This chapter presents both a general overview and trans-dynastic interpretation of the power elites of fifteenth century Islamic West-Asia, their institutions and practices, and the many transformations that marked their trajectories across the rough political landscape of the time.1 As far as that overview is concerned, the chapter retraces the general contours of these many crisscrossing trajectories of trans-regional, regional and local empowerment that distinguished the landscape from Nile to Oxus and from Bosporus to Indus between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries ce (or the end of the eighth and the beginning of the tenth centuries ah).