Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul. Stroll in the streets of three successive  Ottoman capitals inhabited by “The Sultans of Rome. 

“A people who saw themselves not simply as Turks- but Osmanlis- followers of Osman, owed their ultimate imperial destiny to an initial geographical accident; the fact of their strategic situation in the northwest corner of Asia Minor, right on the Asiatic frontiers of the Byzantine Empire at the time of its decline, moreover within easy reach of the sea and the lands of Balkan Europe beyond it. They proved unique in their marches and were able to transform the fruits of their military conquest into an effective political organism.

The Ottoman Turks soon were no longer mere nomads but settlers, creators, and builders too. Compounded of elements Asiatic and European, Moslem and Christian, Turk and Turcoman, nomadic and sedentary, their system was pragmatic in outlook and free from the more orthodox cultural and social constraints of the other feudal Turkish principalities to the further east.

Their system was the prototype of a society destined to inherit and transform Byzantium. Just so had Byzantium itself succeeded Rome.”

The Ottoman Centuries, Lord Kinross