This first volume of The Cambridge History of Turkey considers the transition period from the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the creation of an Ottoman Empire with its imperial capital of Istanbul. The first four chapters examine various aspects of the political history of the period: the history of Byzantium, the Mongol period in Anatolia, the Turkish advance into Europe and the rise of the Turkish states, including that of the Ottomans. The following four chapters deal with various aspects of the social and economic life of the period, focusing on the military, the economy, art and architecture, and the cultural and religious milieu of this world of transition from Byzantium to Ottoman Empire.

The defeat in August 1071 of the Byzantine emperor Romanos Diogenes by the Turkomans at the battle of Malazgirt (Manzikert) is taken as a turning point in the history of Anatolia and the Byzantine Empire. From this time the Byzantines were unable to stem the flow of the Turks into Anatolia and the slow process of Turkification had begun. But it was not a battle of conquest, as both Julian Chrysostomides (p. 10) and Ahmet Yaşar Ocak (p. 356) point out in this volume. The Seljuk ruler Alp Arslan was intending not to conquer Anatolia, but rather to move against Syria and Egypt. This was not the first Turkish appearance in the region and Byzantine Anatolia had already been weakened before the battle of Malazgirt by many years of Turkoman raiding.