8 | Living in the Ottoman Realm
commercial activities without much disruption. Their flexibility and adaptability
to new rulers ensured their survival as a community under Ottoman rule. This
is not a story of clash or conflict but one of accommodation and reconciliation
during a transition period, full of changes as well as continuities, and the leading
actors were the Genoese families who kept their commercial interests and main-
tained order in the vibrant and cosmopolitan setting of Ottoman Galata.
In chapter 4 Theoharis Stavrides traces the Christian connections of the
fifteenth-century grand vizier Mahmud Pasha Angelović, who was a convert to
Islam and a descendant of Byzantine aristocratic families. It examines how these
connections were exploited by Sultan Mehmed II while representing a potential
threat for the Ottoman dynasty. Mahmud Pasha became a Muslim, but he re-
tained his connections to his Orthodox Christian relations, who helped facilitate
Ottoman consolidation of their conquests in the Balkans.
In chapter 5 Murat Cem Mengüç contextualizes a specific excerpt from an
early sixteenth-century Ottoman history book to explain how the identity terms
“Türk,” “Türkmen,” and “Ottoman” operated after the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople (1453). Ottomans explained their legitimacy among Turkish-
speaking Muslims from a new imperial status, according to Turkic origins, to
gain the support of Turkic rulers of Anatolia. To silence the previously autono-
mous Türkmen, whose lands were being rapidly confiscated by the Ottomans,
they argued that the Ottomans were the legitimate Turkic leaders of Islamic im-
perialism at the Christian frontier.
In chapter 6 Hasan Karatas reveals that the Ottoman incorporation of Ana-
tolia in the fifteenth century was a process full of tensions and negotiations. The
chapter tells the story of a Sufi shaykh in north-central Anatolia whose quest
for acceptance in Ottoman circles reveals the construction of Ottoman identity
in the Anatolian provinces while also showing how family and property rela-
tions and larger political developments intersect at the formation of a Sufi order.
Habib-i Karamani (d. 1496) was one of the earliest propagators of the Halveti
order. He was born and educated in the Karaman region in central Anatolia
before it was incorporated by the Ottomans as a result of a series of military
conflicts in the fifteenth century. Habib-i Karamani struggled for years to enter
Ottoman networks but never became accepted in Istanbul, because he backed the
wrong prince in the succession dispute between Bayezid and Cem at the death of
Mehmed II.
Part II. th through th Centuries: Expansion and Cultural Splendor:
The Creation of a Sunni Islamic Empire
Part II traces the transformation of Ottoman identity as a result of rapid expan-
sion into eastern Anatolia and the Arab lands that resulted from the campaigns