A buyruldu (decree) from 1793 required that the ships of the Ottoman Navy were to use a red flag with the star and crescent in white.
The star and crescent design later became a common element in the national flags of Ottoman successor states in the 20th century.
A depiction of a tugh appears in the Relation d'un voyage du Levant by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1718).
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman war flags often depicted the bifurcated Zulfiqar sword, often misinterpreted in Western literature as showing a pair of scissors.
Franz Babinger (1992) suggests this possibility, noting that the crescent alone has a much older tradition also with Turkic tribes in the interior of Asia.
[13] Turkish historians tend to stress the antiquity of the crescent (not star-and-crescent) symbol among the early Turkic states in Asia.