Poll: Best Ottoman Sultan that existed

Best Ottoman Sultan

  • Osman I (1280-1323)

    Votes: 2 1.9%
  • Orhan I (1323-1359)

    Votes: 2 1.9%
  • Murad I (1359-1389)

    Votes: 2 1.9%
  • Bayezid I (1389-1402)

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Mehmed I (1413-1421)

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Murad II (1421-1451)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mehmed II the Conqueror (1451-1481)

    Votes: 32 30.2%
  • Selim I (1512-1520)

    Votes: 10 9.4%
  • Suleiman I the Magnificent (1520-1566)

    Votes: 42 39.6%
  • Ahmed I (1603-1617)

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Osman II (1618-1622)

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Murad IV (1623-1640)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mustafa II (1695-1703)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mahmud I (1730-1754)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Selim III (1789-1807)

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Mahmud II (1808-1839)

    Votes: 5 4.7%
  • Abdulmecid I (1839-1861)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Abdulaziz I (1861-1876)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Abdulhamid II (1876-1909)

    Votes: 3 2.8%
  • Others

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Total voters
    106
Obviously the correct answer is Suleiman. But I do have to say that I always had my sympathy (even though he wasn’t that great of a ruler) for Abdulmecid.
 
In my headcanon, Mehmed II is currently wandering through Hell bereft of his eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and hands, as punishment for his snuffing out of such a beautiful culture, and ridding Europe and Asia of its last link to the Ancient World.

EDIT: Only just occurred to me that this may be interpreted as anti-Turkish or Anti-Muslim. I wish to stress that this is not at all what I was thinking, and indeed, I do genuinely like the Ottomans generally (except on EU4 where they are so overpowered as to be insane), but the Classicist within me quails at the loss of the last empire to legitimately bear the mantle of Greece and Rome.

DOUBLE EDIT: I’m sorry, Russia does not count as an inheritor. It was far removed from any of the Ancient civilizations geographically and is more a product of indigenous Slavic heritage than its admittedly heavy Greek borrowings. Neither do the Ottomans since they were really just another Steppe people that had been plaguing Rome and Byzantium for a millennia.

You may consider the Papacy as another link to the Ancient World as it existed before the East Roman Empire (I call it East Roman as I despise the name Byzantine. They're Roman)

I hope I, a simple peasant with a Samsung Phone and Wifi, made your day better :p
 
Difficult choice between Murad II, Mehmed II, and Suleiman I. Think I'm going to have to go with Mehmed II though, if only for the quote that convinced his father to command at Varna: "If you are the Sultan, come and lead your armies. If I am the Sultan, I command you to come and lead my armies."

Not bad for a twelve-year old, to say nothing of what he did afterward.
 
Right and the balance of the two is where the question of what makes a great leader comes into play. I tend to think whoever provides for their people the best is the greatest leader, but one must take into account if the question is asking for the leader who most benefitted their country as a people or their country as an institution.

The last sentence is quite profound: there were and probably still are historians of the "state" school which are stressing "country as an institution" while more or less ignoring "country as a people". As a result we have "Louis XIV, the Great", "Peter I, the Great" and other cases when "institutional" component had been chosen as the main criteria. OTOH, the rulers who were "inactive" in their foreign policies and did not enforce the "it is for your own good, idiots" changes domestically are shrugged off even if during their rules the subjects were doing much better than during the reigns of the "great" ones.

Take Peter I. He is "the Great" because he enforced some superficial changes, mostly in the dress code and renaming the institutions, and spent 2 decades conquering few pieces of a territory. All that at the expense of anything between 20 and 25% of a population, introduction of the much more severe version of a serfdom than already existed and the terrible both short- and long-term impact on the Russian economy. His "window to Europe" (term invented after his death) did not result in any breakthrough: the Russian merchants were not sailing overseas even at the time of Catherine II but pre-Petrian navigation on the northern seas was almost completely destroyed. Russian army was in a process of a "natural westernization" during 2 previous reigns and, later, Potemkin correctly characterized Peter's witless copying of the Western uniforms (shoes and stockings in the Russian dirt and snow, absence of the warm winter clothing, etc.) as a "garbage". But who cares if there was "glory" involved.
 

longsword14

Banned
They had the lowest height standards for the army recruits (in the early-/mid-XIX European countries tended not to recruit the short people).
I have heard different variations, but never framed like this.
Point me a source ? I want to compare with contemporary standards.
 
I'd argue Mahmud II. He singlehandedly gave the empire one more century of life. And the military institutions on which modern Turkey got established. All from a much worse starting position than other on the list. Now I'd hardly had minded the empire collapsing without Mahmud but this is entirely different to respecting the man's accomplishments.
 
Top