Assigned Reading:

Imber, chapters 2 and 3.

Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 9.

Primary Source: Konstantin Mihailovic, Memoirs of a Janissary, extracts.

Seminar Questions:

• What did the elite "Osmanlı" identity consist of?
  
• To what extent were elite Ottoman soldiers and officials a separate caste from the rest of the population?
  
• What role did elite women play in politics?
  

Further Reading:

Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Allen Unwin, 1959)

Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton University Press, 1978).

Colin Imber, "Government, Administration and Law," Cambridge History of Turkey 2: The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603, 205-240.

Metin Kunt, "Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment," International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974), 233-239.

Metin Kunt, The Sultan's Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650 (Columbia University Press, 1983).

Theodoris Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Mahmud Pasha Angelovic, 1453-1474 (Brill, 2001).

Anne Walthall (ed.), Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (University of California Press, 2008).