While most Western authors use the word 'Turk' to refer to the people of the Ottoman Empire, I try to always use the word Ottoman.

The Ottoman Empire was not built on a national basis, but on a dynastic one. The governing elite of soldiers, officials and judges (and from the mid-19th century on, all citizens) were called Ottomans, after the dynasty, whether they were ethnically Turkish, Slavic, Albanian, Egyptian or Greek.

Within the Ottoman Empire the word 'Turk' was an unflattering term used to mean an ignorant or silly peasant or yokel, and was used primarily to describe the Turkish speaking peasants of Anatolia.

Ignorant of these facts, Europeans, trapped in the prison of their own nationalism, often called the Sultan the "Grand Turk," and the Ottoman Empire "Turkey."

In 1802, for instance, when Halet Efendi went to Paris as the new Ottoman ambassador, he was shocked and offended to discover he was called the "Turkish Ambassador." When congratulating himself on a particularly clever diplomatic maneuver, he remarked in his correspondence that this time they had not found him to be the 'Turkish' -- i.e. the ignorant -- ambassador that they wanted.

The same applied to the country. In Ottoman times no such entity as Turkey existed. There were certain dominantly Turkish-speaking lands, roughly corresponding to the territories of the original Ottoman conquests of Rumelia and Anatolia, but these were divided into administrative areas in the same way as most other Ottoman lands. The concept of 'Turkishness, in a national sense simply did not exist.

Instead the Turkish Empire was officially known as the 'High State' or the 'Guarded Dominions' or the 'Abode of the Faith.'