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Cornucopia Book Offers The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350 -1550: by Heath Lowry Bahcesehir University Press £27.50 Heath Lowry is Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University. Cornucopia 32 Cornucopia 38 Ottoman Bursa | |||||||||
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From the dust jacket: A consistent feature of the author's work throughout the past three decades has been his pioneering utilization of the 15th- and 16th-century tax registers (tahrir defter) maintiand by the Ottoman bureaucracy. In a series of books and articles, he has examined areas from Trabzon in northeastern Anatolia to Selanik (Thessaloniki) in Macedonia, with the object of shedding light on the status and rule of the state's Muslim and non-Muslim inhabitants. This work continues his earlier studies, albeit on a wider screen. On the basis of the testimony of the surviving 15th-century tax registers, it examines the manner in which the region of present-day northern Greece (and by extension the Balkans as a whole) was incorporated into the Ottman polity in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries. It then weighs the resulting profile against the silent testimony of the Ottoman architectural remains in the region, in an attempt to determine the actual steps of conquest, settlement and infrastructural development. Given the fact that heretofore, much of our knowledge of early Ottoman history has been based on the later Ottoman chronicle tradition, the tone of this book is revisionist, that is it challenges much of the conventional wisdom. Its arguments are illustrated by a large body of pictures (likewise taken by the author), depicting the physical remains of the half-mellennium-long Ottoman presence in the region. As such it represents a unique example of the manner in which by a careful utilization of architectural and archaeological remains, together with the earliest surviving bureaucratic records, supplemented by the testimony of travellers, it is possible to refine our understanding of early Ottoman history.
Cornucopia 39 | |||||||||
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The Nature of the Early Ottoman State | |||||||||
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