Russia and the Ottoman Empire: The Geopolitical Dimension

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500-1800

By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a major military power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans were feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccol6 Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. The latter regarded the empire of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) as a model to be emulated by his own ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy (r. 1547-84), and inde...

Hijra and forced migration from nineteenth-century Russia to the Ottoman Empire

Agricultural Productivity in the Early Ottoman Empire

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I use data from the tax registers of the Ottoman Empire to estimate grain output per worker, standardiz...

A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe.

This essay studies Moses Galeano, a Jewish scholar with ties to Crete and the Ottoman Sultan's court, who traveled to the Veneto around 1500. After describing Galeano's intellectual milieu, it focuses, first, on circumstantial evidence that he transmitted information central to the rise of Renaissance astronomy. Galeano knew of theories that strongly resemble portions of astronomy texts written...

Sports Lodges in the Ottoman Empire Depicted in the Travel Book (Seyahat-Name) of Evliya Çelebi

Background. Sport lodges are institutions that are responsible for providing athletes with accommodation, food and training. Sport lodges had the same tasks as today's sports clubs and played a vital role in the institutionalization and development of sports within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Evliya Çelebi is a prominent 17th century traveler. During his lifetime, he traveled throughout ...