Inspired by true events, 'The Blue Hour' is a story of political intrigue and doomed love set in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire during the summer of 1876. All Prince Hamid and the Belgian glove-maker, Flora Cordier, want is to pursue their for...
To give you a better idea of what the Ottoman Empire was, I have included a couple of maps.
In 1298 Osman I founded the Osman dynasty. It reigned in an unbroken line for 623 years, until 1922. A Wattpad reader shared with me that, although the empire and the Caliphate fell, the dynasty still lives, and is represented by Sultan Dündar Osman IV.
The first map below shows the expansion of the Empire from the reign of Osman to the peak of its power in the 16th century marked by the reign of Süleyman I.
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The next map shows how the Empire fell apart, piece by piece, between 1830 and 1914. The decline was a gradual process spanning centuries. The battle of Vienna in 1683 is usually regarded as the beginning of this process.
The end was hastened by the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and World War I, during which the Empire allied with the Central Powers and suffered major territorial and human losses. After the war, the Allied Powers planned to partition the Ottoman Empire through the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkish nationalist movement rejected the Treaty and fought the Turkish War of Independence against the Allied Powers (Greece, France, Italy) and the Ottoman government in Istanbul.
After their victory, the Ottoman Sultanate was abolished on November 1, 1922. The last Sultan, Mehmed VI, was forced into exile on November 17, 1922. The Republic of Turkey was officially proclaimed on October 29, 1923, with Ankara as its capital and Atatürk as its first President.
The Caliphate, which represented the religious authority of the Ottoman Sultans as the leaders of the Islamic world, was abolished on March 3, 1924. This decision was part of Atatürk's reforms to secularize and modernize the newly established Republic of Turkey.
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