The age of gunpowder.

“It passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, without country or abiding-place, had nothing to recommend it.” — Babur, Baburnama (Memoirs), recounting his wanderings after losing Samarkand, 907 AH / 1501–1502; trans. Annette S. Beveridge, 1921

Babur (1483–1530) wrote the first autobiography in Muslim literature—a frank, detailed memoir of his campaigns to found the Mughal Empire. He documented conquest not as inevitable triumph but as years of failure, displacement, and improvisation. His account shows what empire-building looked like from the inside: the chaos, the contingency, and the human cost that political histories of empire expansion erase. Read the source →

“Turkey is a land in which nothing is lacking. If you wish, all can go well with you.” — Rabbi Isaac Zarfati (Tsarfati), letter urging European Jewish communities to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire, mid-15th century

Ha-Kohen (1496–c.1578) was a Jewish physician and historian who documented the expulsion of Jews from Spain (1492), France, and various Italian states—and their welcome in the Ottoman Empire. His comparative account of how different empires governed religious minorities reveals what administrative diversity meant in practice: the Ottoman millet system allowed Jewish, Armenian, and Greek communities to maintain their own courts, schools, and religious institutions in ways that Christian kingdoms did not. Read the source →

“O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee. I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash: Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation. If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt meet Me in a moment of time. Kabir says, “O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath.”” — Kabir, Songs of Kabir, trans. Rabindranath Tagore (1915), Poem I

Kabir was a weaver by trade, born into a low-caste family, who became one of the most influential religious voices of the Bhakti movement. His poetry rejected the authority of both Hindu Brahmin priests and Muslim clerics alike, insisting God was found in neither temple nor mosque but in direct, unmediated devotion. That syncretic, anti-institutional stance shaped Guru Nanak and the founding of Sikhism a generation later, and challenged the religious establishments this topic’s empires depended on to legitimize their rule. Read the source →

“I was also taken in that city with my two brothers, and wherever the Turks to whom we were entrusted drove us in a band, and wherever we came to forests or mountains, there we always thought about killing the Turks and running away by ourselves among the mountains, but our youth did not permit us to do that; for I myself with nineteen others ran away from them in the night from a village called Samokovo.” — Konstantin Mihailović (Konstantin of Ostrovica), Memoirs of a Janissary (Turkish Chronicle), written c. 1490s — describing his own capture into the janissary corps at the fall of Novo Brdo, 1455

Mihailović (c. 1430–c.1501) was a Serbian Christian captured by the Ottomans around 1455 during the conquest of Smederevo. He served as a janissary for over a decade before escaping to write this memoir—one of the earliest first-person accounts of the devshirme system from the inside. His comparative observations of Ottoman versus Christian military governance show what the “administration of diverse peoples” looked like for the people being administered. Read the source →