The Ottoman Core: A Spatial Exploration of the Emergence of Ottoman Governance Practices

The OTTOMANCORE project seeks to redefine the understanding of how the Ottoman Empire was governed during its much-debated formative period (14th16th centuries).

It challenges the prevalent statist narrative in historiography that envisages Ottoman rulership as a top-down, preordained construct and proposes a novel regional perspective to examine governance practices from a spatially aware and actor-centered viewpoint.

Leveraging a robust analytical foundation that assimilates information from a diverse array of Ottoman and Central European narrative and documentary sources, as well as archaeological data, the project explores the local mechanisms and socio-economic grounding of Ottoman governance.

OTTOMANCORE proposes to deconstruct the essential constituents of governance and deanonymize numerous provincial stakeholders to unearth the grassroots of Ottoman rulership. The project is structured into three interlocking modules.

The first is dedicated to developing innovative Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models and automated data extraction from Ottoman sources.

The second module delves into a complex geospatial analysis of diverse data, probing the local governance practices, landholding patterns, and socio-economic dynamics by examining several interrelated components: i) land regime; ii) settlement network; iii) population geography; iv) connectivity and communication; v) revenue distribution.

The final module aims to synthesize these findings into a coherent spatial narrative, rearticulating the history of Ottoman governance from a regional standpoint.

OTTOMANCOREs approach, blending history with cutting-edge technology, pushes the boundaries of Ottoman historiography and sets a new standard for empirical research.

By challenging existing narratives and introducing novel methodologies, it holds the potential to foster a more nuanced appreciation of Ottoman governance and reshape our understanding of the ruling practices of pre-modern empires.