Western literature about the Osmanlı Devlet, however scholarly it may seem, comprises a huge monument of distortion. Since ... for too long the Ottomans have been studied without use of any of their sources, resulting in serious distortion and error. No history of France would be considered methodologically sound and balanced if it were written on the basis of English and Italian observations. (Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge University Press, 1992, II, x.)
This book is based mainly on Osmanlı sources and represents an entirely new approach.