Rudi Paul Linder examines the the impact of nomadism on early Ottoman history and challenges the conclusions of Paul Wittek's Rise of the Ottoman Empire, which defined the approaches of more than two generatios of scholars. Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia offers a revealing study of pastoral nomads inhabiting the Anatolian plateau, the ways they met their needs, their threat to settled society, and how that society controlled them in the high Middle Ages.