The administrative elite of the empire disproportionately hailed from the European conquests (far more Grand Viziers were Albanians, Georgians or Greeks than Anatolian Turks or Arabs), commerce was largely run by Jews, Greeks and Armenians, and the elite itself had European concubines and wives from very early on (the early Ottoman dynasty tree features several captured Greek noblewomen, and later we have the ethnically half Ukrainian/Ruthenian Selim II.; this behavior was mirrored widely in the non-royal part of the elite as well).
Essentially, the apparatus keeping the empire running was highly disproportionately European, and the wielders of power themselves, while they definitely weren't European in a cultural sense, became more and more European(-adjacent) genetically as time went on. "Pure" Turkic steppe warrior ancestry in the elite was probably already washed out from mixing with local Hellenized Anatolians, Kurds and Armenians before the Ottomans really got started as a serious power, similar to what happened to the original Hungarians.
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The administrative elite of the empire disproportionately hailed from the European conquests (far more Grand Viziers were Albanians, Georgians or Greeks than Anatolian Turks or Arabs), commerce was largely run by Jews, Greeks and Armenians, and the elite itself had European concubines and wives from very early on (the early Ottoman dynasty tree features several captured Greek noblewomen, and later we have the ethnically half Ukrainian/Ruthenian Selim II.; this behavior was mirrored widely in the non-royal part of the elite as well).
Essentially, the apparatus keeping the empire running was highly disproportionately European, and the wielders of power themselves, while they definitely weren't European in a cultural sense, became more and more European(-adjacent) genetically as time went on. "Pure" Turkic steppe warrior ancestry in the elite was probably already washed out from mixing with local Hellenized Anatolians, Kurds and Armenians before the Ottomans really got started as a serious power, similar to what happened to the original Hungarians.
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