Sanjak in the context of Calque

Sanjak-bey, sanjaq-bey or -beg (Ottoman Turkish: سنجاق بك, lit. 'lord of the standard') was the title given in the Ottoman Empire to a bey (a high-ranking officer, but usually not a pasha) appointed to the military and administrative command of a district (sanjak, in Arabic liwa’), hence the equivalent Arabic title of amir liwa (أمير لواء ’amīr liwā’) He was answerable to a superior wāli or another provincial governor. In a few cases the sanjak-bey was himself directly answerable to the sultan in Constantinople.

Like other early Ottoman administrative offices, the sanjak-bey had a military origin: the term sanjak (and liva) means "flag" or "standard" and denoted the insigne around which, in times of war, the cavalrymen holding fiefs (timars or ziamets) in the specific district gathered. The sanjakbey was in turn subordinate to a beylerbey ("bey of beys") who governed an eyalet and commanded his subordinate sanjak-beys in war. In this way, the structure of command on the battlefield resembled the hierarchy of provincial government.

The Sanjak of Dibra, Debar, or Dibër (Turkish: Debre Sancağı, Albanian: Sanxhaku i Dibrës, Macedonian: Дебарски санџак, romanized: Debarski sandžak) was one of the sanjaks of the Ottoman Empire. Its capital was Debar, Macedonia (modern-day North Macedonia). Today, the western part of its territory belongs to Albania (Lower Dibra and Mat) and the eastern part to North Macedonia (Reka and Debar).

Ottoman Hungary (Hungarian: Török hódoltság, lit. 'Turkish subjugation') encompassed the parts of the Kingdom of Hungary which were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire from the occupation of Buda in 1541 until the liberation of the region under Habsburg leadership during the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), until the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. The territory was incorporated into the empire, under the name Macaristan. For most of its duration, Ottoman Hungary covered Southern Transdanubia and almost the entire region of the Great Hungarian Plain.

Ottoman Hungary was divided for administrative purposes into Eyalets (provinces), which were further divided into Sanjaks. Ownership of much of the land was distributed to Ottoman soldiers and officials with the remaining territory being retained by the Ottoman state. As a border territory, much of Ottoman Hungary was heavily fortified with troop garrisons. Remaining economically under-developed, it became a drain on Ottoman resources. During the centuries long three-way Hungarian–Habsburg–Ottoman wars the Hungarian population was highly decimated.

The Eyalet of Cyprus (Ottoman Turkish: ایالت قبرص, Eyālet-i Ḳıbrıṣ) was an eyalet/province of the Ottoman Empire made up of the island of Cyprus, which was annexed into the Empire in 1571. The Ottomans changed the way they administered Cyprus multiple times. It was a sanjak/sub-province (سانجاغى قبرص, Sancağı Ḳıbrıṣ) of the Eyalet of the Archipelago from 1670 to 1703, and again from 1784 to 1878; a fief of the Grand Vizier (1703–1745 and 1748–1784); and again an eyalet for the short period from 1745 to 1748.

The Italo-Turkish War (Turkish: Trablusgarp Savaşı, "Tripolitanian War", Italian: Guerra di Libia, "War of Libya"), also known as the Turco-Italian War, was fought between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire from 29 September 1911 to 18 October 1912. As a result of this conflict, Italy captured coastal areas of the Ottoman Tripolitania Vilayet, of which the main sub-provinces were Fezzan (Turkish: Fizan), Cyrenaica (Turkish: Sirenayka), and Tripoli (Turkish: Trablusgarp) itself. These territories became the colonies of Italian Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which would later merge into Italian Libya.

During the conflict, Italian forces also occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. In the 1912 Treaty of Ouchy, which ended the war and gave Italy the possession of Libya, the Italians agreed to return the Dodecanese to the Ottoman Empire. However, the vagueness of the text, combined with subsequent adverse events unfavourable to the Ottoman Empire (the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and World War I), allowed a provisional Italian administration of the islands, and Turkey eventually renounced all claims on these islands in Article 122 of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), confirmed by Article 15 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

The Sanjak of Montenegro (Montenegrin and Serbian Cyrillic: Санџак Црне Горе, romanized: Sandžak Crne Gore; Turkish: Karadağ Sancağı, literally Sanjak of the Black Mountain) was a province (sanjak) of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Peninsula roughly corresponding to modern Montenegro. It was created in 1514 from the borders of the former Zeta, ruled by the Crnojevići, which had earlier been organized into the Sanjak of Scutari in 1499.

The Sanjak of Prizren (Turkish: Prizren Sancağı, Albanian: Sanxhaku i Prizrenit, Serbian: Призренски санџак / Prizrenski sandžak) was one of the sanjaks in the Ottoman Empire with Prizren as its administrative centre. It was founded immediately after Ottoman Empire captured Prizren from the Serbian Despotate in 1455. The rest of the territory of Serbian Despotate was conquered after the fall of Smederevo in 1459, and divided into following sanjaks: Sanjak of Viçitrina, Sanjak of Kruševac and Sanjak of Smederevo. At the beginning of the First Balkan War in 1912, the territory of Sanjak of Prizren was occupied by the army of the Kingdom of Serbia. Based on Treaty of London signed on 30 May 1913, the territory of Sanjak of Prizren became part of Serbia.

Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1455 to 1913, originally as part of the eyalet of Rumelia, and from 1864 as a separate Kosovo vilayet.

During this period several administrative districts (known as sanjaks ("banners" or districts) each ruled by a sanjakbey (roughly equivalent to "district lord") have included parts of the territory as parts of their territories.

The Sanjak of Albania (Ottoman Turkish: سنجاق آرونید, romanized: Sancâk-ı Arvanid, or آرونید سنجاغی, Arvanid sancâğı; Albanian: Sanxhaku i Arbërisë or Sanxhaku i Shqipërisë) was a second-level administrative unit of the Ottoman Empire between 1415 and 1444. Its mandate included territories of modern central and southern Albania between Krujë to the Kalamas River in northwestern Greece.

Chameria (also spelled Çameria; Albanian: Çamëria; Greek: Τσαμουριά, romanized: Tsamouriá) is a historical region along the coast of the Ionian Sea in southwestern Albania and northwestern Greece, traditionally associated with the Albanian ethnic subgroup of the Chams. For a brief period (1909-1912), three kazas (Filat, Aydonat and Margiliç) were combined by the Ottomans into an administrative district called Çamlik sancak. During the interwar period, the toponym was in common use and the official name of the area above the Acheron river in all Greek state documents. The term is used today mostly by Albanians and it is obsolete in Greek, surviving in some old folk songs. Most of what is called Chameria is divided between parts of the Greek regional units of Thesprotia, Preveza, and Ioannina (some villages at the western side); and the municipality of Konispol at the southernmost extremity of Albania. Apart from geographic and ethnographic usages, in contemporary times within Albania the toponym has also acquired irredentist connotations.

The siege of Shkodra (Albanian: Rrethimi i Shkodrës) took place from May 1478 to April 1479 as a confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetians together with the League of Lezhë and other Albanians at Shkodra (Scutari in Italian) and its Rozafa Castle during the First Ottoman-Venetian War (1463–1479). Ottoman historian Franz Babinger called the siege "one of the most remarkable episodes in the struggle between the West and the Crescent".

A small force of approximately 1,600 Albanian and Italian men and a much smaller number of women faced a massive Ottoman force containing artillery cast on site and an army reported (though widely disputed) to have been as many as 350,000 in number. The campaign was so important to Mehmed the Conqueror that he came personally to ensure triumph. After nineteen days of bombarding the castle walls, the Ottomans launched five successive general attacks which all ended in victory for the besieged. With dwindling resources, Mehmed attacked and defeated the smaller surrounding fortresses of Žabljak Crnojevića, Drisht, and Lezha, left a siege force to starve Shkodra into surrender, and returned to Constantinople. On January 25, 1479, Venice and Constantinople signed a peace agreement that among other concessions ceded Shkodra to the Ottoman Empire. The defenders of the citadel emigrated to Venice, whereas many Albanians from the region retreated into the mountains. Shkodra then became a seat of the newly established Ottoman sanjak, the Sanjak of Scutari. The Ottomans held the city until Montenegro captured it in April 1913, after a six-month siege.

Liwa (Arabic: لواء, liwā’, "ensign" or "banner") has developed various meanings in Arabic:

• a banner, in all senses (flag, advertising banner, election publicity banner, etc.)
• a district; see also: banner (administrative division)
• a level of military unit with its own ensign, now used as the equivalent to brigade
• an officer commanding a number of liwa units, now equivalent to a major general

In Turkish, liva (لواء, livâ) was used interchangeably with sanjak to describe the secondary administrative divisions into which the provinces of the Ottoman Empire were divided. After the fall of the empire, the term was used in the Arab countries formerly under Ottoman rule. It was gradually replaced by other terms like qadaa and mintaqa and is now defunct. It is only used occasionally in Syria to refer to the Hatay Province, ceded by the French mandate of Syria to Turkey in 1939, when it was Liwa’ Iskenderun.

The administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire were administrative divisions of the state organisation of the Ottoman Empire. Outside this system were various types of vassal and tributary states.

The Ottoman Empire was first subdivided into provinces, in the sense of fixed territorial units with governors appointed by the sultan, in the late 14th century. The beylerbey, or governor, of each province was appointed by the central government. Sanjaks (banners) were governed by sanjak-beys, selected from the high military ranks by the central government. Beylerbeyis had authority over all the sancakbeyis in a region. Kaza was a subdivision of sancak and referred to the basic administrative district, governed by a kadi.

The Sanjak of Smederevo, also known in historiography as the Pashalik of Belgrade, was an Ottoman administrative unit (sanjak) centered on Smederevo, that existed between the 15th and the outset of the 19th centuries. It was located in the territory of present-day Central Serbia.
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The Sanjak of Novi Pazar (Albanian: Sanxhaku i Pazarit të Ri; Serbo-Croatian: Novopazarski sandžak, Новопазарски санџак; Turkish: Yeni Pazar sancağı) was an Ottoman sanjak (second-level administrative unit) that was created in 1865. It was reorganized in 1880 and 1902. The Ottoman rule in the region lasted until the First Balkan War (1912) and the treaty of London(1913) The Sanjak of Novi Pazar included territories of present-day northeastern Montenegro and southwestern Serbia, also including some northern parts of Kosovo. In modern day terms the region is known as Sandžak.

The Mosul Vilayet (Arabic: ولاية الموصل; Ottoman Turkish: ولايت موصل, romanized: Vilâyet-i Musul) was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire. It was created from the northern sanjaks of the Baghdad Vilayet in 1878. Mosul Vilayet was part of 'the Iraq Region' (Hıtta-i Irakiyye).

At the beginning of the 20th century, it reportedly had an area of 29,220 square miles (75,700 km), while the preliminary results of the first Ottoman census of 1885 (published in 1908) gave the population as 300,280. The accuracy of the population figures ranges from "approximate" to "merely conjectural" depending on the region from which they were gathered.

Tripoli Eyalet (Ottoman Turkish: ایالت طرابلس شام, romanized: Eyālet-i Ṭrāblus-ı Şām; Arabic: طرابلس الشام) was an eyalet of the Ottoman Empire. The capital was in Tripoli, Lebanon. Its reported area in the 19th century was 1,629 square miles (4,220 km).

It extended along the coast, from the southern limits of the Amanus mountains in the north, to the gorge of Maameltein to the south, which separated it from the territory of the sanjak of Sidon-Beirut.

Lazistan (Laz: ლაზონა / Lazona, ლაზეთი / Lazeti, ჭანეთი / Ç'aneti; Ottoman Turkish: لازستان, Lazistān) was the Ottoman administrative name for the sanjak, under Trebizond Vilayet, comprising the Laz or Lazuri-speaking population on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea. It covered modern day land of contemporary Rize Province and the littoral of contemporary Artvin Province.
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Kaymakam, also known by many other romanizations, was a title used by various officials of the Ottoman Empire, including acting grand viziers, governors of provincial sanjaks, and administrators of district kazas. The title has been retained and is sometimes used without translation for provincial or subdistrict governors in various Ottoman successor states, including the Republic of Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq, and Lebanon.