To make the book accessible to the general reader, Ottoman and Turkish names have been rendered in modern Turkish spelling, and non-English terms have been translated into English. Those Arabic, Ottoman, and Turkish words generally known in English, such as pasha, sheikh, and the like, are presented in their English forms.
The Turkish letters and their pronunciation are as follows:
c as j in John
ç as ch in church
ğ is silent; it lengthens the preceding vowel
ı as i in cousin
ş as sh in ship
Istanbul or Constantinople? Despite the fact that the name Constantinople was used by the Ottomans themselves, it is convention to call the Byzantine city of Constantinople by that name only until the Ottoman conquest in 1453, and thereafter to use the name Istanbul, which derives from the Greek stin poli (to the city), the name officially given to the city only after the fall of the empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This book follows that convention.
Because the Ottomans used the term ‘Anatolia’ to refer to Southwest Asia/Asia Minor, this is the term used in this book. Likewise, the region often referred to as the Balkans—but which the Ottomans called Rûmeli (land of the Romans)—is rendered as ‘Rûm’. The approximate English translation of this is Southeastern Europe, the term most often used in this book.