By Mr L. M. Potts
From as early as the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was vast in both scope and power. The empire comprised of large areas of the North African region on the Mediterranean coast, territory in the Middle East including parts of Iraq, Syria and Iran, and stretched into Europe, occupying the majority of land in the Balkan region. The Ottoman Empire thus ruled over people of a variety of different ethnicities, each following different religions and speaking different languages. However, there was no equality amongst the people under Ottoman rule which along with poor leadership and economic and military failures, contributed to the erosion of the once formidable Ottoman Empire.
As the Ottoman Empire became weaker as the C19th progressed, it earned the title of 'the sick man of Europe', first coined by Tsar Nicholas I in 1853. Due to a rise in nationalism in the Balkans, the Ottomans lost territory to the declaration of independence of Greece in 1830 and then Serbia and Montenegro in 1878 after the Russo-Turkish war and the subsequent Treaty of Berlin. Furthermore, the weakness of the Ottoman Empire was exploited by the Great Powers of Europe as they sought to benefit at the expense of the Ottomans. Britain and France seized the opportunity to expand their own empires by taking power over Egypt and Cyprus (UK) and Algeria and Tunisia (FR) in the mid-late c19th. By 1900, the Ottoman Empire was a shadow of its former self, which would prove troublesome for international relations as nationalism took hold in the Balkan region. Dubbed 'the Eastern Question' by the Great Powers of Europe, the consequences of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was rightly identified as a stimulus to disturb the peace in Europe.
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