Introduction / Christine Woodhead -- Nomads and tribes in the Ottoman Empire / Resat Kasaba -- The Ottoman economy in the early imperial age / Rhoads Murphey -- The law of the land / Colin Imber -- A kadi court in the Balkans : Sofia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries / Rossitsa Gradeva -- Imarets / Amy Singer -- Sufis in the age of state-building and confessionalization / Derin Terzioglu -- Royal and other households / Metin Kunt -- "On the tranquillity and repose of the sultan" : the construction of a topos / Hakan Karateke -- Of translation and empire : sixteenth-century Ottoman imperial interpreters as renaissance go-betweens / Tijana Krstic -- Ottoman languages / Christine Woodhead -- Ethnicity, race, religion and social class : Ottoman markers of difference / Baki Tezcan -- The kizilbas of Syria and Ottoman Shiism / Stefan Winter -- The reign of violence : the Celalis c. 1550-1700 / Oktay Oجˆzel.