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According to A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani --

In the eastern Mediterranean, the new and rising power was that of a Muslim dynasty,
named after its founder, 'Uthman or (in its Turkish spelling) OSMAN: hence its Islamic
name of Osmanli or some equivalent, anglicized as OTTOMAN....By the end of the four-
teenth century its forces had crossed the [Bosphorus] straits into eastern Europe and ex-
panded rapidly there. Its eastern European empire added to its strength....With its in-
creased strength it was then able to turn eastwards in Anatolia, in spite of a temporary
check when its army was defeated by that of another Turkish conqueror from the east,
Timur (Tamerlane). In 1453 it absorbed what was left of the Byzantine Empire and took
Constantinople as its new capital, Istanbul.

Continues Hourani:

There was a long struggle for control of the frontier regions lying between their main cen-
tres of power, eastern Anatolia and Iraq; Baghdad was conquered by the Ottomans in
1534, lost to the Safavids in 1623, and not taken by the Ottomans again until 1638. It was
partly as a consequence of the struggle with the Safavids that the Ottomans moved south
into the lands of the Mamluk sultanate. Largely because of their superior firepower and
military organization, they were able to occupy Syria, Egypt and western Arabia in
1516-17.

The Ottoman Empire was now the principal military and naval power in the eastern
Mediterranean, and also in the Red Sea, and this brought it into potential conflict with the
Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and the Spaniards in the western Mediterranean...in the
Mediterranean it used its naval power to check Spanish expansion and established a chain
of strong points at Algiers (in the 1520s), Tripoli (in the 1550s) and Tunis (1574), but not
further west in Morocco (1991, pps. 214-215).

The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest political structures that the western part of the
world had known since the Roman Empire disintegrated. It ruled eastern Europe, western Asia and
most of the Maghrib, and held together land with very different political traditions, and many eth-
nic groups such as Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Armenians, Turks and Arabs. It main-
tained its rule over most of them for 400 years or so, and over some of them for as long as 600
years.

This was brought about, as explained by the Encyclopedia Britannica, "by a series of the
most warlike princes in history" (Vol. 18, p. 272).

In marked agreement with this division of the rise and spread of Islam is the two-fold pic-
ture presented by the fifth and sixth trumpet visions, which are connected closely together, while
being separated from the preceding group of four trumpets, and also from the seventh which stands
by itself.

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