Despite efforts to improve education in the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire lagged far behind its

European competitors in literacy, so by 1914, it’s estimated that only between 5 and 10 percent
of its inhabitants could read. “The human resources of the Ottoman empire, like the natural
resources, were comparatively undeveloped,” Reynolds notes. That meant the empire had a
shortage of well-trained military officers, engineers, clerks, doctors and other professions.

Other countries deliberately weakened it.

The ambition of European powers also helped to hasten the Ottoman Empire’s demise, explains
Eugene Rogan, director of the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College. Russia and Austria
both supported rebellious nationalists in the Balkans to further their own influence. And the
British and the French were eager to carve away territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire in
the Middle East and North Africa.

It faced a destructive rivalry with Russia.

Neighboring Czarist Russia, whose sprawling realm included Muslims as well, developed into an
increasingly bitter rival “The Russian empire was the single greatest threat to the Ottoman
empire, and it was a truly existential threat,” Reynolds says. When the two empires took opposite
sides in World War I, though, the Russians ended up collapsing first, in part because of the
Ottoman forces prevented Russia from getting supplies from Europe via the Black Sea. Tzar
Nicholas II and his foreign minister, Sergei Sazanov, resisted the idea of negotiating a separate
peace with the empire, which might have saved Russia.

In 1683, the Ottoman Turks were defeated at the Battle of Vienna. This loss added to their
already waning status.

Over the next hundred years, the empire began to lose key regions of land. After a revolt, Greece
won their independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830.

It picked the wrong side in World War I.

Siding with Germany in World War I may have been the most significant reason for the Ottoman
Empire’s demise. Before the war, the Ottoman Empire had signed a secret treaty with Germany,
which turned out to be a very bad choice. In the conflict that followed, the empire’s army fought
a brutal, bloody campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula to protect Constantinople from invading
Allied forces in 1915 and 1916. Ultimately, the empire lost nearly a half a million soldiers, most
of them to disease, plus about 3.8 million more that were injured or became ill. In October 1918,
the empire signed an armistice with Great Britain, and quit the war. Around this time, Europe
had strengthened rapidly with the Renaissance and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Other
factors, such as poor leadership and having to compete with trade from the Americas and India,
led to the weakening of the empire.