The modern Turkish alphabet has 29 letters, of which three vowels and three consonants are unfamiliar to those who do not know the language, and one consonant is pronounced differently from English. The letters in question are these:
c as j in Jane
ç as ch in chip
ğ silent; lengthens a preceding vowel
ı as i in cousin
ö as eu in Fr. deux
ş as sh in ship
ü as in Fr. tu
Turkish also has a dotted capital i – İ – which I have used for Ottoman and Turkish personal and place-names, e.g. İzmir, not Izmir, but have not used, exceptionally, for Istanbul, which I have written thus and not as İstanbul as is proper.
Imposing entirely consistent systems for personal and place-names has proved an insurmountable challenge. For people who may be deemed Ottomans I have used modern Turkish ‘academic’ spellings: the name Mehmed, for instance, is today Mehmet in popular usage, and Bayezid, Beyazit; I have preferred the older version. I have also used the Turkish version for the names of the Turcoman rulers of, for example, Karaman and the Akkoyunlu. For Seljuks, Mamluks, Safavids and other non-Ottomans I have relied on the spelling in the Cambridge History of Islam (omitting indication of vowel length) except for a few individuals familiar to English readers, such as Tamerlane (properly Timur).
Place-names are still more problematic; for every watertight reason for preferring one spelling over another, there is an equally watertight reason for preferring the second. Most places had more than one name; some places in central Europe, for instance, are known by four names e.g. Nové Zámky (mod.), Uyvar (Ott.), Érsekújvár (Hung.), Neuhäusel (Ger.). The Ottoman place-names (which have usually been retained in modern Turkish) are most familiar to me, but would have confounded English readers. I have therefore, since they have the virtue of being easy to locate, but at risk of anachronism, chosen to use modern place-names as given in The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World (Millennium Edition, 2000) except in the case of some Ottoman provinces for which to use a modern name would have been an anachronism too far, and idiosyncrasy seemed a lesser sin – Uyvar is a case in point. An alternative, perhaps more familiar, place-name is often given at first mention in the text, and alternative names are also found in the Index.
Mapping the Ottoman Empire is notoriously difficult. The empire’s frontiers were never entirely stable for long and, internally, provinces formed and re-formed; historians still do not have an accurate picture of which provinces existed at any time, let alone exactly where their borders lay. Any map attempting to show provinces can therefore only be impressionistic; the administrative centre of each province is, however, usually known.
Many of the passages quoted in the text have been shortened and the style of some translations by others into English from another language has been slightly revised.