Ottoman flag
The national flag of the Ottoman Empire in its last century: a red flag with a white crescent and a white star. Red flags with the crescent and an eight-pointed star date from Sultan Selim III at the end of the 18th century; the star became five-pointed under Abdülmecid I, and the Republic of Türkiye kept the flag.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon dates the basic form to 1793, under Sultan Selim III, when red flags replaced the green ones used at sea; the crescent’s outer edge was then a half circle and the star had eight points. It says the flag Sultan Abdülmecid I introduced and made law in 1844 is in all essentials today’s. Orhan F. Köprülü, writing in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (1992), has Selim III add the eight-pointed star to the crescent on the army’s and navy’s flags, finds the red flag with crescent and star the Ottoman state’s national flag by the first half of the 19th century, and says the eight-pointed star was changed to a five-pointed one late in Abdülmecid’s reign. Its successor flies it still: when the sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922 the empire’s national flag was kept, and the Turkish flag law of 29 May 1936 fixed its final form.
Origin and history
Red came to the flag before the star did. The Kure encyclopedia writes that red became the Ottoman state’s official flag colour over time, above all at sea and in the army, that the crescent grew more prominent on Ottoman flags, and that the star was joined to it later. Köprülü traces the sultans’ own banners: white under Mehmed II and his successors, and red beside the white, and, as the chronicler Ibn Iyas records, a white and a red banner set up before Selim I’s tent when he conquered Egypt. Green banners, in his account, belonged to the fighters for the faith and were used mostly at sea. Under Selim III the arrangements of the late 18th century made the red flag with the white crescent and star the state’s official flag, Kure says, and Köprülü writes that by then the colours and forms of flags for ports and merchant ships had been brought into a regular order. An album of the imperial flags of Abdülmecid’s time shows them all red with white devices, except the green flag of Tripoli in Africa with three stars.
The crescent, the star and the tughra
The crescent and star were not the empire’s coat of arms. Store norske leksikon notes that they had been a symbol of Islam since the 1400s, perhaps earlier, and were used in the Ottoman Empire without being the empire’s or the sultan’s emblem: each sultan used his own calligraphic monogram, the tughra, on seals and coins, and Abdülhamid II introduced a coat of arms on European models in 1882. The motif on its own is on the star and crescent page.
Merchant flags before 1793
For the centuries before the red flag, Store norske leksikon describes merchant flags that marked the crew’s religion. From 1453 to 1793 they all had three horizontal stripes, red at top and bottom, and the middle stripe was green for Muslims, yellow for Jews, blue for Orthodox Christians and black for Catholics.
The Ottoman flag and Turkey’s
Store norske leksikon calls the flag Abdülmecid made law in 1844 essentially identical to Turkey’s flag today. The Republic fixed the details. After a flag instruction of 22 October 1925 written mainly for the navy, Köprülü writes, the Grand National Assembly passed the Turkish flag law of 29 May 1936, and its regulation of 1937 set every detail of every Turkish flag.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comFlag of TurkeyThe Republic of Türkiye kept the Ottoman red flag with crescent and star.Read next
- Next in Historical flagsYellow Dragon FlagThe national flag of China under the Qing dynasty: a yellow flag with a blue dragon and a red disc. It began as a triangular flag for government ships in the 1860s; the Regulations for the Beiyang Fleet of 1888 made it rectangular, and it flew until the dynasty fell.
- The crescent and star on their own, a symbol of Islam that the Ottoman flag carried.Star and crescentA crescent moon with a star, widely taken as an emblem of Islam and of Muslim countries, though many Muslims do not accept it as a symbol of their faith.
See also
Jolly Roger, Blackbeard’s flag, Calico Jack’s flag, Bartholomew Roberts’s flag, Emanuel Wynne’s flag, Vexillum.
Sources
- Tyrkias flagg og våpen (Store norske leksikon), Lars Roede, “Tyrkias flagg og våpen”, Store norske leksikon, Store norske leksikon, Flagget; Statsemblemet
- Bayrak (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi), Orhan F. Köprülü, “Bayrak”, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 5 (1992), TDV İslâm Araştırmaları Merkezi, Osmanlı Devleti; Türkiye Cumhuriyeti
- Türk Bayrağı, Kure Ansiklopedi entry “Türk Bayrağı”, Kure Ansiklopedi, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Bayrak Kullanımı
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves, squares and rectangles or stars.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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