According to Biblical prophecy (see previous sections of this work) there were to be four, and only four successive Empires in the Middle East, each conquering the one before it.  The Empires were:  Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and the Roman/Byzantine empires.  However, history books say that there were five successive Empires -- they say that the Ottoman Empire conquered the Byzantine Empire.  How can this be?

The above map shows the Ottoman Empire.  Historians are very precise scholars, but they also like to divide the past into manageable chunks.  That desire of historians to separate one time from another time can lead to divisions in history that would have seemed arbitrary to the people living at that time.  If we remove the artificial divisions then we get a more accurate picture of what life was like for the people living in the past.  Lets look at the start of the Ottoman Empire as the people living then would have perceived it.
     The Roman Empire had a Christian government, but the people were Muslim.  The people did not like that their country was being ruled by Christians.  In the year 1300, Osman I lived in the very middle of the Roman Empire, just outside of the capitol city.  Osman I decided to overthrow the Christian emperor and replace him with an Islamic emperor, so he raised an army of Turks and started a revolution.  The Turks were not outside invaders, they were all from there, and the Roman Empire was their home.  The following picture shows the location and size of land controlled by the Turk army in the year 1300, just south of the city of Constantinople:

In 1300 the Ottoman "empire" was just a small group of revolutionaries who controlled a small amount of land.  In the year 1453 Mehmed II became sultan of the Turk army, and two years later Mehmed II captured Constantinople.  However, Mehmed did not destroy Constantinople like an invading army would normally do -- instead the Turks preserved the city intact because Constantinople was their city, it was their capital.  The area of Constantinople was originally Greek Byzantium, and the traditional symbol for Greek Byzantium was the pagan crescent and star.  The Turks' ancestors were culturally Greek and the crescent and star was their traditional symbol.  After the revolution, the Turks replaced all the Christian crosses with this traditional symbol.  The following pictures show the original Greek symbol used in the first century BCE, and the Turk symbol used by the Ottoman Empire:

The first thing that Mehmed II did after taking the city was to declare himself to be Caesar and the Roman emperor!  The following is from the Encyclopædia Britannica:
  

After the civil war the Empire had the same population, the same capitol city, the same symbols, and a Roman emperor.  The Empire went from being a pagan Empire in Biblical times, to being a Christian Empire, and then becoming an Islamic Empire, but it was the same Empire.  The Ottoman Empire is a continuation of the Roman Empire.  The city's name was then changed from the Christian name Constantinople to the Muslim name Istanbul.
     However, the history books say that the Ottoman Empire fell during World War I.  Since the Bible says that this final Empire must still be in existence when Jesus returns, how can the Ottoman Empire be that final Empire if the history books say that it is already gone?  We will look at that in the next section.