Somehow, that anarchic soup of nomads, peasants, tribal warriors, mystics, knights, artisans, merchants, and miscellaneous others populating Anatolia had coalesced into a society of clockwork complexity full of interlocking parts that balanced one another, each acting as a spur and check on the others. Nothing like it had been seen before, and nothing like it has been seen again. Only contemporary American society offers an adequate analogy to the complexity of Ottoman society—but only to the complexity. The devil is in the details, and our world differs from that of the Ottomans in just about
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