Abundant material for a study of the sixteenth-century Ottoman government has been provided and preserved; for the great place which the expanding empire held in the world developed an immense interest in its affairs on the part of the West, and made it worth the while of many of its Western residents to prepare descriptions of its outstanding features, among which its peculiar government was treated with special fulness. The writings of these men of various Western nationalities are in a way more helpful than a similar number of books from native writers would be, because the foreigners could usually take nothing for granted, but were compelled to draw a complete picture. They could not, on the other hand, get at the inner springs of the Ottoman activity as well as natives could; nor do any of them, with the exception of Menavino, seem actually to have read and known the Ottoman laws. Fortunately, Ottoman historians began to write abundantly shortly before the reign of Suleiman. For Suleiman’s own time, the collections of his _Kanuns_ (since he was noted as a legislator) contain much material which helps toward an understanding of his government; moreover, writers of a later date have been drawn with special interest toward his reign, as the climax of Ottoman greatness. At the same time, no one but Zinkeisen has attempted to give an extended account of the Ottoman government as it was in the sixteenth century. No reasonably complete bibliography of books relating to Turkey has been made. The following lists are worthy of mention as giving information in regard to the material for a study of Turkish history and institutions before the year 1600:— Richard Knolles gives a bare list of his authorities, to the number of about twenty-five, at the beginning of his _Generall Historie of the Turkes_, London, 1603. J. H. Boecler published at Bautzen in 1717 a _Commentarius Historico-Politicus de Rebus Turcicis_, in which he gives, at pp. 14-41, a list of 317 works on Turkish history and affairs, including 45 folio volumes, 128 quartos, 98 octavos, and 45 duodecimos. Joseph von Hammer discusses his authorities in the preface to volume i of his _Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches_ (Pest, 1827); and in volume x, pp. 57-336 (1835), he prints a list containing 3,025 titles of works relating to Ottoman history which were to be found in Europe outside of Constantinople. Amat di San Filippo, in his _Biografia dei Viaggiatori Italiani_, etc. (2 vols., Rome, 1882), gives accounts of many of the early Italian writers on Turkish affairs. Henri Hauser, in his edition of Du Fresne-Canaye, described below (p. 319), prints as Appendix II an _Essai d’une Bibliographie des Ouvrages du XVIe Siècle relatifs au Levant_. The list, which does not pretend to completeness, contains about 60 different titles.