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ABSTRACT:This article highlights the absence of historical gazetteers for territories once part of the Ottoman Empire, which hinders modern scholarship. The mid-nineteenth-century population registers (nüfus defterleri) offer a useful foundation for developing a gazetteer of the entire Ottoman Empire, but their use is limited due to the challenging task of geolocating the included populated places. To overcome this issue, two research projects collaborated to map mid-nineteenth-century population data using around 850 Ottoman population registers from the 1840s. The authors utilized historical maps and population registers to geolocate 16,782 populated places, creating the first version of their regional mid-nineteenth-century gazetteer. The article outlines the team's methodology used to build the gazetteer and addresses the notable limitations of the sources. Moreover, it contributes to the study of Ottoman population geography by demonstrating the extensive possibilities of historical GIS methodologies in enriching population density maps by considering environmental variables in the analysis.

Abstract:This article examines the process that formed the urban fabric of early Ottoman Edirne from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. By examining the physical structures built in the course of the first century after the Ottoman conquest of the city the article traces the formation of the Ottoman urban morphology, which replaced the inherited Byzantine spatial order of urban tissue. The study argues that Ottoman-era normative patterns, visible in the spatial modification of other Bithynian and Balkan cities, are also clearly discernible in Edirne. Scholars have previously examined in detail the rich architectural heritage of early Ottoman Edirne mostly from artistic and architectural perspectives, but paid little attention to the changes of the city’s physical form. The few publications that study the spatial transformation of the city in the Ottoman era have failed to comprehend the key role of the T-type zaviye/imarets in the process of structural change and have not identified the existence of a normative pattern, which dominated the transformation of the Ottoman cities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the period from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.

Abstract:This article examines the process that formed the urban fabric of early Ottoman Edirne from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. By examining the physical structures built in the course of the first century after the Ottoman conquest of the city the article traces the formation of the Ottoman urban morphology, which replaced the inherited Byzantine spatial order of urban tissue. The study argues that Ottoman-era normative patterns, visible in the spatial modification of other Bithynian and Balkan cities, are also clearly discernible in Edirne. Scholars have previously examined in detail the rich architectural heritage of early Ottoman Edirne mostly from artistic and architectural perspectives, but paid little attention to the changes of the city’s physical form. The few publications that study the spatial transformation of the city in the Ottoman era have failed to comprehend the key role of the T-type zaviye/imarets in the process of structural change and have not identified the existence of a normative pattern, which dominated the transformation of the Ottoman cities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the period from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.