From the very early years of their struggle to carve out a space for themselves in medieval Anatolia right to the final days of their existence as an independent polity, the Ottomans were caught between two conflicting tendencies. One of these was the tendency toward continuing flux and mobility that characterized the lives of both the nomadic tribes that were indigenous to this part of the world and the early Ottomans. The other tendency was the drive to form an effective imperial bureaucracy to govern what became the largest empire of the early modern era. When I first started working on this project, I had assumed that these two tendencies represented two irreconcilable forces; that the formation of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman and Turkish states involved a protracted contest between, on the one hand, an officialdom that had always been for “stasis” and, on the other, the masses of real and potential subjects who wanted to continue their peripatetic lives at all costs. Along with many historians, I thought that it would be inconceivable for an early modern polity such as the Ottoman Empire to survive and expand as the Ottomans did without developing an effective way of settling and controlling the nomads and without abandoning their own nomadic past.

As I examined the policies that were designed to impose stasis as the norm of the realm at various points in Ottoman history, however, I found that these were much more than simple directives designed to bring about a settled and sedentarized society.