Book excerpt: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808 is the first book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. It describes how the Ottoman Turks, a small band of nomadic soldiers, managed to expand their dominions from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia on the borders of the Byzantine Empire into one of the great empires of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and Asia, extending from northern Hungary to southern Arabia and from the Crimea across North Africa almost to the Atlantic Ocean. The volume sweeps away the accumulated prejudices of centuries and describes the empire of the sultans as a living, changing society, dominated by the small multinational Ottoman ruling class led by the sultan, but with a scope of government so narrow that the subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were left to carry on their own lives, religions, and traditions with little outside interference.