Four years of residence in the Ottoman Empire, chiefly in Constantinople, during the most disastrous period of its decline, have led me to investigate its origin. This book is written because I feel that the result of my research brings a new point of view to the student of the twentieth-century problems of the Near East, as well as to those who are interested in fourteenth-century Europe. If we study the past, it is to understand the present and to prepare for the future.

I plead guilty to many footnotes. Much of my text is controversial in character, and the subject-matter is so little known that the general reader would hardly be able to form judgements without a constant—but I trust not wearisome—reference to authorities.

The risk that I run of incurring criticism from Oriental philologists on the ground of nomenclature is very great. I ask their indulgence. Will they not take into consideration the fact that there is no accepted standard among English-speaking scholars for the transliteration of Turkish and Slavic names? Wherever possible, I have adopted the spelling in general usage in the Near East, and in English standard lexicons and encyclopaedias. When a general usage cannot be determined, I have frequently been at a loss.

There was the effort to be as consistent in spelling as sources and authorities would permit. But where consistency was lacking in originals, a consistent transliteration sometimes presented difficulties with which I was incompetent to cope. Even a philologist, with a system, would be puzzled when he found his sources conflicting with each other in spelling, and—as is often the case—with themselves. And if a philologist thinks that he can establish his system by transliterating the spoken word, let him travel from Constantinople to Cairo overland, and he will have a bewildering collection of variants before he reaches his journey’s end. I was not long in Turkey before I learned that Osman and Othman were both correct. It depended merely upon whether you were in Constantinople or Konia! After you had decided to accept the pronunciation of the capital, you were told that Konia is the Tours of Turkey.

My acknowledgements to kind friends are many. I am grateful for the year-in and year-out patience and willingness of the officials of the BibliothÈque Nationale during long periods of constant demand upon their time and attention. Professors John De Witt, D.D., LL.D., of Princeton Theological Seminary, Duncan B. Macdonald, Ph.D., of Hartford Theological Seminary, and Edward P. Cheyney, Ph.D., LL.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, have read portions of the manuscript, and have made important and helpful suggestions. The whole manuscript has been read by Professors Talcott Williams, LL.D., of Columbia University, and R. M. McElroy, Ph.D., of Princeton University, who have not hesitated to give many hours to discussion and criticism of the theory that the book presents.

Above all, I am indebted for practical aid and encouragement in research and in writing, from the inception of the idea of the book until the manuscript went to press, to my wife, with her Bryn Mawr insistence upon accuracy of detail and care for form of narrative, and to Alexander Souter, D.Litt., Regius Professor of Humanity in Aberdeen University, my two comrades in research through a succession of happy years in the rue de Richelieu, rue Servandoni, and rue du Montparnasse of the queen city of the world.

H. A. G.

Paris,
September 1, 1915.