This volume brings together ten studies on the political, religious and socioeconomic interaction between the rising Ottoman empire and declining Byzantine state in the last decades of the fourteenth century. They focus on key but under-explored episodes of that encounter, particularly in connection with Murad I, Bayezid I, and Manuel II Palaiologos. Included is an assessment of the contemporary significance of Manuel II’s Dialogue With A Persian, recently brought to global prominence and controversy by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 lecture in Regensburg, and a previously unpublished analysis of Manuel's Epistolary Discourse to Kabasilas.