The sixteenth century is generally considered the heyday of the Ottoman Empire. At that time, the Ottomans ruled over vast territories, exercising their control over people of various religions and ethnicities. In this paper I shed light on the successful incorporation of territories into the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the aspect of culture. I explore the extent to which inhabitants of remote Ottoman provinces—and in particular the inhabitants of Ottoman Bosnia—participated in the production and consumption of Ottoman culture, and the nature of this participation. I then relate the conclusions of this inquiry to the political developments of the time.

The paper deals with the challenge of scale in the study of the social and political history of empire. It discusses how the study of a particular imperial province can be contextualised, by using Ottoman biographical dictionaries, written in the imperial centre. The information included in such biographies helps determine the extent to which Bosnians were perceived at the centre as involved in Ottoman production of poetry, thus combining viewpoints from the imperial centre and its periphery in order to “scale-up” conclusions based on localised research.