It took centuries before Byzantine Anatolia became a predominantly Turkish and Muslim area. It still has to be explained how it could happen, that the Turkish-Muslim immigrants, who for a long time constituted a minority, did not merge into the autochthonous Christian majority, but that, on the contrary, it was the immigrants’ language and religion that became prevalent. This study contributes to a better understanding of this complicated process which remains insufficiantly explored. It examines perceptions of the self and the other to be found in the oldest Anatolian-Muslim narrative sources, comprising historiographies, hagiographies and popular novels dating from the 13th-15th centuries. It focusses on the question to which extent mental perceptions of identity and alterity to be found in these texts reflect this long-term process of transformation or even had an impact on it.
