The Rise of the Ottomans
Seminar Questions
- What explains the rapid expansion of the Ottoman emirate?
What did Islam mean on the fourteenth-century Anatolian frontier?
Documents
- Excerpt from Ahmedi’s Tevarih-i Muluk-i Al-i ‘Osman (History of the Kings of the Ottoman Dynasty). In Kemal Sılay, “Ahmedi’s History of the Ottoman Dynasty,” Journal of Turkish Studies 16 (1992), 129-200. Read lines 25 through 135 of the poem (pp. 136-9). You may also find the first part of the editor’s introduction useful (pp. 129-31).
- Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, AD 1325-1354, trans. H.A.R. Gibb (Cambridge UP, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 449-59 (This is an ebook; if the link is broken or doesn't work please search for the title on the library website). Or it can be found here.
Introductory Reading
- Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power, pp. 4-17
(Sections headed “Before the Ottomans” and “The Ottoman Emirate.”) Available as e- book via library website.
Further Reading
Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2014)
Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History, c.1071 – 1330 (Taplinger, 1968)
Kate Fleet, “The Rise of the Ottomans,” New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 2.
Jonathan Harris et al, Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150 (Oxford UP, 2012)
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1481 (Isis Press, 1990)
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (Phoenix, 2001)
Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (University of California Press, 1996)
M. Fuad Koprulu, The Origins of the Ottoman Empire (State University of New York Press, 1991)
Gary Lieser, “The Turks in Anatolia before the Ottomans,” New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 2.
Rudi Lindner, “Anatolia, 1300-1453,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1.
Rudi Lindner, Explorations in Ottoman Pre-History (University of Michigan Press, 2006)
Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (State University of New York Press, 2003)
Heath Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350-1550: The Conquest, Settlement and Infrastructural Development of Northern Greece (Bahcesehir University Press, 2008)
Nevra Necipoglu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire (Cambridge UP, 2012)
Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Colin Heywood (Routledge, 2012)
Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (University of California Press, 1986).
