Cornucopia No. 41 features a summary of Heath Lowry's 2008 book (see posting below) by Caroline Finkel, stressing the importance of March Lord families in not only the conquest but the urbanization of the post-Byzantine Balkans:

"The hero of Lowry’s story is the ucbey (march lord) Haci Gazi Evrenos Bey, who died in 1417 and was associated with almost every conquest between the Meric River in the east and the Adriatic in the west. Although Evrenos’s name has not been erased from history, the part played by him and his family in establishing Ottoman rule in western Thrace and Macedonia, and maintaining it down the centuries, was egregiously downplayed by later chroniclers ... Evrenos was the most prominent of the march lords in the Balkans in the second half of the 14th century, and the now mostly ruined buildings marking their westerly progress provide the evidence that he and his family, the Evrenosogullari, were responsible for pushing back the Ottoman frontier. They settled first in Gumulcine (modern Komotini), then in Siroz (Serres) and finally in Yenice Vardar (Giannitsa). Evrenos endowed these cities, and other sites along his route, with mosques and the infrastructure of urban and commercial life ... Lowry’s findings lead him to the view that the Osmanogullari – the Ottomans – were no more than first among equals at this time. He also rejects the view that their westward push was merely a series of raids for slaves and booty, arguing that they had planned a campaign of conquest from the outset, as the permanence of the monuments they built eloquently testifies."

The Princeton-based Ottomanist Heath Lowry has recently released two books significantly increasing our understanding of the early Ottoman expansion into Greece in the 14th century (1, 2). Not entirely unnoticed should go a review he wrote for Cornucopia: the magazine for connoisseurs of Turkey (No. 39), in which he discusses the recent book  The Byzantine Monuments of the Evros/Meric River Valley by Robert Ousterhout and Charalambos Bakirtzis. The text is available online here. While he finds the book a useful addition, he disagrees with them when it comes to the 14th-ct. fortress of Pythion near Didymoteicho in Greek Thrace. One part of which has been dendrochronologically dated to c1331, hence making it a Byzantine building. Lowry, however, suggests to attribute the second stage of the fortresses construction to the Ottoman "Lord of the Marches" Haci Ilbegi. If this dating is correct, it would make the Pythion fortress "the earliest known Ottoman fortification, predating Anadolu Hisarı on the Asian side of the Bosphorus by close to half a century." Curiously, Bulgarian National Television has just used the fortress for the filming of its documentary titled The Ottoman Invasion (*).