The Gaza or Gazi Thesis (from Ottoman Turkish: غزا‎, ġazā, "holy war," or simply "raid") is a historical paradigm first formulated by Paul Wittek which has been used to interpret the nature of the Ottoman Empire during the earliest period of its history, the fourteenth century. The thesis addresses the question of how the Ottomans were able to expand from a small principality on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire into a centralized, intercontinental empire. According to the Gaza Thesis, the Ottomans accomplished this by attracting recruits to fight for them in the name of Islamic holy war against the non-believers. Such a warrior was known in Turkish as a gazi, and thus this thesis sees the early Ottoman state as a "Gazi State," defined by an ideology of holy war. The Gaza Thesis dominat