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Dr. Bruno di Nicola, University of St. Andrews

The Islamisation process by which the Anatolian Peninsula went from a majority Christian to a majority Muslim population between the 12th and the 15th centuries have puzzled Turkish and western scholars for decades. Recently, at the University of St. Andrews, a new approach to the issue has been carried out by applying modern technologies to the collection, storage and analysis of large amounts of data. The St. Andrews’ based project The Islamisation of Anatolia has developed a digital database containing detailed information on the literary production in Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages in pre-Ottoman Anatolia. In this presentation, we will overview part of the secondary literature on the topic vis-à-vis some novel preliminary findings resulting from the data analysis of the newly created database.
Dr Bruno De Nicola (BA Barcelona, MA London, PhD Cambridge) is a Research Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of St. Andrews (United Kingdom). He is part of the ERC-funded project The Islamisation of Anatolia, 1100-1500. His main areas of research include the history of the Mongol Empire, medieval Iran and Anatolia. He has recently published Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Ashgate, 2015) with Andrew Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz and is currently preparing the publication of his first monograph Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206-1335 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).