Suraiya Faroqhi's scholarly contribution to the field of Ottoman history has been prodigious. Her latest book represents a summation of that scholarship, an introduction to the state-of-the-art in Ottoman history. In a compelling exploration of the ways that primary and secondary sources can be used to interpret history, the author reaches out to students and researchers in the field and in related disciplines to familiarise them with these documents. By considering both archival and narrative sources, she explains why they were prepared, encouraging her readers to adopt a critical approach to their findings, and disabusing them of the notion that everything recorded in official documents is necessarily true! While the book is essentially a guide to a complex discipline for those about to embark upon their research, the experienced Ottomanist will find much that is original and provocative in its sophisticated interpretation of the field.

This book dedicated to Suraiya Faroqhi shows that the early modern world was not only characterized by its having been split up into states with closed frontiers. Writing history “from the bottom”, by treating the Ottoman Empire and other countries as “subjects of history”, reduces the importance of political borders for doing historical research. Each social, economic and religious group had its own world-view and in most of the cases the borders of these communities were not identical with the political frontiers. Regarding the Ottoman Empire and the other early modern states as systems of different ecumenical communities rather than only as political units offers a different approach to a better understanding of the various ways in which their subjects interacted. In this context the term ecumenical community designates social, religious and economic groups building up cross-border communities. Different ecumenical communities overlapped within the boundaries of a state or in a specific area and gave them their distinctive characters. This festschrift for Suraiya Faroqhi aims to describe some of the close contacts between various ecumenical communities within and beyond the Ottoman borders.