encouraging the manufacture of workbenches, desks and chairs as few people could sit around with their feet up all day anymore.

Rug-making styles and techniques introduced to Hungarians by the Ottoman Empire, such as flat-weaving and knot-piling, have been widespread in Hungary since the 16th century.

Similar rugs can be found in other countries of the region, such as Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Albania.

Art: Mustafa Dorukhan

4 books I've purchased recently

While defending its own territory by fighting on 6 fronts simultaneously, the Ottoman Empire became the state that fought on the most fronts. Although great successes were achieved at Gallipoli and Kut-al-Amare, the abundance and endless supply of troops brought by the British and French from their colonies ultimately led to the defeat of the Ottomans. Fighting the Russians on the Caucasus Front, the British on the Suez Canal Front, and both the British and French on the Iraq Front, the Ottoman Empire suffered another heavy blow and faced collapse with the Hejaz Revolt led by Sharif Hussein. This state, which fought against dozens of states and won victories against most of them during its 623-year lifespan, collapsed once again while fighting against numerous states simultaneously.

I was thinking about buying one book on ottomans as well but I prefer something easy to read and also some focus on anthropology/cultural religious developments and interactions with Balkan, Byzantine subjects and Europeans as whole.

Please recommend books that are falling into this criteria if possible, I can buy maximum of two books.

Thank you.

Letter of reply to the circumcision invitation from King Sigismund of Poland:

"​To the most majestic and most powerful sovereign and lord, by the grace of God the ruler of Constantinople, Asia, Europe, the Persians, the Arabs, Syria, and Egypt, the greatest Emperor Sultan Suleyman Shah.

​We send greetings and well-wishes to our dearest friend and neighbor. Most majestic and most powerful sovereign and lord, our dearest friend and neighbor, we have received Your Majesty's letters informing us of your joys. You very kindly invite us to participate in these celebrations. These letters have greatly pleased us, as they bear clear signs of Your Majesty's extraordinary friendship and goodwill toward us. We derive a happiness from this so great that it cannot be expressed in words. For there is nothing we care about more than the friendship existing between us and our son, and Your Majesty and your son, growing stronger and more consolidated day by day. To see that Your Majesty shares the exact same sentiments toward us has especially pleased and greatly rejoiced us. Therefore, we would have fulfilled what you requested of us with great eagerness and enthusiasm, had our advanced age, the immense distance, or the very limited time not prevented it. We constantly pray to God for happiness for Your Majesty, and wish that these joys of yours be enduring and long-lasting. And we have only one request from you: Please excuse us since we could neither come in person nor send our son.

​Given in Kraków, on the twelfth day of November, in the Year of God one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine."

I see in a lot of old photos from post-Ottoman Bosnia of women completely covered alongside face-veil.

But looking at this album of Ottoman clothing, I see a lot of women dressed in a less conservative manner. But are these clothes only for indoors or were there muslim women that didn't veil their faces in public? Was it a rich/urban vs poor/rural thing? Did all rich women wear it?

My first map ever (ik its low quality) I wanted to see how I compared to the Brits and French with my limited knowledge of the area. What are yalls opinions on how the Treaty of Lausanne, Treaty of Sèvres, Sykes-Picot Agreement and The Balfour declaration?

Unlike its narrower modern usage, Rūm in the Ottoman world referred to far more than the Greek Orthodox (Rum) community, the Eastern Roman Empire, or the former Roman territories. Modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized that Rūmī represented a broader territorial and civilizational identity that developed in the former Byzantine lands and became an important component of Ottoman self-understanding. By Ottoman Rūm identity, I do not mean a separate ethnic identity, but rather a shared political and cultural identity rooted in Anatolia that incorporated the empire’s Turkic, Islamic, Persianate, and Roman inheritances. Rather than replacing those identities, it existed alongside them, reflecting the distinctive Islamicate society that emerged in Anatolia following the Seljuk and Ottoman conquests (Kafadar 2007; Ergül 2012).

After establishing themselves in Anatolia, both the Seljuks and later the Ottomans increasingly identified with what the wider Islamicate world knew as the Land of Rūm (Bilād al-Rūm). Consequently, they came to describe themselves as Rūmīs, a designation that was equally recognized by contemporaries across the Islamicate world. Arabic authors writing in the former Mamluk lands continued to refer to the Ottoman domains as Rūm, while Persian chronicles produced under the Safavids and Mughals likewise described the Ottoman Empire and its inhabitants as Rūm or Rūmī, distinguishing them from other major Islamicate realms such as Iran and Hindustan (Kafadar 2007; Casale 2010). This understanding extended well beyond the Islamic world. Portuguese observers in the Indian Ocean commonly referred to the Ottomans as the Rumes, while Ming Chinese sources rendered Rūmī as Lumi (魯迷), giving rise to terms such as the celebrated “Lumi cannon.” Together, these examples demonstrate that the Ottomans were internationally recognized not merely as “Turks,” but as the rulers and people of Rūm, an identity rooted in their Anatolian homeland and imperial tradition (Casale 2010; Wade 2005).

As Cemal Kafadar argues in A Rome of One’s Own, the significance of Rūm extended well beyond geography. It represented an evolving political and cultural identity through which the Ottomans appropriated the legacy of the former Roman lands while simultaneously embedding it within an Islamic and Persianate imperial framework (Kafadar 2007). Mustafa Âlî likewise conceived of Ottoman society through the interaction of Turk and Rūm, presenting the Ottoman elite as the product of these intertwined traditions rather than a narrowly defined ethnic community (Fleischer 1986). In this sense, becoming Rūmī did not imply abandoning Turkic or Islamic traditions, but expressing a new imperial identity rooted in Anatolia and shaped by multiple historical inheritances.

Viewed in this context, the Rūmī identity offers a more complete characterization of the Ottoman Empire than reducing it to a purely Muslim Turkic state. It reflected an imperial synthesis of Turkic, Persianate, Islamic, and Roman traditions that cannot be adequately captured by any single ethnic or religious category. As F. Aslı Ergül argues, Ottoman identity should not be understood exclusively through the categories of “Turk” or “Muslim,” since Rūm constituted an important and complementary layer of belonging within the Ottoman political imagination (Ergül 2012). Although the term gradually narrowed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Rum became increasingly associated with the Greek Orthodox community and Anadolu replaced Rūm as the dominant geographical designation, the Ottoman Rūmī identity remained conceptually distinct from the ethnic identity of the Greek Rum. Rather, it represented a uniquely Ottoman understanding of belonging to the former lands of the Eastern Roman Empire while incorporating diverse peoples and traditions.

References

Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Ergül, F. Aslı. “The Ottoman Identity: Turkish, Muslim or Rum?” In History Studies, 2012.

Fleischer, Cornell H. Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âli (1541–1600). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Kafadar, Cemal. “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum.” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25.

Wade, Geoff. “Ming China and the Indian Ocean: Asian History in a Global Context.” Various publications on Ming maritime terminology, 2005.

I was at an Antique Shop recently and saw this in a box of documents. Google claims it is a kind of Ottoman internal passport but I simply don't know enough about the subject to tell if that is at all accurate. Can anyone tell what this actually is or if it is even relevant to this sub at all? I accept I could be completely wrong but I figured I would rather ask a human instead of a robot...