From 1326 to 1402, Bursa, known to the Byzantines as Prousa, served as the first capital of the Ottoman Empire. It retained its spiritual and commercial importance even after Edirne (Adrianople) in Thrace, and later Constantinople (Istanbul), functioned as Ottoman capitals. Yet, to date, no comprehensive study has been published on the city's role as the inaugural center of a great empire. In works by art and architectural historians, the city has often been portrayed as having a small or insignificant pre-Ottoman past, as if the Ottomans created the city from scratch. This couldn't be farther from the truth. In this book, rooted in the author's archaeological experience, Suna Çagaptay tells the story of the transition from a Byzantine Christian city to an Islamic Ottoman one, positing that Bursa was a multi-faith capital where we can see the religious plurality and modernity of the Ottoman world. The encounter between local and incoming forms, as this book shows, created a synthesis filled with nuance, texture, and meaning. Indeed, when one looks more closely and recognizes that the contributions of the past do not threaten the authenticity of the present, a richer and more accurate narrative of the city and its Ottoman accommodation emerges.

In this ground-breaking work on the Ottoman town of Manastir (Bitola), Robert Mihajlovski, provides a detailed account of the development of Islamic, Christian and Sephardic religious architecture and culture as it manifested in the town and precincts.

Architectural and urban analysis of Athens between 1456 and 1920 discloses the metamorphosis of a town to a city, experienced as an invigorating adventure through the meandering routes of history.

This book traces the history of conflict and contact between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East prior to 1914.

This book explores the role of conversion to Islam in the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, its imperial ideology and Sunni identity, and its relationship with its Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, in the context of the early modern Mediterranean.

The book examines the postcolonial Muslim political discourse through monuments. It establishes a link between the process by which historic buildings become monuments and the gradual transformation of these historic/legal entities into political objects. The author studies the multiple interpretations of Indo-Islamic historical buildings as ‘political sites’ as well as emerging Muslim religiosities and the internal configurations of Muslim politics in India. He also looks at the modes by which a memory of a royal Muslim past is articulated for political mobilisation. Raising critical questions such as whether Muslim responses to political questions are homogenous, the book will greatly interest researchers and students of political science, modern Indian history, sociology, as well as the general reader interested in contemporary India.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: everyday coexistence in the post-Ottoman space / Rebecca Bryant -- Landscapes of coexistence and conflict -- Sharing traditions of land use and ownership : considering the "ground" for coexistence and conflict in pre-modern Cyprus / Irene Dietzel -- Intersecting religioscapes in post-Ottoman spaces : trajectories of change, competition and sharing of religious spaces / Robert Hayden -- Cosmopolitanism or constitutive violence? : the creation of "Turkish" heraklion / Aris Anagnostopoulos -- Trade and exchange in Nicosia's common realm : Ermou street in the 1940s and 1950s / Anita Bakshi -- Performing coexistence and difference -- In bed together : coexistence in togo Mizrahia's Alexandria films / Deborah A. Starr -- Memory, conviviality and coexistence : negotiating class differences in Burgazadas, Istanbul / Deniz Neriman Duru -- "If you write this tano, it will be tono!" : performing linguistic difference in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina / Azra Hromadzic -- Negotiating everyday coexistence in the shadow of conflict -- The Istanbul Armenians : negotiating coexistence / Sossie Kasbarian -- A conflict of spaces or of recognition? : co-presence in divided Jerusalem / Sylvaine Bulle -- Grounds for sharing, occasions for conflict : an inquiry into the social foundations of cohabitation and antagonism / Glenn Bowman

Academic Studies in Architectural Sciences

Less than Nations: Central-Eastern European Minorities after WWI represents the result of research that the author has carried over recent years, and was facilitated by the 2008 PRIN project (Programmi di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) and the 2010 Sapienza Research funds. The book analyses the conditions of national minorities after World War I, when the geo-political map of Central-Eastern Europe was redefined by international diplomacy. The new settlements were based on the principle of national self-determination and were conditioned by the geographic reality of Central-Eastern Europe, where states and nations rarely coincided. The second volume of the book analyses some special aspects of this question and focuses on the interpretation of some particular cases, which had an outstanding role in the definition of the international framework. The massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and of the Jews in Eastern Europe, for example, alarmed the international community and contributed to the 1919 "emergency" of minority rights. The role of Kin States such as Germany and Hungary, instead, characterized the entire interwar period and conditioned the stability of Europe and the League of Nations. Finally, special cases like those of Slovakia and Bosnia are also helpful in understanding the ideas of nation and minority, and how conceptualisations of the latter have changed throughout the last century.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Turkey examines the period from the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the accession of Ahmed I in 1603. During this period, the Ottoman Empire moved into a new phase of expansion, emerging in the sixteenth century as a dominant political player on the world scene. With territory stretching around the Mediterranean from the Adriatic Sea to Morocco, and from the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea, the Ottomans reached the apogee of their military might in a period seen by many later Ottomans, and historians, as a golden age in which the state was strong, the sultan's might unquestionable, and intellectual life and the arts flourishing. In this volume, leading scholars assess the considerable expansion of Ottoman power and effervescence of the Ottoman intellectual and cultural world. They also investigate the challenges that faced the Ottoman state, particularly in the later period, as the empire experienced economic crises, revolts and drawn-out wars.