The stories of renegades—Europeans who had converted to Islam in the early modern Ottoman world—lured their contemporaries as well as present-day historians. The latter, often fascinated by the topic of religious transgression, tend to approach this heterogeneous group by focusing on individual renegades whose conversion was followed by exceptionally successful political and military careers. In his recent The Sultan's Renegades, Tobias P. Graf examines how these European converts assimilated into the Ottoman elite and engaged with its agenda, suggesting that the scholarly portrayals of renegades as exceptional individuals have frequently been exaggerated and that these converts did not stand out in comparison with other outsiders who became servants of the sultan.

In five chapters Graf analyzes different aspects of renegades’ conversion and their assimilation into Ottoman imperial structures. The first chapter provides an important panorama of the military-administrative Ottoman elite and its evolution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Graf presents the partly overlapping groups and institutions that channeled the professional careers and lives of members of the military-administrative elite: timar (revenue grant) holder cavalrymen, kul (slaves), devşirme (conscription system based on the recruitment of boys from among the Anatolian and Balkan Christian populations), and the households of the sultan and the grandees.

The following chapters focus on European renegades and compare their trajectories with other outsiders assimilated into the empire's political structures. The second chapter explores the rituals European converts to Islam had to go through—from the proclamation of faith through the reception of new names, change of clothing and dietary regime, and circumcision, to the gifts the converts received from their patrons. Graf convincingly argues that religious conversion was a process with cultural, social, political, legal, and fiscal implications. Converts learned a new language, were inserted into social networks and political institutions, were bound to new taxation regimes, and enjoyed full equality in Muslim courts. More than anything, conversion emerges as a political act, a demonstration of the convert's loyalty to the sultan.

The next two chapters use well-documented test cases to discuss specific aspects of conversion. The third explores how converts might have experienced their conversion, showing how they alluded, often pragmatically, to large-scale political-religious processes such as confessionalization in order to construe and construct their conversion, but also to advance their admission into the political elite. The fourth chapter further pursues the problem of renegades’ incorporation into the military-administrative structure, stressing the role of the sultan's and grandees’ households in the process. In analyzing these cases, Graf demonstrates how the careers and forms of association of European renegades were not exceptional in comparison with other outsiders the empire incorporated, most notably the devşirme conscripts. If the second and third chapters debunked the idea of conversion as a single moment of transformation of the self, the final stresses the continuation of social and kinship ties between converts and their previous communities. Graf shows how, in principle, conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Empire was not forced. In fact, while the majority of renegades converted in the context of captivity, there is evidence of converts who voluntarily migrated to the Ottoman Empire to convert to Islam. And yet, with the geopolitical stabilization that characterized the second half of the sixteenth century, the empire became more exclusive, forced conversions were recognized as valid, and in general career paths previously open to converts only became dominated or at least widely populated by born Muslims.

Graf's The Sultan's Renegades is an important addition to recent research on the topic and is the first to focus on converts’ assimilation into the imperial structures. Its publication stresses the relative dearth of similar studies focusing on the Western Mediterranean in the period. The Sultan's Renegades will be of great interest for scholars of the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean studies, religion and conversion, cross-confessional encounter, and cultural intermediaries.