Ottoman Studies

The definitive history of the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and most influential empires in world history. Its reach extended to three continents and it survived for more than six centuries, but its history is too often colored by the memory of its bloody final throes on the battlefields of World War I. In this magisterial work-the first definitive account written for the general reader-renowned scholar and journalist Caroline Finkel lucidly recounts the epic story of the Ottoman Empire from its origins in the thirteenth century through its destruction in the twentieth.

This stimulating and ground-breaking book surveys the history of the Ottoman Empire from its obscure origins in the early 1300s, through its rise to the status of a world power, and its "times of trouble" in the seventeenth century. Drawing both on existing scholarship and research as well as original source materials, The Ottoman Empire provides a preliminary narrative of key events and examines the internal structure and politics of the Ottoman dynasty, revealing the growth and development of the power, politics, and institutions through which the Sultans ruled the Empire. The Ottoman Empire draws from a wealth of multi-lingual sources, many of which are previously untranslated, and presents a fresh view on one of the most important, yet misunderstood, Empires of the pre-modern age.

Cemal Kafadar offers a much more subtle and complex interpretation of the early Ottoman period than that provided by other historians. His careful analysis of medieval as well as modern historiography from the perspective of a cultural historian demonstrates how ethnic, tribal, linguistic, religious, and political affiliations were all at play in the struggle for power in Anatolia and the Balkans during the late Middle Ages. This highly original look at the rise of the Ottoman empire--the longest-lived political entity in human history--shows the transformation of a tiny frontier enterprise into a centralized imperial state that saw itself as both leader of the world's Muslims and heir to the Eastern Roman Empire.

Rudi Paul Linder examines the the impact of nomadism on early Ottoman history and challenges the conclusions of Paul Wittek's Rise of the Ottoman Empire, which defined the approaches of more than two generatios of scholars. Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia offers a revealing study of pastoral nomads inhabiting the Anatolian plateau, the ways they met their needs, their threat to settled society, and how that society controlled them in the high Middle Ages.

The transformation of a small emirate, situated on the south-eastern border of the Byzantine state, into the powerful Ottoman empire, which succeeded that of Byzantium and exerted a powerful impact on the Western Christian world for several centuries, constitutes a phenomenon with a variety of aspects

"Any further advances in scholarship on the late medieval Balkans will have to begin with this book." ---George Majeska, University of Maryland The Late Medieval Balkans is the first comprehensive examination of the events of the late medieval Balkan history---events that were as important as they were fascinating. The period that John Fine examines was an era of significant demographic, political, and religious change in the region. During this time, native populations were supplemented or replaced by the Bulgars and various Slavic tribes, who were to become the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Croats---ethnic identities whose historical conflicts have persisted to this day. The Late Medieval Balkans is an important source for those who wish to expand their knowledge of this turbulent period and who wish to broaden their understanding of the region. John V. A. Fine, Jr., is Professor of History, University of Michigan.

Drawing on surviving documents from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State provides a revisionist approach to the study of the formative years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging the predominant view that a desire to spread Islam accounted for Ottoman success during the fourteenth-century advance into Southeastern Europe, Lowry argues that the primary motivation was a desire for booty and slaves. The early Ottomans were a plundering confederacy, open to anyone (Muslim or Christian) who could meaningfully contribute to this goal. It was this lack of a strict religious orthodoxy, and a willingness to preserve local customs and practices, that allowed the Ottomans to gain and maintain support. Later accounts were written to buttress what had become the self-image of the dynasty following its incorporation of the heartland of the Islamic world in the sixteenth century.

The Ghazi Sultans were frontier holy-warrior kings of late medieval and early modern Islamic history. This book is a comparative study of three particular Ghazis in the Muslim world at that time, demonstrating the extent to which these men were influenced by the actions and writings of their predecessors in shaping strategy and the way in which they saw themselves. Using a broad range of Persian, Arabic and Turkish texts, the author offers new findings in the history of memory and self-fashioning, demonstrating thereby the value of intertextual approaches to historical and literary studies. The three main themes explored include the formation of the ideal of the Ghazi king in the eleventh century, the imitation thereof in fifteenth and early sixteenth century Anatolia and India, and the process of transmission of the relevant texts. By focusing on the philosophical questions of 'becoming' and 'modelling', Anooshahr has sought alternatives to historiographic approaches that only find facts, ideology, and legitimization in these texts. This book will be of interest to scholars specialising in Medieval and early modern Islamic history, Islamic literature, and the history of religion.

Gives the first broad comprehensive account--political, religious, social, and economic--of the Turkish history of Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and outlines the major factors that led to the rise of the Ottomans.

Paul Wittek's The Rise of the Ottoman Empire was first published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1938 and has been out of print for more than a quarter of a century. The present reissue of the text also brings together translations of some of his other studies on Ottoman history; eight closely interconnected writings on the period from the founding of the state to the Fall of Constantinople and the reign of Mehmed II. Most of these pieces reproduces the texts of lectures or conference papers delivered by Wittek between 1936 and 1938 when he was teaching at Université Libré in Brussels, Belgium. The books or journals in which they were originally published are for the most part inaccessible except in specialist libraries, in a period when Wittek's activities as an Ottoman historian, in particular his formulations regarding the origins and subsequent history of the Ottoman state (the "Ghazi thesis"), are coming under increasing study within the Anglo-Saxon world of scholarship. An introduction by Colin Heywood sets Wittek's work in its historical and historiographical context for the benefit of those students who were not privileged to experience it firsthand. This reissue and recontextualizing of Wittek's pioneering work on early Ottoman history makes a valuable contribution to the field and to the historiography of Asian and Middle Eastern history generally.

This book is the first detailed reconstruction of the events and political culture of the Ottoman civil war of 1402-1413. After Timur defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara and dismembered their empire, the sons of Bayezid "the Thunderbolt" fought bloody battles for his throne, using literature and other means to justify their claims against each other. An analysis of the literature in question, which is among the earliest in Ottoman history, reveals fascinating attitudes on matters such as dynastic fratricide and power-sharing.

The manuscript translated here contains one of the most important texts for understanding the development of early Ottoman historiography in the fifteenth century. The so-called Oxford Anonymous chronicle is a comprehensive history of the Ottoman dynasty in Turkish, compiled from various sources to tell the story of the dynasty from its rise to the year 1484 (AH 889). Like several other histories produced around the same time, some of which it influenced, it presents the Ottomans in the context of wider Islamic history and contains a coherent argument for their superiority over other dynasties. The manuscript had previously belonged to the Dutch orientalist Jacob Golius (d. 1667). Although its history is largely unknown, it was probably a presentation copy made for Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512). The work itself is a product of Bayezid's patronage, and shows a strong preoccupation with the perennial Ottoman problem of dynastic succession. Fully one third of the manuscript contains an older text recounting in epic terms the struggles of Mehmed I against his brothers (140213). The obvious explanation is that when Oxford Anonymous was compiled, Bayezid II was also facing a rival claimant to the throne, his brother Cem Sultan (d. 1495).

This volume brings together ten studies on the political, religious and socioeconomic interaction between the rising Ottoman empire and declining Byzantine state in the last decades of the fourteenth century. They focus on key but under-explored episodes of that encounter, particularly in connection with Murad I, Bayezid I, and Manuel II Palaiologos. Included is an assessment of the contemporary significance of Manuel II's Dialogue With A Persian, recently brought to global prominence and controversy by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 lecture in Regensburg, and a previously unpublished analysis of Manuel's Epistolary Discourse to Kabasilas.

Born as a military frontier principality at the turn of the Fourteenth century, Turkey developed into the dominant force in Anatolia and the Balkans, growing to become the most powerful Islamic state after 1517 when it incorporated the old Arab lands. This distinctively Eastern culture, with all its detail and intricacies, is explored here by a pre-eminent scholar of Turkish history. He gives a striking picture of the prominence of religion and warfare in everyday life as well as the traditions of statecraft, administration, social values, financial and land policies. The definitive account, this is an indispensable companion to anyone with an interest in Islam, Turkey and the Balkans.

Presented here of the first time in English is a translation of Mehmed Fuad Köprülü's important work of Turkish historiography and history, Some Observations on the Influence of Byzantine Instutions on Ottoman Institutions. This work was originally published more than half a century ago, in 1931. Despite the years and the more recent research that has been done on this subject, Köprülü's work retains considerable interest to Byzantinists, Ottomanists and Islamicts. Indeed, it can be regarded as the starting point for the modern study of the social, economic and relationship between Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, and for the modern study of the historical development of Turkish institutions in general.

The studies included in the present collection by Elizabeth Zachariadou are concerned with the long period of transition from the Byzantine Empire to its successor, the Ottoman Empire. Among the themes covered are the processes of settlement and state-formation amongst the nomadic and often superficially islamized Turks who invaded Asia Minor, and the interactions between them and the conquered Christian population, including not infrequent intermarriage. Other studies focus on how the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of the old Byzantine territories became centred around their ecclesiastical authorities and the patriarchate, and accommodated themselves to their new masters, offering particular services notably in economic life and foreign relations, and channelling their energies into such fruitful areas as trade and shipping.

The papers in this volume, adapted from those given at the 1982 Byzantine Studies Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, are the result of a four-year pilot project sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks and the Centre for Byzantine Studies at the University of Birmingham. The authors trance elements of continuity and change in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries by analyzing two groups of evidence: the charters of the monasteries of Mount Athos, and the Ottoman tax registers, the tahrir defters.

Emir Timur ve Yıldırım Bâyezid’in kitabımıza konu olan mücadelesi, tarih ilminin en ilgi çeken meselelerinden biridir. Timur’un Hindistan’dan getirdiği filleri ve Osmanlı padişahının esareti gibi konular, bu tarihî hadiseyi kitlelerin hafızasına kazıyan unsurların başında gelmektedir. İlk Osmanlı tarih yazarlarının Ankara Savaşı’nda alınan mağlubiyeti kaydetmede yeterli özeni göstermedikleri bilinmektedir. Bunun gerekçesi oldukça basittir. En başta, hanedan ve saltanatı yüceltmek gibi endişelerle kaleme alınmış olan bir eserden bu hezimeti teferruatıyla aktarması beklenemez. Timur’un Anadolu Seferi ve Ankara Savaşı’nın muasır kaynakları Nizamüddin Şâmî ve Şerefeddin Ali Yezdî’nin aynı isimleri taşıyan Zâfernâme’leridir. Bunlara İbn Arabşah’ın Acâibü’l-makdûr adlı eserini de eklemek gerekir. Bu üç eser olmadan Ankara Savaşı’nı kaleme almak ilmî bir usûl değildir. Osmanlı tarih yazarlarının sultanlarını övmeleri gibi, Timurlu tarihçiler de Timur ve zaferlerinden övgüyle bahsederler. Bu yüzden çağdaş kaynakların “taraf” olduğu “tartışmalı” bir konuda yazmak cüretkârlık olarak görülebilir. Ancak, konu hakkında akademik düzeyde son yayınların 1934’te Ömer Halis ve 1942’de Alexandrescu-Dersca tarafından kaleme alındığı düşünülürse, Osmanlı Tarihi’nin bu mühim devresini ve hadisesini araştırmanın artık ertelenemez bir zaruret haline geldiği takdir edilecektir. 1402’nin 28 Temmuz’unda Ankara’nın kuzeydoğusunda Çubuk Ovası’nda karşılaşan iki ordudan yenilen taraf Osmanlılar olmuştu. Padişah esir edilmiş ve esareti hayatının sonu olmuştu. Osmanlı tarihinde Fetret Dönemi, savaş sonrası toparlanmanın adıdır. Ancak kaybedilen yarım asır olmuştu. Fatih’in İstanbul’u fethi ile Osmanlı’nın ulaştığı seviye, Yıldırım Bâyezid’in Ankara Savaşı arifesinde devleti çıkardığı zirveye karşılık gelir. Kaybedilen yarım asrın hesabı budur. Bizans ve Avrupa da bu savaşın sonuçlarından doğrudan etkilenmiştir. Bizans yarım asır daha siyasî hayatına devam etmiş, Osmanlı ilerleyişinin durmasıyla Avrupa da rahat bir nefes almıştır.