ABSTRACT
Before us lie vast spaces ruled by the descendants of the House of Osman — the ‘Ottomans’. This was originally, at the end of the thirteenth century, only a modest Turkish-speaking tribal principality on the Anatolian margins of the Seljuq lands, but as of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it became a size-able political entity, and for several centuries its lands ran in a swath around the Mediterranean and Eurasia, from the Maghreb to the Caucasus, and from the Hungarian plains to Yemen. This expansion coincided with the introduction of a political structure of similar scale via a process of both centralization and ‘imperialization’ (Kafadar 1995: 97). This resulted in what is today commonly known as the Ottoman Empire.
