Diplomat: Someone who negotiates with other countries on behalf of his own.
Divan: A council of state in the Ottoman Empire.
Islamize: To convert to Islam.
Khan: A Central Asian chieftain.
Shi'ism: A branch of Islam that does not acknowledge the first three caliphs, and that holds that the true line of leadership is through a series of imams who came after Ali.
Sultan: A type of king in the Muslim world.
Sultanate: An area ruled by a Sultan.
Sunni: An orthodox Muslim who acknowledges the first four caliphs.
Terrorist: Frightening (and usually harming) a group of people in order to achieve a specific political goal.
Vizier: A chief minister.
Southern Russia, where they established an empire called the Khazar Khanate (kuh-ZAHR KAHN-et). Khan is a title of leadership among Central Asian peoples, and though the khanate was loosely organized as befit a nomadic tribe, the Khazars viewed themselves as enough of a nation to send an ambassador to Byzantium in 568. Later the region came to be known simply as Khazaria, and in the 700s its people converted to Judaism (see box, "The Jewish Kingdom of Khazaria," chapter 8).
In the 600s, another Turkic group moved westward, where they became identified as Bulgars. As they intermarried with Slavs to found the nation of Bulgaria, their Turkish identity vanished. Also during this time, various groups of Turks controlled an enormous expanse of land from China to the Black Sea, and some historians view this as a single, ill-defined "empire." Whatever the case, its impact on history was minor, particularly in the face of the rapid Arab expansion that followed the establishment of the Islamic faith.
Among the Turkish groups in the "empire" to become Islamized (IZ-lum-ized) were the Oghuz (oh-GUZ), converted by missionaries from Persia in 960. Their Islamic faith had enormous significance for the Turks' future history, as did the fact that many Turks had served the Abbasid caliphate as slave soldiers. The use of slave soldiers, males raised and trained from childhood to serve a military commander, would become a common practice in Turkish-dominated states throughout
A map showing the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Illustration by XNR Productions. Reproduced by permission of the Gale Croup.
The medieval world. Slave soldiers often gained their freedom, and many went on to become leaders: a slave soldier established the Delhi Sultanate in India in 1206, and a group of slave soldiers called Mamluks won control of Egypt in 1252.
World History
