The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT

A note on transliteration and dates
For Ottoman-Turkish words, modern Turkish spelling according to Redhouse Yeni Türkçe–İngilizce Sözlük, New Redhouse Turkish–English Dictionary of 1968 (Istanbul: Redhouse Press) has been used. Only those words denoting places, people and terms of the Islamic realm that never formed part of the Ottoman world have been rendered in the transliteration used in The Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edition, 1960–). ed. by H.A.R. Gibb et alii (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

Where there exists an accepted English name for a city or region, this has been preferred, i.e. ‘Aleppo’ as opposed to ‘Halep’ or alab’, ‘Syria’ as opposed to ‘Şām’.

The present volume contains a good many dates that I have found in sources using only Common Era (CE) datings. This means that the relevant Islamic year normally encompasses two years, and in order to avoid beginning with a ‘hyphenated’ expression, I have put the CE date first. When giving the birth and death dates of individuals, or the dates between which a given ruler was in power, the first date mentioned is always the first of the two hicri years into which his/her birth or accession is known to have fallen. As to the second date, it is the second of the two hicri years corresponding to the relevant person’s death or dethronement, thus for example: Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66/ 926–74). For twentieth- and twenty-first-century dates, there are no hicri equivalents.

In the notes only CE dates have been used unless we are dealing with the date of an archival document. Since this is normally in Ottoman, the hicri date will be a single year, and its CE equivalent has to be hyphenated. In consequence when giving the date of an archival document the hicri date will come first.