Rumelia (St. George's Night)

The Sultanate of Rumelia was a Muslim state which succeeded the Osmanli Sultanate in the early 1400s. With power in the Near East held by the Timurid Empire, which destroyed the Osmanli at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, and with Anatolia devastated, the remnants of the Osmanli dynasty - and much of Anatolia's Turkish population - fled west to the Sultanate's Greek territory, where it pursued a naval route to power in the Mediterranean. The Sultanate's galleys dominated the eastern Mediterranean for much of the 1400s. It defeated Venice in the 1430s, taking Cyprus and Crete, and conquered the Maghreb in the 1440s. From the 1450s to early 1600s, Rumelia fought Castile and Aragon in a series of naval wars over Sicily, Granada, and, eventually, territory in the New World, although all of these powers eventually disengaged in favour of pursuing mainland ambitions. Although Rumelia lost its colonial empire, and the struggle for Granada, it remained a significant mercantile and military power, particularly as Hussite Europe began to ally against the Catholic powers in the 1600s.