This is a course about cultural, political, social, ecological, and culinary transformation, a course about change and cultural persistence, a course about the creation of a new land and a new society from elements drawn from the ancient world, Inner Asia, and Mediterranean commerce. It is also about the legacy of that upheaval and how it has been used, and misused, in the present.
- Principles of nomadic and sedentary social and political organization in the middle ages
- the Mongol power and its career
- Seljuk decay and Ottoman success
- Ottoman social, economic, political, and military institutions
- Safavid origins
- the sedentarization of Ottoman history
- high and low culture in the Ottoman domains.