Acknowledgements
This was not an easy project. The vast number of documents we set out to translate notwithstanding, it took a great deal of time and resources to find the right people with the necessary skills to bring the project to fruition. The team members have changed several times, and eventually none of the members of the initial team survived the project.
I am indebted to many people who have all contributed in significant ways to this book. First and foremost, I am most grateful to Panagiotis C. Laskaridis, President of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, for having the vision to sponsor this rather unusual project. I would like to thank Konstantinos Mazarakis-Ainian for facilitating matters at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation. I am also indebted to Konstantinos Thanasakis for tirelessly coordinating every aspect of this project.
I am genuinely obliged to Kahraman Şakul, who joined the project at a later stage and fastidiously retranslated and edited a good number of the documents from scratch. Without his support, this book would not have been completed in time.
Particular thanks are due to my young colleague Çağrı Erdoğan, who amazed me with his knowledge of Ottoman paleography and undertook the hefty job of placing the diacritical marks on the transliterations, as well as transliterating several registers.
I would like to thank Aysel Yıldız, Mehmet Savan, and Nikola Rakovski most sincerely for taking this project seriously and working around the clock on the transliterations and translations.
I warmly thank Alexandra Pel for meticulously editing the English text on a tight schedule and preparing the final manuscript for publication. My special thanks to Lydia Papageorgiou-George for preparing the maps and the bibliography and to Efi Andrikopoulou for preparing the index.
Candan Badem, Mehmet Mennan, Yusuf Şafak, Himmet Taşkömür, Ilias Kolovos, Paraskevas Matalas, Alidost Numan, Hara Nassiki, Despoina Pavlidou, Sinan Kuneralp, Ali Can Batmaz, and Gelina Harlaftis all made valuable contributions at different stages of the project, and my special thanks go to them.
I would also like to thank Abdurraouf Oueslati, Acquisitions Editor for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Brill, and the Brill production team for their assistance at the final stage of this book.
Last but not least, I am grateful to my wife, Olga Antonea, for handling various graphic design issues and also for her patience and support throughout the project.
H. Şükrü Ilıcak