Ottoman wars from the mid-fifteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century fundamentally changed the geopolitics of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and the Middle East. The Ottomans emerged in West Asia Minor toward the end of the thirteenth century. Known as “Turks” in contemporaneous Europe, the Ottoman ruling elite incorporated people of a wide variety of ethnic origins who considered themselves the followers and descendants of Osman (d. 1324?), the dynasty’s founder. Those loyal to the dynasty of Osman used the Turkish designation of “Osmanlı” (Turkish, “of Osman”), which over time came to be rendered in English as “Ottoman.” Within three generations after Osman’s death, the Ottomans had either conquered or subjugated into vassalage most of the preexisting polities and rival dynasties in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Timur Lenk’s victory over the Ottomans near Ankara in 1402 temporarily checked Ottoman expansion. Still, the dynasty recovered, and by 1453 Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) sealed the Ottomans’ status as a formidable military power by conquering Constantinople, the capital of the thousand-year-old Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire. Expansion through conquest continued well into the sixteenth century. Ottoman battlefield victories under Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) against the Safavids of Persia (Chaldiran in 1514) and the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt (Marj Dabiq in 1516 and Raydaniyya in 1517) and under Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66) against the Hungarians (Mohács in 1526) resulted in spectacular Ottoman territorial gains in eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Egypt, and Hungary.