When the Ottomans turn türk During the first century of their Empire, Ottomans didn’t write history books about themselves, and if they did, they didn’t care to preserve them. From Murad II’s reign onwards, there emerged an interest in writing about the Ottoman past, and the earliest comprehensive Ottoman histories were composed around 1450’s. During the second half of the fifteenth century, historians worked hard to tailor a coherent past for the Ottomans. They debated many issues, such as the chronology of the events, genealogy of the dynasty, how Ertu?rul or Osman received the leadership of gaza, and how they dreamed of a glorious future for their people. This paper will examine the works of the late fifteenth century Ottoman historians and how they used the terms türk and türkmen. It will argue that throughout the fifteenth century, the Turkic origins of the Ottomans were mostly implied and marginalized. However, after 1470’s, historians grew comfortable with using the terms türk and türkmen in their references to the Ottoman dynasty, and started to point at the Turkic origins of the Ottomans. This shift in Ottoman historical consciousness and identity coincided with other major changes in Ottoman society’s perception of itself. This paper will argue that the late fifteenth century historians who transformed the unwritten memory of the Empire into history books, who constructed the first blue prints of what later became the official Ottoman history, and who legitimized the Ottoman sovereignty, also strived to represent them as türk and türkmen, which was not necessarily how the dynasty saw itself.