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...

In the late nineteenth century Chinese residents of Dihua (Urumqi), the desert capital of China’s Xinjiang Province, referred to the large, fortified gateway which separated the walled Chinese settlement from the walled Muslim settlement as the “gate which divides heaven from earth.” In so distancing themselves from their near neighbors, with whom they were inextricably linked through the econo...

Ivan Cibrario Bertolotti IEIIT-CNR – Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell’Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni 11.

Mosques are external load dominated buildings that characterized by their intermittent and varying occupancy schedules. Most mosques employ some form of mechanical heating/cooling system in order to maintain suitable thermal comfort conditions for the users during prayer times. Due unique spatial characteristics patterns mosques, these systems often found be energy-intensive which impacts overa...