by Larry Reed
GoldSeek
By the start of the 20th Century, governments and their diplomats around the world dubbed the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire “the sick man of Europe.”
Conventional wisdom, reflected in high school and college history texts to this day, cites these contributing factors in the 500-year decline of what was once one of the biggest and most powerful domains in the world: a failure to industrialize and modernize; internal strife; conflict with neighbors, particularly Russia; and siding with Germany in World War I.
All those factors played a role in the Empire’s formal end in 1922, when it was dismantled. The smaller nation of Turkey emerged in its place. But historians, who often prefer to tell history in political and military terms, probably underestimate the role of currency debasement (a.k.a.. inflation) in the demise of the Ottomans.