Demographic Transformation in Anatolia and Rumelia, 15th–19th Centuries

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-scale refugee flows that accompanied the empire’s territorial contraction in the nineteenth century.

By tracing these successive waves of movement - state-directed, voluntary, or crisis-driven - the article demonstrates how the Ottoman world developed into a deeply interconnected demographic space linking central Anatolia, Thrace, the Balkans, Crimea, and the Caucasus.

Introduction

The incorporation of the Karamanid principality into the Ottoman Empire under Mehmed II marked not the end, but the beginning of profound demographic change across Anatolia and the Balkans.

While Ottomans and Karamanids examined political and linguistic contrasts between the Ottomans and the Karamanids, the present study shifts attention from state structures to the movement of people.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, population relocations, some engineered by the state, others produced by war, rebellion, or economic upheaval, reshaped the social fabric of formerly Karamanid territories and connected them to wider demographic currents in Rumelia.

Understanding these migrations is essential for reconstructing the human geography of the Ottoman world, where identities were not static, but continually renewed through movement, resettlement, and integration. Population mobility was not an anomaly but a defining characteristic of imperial governance and societal life.

Methodological Framework

This study adopts a historical–structural approach to Ottoman demography, combining qualitative imperial documentation with secondary quantitative reconstructions. It draws primarily on the interpretive synthesis of tahrir registers (land and population surveys), mühimme defters (imperial council decrees), vakıf records, and refugee settlement reports, as reflected in the work of scholars such as İnalcık, Faroqhi, Karpat, Darling, and Pamuk. While the exact numerical scale of population movements remains difficult to determine with precision due to archival fragmentation and regional asymmetries in record-keeping, the convergence of fiscal, military, and settlement sources allows for a robust reconstruction of directional flows, economic functions, and institutional intent.

Rather than treating migration as a purely demographic variable, the article analyzes it as a state-mediated socio-economic process embedded in imperial governance. The focus is therefore not on absolute population totals but on relational transformations: how displaced populations were reinserted into production systems, provisioning networks, frontier defense, and urban labor markets.

Oral transmission, lineage memory, and craft continuity are treated as complementary historical evidence, not as substitutes for archival verification, but as indicators of how demographic restructuring was metabolized at the social level. This mixed evidentiary strategy allows the article to bridge macro-imperial policy with micro-social adaptation without reducing migration to either bureaucratic abstraction or anecdotal inheritance.

Forced Relocation After Mehmed II

The forced relocation (sürgün) policy developed by Mehmed II continued, in modified forms, under his successors. During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman administration regularly used forced relocation to populate strategic frontier towns, strengthen agricultural zones, and manage tribes whose mobility challenged imperial authority.

While the scale of relocation after Mehmed II was less dramatic, the method persisted as a routine administrative instrument. Families from Konya, Karaman, Niğde, Aksaray, and Kayseri were resettled in Rumelian towns such as Edirne, Filibe (Plovdiv), Silistre, Manastır, and Tırnova. These relocations served multiple purposes: to secure border regions, supply labor for urban growth, and mitigate the influence of powerful Turkmen clans.

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The result was a steady flow of Anatolian households into the Balkans that contributed to the emergence of mixed Turkmen–Balkan populations. These communities became a distinctive component of the Rumelian Muslim demographic.

The Celâlî Rebellions and the Internal Displacement of Anatolia (Late 16th–Early 17th Centuries)

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed the Celâlî rebellions, a series of armed uprisings triggered by tax pressure, inflation, climate-induced agricultural decline, and systemic disruptions in the timar system rather than ideological opposition to the Ottoman state. These events generated one of the most significant internal migrations in Ottoman history.

The Celâlî rebellions geographically followed the main agrarian heartlands, military routes, and tax corridors of the empire. They were concentrated primarily in central Anatolia, especially the former Karamanid regions of Konya, Karaman, Niğde, Kayseri, and Sivas, while also extending into northern and eastern Anatolia, with their demographic fallout reshaping western Anatolia and Thrace through mass refugee movement from the late 16th to the early 17th century (c. 1590–1610).

The term “Celâlî” originally derives from the 1511 uprising led by Şahkulu Celâl, a rebellious Turkmen figure whose revolt against the Ottoman authorities became infamous for its scale and violence. Although the later rebellions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had entirely different causes, driven primarily by taxation, inflation, agrarian crisis, and the breakdown of the timar system, the Ottoman state continued to refer to all major provincial uprisings in Anatolia as Celâlî.

By the late 1500s, the term had become a generic administrative label for large-scale rural insurgency rather than a reference to Şahkulu himself. This semantic continuity explains why movements of very different origins and motivations are grouped under the same name.

The fiscal burden of near-continuous warfare against the Habsburg and Safavid fronts sharply increased extraordinary taxation (avarız), while long-term price inflation, closely linked to the influx of New World silver into European and Ottoman markets, severely eroded real incomes.

Simultaneously, climatic volatility associated with the “Little Ice Age” produced recurrent crop failures, droughts, and harsh winters, further destabilizing subsistence agriculture. These pressures coincided with the structural breakdown of the timar system, as land revenues were increasingly transferred from cavalry-based military fiefs to short-term tax farming (iltizam). This shift weakened rural protection mechanisms, impoverished sipahis, and left large segments of the peasantry exposed to predatory taxation and armed coercion.

The combined result was a profound agrarian crisis marked by debt, land abandonment, and the mass militarization of landless peasants and unemployed cavalrymen, who together formed the social base of the Celâlî movements.

Central Anatolia, especially the former Karamanid regions of Konya, Karaman, Niğde, Aksaray, and Kayseri, experienced some of the most severe depopulation in Ottoman history. Contemporary Ottoman sources and later demographic reconstructions suggest that in some districts between 30 and 60 percent of rural settlements were temporarily abandoned during peak phases of rebellion between 1596 and 1610.

Entire villages were emptied as peasants fled Celâlî bands, tax collectors, and state punitive campaigns. Large numbers sought refuge in mountainous and forested zones beyond effective administrative control, while others migrated westward toward the relatively secure and commercially expanding regions of Bursa, Manisa, Kütahya, Balıkesir, and the İzmir hinterland. A further migration stream moved northward into Thrace and the southern Balkans, reinforcing earlier Anatolian settlement layers in Rumelia.

In parallel, the Ottoman administration implemented forced resettlement measures (sürgün-i hane) to repopulate devastated agricultural zones and restore fiscal productivity, relocating displaced households to underpopulated districts or strategically significant provisioning corridors.

The demographic and economic consequences of the Celâlî migrations extended throughout the seventeenth century and produced lasting transformations in Ottoman economic geography.

In western Anatolia and the Aegean basin, many former subsistence peasants were absorbed into market-oriented agricultural zones, producing cotton, tobacco, olives, silk, and wine for both imperial and Mediterranean markets. Sharecropping (ortakçılık), seasonal wage labor, and commercial farming replaced earlier village-based subsistence structures.

In rapidly growing urban centers such as Bursa, Manisa, İzmir, and later Edirne, displaced populations supplied labor for textile workshops, silk production, caravan trade, port services, and artisanal manufacturing, contributing to the expansion of proto-industrial urban economies.

In Thrace and the Balkans, Celâlî migrants were largely integrated as grain producers, livestock breeders, transport workers, and provisioning laborers, directly linked to Istanbul’s imperial supply system (iaşe). Thus, the Celâlî upheavals did not merely redistribute population, they generated a profound restructuring of Ottoman economic life, transforming large segments of the rural peasantry into market-dependent producers and urban wage earners within an increasingly monetized imperial economy.

Ottoman–Safavid Conflicts and Eastern Frontier Migrations (Early 16th-Early 18th Centuries)

The prolonged rivalry between the Ottoman and Safavid states from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries generated one of the most persistent axes of population movement within the empire.

This conflict was not only a struggle over territorial sovereignty but also a confrontation between competing political and religious orders, particularly over the allegiance of Turkmen tribal confederations inhabiting eastern and central Anatolia.

Many Turkmen groups shared cultural, linguistic, and in some cases religious affinities with the Safavid order, especially in its early militant Shiʿi phase.

Religiously, a significant portion of the Turkmen population adhered to heterodox Islamic traditions later identified with the Alevi–Kızılbaş milieu, within which the Safavid shah was venerated not merely as a political ruler but as a charismatic spiritual leader.

Linguistically, the early Safavids employed Azerbaijani Turkic as a court, military, and propaganda language, and Shah Ismail himself composed political and devotional poetry in Turkic under the name “Hatayi,” allowing Safavid ideology to circulate directly among Anatolian Turkmens through oral poetry, hymns (nefes), and dervish networks.

Culturally and socially, both the Safavid movement and the Anatolian Turkmens emerged from a shared nomadic–tribal world of pastoral economy, clan loyalty, and warrior ethics, which stood in contrast to the Ottoman bureaucratic and Sunni-orthodox imperial order. These overlapping religious, linguistic, and social bonds created a trans-regional sphere of loyalty transcending political borders, and thus made many Turkmen communities structurally susceptible to Safavid influence.

As a result, their political loyalties remained fluid. Recurrent warfare, punitive campaigns, and sectarian suspicion produced continuous population oscillation between eastern Anatolia, northern Syria, Azerbaijan, and central Anatolian plateaus.

Kurdish groups were similarly mobile, though their movements were more tightly linked to shifting frontier control and the granting or revocation of hereditary local authority (yurtluk–ocaklık). Migration thus emerged as both a survival strategy for frontier populations and a deliberate instrument of imperial discipline.

From the perspective of the Ottoman central administration, tribal mobility increasingly came to be perceived as a structural threat to fiscal stability, military recruitment, and ideological order. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the state therefore adopted a systematic policy of dispersal and resettlement aimed at breaking up large, politically autonomous Turkmen concentrations in eastern and central Anatolia.

Tribes suspected of Safavid sympathies or chronic rebellion were forcibly transferred to Thrace, Macedonia, the Danube basin, and the western Balkans, where they were placed under closer bureaucratic surveillance. These groups were expected simultaneously to serve as frontier cultivators, auxiliary military labor, and transport providers supporting imperial supply routes. By converting mobile pastoralists into semi-sedentary agricultural producers and provisioning agents, the Ottoman state sought to transform a volatile frontier population into a fiscally legible and militarily dependable resource.

The economic consequences of these eastern frontier relocations were significant both for the regions of origin and for the settlement zones. In eastern and central Anatolia, the removal of large tribal units weakened rebel recruitment, reduced seasonal raiding, and facilitated the extension of direct tax administration.

In Rumelia and western Anatolia, newly settled Turkmen households were integrated into grain cultivation, animal husbandry, transport labor, and border provisioning economies, particularly along routes supplying Istanbul and the Danubian garrisons. Over time, many of these communities underwent gradual sedentarization, transitioning from transhumant pastoralism to mixed agro-pastoral and market-oriented production.

This process contributed to the long-term demographic fusion of Anatolian and Balkan populations, and reinforced the transformation of Ottoman frontiers into economically productive imperial interiors. Thus, Ottoman–Safavid conflict-induced migrations did not merely shift populations across space. They restructured patterns of land use, labor organization, and imperial integration across two continents.

Steppe Migrations: Tatars, Nogais, and the Eighteenth-Century Transformations

The eighteenth century introduced new and far-reaching demographic pressures as a result of Russian imperial expansion across the northern Black Sea region. The progressive Russian advance toward the steppe frontier culminated in the formal annexation of Crimea by Russis in 1783, dismantling the Crimean Khanate, which had long functioned as both an Ottoman vassal and a buffer zone against Slavic encroachment. This geopolitical rupture triggered the systematic displacement of Nogai and Crimean Tatar pastoral populations, who faced land confiscation, forced sedentarization, military repression, and religious pressure under Russian rule.

Entire tribal confederations were driven southward in successive waves, producing one of the largest Muslim refugee flows in the pre-modern Ottoman world. These migrations were not isolated events but unfolded over several decades, intensifying during periods of Russo-Ottoman warfare and frontier pacification.

The Ottoman state responded to this influx through an organized resettlement strategy aimed at both humanitarian reception and imperial consolidation. Large numbers of Tatars and Nogais were settled across Thrace, Dobrudja, Silistre, Shumen, Vidin, Edirne, and the lower Danube basin, often in zones that had already absorbed earlier waves of Anatolian Turkmen settlers. This spatial logic was deliberate.

The empire sought to repopulate underutilized agricultural land, reinforce frontier security against renewed Russian pressure, and strengthen Muslim demographic presence in politically sensitive borderlands. In many cases, refugee groups were granted tax exemptions (muafiyet), access to pasture rights, seed grain, and temporary relief from military obligations to facilitate their integration into local economies.

Economically, these steppe migrants underwent a gradual transition from nomadic pastoralism to mixed agro-pastoral and market-oriented production. While animal husbandry remained central, especially sheep, horse, and cattle breeding, many Tatar and Nogai households increasingly engaged in grain cultivation, transport services, and caravan provisioning, linking their livelihoods to Ottoman military and urban supply networks.

In Thrace and along the Danube corridor, they played a significant role in Istanbul’s provisioning system (iaşe), contributing meat, wool, hides, and cereals to imperial markets. Over time, some communities also entered auxiliary military service, border patrol, and transport labor, extending older steppe military traditions into new imperial economic functions. The iaşe system was the Ottoman state’s centrally regulated provisioning regime, based on compulsory delivery, priority supply of the capital and the army, and strict price controls, designed to guarantee subsistence rather than market profit.

Culturally and socially, the arrival of Tatar and Nogai refugees introduced distinctive steppe linguistic features, clan-based social structures, equestrian culture, and military traditions into the Balkan environment. These elements became interwoven with the already heterogeneous fabric of Rumelia, where Turkmen, Balkan Muslims, Christians, and earlier migrant populations coexisted.

Rather than replacing existing social orders, the newcomers were absorbed into layered settlement zones, intensifying the ethnic and cultural complexity of regions that had previously been dominated by Turkmen agrarian communities. Over generations, intermarriage, shared economic networks, and common imperial institutions facilitated their gradual integration, while still preserving elements of steppe identity in dialect, dress, and collective memory.

Thus, the Tatar and Nogai migrations of the eighteenth century did not merely augment the Ottoman population numerically. They reshaped frontier economies, reinforced imperial defense systems, and deepened the multi-layered demographic character of the Balkans. These movements also established enduring transregional connections between Crimea, the steppe world, and the Ottoman Balkans, the demographic legacy of which remains visible in Thracian and Danubian settlement patterns to this day.

Nineteenth-Century Refugee Waves and the Reordering of Rumelia and Anatolia

The nineteenth century witnessed the most profound and disruptive demographic upheavals of the Ottoman period, closely intertwined with the rise of Balkan nationalism, the expansion of European great-power intervention, and the empire’s accelerating territorial contraction.

The Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), the successive Serbian uprisings, and the Russo-Ottoman wars of 1828–29, 1853–56, and especially 1877–78 generated repeated cycles of forced population displacement.

As Ottoman authority receded from large portions of the Balkans, hundreds of thousands of Muslims, including Turks, Tatars, Pomaks, Albanians, Bosniaks, and Circassians, were expelled through violence, expropriation, and organized population transfer. These displacements were not episodic but cumulative, unfolding over decades and creating a sustained humanitarian and fiscal crisis for the Ottoman state.

Large numbers of Muslim refugees (muhacirler) fled Ottoman losses in Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, and later Romania, often under conditions of extreme material deprivation. The Ottoman government attempted to manage this influx through newly created institutional mechanisms, including the Muhacirin Commission, which coordinated transportation, land distribution, tax exemptions, and provisional subsistence aid. Many refugees were settled in western Anatolia, the Marmara basin, and Thrace, where arable land, proximity to markets, and access to imperial supply routes made integration more feasible.

Edirne, in particular, absorbed exceptionally large refugee populations due to its strategic location at the intersection of Balkan and Anatolian transportation corridors, its administrative infrastructure, and its role as a provisioning center for both military and civilian needs. The sudden influx transformed the city’s labor market, housing structure, and social composition within a single generation.

Although overwhelmed by refugee arrivals from the Balkans, patterns of Anatolia-to-Rumelia mobility did not cease entirely in the early nineteenth century. Administrative appointments, military postings, vakıf-based settlement initiatives, and expanding artisanal and commercial demand continued to draw families from central Anatolia to key Rumelian towns.

Vakıf-based settlement initiatives served multiple strategic functions within the Ottoman imperial system. Beyond charitable relief, vakıfs were used to secure the permanent settlement of population in newly founded towns, agricultural zones, and frontier corridors by providing land, housing, and economic infrastructure. They enabled the integration of migrants into productive rural and urban economies, ensured the provisioning of Istanbul and the army within the framework of the iaşe system, and functioned as a non-coercive instrument of demographic engineering. At the same time, vakıf endowments facilitated the religious and cultural integration of space through mosques, imarets, and educational institutions, thereby linking population settlement directly to territorial legitimation and imperial order.

Archival records confirm the settlement of households from Konya, Karaman, Niğde, and Kayseri in Edirne, Filibe (Plovdiv), Varna, and Ruse during periods of administrative reorganization and urban economic expansion. This two-directional mobility complicates any strict narrative of one-way displacement and demonstrates that imperial integration still functioned through bureaucratic circulation, military service, and commercial opportunity even in an age of imperial decline.

By the late nineteenth century, Thrace emerged as one of the most demographically layered regions of the Ottoman world, incorporating older Turkmen villages, descendants of Karamanid-era forced relocation populations, Crimean Tatars and Nogais of the eighteenth century, Circassian settlers from the Caucasus, and large contingents of Balkan Muslim refugees. These groups were not merely juxtaposed spatially but became interwoven through labor markets, agricultural partnerships, military service, religious institutions, and intermarriage. New rural settlements were often founded specifically for refugee groups, while others were integrated into existing villages through land redistribution and communal production arrangements.

Economically, this transformed Thrace into a highly dynamic zone of grain production, animal husbandry, transport labor, and market-oriented agriculture, tightly integrated into Istanbul’s provisioning system and late Ottoman commercial networks. Refugees brought new skills in stockbreeding, dairy production, cart transport, textile handicrafts, and small-scale trade, reshaping local production structures. At the same time, competition over land, water, and tax obligations frequently produced social tensions, forcing the Ottoman state to intervene repeatedly through cadastral surveys, vakıf endowments, and military arbitration.

The syncretic demographic structure generated by these successive migrations remains visible in Thracian dialects, settlement patterns, family genealogies, culinary traditions, and religious landscapes today. Rather than representing a simple accumulation of displaced populations, nineteenth-century Thrace became a laboratory of late imperial social recomposition, where earlier Turkmen layers, Karamanid legacies, steppe migrations, and Balkan refugee identities converged into a complex and enduring regional mosaic.

Genealogy, Culture, and Economy in a World of Continuous Migration

These multiple waves of migration unfolding over four centuries produced a social world in which genealogies were not linear or territorially fixed, but layered, transregional, and historically sedimented. Families in Rumelia, particularly in Edirne, Filibe (Plovdiv), Yanbolu (Yambol), Dobrudja, Varna, and the Danube basin, frequently trace their origins to central Anatolia, either through documented forced relocation from Karamanid and Celâlî-era zones or through later voluntary migrations connected to military service, vakıf settlement, artisanal circulation, and refugee resettlement.

These genealogies were often preserved not in formal archives but through oral transmission, marriage networks, craft lineages, and neighborhood memory, producing a form of historical consciousness grounded as much in collective experience as in written documentation.

As a result, lineage identities were rarely singular. They reflected multiple points of geographic origin layered across generations, often combining Anatolian, Balkan, steppe, and Caucasian ancestral strands.

Culturally, the convergence of Turkmen, Balkan Muslim, Tatar, Nogai, and Circassian elements generated a profoundly hybrid social landscape in which everyday practices, language use, cuisine, dress, music, kinship organization, and religious ritual, became sites of continuous synthesis.

Linguistic registers blended Anatolian Turkish with Balkan phonetics and steppe vocabulary. Sufi institutions, neighborhood mosques, military lodges, and vakıf complexes functioned as nodes of cultural integration, where displaced populations were embedded into new moral economies of charity, labor, and communal belonging. This cultural hybridity was not merely aesthetic but deeply institutional, shaping patterns of mutual aid, conflict resolution, and social legitimacy across migrant communities.

Economically, these migrations produced successive waves of labor-market reconstitution rather than simple population replacement. Former subsistence peasants from Karamanid and Celâlî zones were transformed into market-oriented cultivators, transport workers, textile artisans, and provisioning laborers in Rumelian cities and agricultural basins.

Steppe-origin groups such as Tatars and Nogais injected pastoral economies and mobility-based labor into agrarian regions tied to Istanbul’s supply system. Circassian communities reorganized frontier economies through livestock production, transport cartels, mounted auxiliary service, and mixed agro-military settlement models.

Over time, these diverse economic adaptations produced interdependent regional economies in which migrant groups occupied complementary roles across agriculture, trade, transport, security, and artisanal production. Migration thus functioned not as an economic rupture alone, but as a mechanism of imperial economic diversification and frontier capitalization.

The Ottoman demographic regime that emerged from these layered migrations therefore differed fundamentally from the homogeneous national populations imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism. Identity formation in the Ottoman world remained situational, plural, and relational, shaped less by fixed ethnicity than by imperial institutions, economic function, religious affiliation, and local networks of survival.

Lineage identities were continually reworked through displacement, resettlement, and occupational transformation, producing populations that were historically mobile rather than territorially anchored. This complex social morphology, visible most clearly in Thrace and the southern Balkans, reveals that the Ottoman Empire did not merely govern diversity. It actively produced it through migration, economic restructuring, and state-directed demographic engineering.

The modern drive toward ethnic homogeneity thus represents not a continuation of Ottoman social order but a radical rupture from its historically layered population structure.

Migration, State Formation, and Imperial Governance

The Ottoman management of mobility analyzed in this article corresponds closely with comparative theories of migration and state formation. Charles Tilly’s formulation that “states make war, and war makes states,” can be extended in the Ottoman case to include migration as a parallel mechanism of state-making, where population movement becomes a tool of fiscal extraction, military provisioning, and territorial integration. The Ottoman Empire exemplifies what might be termed “infrastructural mobility governance,” in which the state does not merely react to population movement but actively produces and channels it.

From a political–economic perspective, this dynamic also resonates with Saskia Sassen’s analysis of how large-scale institutional systems restructure labor and territory through forced and semi-forced mobility, although in a pre-capitalist imperial context.

Migration in the Ottoman world was not primarily an expression of individual choice but a structural outcome of state power intersecting with market formation, military logistics, and ecological volatility. In this sense, the empire functioned as a migratory political economy, in which population displacement, resettlement, and recomposition were not episodic disruptions but constitutive elements of imperial order itself.

This framing allows Ottoman demographic history to be situated within a broader comparative understanding of how empires differ from nation-states not only in scale, but in their fundamentally different relationships to movement, identity, and territorial belonging.

Conclusion

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, Anatolia and Rumelia were transformed by sustained, interlinked movements of population that were neither random nor episodic.

The demographic strategies initiated under Mehmed II provided an institutional template for later population management, while the Celâlî rebellions, Ottoman–Safavid frontier conflicts, steppe displacements, and the collapse of Ottoman authority in the Balkans generated successive waves of mobility through crisis, coercion, and survival. These processes did not merely redistribute people across space. They reorganized labor, land use, provisioning systems, and social hierarchies across the empire.

The cumulative effect of these four centuries of migration was the creation of a densely interconnected imperial demographic system in which central Anatolia, Thrace, the Balkans, Crimea, and the Caucasus were bound together through continuous circulation of people, skills, and economic functions.

Former Karamanid lands were thus not peripheral remnants of a conquered polity but deeply embedded in imperial demographic circuits that linked frontier defense, urban provisioning, agricultural commercialization, and refugee settlement into a single integrated structure.

Crucially, this history reveals that the Ottoman Empire did not merely accommodate population movement. It actively produced and governed mobility as an instrument of imperial order. Forced relocation (sürgün), frontier dispersal, steppe resettlement, and refugee integration were not emergency responses alone, but constituted a statecraft.

Migration functioned simultaneously as a tool of political control, an engine of economic redistribution, and a mechanism of cultural integration. Empire, in this sense, operated not as a territorially fixed container of peoples, but as a dynamic migratory regime.

The demographic world that emerged from these layered movements differed fundamentally from the homogeneous national populations imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism. Identity in the Ottoman context remained situational, plural, and relational, shaped by imperial institutions, economic position, religious affiliation, and local survival networks rather than by rigid ethnic boundaries.

Lineages were continually reworked through displacement, resettlement, intermarriage, and occupational transformation, producing populations that were historically mobile rather than territorially anchored.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Thrace and the southern Balkans, where Turkmen settlers, Karamanid-era relocatees, steppe migrants, Caucasian refugees, and Balkan Muslim displaced populations converged into an enduring social mosaic. This region illustrates with particular clarity that Ottoman diversity was not merely inherited from conquest but actively constructed through migration, economic restructuring, and demographic engineering.

Seen from this perspective, the modern drive toward ethnic homogeneity intensified after the Balkan Wars and the First World War represents not the culmination of Ottoman social evolution but a radical rupture from its historically layered population structure.

The late Ottoman and early republican transition thus marks not simply a change of political regime, but a fundamental transformation in how population, identity, and territory were imagined and governed.

Understanding these long-term demographic processes is therefore essential not only for Ottoman social and economic history, but also for interpreting the deep genealogical, cultural, and regional continuities that persist beneath the surface of modern national identities in Anatolia and the Balkans.

The demographic order analyzed in this article, characterized by mobility, layered genealogies, and imperial integration through displacement, did not disappear organically with the end of Ottoman rule. It was instead violently restructured in the early twentieth century through the rise of territorial nationalism, total war, and state-directed homogenization.

The Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the Greco–Turkish population exchange transformed migration from an imperial instrument of integration into a nation-state technology of exclusion.

Whereas the Ottoman system had produced diversity through movement, the emerging national regimes sought legitimacy through ethnic unification, border purification, and demographic closure.

The next article in this series will therefore examine how the flexible, layered population world of the late empire was dismantled between 1912 and 1923 and replaced by a fundamentally different logic of sovereignty, identity, and territorial belonging.