Rise of the Ottoman Empire
The foundation and rise of the Ottoman Empire is a period of history that started with the emergence of the Ottoman principality in , and ended with the conquest of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. This period witnessed the foundation of a political entity ruled by the Ottoman Dynasty in the northwestern Anatolian region of Bithynia, and its transformation from a small principality on the Byzantine frontier into an empire spanning the Balkans and Anatolia. For this reason, this period in the empire's history has been described as the Proto-Imperial Era. Throughout most of this period, the Ottomans were merely one of many competing states in the region, and relied upon the support of local warlords and vassals to maintain control over their realm. By the middle of the fifteenth century the Ottoman sultans were able to accumulate enough personal power and authority to establish a centralized imperial state, a process which was brought to fruition by Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451-1481). The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 is seen as the symbolic moment when the emerging Ottoman state shifted from a mere principality into an empire, marking a major turning point in its history.
History of liberalism
In the Ottoman Empire, to secure its territorial integrity against internal nationalist movements and external aggressive powers, the Empire launched a series of reforms. This period is called Tanzimat (reorganization). Although liberal ministers and intellectuals tried to influence the reforms, the motives for the implementation of Tanzimât were bureaucratic. These changes were made to improve civil liberties. However, the reformist ideas and trends of the Nahda and Tanzimat didn't reach the common population successfully, as the books, periodicals, and newspapers were accessible primarily to intellectuals and segments of an emerging middle class, while many Muslims saw them as foreign influences on the world of Islam. That perception complicated reformist efforts made by Middle Eastern states. A policy called Ottomanism was meant to unite all the different peoples living in Ottoman territories, "Muslim and non-Muslim, Turkish and Greek, Armenian and Jewish, Kurd and Arab". The policy officially began with the Edict of Gülhane of 1839, declaring equality before the law for both Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans.
In 1865, a group of Ottoman Turkish intellectuals, who were dissatisfied with the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, established a secret society called the Young Ottomans. They believed the reforms did not go far enough and wanted to end the autocracy in the empire. They sought to transform Ottoman society by preserving the empire and modernizing it along European lines, adopting a constitutional government. Though the Young Ottomans were frequently in disagreement ideologically, they all agreed that the new constitutional government should continue to be somewhat rooted in Islam to emphasize "the continuing and essential validity of Islam as the basis of Ottoman political culture." However, they syncretize Islamic idealism with modern liberalism and parliamentary democracy; to them the European parliamentary liberalism was a model to follow, in accordance with the tenets of Islam. They "attempted to reconcile Islamic concepts of government with the ideas of Montesquieu, Danton, Rousseau, and contemporary European Scholars and statesmen."