ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a birds-eye view of the several compass points of the territories of the Ottoman Empire as they might have appeared to travellers around 1750. The Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699 ended years of almost continual Ottoman warfare with the European alliance known as the holy league. The impact of such far-flung frontiers on imperial styles of organization and governance was profound for all three dynasties. The survery begins with the northern arc, the Russian-Ottoman frontier, and moves on to the eastern, western, and southern compass points to convey the ecological variety and vulnerability of Ottoman borderlands and their inhabitants as the story opens. Ottoman sovereignty can be envisioned as an imperial center with Istanbul at its heart surrounded by a wide buffer zone where clientage and border raids sustained autonomous martial communities and a rudimentary economy.
