Ertugrul Osman, who might have ruled the Ottoman Empire from a palace in Istanbul but instead spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan, died Wednesday night in Istanbul. He was 97.

The cause was kidney failure, according to his wife, Zeynep, who was visiting Istanbul with him when he died.

Osman was a descendant of Osman I, the Anatolian ruler who in 1299 established the kingdom that eventually controlled parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He would have eventually become the sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923.

For the last 64 years, Osman — formally His Imperial Highness Prince Ertugrul Osman — and his wife, a niece of a former Afghan king, lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a four-story building on Lexington Avenue. At one time they kept 12 dogs in their home, a two-bedroom unit up a narrow, dim stairway, and enlisted neighborhood children to walk them.

Given the gap between what might have been and what was, Osman was often asked if he dreamed that the empire would be restored. He always answered, flatly, no.

“I’m a very practical person,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “Democracy works well in Turkey.”

In an interview for Al-Jazeera television in 2008, he refused to say an unkind word about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led the revolution that deposed his family.

Ali Tayar, an architect from Istanbul and a friend, said in 2006 that Osman had “no ambitions to return, and he doesn’t want anyone to think he does.”

“But he’s an incredibly important link to Turkey’s past,” Tayar added.

Born in 1912, Osman was the last surviving grandson of an Ottoman emperor; his grandfather, Abdul Hamid II, ruled from 1876 to 1909. In 1924, the royal family was expelled by Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. “The men had one day to leave,” Osman said. “The women were given a week.”

Osman attended school in Vienna and moved to New York in 1939. He returned to Turkey for the first time 53 years later, in August 1992, at the invitation of the prime minister. On that trip, he went to see the 285-room Dolmabahce Palace, which had been his grandfather’s home (and where he had played as a child). He insisted on joining a tour group, despite the summer heat. “I didn’t want a fuss,” he said. “I’m not that kind of person.”