For over four centuries, the Ottoman Empire governed  population movement as a routine component of administrative order. Warfare, fiscal extraction, frontier security, environmental pressures, and centralized planning continuously displaced and recombined populations  across Anatolia, the Balkans, the Black Sea steppe, and the Caucasus. In this context, mobility functioned not as an exceptional disruption but as a regular instrument of imperial governance . Through sustained

Abstract This article examines the major population movements that reshaped Anatolia  and Rumelia  between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on the political and institutional context outlined in Ottomans and Karamanids , it analyzes the long-term repercussions of Ottoman expansion, the application and evolution of forced relocation (sürgün), the demographic effects of the Celâlî rebellions, migrations driven by Ottoman–Safavid frontier dynamics, and the large-

Folk literature and music represent one side of the Ottoman society’s cultural life. The daily life of the rural population, its poverty,...