By the middle decades of the ninth/fifteenth century, a clearer picture of the activities of Halveti leaders begins to emerge, as the chronological distance between them and their Ottoman biographers narrows. As a result, historians can be more certain when they discuss linkages between prominent Halveti figures and other personalities and events appearing in their societies. During this period, dating from the ninth/fifteenth to the eleventh/seventeenth centuries, the range and activities of Halveti leaders expanded dramatically. This chapter provides a broad outline of how the order spread and its sub-branches multiplied and took a position of widespread political, religious, and social power and influence in the Islamic world as a whole. This process of growth and expansion also became intimately intertwined with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire's power and influence.

In the centuries that followed the disruptions wreaked by the Timurid invasions, several factors encouraged the growth of the Halveti order's membership. The first of these was increased interest among Anatolian Turkish Muslims, who wished to gain a better knowledge of the traditions of their faith. Initially, not all Anatolians embarked on this quest willingly. We know that Temür forcibly relocated many captured intellectuals and artisans eastward to Iran and Central Asia, who later returned bearing an increased knowledge of the traditions and scholarship of the eastern Islamic world as a by-product of their exile there.