Figures
1 Cutting an institution’s existence along the historical spectrum 34
2 Late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century heavy Ottoman horseman armour 45
3 Sixteenth-century Ottoman sipāhi in European eyes (from E. W. Happels, Thesaurus Exoticorum: Oder eine mit außländischen Raritäten und Geschichten wohlversehene Schatzkammer … (Hamburg, 1688), 3: 45: after a mid-sixteenth-century drawing by Melchior Lorich) 61
4 Overview: The aḳıncı pyramid 78
5 First two pages from the 1472 aḳıncı register, which contain the sultan’s order (ḥükm) and the beginning of the accounting: Bulgarian National Library ‘Cyril and Method’ Sofia, OAK 94/73, fols. 3v–4r 84
6 ʿOṡmān, Hüner-nâme, Topkapı, Hazine, no. 1523, fol. 57b 95
7 Fourteenth-century Byzantine military fashion in The Trebizond Alexander Romance, second half of the fourteenth century, Venice, Hellenic Institute Codex Gr. 5, fol. 39r 105
8 Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. 1803, fol. 123r: Describing how the Turks became part of the Grand Catalan Company 116
9 Gigliati struck in the names of the lord of Aydın, Saruḫān and Menteşe 136
10 Momčila’s fortress in Pirot, Serbia 151
11 Visualisation of the network of the dynatoi (1310–1341) if one uses Andronikos II and Andronikos III as brokers. Credit: Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, “Complex Historical Dynamics of Crisis: The Case of Byzantium,” in Krise und Transformation. Beiträge des internationalen Symposiums vom 22. bis 23. November 2010 an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, eds. Suppan Arnold and Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2012), 120 161
12 Akçes of Orḫān Beğ, ‘Beğlerbeği (Çelebi)’ and İsḥāḳ Beğ 177
13 The first Ottoman silver coin (akçe): on reverse “Orḫān bin ʿOṡmān, düribe Brūsā” in quatrefoil, outside year in Arabic 178
14 The keep of Pythion and the Evros valley 212
15 Letter to Sarži dated 10 December 1399: Lettere di Levante no. 1 (1395–1423), fol. 23r 224
Maps
1 Mapping the mid-fifteenth-century aḳıncı families 89
2 Political atomisation in the fourteenth-century Balkans 156
3 Chersonese Peninsula and the coastal area below Panides (Panion) 199