Ottoman Empire
Several historians such as British historian Edward Gibbon and the Greek historian Dimitri Kitzikis have argued that after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman state took over the machinery of the Roman state, and that in essence the Ottoman Empire was a continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire under a thin Turkish Islamic guise. Kitzikis called the Ottoman state "a Greek-Turkish condominium". The American historian Speros Vryonis wrote that the Ottoman state was centered on "a Byzantine-Balkan base with a veneer of the Turkish language and the Islamic religion". Other historians have followed the lead of the Austrian historian Paul Wittek who emphasized the Islamic character of the Ottoman state, seeing the Ottoman state as a "Jihad state" dedicated to expanding the world of Islam. Another group of historians led by the Turkish historian M. Fuat Koprulu championed the ""gazi" thesis" that saw the Ottoman state as a continuation of the way of life of the nomadic Turkic tribes who had come from East Asia to Anatolia via Central Asia and the Middle East on a much larger scale, and argued that the most important cultural influences on the Ottoman state came from Persia. More recently, the American historian Heath Lowry called the Ottoman state a "predatory confederacy" led in equal parts by Turks and Greeks converted to Islam.
Transformation of the Ottoman Empire
The Transformation of the Ottoman Empire, also known as the Era of Transformation, constitutes a period in the history of the Ottoman Empire from to , spanning roughly from the end of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent to the Treaty of Karlowitz at the conclusion of the War of the Holy League. This period was characterized by numerous dramatic political, social, and economic changes, which resulted in the empire shifting from an expansionist, patrimonial state into a bureaucratic empire based on an ideology of upholding justice and acting as the protector of Sunni Islam. These changes were in large part prompted by a series of political and economic crises in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, resulting from inflation, warfare, and political factionalism. Yet despite these crises the empire remained strong both politically and economically, and continued to adapt to the challenges of a changing world. The seventeenth century was once characterized as a period of decline for the Ottomans, but since the 1980s historians of the Ottoman Empire have increasingly rejected that characterization, identifying it instead as a period of crisis, adaptation, and transformation.