The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ A note on transliteration and dates
For Ottoman-Turkish words, modern Turkish spelling according to Redhouse
Yeni Türkçe–İngilizce Sözlük, New Redhouse Turkish–English Dictionary of
1968 (Istanbul: Redhouse Press) has been used. Only those words denoting
places, people and terms of the Islamic realm that never formed part of the Ottoman
world have been rendered in the transliteration used in The Encyclopedia of
Islam (2nd edition, 1960–). ed. by H.A.R. Gibb et alii (Leiden: E. J. Brill).
Where there exists an accepted English name for a city or region, this has been
preferred, i.e. ‘Aleppo’ as opposed to ‘Halep’ or H.
alab’, ‘Syria’ as opposed to
‘Şām’.
The present volume contains a good many dates that I have found in sources
using only Common Era (CE) datings. This means that the relevant Islamic year
normally encompasses two years, and in order to avoid beginning with a
‘hyphenated’ expression, I have put the CE date first. When giving the birth and
death dates of individuals, or the dates between which a given ruler was in
power, the first date mentioned is always the first of the two hicri years into
which his/her birth or accession is known to have fallen. As to the second date, it
is the second of the two hicri years corresponding to the relevant person’s death
or dethronement, thus for example: Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66/
926–74). For twentieth- and twenty-first-century dates, there are no hicri
equivalents.
In the notes only CE dates have been used unless we are dealing with the date
of an archival document. Since this is normally in Ottoman, the hicri date will be
a single year, and its CE equivalent has to be hyphenated. In consequence when
giving the date of an archival document the hicri date will come first.