The Ottoman Empire began as a tiny state in the fourteenth century. It was centered in the city of Bursa in what is now northeast Turkey, and it rapidly expanded through the conquest of neighboring states. Its greatest expansion was in the sixteenth century, when it included southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Due to wars with other European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire began to decline and became known as the “sick man of Europe.” The Empire’s successor was Turkey, which became an independent country in 1922.