Recent historical studies on the Ottoman Empire have taken for granted that subjects of the Ottoman polity flourished under a so-called “Pax Ottomanica.” This edited volume probes the rosy narrative of Ottoman tolerance that has long dominated the discussions. The articles carefully strive to contextualize the many issues that sound like ethnic slurs, racial stereotyping, religious discrimination, misogyny and elitism to modern ears. The goal of the volume is not to prove that Ottoman society was a persecuting one, or that dislike or distrust was its defining characteristic, but to investigate the axes of tension, blemishes, and fractures in the everyday practice of coexistence in a dynamic, multi-religious, multi-confessional and multi-ethnic empire in which difference was the norm rather than the exception.

Hakan T. Karateke (PhD, Bamberg University) is Professor of Ottoman and Turkish Culture, Language, and Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Evliya Çelebi’s Journey from Bursa to the Dardanelles and Edirne (2013) and an article titled “The Rosy History of Jews in the Ottoman Empire: A Critical Approach to Jewish Historiography.”

H. Erdem Çıpa (PhD, Harvard University) is Associate Professor of Ottoman history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World (2017) and co-editor, with E. Fetvacı, of Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future (2013).

Helga Anetshofer (PhD, Vienna University) is Lecturer for Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the University of Chicago. Her publications include her recent articles “Folk Etymologies and Stories of Toponyms from Danishmendid Territory in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname” (2015) and “The Hero Dons a Talismanic Shirt for Battle: Magic Objects Aiding the Warrior in a Turkish Epic Romance” (2018).