authority varied across its territories.

The state could not dominate much of the Middle East as effectively as it could its heartland in Anatolia. Bedouins and other tribal powers continually challenged Ottoman authority in the Arabian Peninsula, while the state lacked the administrative capacity to establish stable order or collect taxes consistently in many areas. It therefore sold individuals the right to collect taxes, leaving tax farmers with considerable autonomy and power. In some territories, they took between half and two-thirds of what farmers produced, and much of that revenue remained with the collectors.

Consequences for Local Society

Where the Ottoman state could not establish stable order, property rights remained insecure and armed groups competed for local control. Banditry and lawlessness were part of this setting, and the consequences could reshape where people lived. In Palestine, beginning in the late sixteenth century, peasants left the most fertile land for mountainous areas that offered greater protection from banditry.

This account distinguishes imperial reach from effective government. The conquest initiated an empire whose authority extended over a vast region, but its political and administrative limits affected how that authority operated locally. The resulting combination of extraction, insecure property, and uneven control is part of the book’s explanation for the institutional inheritance of the Middle East.

Historical Significance

The Fall of Constantinople is significant here chiefly as a turning point in the sequence of Ottoman expansion. The book argues that the political and economic institutions of the Middle East were shaped by Ottoman colonial rule, just as those of Latin America were shaped by Spanish colonialism. The conquest provides the beginning of that Ottoman trajectory, while the later account shows that imperial expansion did not mean uniform state control: local challenges and limited administrative capacity helped determine the conditions people faced under Ottoman rule.