<P> Of particular importance for Ottoman success was their ability to keep the empire intact from generation to generation . While other Turkic groups frequently divided their realms between the sons of a deceased ruler, the Ottomans consistently kept the empire united under a single heir . </P> <P> The process of centralization is closely connected with an influx of Muslim scholars from Central Anatolia, where a more urban and bureaucratic Turkish civilization had developed under the Seljuks of Rum . Particularly influential was the Çandarlı family, which supplied several Grand Viziers to the early Ottomans and influenced their institutional development . Some time after 1376, Kara Halil, the head of the Çandarlı family, encouraged Murad I to institute a tax of one - fifth on slaves taken in war, known as the pençik . This gave the Ottoman rulers a source of manpower from which they could construct a new personal army, known as the Janissaries (yeniçeri). Such measures frustrated the gazis which the Ottomans relied upon to sustain their military conquests, and created lasting tensions within the state . It was also during the reign of Murad I that the office of military judge (Kazasker) was created, indicating an increasing level of social stratification between the emerging military - administrative class (askeri) and the rest of society . Murad I also instituted the practice of appointing particular frontier warriors as "Lords of the Frontier" (uc begleri). Such power of appointment indicated that the Ottoman rulers were no longer merely primus inter pares but sat at the top of a hierarchy of leadership . As a way of openly declaring this new status, Murad became the first Ottoman ruler to adopt the title of sultan . </P> <P> Beginning at the latest by the 1430s, but most likely earlier, the Ottomans conducted regular cadastral surveys of the territory under their rule, producing record - books known as tahrir defters . These surveys enabled the Ottoman state to organize the distribution of agricultural taxation rights to the military class of timariots, cavalrymen who collected revenue from the land in exchange for serving in the Ottoman army . Timariots came from diverse backgrounds . Some achieved their position as a reward for military service, while others were descended from the pre-Ottoman aristocracy and simply continued to collect revenue from their old lands, now serving in the Ottoman army as well . Of the latter, many were converts to Islam, while others remained Christian . </P> <P> Of great symbolic importance for Ottoman centralization was the practice whereby Ottoman rulers would customarily stand upon hearing the sound of martial music, indicating their willingness to participate in gaza . Shortly after the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II discontinued this practice, indicating that the Ottoman ruler was no longer a simple frontier warrior, but the sovereign of an empire . The empire's capital was shifted from Edirne, the city symbolically connected with the frontier warrior ethos of gaza, to Constantinople, a city with deeply imperial connotations due to its long history as the capital of the Byzantine Empire . This was seen, both symbolically and practically, as the moment of the empire's definitive shift from a frontier principality into an empire . </P>

Which statement accurately contrast the ottoman and byzantine empires during the 1400s