Topkapi may be considered a trans-cultural focal point in which a holistic civilization was created from the nomadic culture of Turkish tribesmen whose forefathers had set out from Central Asia and reached Asia Minor with stopovers in Persia and Mesopotamia. Within the historically short period of two centuries, the Ottomans rose from a small, feudal principality to become a major -the major- world power, yet at the same time they possessed a court tradition and culture of their own that was over a thousand years old. Undoubtedly Topkapi involved a synthesis of Byzantine elements but what grew up on the peninsula by the Golden Horn cannot possibly be divorced from its predecessors in Ottoman history.