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CHAPTER 1

The Moderns

If you have nothing to tell us except that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to us? Voltaire, article on history, Encyclopédie

The Rise of the Ottoman State in Modern Historiography

Beginning in the fifteenth century, numerous historical accounts were composed, by Ottomans and others, that relate a series of events delineating the emergence and expansion of Ottoman power, but none of these would have passed Voltaire's test. From the point of view of modern historiography, they contain no explanation, no analysis of underlying causes or dynamics, and are only narratives of events in succession about successive dynasties and states. Naturally, a reader of Dumézil would be ready to trace implicit explanatory models in these sources, as literary or nonanalytical as they may seem, through an examination of their selection and ordering of events.¹ However, this would not change the fact that “the rise of the Ottoman state” was not problematized and explicit causal explanations were not sought until after the full impact of positivist and historicist thought on Ottoman studies at the turn of this century.

Ottoman histories from the earliest written works in the fifteenth century to the late imperial age tend to start off with Osman's genealogy and his dream against the backdrop of the physical and political turmoil caused by the Chingisids in western Asia. With Turks pouring into Asia Minor due to the onslaught of the Mongol armies and with Seljuk power disintegrating, a young warrior (son of so-and-so, son of so-and-so, etc.) has an auspicious dream that is read to imply the dreamer and his descendants are selected by God for rulership. There are various versions of this legend, and some attribute the dream to Ertozril, Osman's father, but they all precede Osman's bid for political power and indicate that it was endowed with divine sanction. To the chroniclers and their audience, pedigree and divine sanction clearly played a crucial role in the rise of Ottoman power. These are accompanied by such personal qualities as sincere faith, righteousness, valor, and leadership.

Further, supplementary explanations could be woven into this model depending on the narrator's concerns. Just as genealogies could be reshaped or embellished through, say, remembrance of forgotten ancestors, divine blessing could easily accommodate some holy person who may be assigned intermediacy in its allocation or verification. If you wanted to make sure that you and yours got proper credit for their real or imagined contribution to Ottoman successes, you might include an episode or two to underline the nature of that contribution. In the vita of c Bekta, for instance, the patron saint of the Bektorder of dervishes, rulership is again a question of divine selection whereby God's sanction is removed from the House of Seljuk and transferred to that of Ertoril.² However, the transfer does not take place through direct intervention by God. The news is broken by c Bekta, who, thanks to his vilyet (proximity to God), has access to such divine secrets and power to intercede in the actual transmission of rulership. His blessing turns out to be another “factor” in the rise of Ottoman power.

In European sources, the question of origins again took up considerable space, but here the emphasis was on ethnicity or race rather than Osman's genealogy: are Turks indeed Trojans; or are they Scythians? What needed to be explained to European audiences was not so much the emergence of the Ottomans in particular but the arrival of the “Turkish menace” or “yoke” at large. Whether they were Trojans avenging Hector or Scythians out to destroy, or an Inner Asiatic people related to the Huns as it was later discovered, their superb military skills—a racial characteristic—would need to be underlined as well as the fact that they were now within the fold of Islam, thus armed with a “warlike religion.” God's design, often in the form of a punishment for the sins of Christians, should not be neglected in this context.

Against this background, it is easy to understand why Samuel Johnson thought so highly of Richard Knolles (1550?–1610) as to call him “the first of historians,” even though the good doctor was quick to add that the historian was “unhappy…in the choice of his subject.” To explain the “beginning, progresse, and perpetuall felicity of this the Othoman Empire,” Knolles referred to

such a rare unitie and agreement amongst them, as well in the manner of their Religion (if it be so to bee called) as in matters concerning their State (especially in all their enterprises to be taken in hand for the augmenting of their Empire) as that thereof they call themselves Islami, that is to say Men of one minde, or at peace amongst themselves; so that it is not to bee marvelled, if thereby they grow strong themselves, and dreadfull unto others. Joyne unto this their courage,…their frugalitie and temperatenesse in their dyet and other manner of living; their carefull observing of their antient Military Discipline; their cheerefull and almost incredible obedience unto their Princes and Sultans…. Whereunto may bee added the two strongest sinewes of every well governed Commonwealth; Reward propounded to the good, and Punishment threatened unto the offender; where the prize is for vertue and valour set up, and the way laid open for every common person, be he never so meanly borne, to aspire unto the greatest honours and preferments both of the Court and of the Field.³

Whatever the value of Knolles's explanations, however, they are clearly not targeted at the earlier phase of Ottoman history, or at the formative stages of the state, as such. This is also true of the more theoretical discourse on comparative political systems undertaken by various Renaissance European authors, such as Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, whose works must have been read by some of the authors of the abundant European historical literature on the Ottomans. It was in fact none other than Knolles who translated Bodin's De la legislation, ou Du¿fouver-nementpolitique des empires into English just before writing his history of the Ottomans.⁴ Like Knolles, the writers of comparative politics analyzed the strengths of the Ottoman system as it stood after the process of imperial construction but were not interested in that process itself. Nor is there anything specifically Ottoman in Knolles's account; all of the “factors” mentioned by him might apply to any of the Turco-Muslim polities the Ottomans competed with. Knolles was explaining the success not of the Ottomans in particular but of the “Turk”—a designation that was more or less synonymous with “Ottoman” and often also with “Muslim” among the Europeans of his age. Besides, as impressive as Knolles's precociously analytical attitude may be, it is submerged in hundreds of pages of traditional histoire événementielle.

This is also true for the most comprehensive and monumental narrative of Ottoman history ever written, Die Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches by the Viennese historian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), who represents the culmination of that tradition.⁵ And it is true, though there are more than glimpses of a new historiography here, even for Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940), the Rumanian medievalist, whose neglected history of the Ottoman Empire is, on the one hand, a throwback to the mode of grand narrative with emphasis on politico-military events but, on the other, a product of the new Kulturgeschichte.⁶ After all, he had been goaded to the task by his mentor, Lamprecht, the German historian whose anti-Rankean genetic method was meant to investigate not “how it actually was” but “how it actually came to be” (wie es eigentlich geworden ist). Not only was Iorga keen on underlining the significance of the Seljuk era as a formative background, but he also chose to include a nonnarrative chapter emphasizing “the military village life of the Turks” and the appeal of Ottoman administration to the Balkan peasantry by providing it protection, he argued, from seigniorial abuse.

It was not before the First World War, when the demise of the Ottoman state seemed imminent, that its emergence appeared as a specific question in historians' imagination. How was it that this state, now looking so weak and decrepit, so old-fashioned, still so oriental after many westernizing reforms, had once been so enormously successful? And the success, many realized, was not just in terms of expansion, which could be easily explained by militarism and violence. This state once ruled, without major unrest, over a huge population with a dizzying variety of religions, languages, and traditions.⁷ How could some “barbarians,” still nomadic at the outset of their empire-building enterprise, create such a sophisticated, even if ultimately “despotic,” polity? The Ottoman patriot or Turkish nationalist would want to demonstrate, with a different wording of course, that this was not surprising, but he or she would be well aware that the question was of utmost weight for one's dignity or possibly the nation's very existence in the context of a new world order that clipped non-European empires into nation-states; these were in principle to be formed by peoples who could demonstrate through their historical experience that they were mature enough to govern themselves.

H. A. Gibbons (1880-1934), an American teaching at Robert College (Istanbul) in the 1910s, was the first to problematize and devote a monograph to the origins of the Ottoman state.⁸ Pointing out that the earliest Ottoman sources –the basis for almost all speculation on the topic until then – were from the fifteenth century, he dismissed them as late fabrications. In fact, his assessment of Ottoman historiography is not very different from that of Busbecq, the Habsburg envoy to Sleymn the Magnificent (r. 1520-66). Echoing the sixteenth-century diplomat, who thought that “Turks have no idea of chronology and dates, and make a wonderful mixture of all the epochs of history,” Gibbons wrote: “We must reject entirely the appreciations of Ottoman historians. None has yet arisen of his [Osman's] own people who has attempted to separate the small measure of truth from the mass of fiction that obscures the real man in the founder of the Ottoman dynasty.”⁹ He thus reached the conclusion that “in the absence of contemporary evidence and of uncon-flicting tradition, we must form our judgement of Osman wholly upon what he accomplished.”¹⁰ Oddly enough after this damning assessment, Gibbons not only used parts of the Ottoman historiographic tradition but even chose to rely on a particularly dubious element of it for his most pivotal argument.

One of his radically novel assertions was that Osman and his followers were pagan Turks living as nomadic pastoralists on the Byzantine frontier and pursuing successful predatory activities due to weakened defenses in that area. Converting to Islam at some stage of Osman's career, as the dream story implied according to Gibbons, these nomads were overtaken by a proselytizing spirit and forced many of their Christian neighbors to convert as well. The story of Osman's blessed reverie, Gibbons thought, may well have been a legend but it was meant to capture a particular moment in the young chieftain's real life, namely, his adoption of a new faith and of a politico-military career in its name.

Taking another piece of evidence from that “mass of fiction” that he otherwise deemed Ottoman histories to be, Gibbons “calculated” that the “four hundred tents” of Osman's tribe must have been joined by so many converts that the new community increased “tenfold” by this process. A new “race” was born—that of the Osmanhs—out of the mixture of ex-pagan Turks and ex-Christian Greeks. The expansion of Osmanli (the Turkish form of “Ottoman”) power was accompanied not so much by fresh elements from the East but by more and more “defections and conversions from among the Byzantine Greeks; so, the creative force of the Ottoman Empire must not be attributed to an Asiatic people but to European” elements.¹¹

This was after all a time when a historian did not even feel the need to be apologetic for making remarks like the following: “The government and the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire are negatively rather than positively evil. There is nothing inherently bad about the Osmanli. He is inert, and has thus failed to reach the standards set by the progress of civilization. He lacks ideals.”¹² Shrug or sigh as one might upon reading such comments today, when cultural domination is asserted and practiced in much subtler ways, Gibbons's self-satisfied lack of sensitivity for the “natives” allowed him to be free of neurotic caution and to make some daring suggestions. Whatever the weaknesses of his specific arguments, and despite his exaggerations and racialization of the issue, he was not altogether off the mark in underlining the emergence of a new political community out of some combination of people from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. It may also shed quite a bit of light on the possibly humble origins and enterprising nature of the early Ottomans to see Osman as a “self-made man.” And even Gibbons's ardent critics agreed that Ottoman expansion in the Balkans must be seen not as the outcome of a series of booty-seeking raids but as “part of a plan of settlement” accompanied by such raids.

For more than two decades following Gibbons's book, the foundation of the Ottoman state and the identity of its founders were hot topics. His theory enjoyed some recognition outside the world of Orientalists especially since it could be superimposed on the theory of some Byzantinists at the time that the flourishing of early Ottoman administrative institutions and practices was due, not to a Turco-Islamic, but to a Byzantine heritage. As Charles Diehl, a French Byzantinist, put it, “the Turks…those rough warriors were neither administrators nor lawyers, and they understood little of political science. Consequendy they modelled many of their state institutions and much of their administrative organization upon what they found in Byzantium.”¹³ While underlining the long historical evolution of the Turks as a background to the Ottomans, Iorga also held that the latter, “conquérants malgré eux,” were almost totally assimilated into Byzantine life except in their religion. The empire they went on to build retained an element, to use his felicitous phrase, of “Byzance aprés Byzance.”¹⁴

Nevertheless, most scholars of Ottoman or oriental history were critical of Gibbons, while some notable cases like Babinger and Grousset were inclined to accept that Osman converted to Islam at a later stage of his chiefdom. These were no more than exceptions however. Giese, for instance, criticized Gibbons's theories and use of evidence, particularly the construction of an argument around the dream legend, and suggested a new catalyst to the Ottoman conquests: Osman's relations with, or rather support among, the a brotherhoods. These brotherhoods were the Anatolian version of the early Islamic futuwwa organizations, which comprised urban artisanal and mercantile milieux conforming to a quasi-chivalric, quasi-Sufi code of behavior and corporation.¹⁵ Kramers took this suggestion a step further and argued that Osman was one of the leaders of the as from the Paphlagonian town of Osmancik—whence he supposedly drew his sobriquet.¹⁶ Several prominent Orientalists such as Houtsma, Huart, Marquart, Massignon, and Mordtmann were eager to comment on issues related to Osman's ethnic or religious identity in those years. And identity–in a combination of ethnic, national, racial, and religious categories –was held to have a major explanatory value in historical understanding, especially in locating the rightful place of individuals and nations in the linear progression of civilization. While the minute differences of the arguments and speculations advanced by all these scholars need not be reproduced here in detail, it should be noted that a common underlying assumption characterized their positions and differentiated them from that of Gibbons; in one way or the other, they all tended to emphasize the “oriental” nature of the Ottomans and accepted the essentially Turco-Muslim identity of the founders of the state.

There was soon an attempt at synthesis by Langer and Blake, who breathed a new historiographic spirit into the debate by bringing in material and sociological factors, such as geography, changing trade patterns, and social organization of religious orders or artisanal associations. Though unable to use the primary sources in Middle Eastern languages, the two coauthors anticipated many of the points and perspectives that were soon to be taken up by two of the most prominent specialists in the field: Kprl and Wittek. While recognizing the significance of conversions from Christianity to Islam, they were cautious enough not to draw any specific demographic configurations from all this. Nor would they accept that Osman had been born pagan on such flimsy evidence, but they were convinced that “religion played a part, perhaps an important part, in the story of Ottoman expansion.” The “elan of the early Ottoman conquerors,” they felt, could be explained by the presence of the dervishes around them. Underlining the growth of trade and the proliferation of the a; organizations as well, they reached the conclusion that “the first sultans had more than a mere horde of nomads to rely upon.”¹⁷

THE KPRL-WITTEK CONSOLIDATION

The elaboration of that last point, as well as the most direct and detailed criticism of Gibbons's views, had to wait until 1934 when Mehmet Fuat Kprl (1890-1966), a Turkish scholar whose intellectual career spans the late Ottoman and early republican periods of imperial dissolution and nation building, delivered a series of lectures at the Sorbonne which were soon published as Les origines de Pempire ottoman.18 Much more than a rebuttal of Gibbons's theories, this book contained a detailed discussion of methodology. K;prl argued that the foundations of the Ottoman state could not be studied as an isolated Bithynian phenomenon, and that historians ought to concentrate not on detached politico-military incidents but on the social morphology, cultural traditions, and institutional structures of Anatolian Turks in general and of the late-thirteenth-century frontiers in particular. His primary conclusion after applying that method to a broad range of sources was that the material and cultural dynamics of Anatolian Turkish society were sufficiendy developed to nurture the growth of a state like that of the Ottomans. A demographic push into western Anatolia in the latter part of the thirteenth century mobilized these dynamics. Even though various forces competed for control over these groups—and it is only here, in the last few pages of his book, that Köprülü turns his attention to the Ottomans specifically—Osman's beglik was favored due, primarily, to its strategic location and then to various other factors (to be discussed in Chapter 3). In short, the Ottoman state was simply the culmination of certain dynamics, skills, and organizational principles that had been imported to or had developed in Anatolian Turkish society over more than two centuries. Osman just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

In the meantime, Paul Wittek (1894-1978), who had been to the Ottoman Empire as an officer of its Austrian ally during World War I and then moved on to a scholarly career, was working on the same period and asking similar questions. He published some of his findings in a 1934 monograph on the emergence and activities of another emirate, the Mentee.¹⁹ Soon after Kprl, Wittek oudined his own ideas on the rise of the Ottoman state in a series of lectures delivered at the University of London in 1937 and published in 1938.²⁰ There were some significant differences between the views of the two scholars; in fact Wittek's work was partially intended to be a critique of Köprülü, as we shall see below. Yet on one basic point they were in agreement: the rise of the Ottoman state had to be studied against the background of centuries of warfare, cultural transformation, acculturation, and settlement of Muslims and Turks in medieval Anatolia.

Kprl and Wittek did not always see the same things in the Anatolian-Turkish background. Yet again they were in agreement on another significant point: one had to distinguish between the hinterland and the frontiers in terms of both their social structure and their cultural characteristics. The two scholars also more or less concurred on the nature of this dichotomy; both of them found the hinterland to be composed of Persianate court circles and settled producers who essentially preferred peaceful relations (cohabitation) with the Byzantines or at least were not pleased to be in a state of continual hostilities, while the marches consisted of nomads, warriors, adventurers, and dervishes who were driven by their search for pasture, booty, glory, or religious vocation. Again, both of these scholars emphasized that frontier society allowed more room for heterodoxy, heterogeneity, and mobility.

As to their dissimilarities, Kprl and Wittek held divergent opinions on the issue of the “tribal factor” in early Ottoman state building. Neither of them understood tribal formations in the sense utilized by modern anthropologists, however. For both historians (and all the Ottomanists of the time) tribalism entailed consanguinity; that is, a tribe would in essence have to be composed of blood relations whose ancestry ought to be traceable to a common origin, at least in principle. Given that, Köprülü was ready to accept that the Ottomans hailed from a tribe belonging to the Kayi branch of the Ouz Turks, as most of the sources maintained and as eventually became official Ottoman dogma. However, Wittek pointed out, the earliest reports about the ancestry of Osman and his tribe are from the fifteenth century, and more significantly, there are a good many divergences in the genealogies different sources provide for the Ottomans. On the basis of these discrepancies, Wittek concluded that the early Ottomans cannot have been tribally associated; otherwise, they would have a consistent genealogy to show for it. In the same vein, Mehmed II would have been unable to toy around with the idea of propagating a Comnenian lineage for his family. Even after Wittels objections, Köprülü insisted on the validity of the Ottomans' Kay1 identity, while at the same time maintaining that this was a secondary issue since, to him, the Kayi origins did not contribute anything specific to the rise of the state.

There was also a major difference of approach between the two scholars. Kprl looked on the frontier society as a broad canvas composed of a variety of social forces (tribesfolk, warriors, dervishes, as, emigré scholar-bureaucrats), all of whom made their own significant contribution to the state-building potential of the Turco-Muslim principalities. All this eventually came under the domination of some descendants of the Kayi tribe because the latter happened to be located in a region that circumstances favored. Wittek, on the other hand, focused his attention on one specific element within the uc (term for frontier in medieval sources, pi. uct) society, the gaza milieu and its ethos, as being instrumental in the emergence of the principalities and ultimately of the Ottoman state, which overran the others. To him, the political history of the frontiers was made by bands of gazis, warriors of the faith, who spread across the frontier areas as Seljuk power diminished and formed aspiring emirates, among which the band led by Osman Gazi carried the day because of its fortunate position. The earliest Ottoman sources, an inscription from 1337 and AhmedFs chronicle, completed ca. 1410, both full of references to the House of Osman as gazis, confirmed in Wittek's opinion the significance of the gaza ethos for the early Ottoman thrust.

These gazi bands may have drawn members from some tribes but were not composed of tribal groups as such; rather, they consisted of warrior-adventurers from various backgrounds. In relation to the Mentee emirate, for instance, he had argued that the “gazi pirates” who founded this stateling were “originally a mixture of Turks and indigenous elements from the neighborhood of Byzantine territory” who were soon joined by “a large number of Byzantine mariners…owing to their unemployment.”²¹ To borrow more recent terminology, gazi bands were “inclusive” entities for Wittek, and tribes were not. Since he held that tribalism required consanguinity (which, he argued, later Ottoman genealogies were unable to establish anyway), and since the warrior bands whom he deemed responsible for the creation of the principalities were anything but consanguineous, he rejected the notion that a tribe could have been instrumental in the foundation of the Ottoman state. The cohesiveness of the political-military cadres of the emirates came from shared goals and faith, not blood.

The differences between Kprl and Wittek were never explicidy discussed in later scholarship because the issue was encumbered by nationalistic or counternationalistic considerations. From that viewpoint, the role of Byzantine “dissidents” and converts in one of the major political achievements of Turco-Muslim civilization was obviously a highly charged issue. The polemic against Western historiography, which often tended to show Turks as uncreative barbarians, should be an object of inquiry in itself as part of late Ottoman/early republican intellectual history. (And its intensity must be seen against the fact that Western historiography had been particularly aggressive in its attempt to barbarize and delegitimize the “Turkish” empire, with territories right within the European continent and lording it over Christian peoples.) Kprl, from his youthful poetry to his postacademic career as a politician, was certainly part of that discourse as an outspoken nationalist (though his nationalism was different from the official version in many ways). Before his lectures on the rise of the Ottoman state, he had published what turned out to be a highly influential study criticizing then prevalent views with respect to Byzantine influences on Ottoman institutions, primarily in the administrative sphere.²² Given all this, Kprl's account of the Ottoman foundations, where he insisted on the presence of a lineage-based tribe as well as an ethnic stock and spoke against emphasizing the conversions, was very easy to read as nationalistic propaganda. And indeed his book is not free of blatant excesses.

On the other hand, Kprl's version of events lacked the convenience of a singular “motive force.” Shaped under the influence of the Durkheimian tradition in Turkish thought, Kprl's account was distinctly akin to the new historiographic temperament of tht Annates, the French historical journal, then only five years old.²³ Rather than dealing with politico-military incidents and presenting a succession of events, Kprl explicitly stated that he intended to view the rise of the Ottoman state on the basis of the morphology of Anatolian Turkish society “and the evolution of its religious, legal, economic, and artistic institutions more than its political and military events.”²⁴ Even though his aim was partially to depict early Ottoman history as a continuation of late-Seljuk Anatolia, he shunned a chronologically ordered narrative. In his review of Kprl's book in the newly launched Annales, Lucien Fevbre noted approvingly the former's “aversion to one-sided explanations” and did not fail to add that “having gone beyond the stage of narrative history, [Kprl] produced a solid work of explanation and synthesis.”²⁵

Written by a man who disdained deterministic single-factor explanations, however, Kprl's account seemed to lack focus from the viewpoint of traditional history-writing. In his preface to the Turkish edition of his book in 1959, Kprlremarked somewhat defensively that some “respected Orientalists who have been occupied with the problem of the origins of the Ottoman Empire, although good philologists [read Wittek?], have not been able to go beyond a narrow and simplistic framework when they dealt with historical subjects because they could not escape from the influence of the mentality of narrative history….The frequent attempts to explain by a single cause, that is from one aspect, any historical process which has come into existence under the influence of many different factors is nothing but the neglect of the complexity, that is, the reality of life.”²⁶ Kprl's sociocultural portrait of the frontiers pointed to various factors that endowed the uc society with mobility and a potential for expansion and to various characteristics of the Ottomans that favored them in particular. The Kay1 origins, for instance, were never assigned a causal or explanatory role, and the demographic push from the east was cited as only one of the elements that transformed frontier mobility into Ottoman expansion.

Whatever his historiographic sophistication, however, Kprl was committed to an essentialist notion of nationhood even more strongly than the historians he opposed. If the Ottoman state was to be seen as a creation of Turks, these must be from the essence of Turkdom, not the newly Turkified. Thus he wrote: “Among the great men of the Ottoman state who won fame in the fourteenth century, and even the fifteenth century, there were very few Christian converts, like the family of Köse Mikhal for instance. Not only was the bureaucracy, which had been established according to Seljuk and Ilkhanid practices, composed entirely of Turkish elements, but those at the head of the government and army were almost invariably Turks. All the historical documents in our possession show this to be definitely the case.”²⁷ Needless to say, this paragraph is not accompanied by any references, for how could it be? How does one show that the fourteenth-century bureaucrats were “entirely” Turkish? So few of them are known as individuals, and most of those appear in the historical record for the first time. Furthermore, we should note the gender-specific designation of the subject of the inquiry: “great men of the Ottoman state.” However one chooses to characterize their ethnic origins, some of those great men, Kprl failed to note, were born to great women who were not of Turkish birth, like Nilüfer tn, the mother of Murd I.

As for lesser men and women, Kprl seems to have been equally keen on maintaining the purity of as many as possible, absolving them of renegadism and probably also the Ottoman conquerors of forced conversion. Against the evidence, he argues: “According to Ottoman sources, Gynk, which was completely inhabited by Christians when Ibn Battuta passed through it, should have been Islamized toward the end of the same century, since Yildirim Bayezid had people brought from there and from Torbali to establish the Muslim quarter that he founded in Constantinople. Even if this report were true, it would be more correct to explain it by the establishment of a new Turkish element there than by a general conversion. Logically one cannot easily accept that the Muslim quarter in Constantinople was simply settled by Greeks who had recendy become Muslims.”²⁸

Later on, he even drops the cautious “almost invariably” and states with absolute certainty that “the Ottoman state was founded exclusively by Turks in the fourteenth century.” And then he finally lets the cat out of the bag when he argues, quite logically, that “just as the fact that a significant number of the rulers of the Byzantine Empire came from foreign elements is no proof that the Greeks lacked administrative ability, an analogous situation occurring in the Ottoman Empire cannot be used as proof that the Turks lacked administrative ability.”²⁹

The last point, namely, the “administrative ability” of a people, to be demonstrated to the “civilized world” in particular, was much more than a question of national pride, as was mentioned above. Such arguments resonated with one of the basic principles in the “new world order” between the two great wars: a people had a right to nationhood in a civilized world only if they could prove that they had in their historical experience what it takes to create a stable state and to govern in a civilized manner. That is one of the most important reasons why nationstates took up the construction of a past as avidly as they drew plans for industrialized modernity. New generations had to, as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk put it in a saying that is now inscribed on many public sites in Turkey, “be proud [of the nation's past achievements], work hard, and be confident [of the future].” Kprl steered his own course clear of official history and of the so-called Turkish history thesis with its notorious, though fortunately short-lived, excesses like the “sun-language theory.”³⁰ Naturally, however, he was a man of his times.

No perilous pitfall in logic seems to have trapped historians more than the genetic fallacy, perhaps because, by the nature of their profession, they are prone to evaluating the truth value of an assertion on the basis of its origins. It seems that the validity of Kprl's account was suspect not necessarily because its contents were analyzed but merely because he was known to have indulged in nationalist polemics and to have given in to notions of ethnic purity. At any rate, Wittek's theory obtained general recognition in the international scholarly community writing in the western European languages, while Kprl's ideas, if indeed considered, were relegated to the status of the best-possible account of a nationalist historiography, albeit with due respect paid to his stature as a scholar. His works on medieval Turkish literary and religious history were used as indispensable sources, but it was Wittek's “gaza thesis” that became the definitive account of the origins of the Ottoman state for a large part of the scholarly world and, with the chivalresque imagery that it conjured, entered many popular treatments.

Still, to present Wittek's thesis as the consensus of the whole field, as some of his critics tend to, would be to overlook the scholarly community in Turkey and to some extent also the Balkans, where the KprlGibbons controversy continued to be important.³¹ In Turkey, Kprl's tribalist-ethnicist views as well as his emphasis on the Turco-Muslim origins of the Ottoman administrative apparatus came to enjoy nearly the status of dogma and were eventually taken in a more chauvinistic direction as they were increasingly stripped of his demographic and sociological concerns.³² And there always were some, in Turkey and elsewhere, who developed alternative views, as we shall see below. By and large, however, the terms of debate as they were developed from the First to the Second World War constituted the larger canvas within which the rise of the Ottoman state was depicted until recendy; Wittek's depiction in particular was copied and recopied until it was reduced to a mere sketch or a textbook orthodoxy in a large part of the world, while the same fate overtook Kprl; in Turkey.

The opening of the Ottoman archives to scholars changed the course of Ottoman studies starting in the 1940s. Both the quantity and the quality of the archival materials, mostiy hard data kept by a meticulous bureaucracy, coincided so well with the rising prestige of social and economic history worldwide that the question of Ottoman “origins,” like questions of origins in general, started to look awfully dated, especially since it required all kinds of “drudgery” that a new historiography reacting to the nineteenth-century philological tradition felt it had better leave to old-fashioned historians.

There is one noteworthy exception to this generalization, however. In a book published in 1947, George G. Arnakis questioned the methodology and the conclusions of both Kprl and Wittek.³³ In a review of that book, an eminent Byzantinist highlighted the main positions of these scholars while summarizing Arnakis's conclusions:

Gibbons' celebrated conclusion that the Ottoman Empire was essentially a creation of a European rather than of an Asiatic people receives endorsement. Kprl's opposite view that the Osmanlis were the very incarnation of every thing Moslem and Turkish is severely criticized as modern Turkish “ethnicism.”…Wittek emphasizes Ghazi ideology rather than Turkish race, as Kprl does; and indeed rejects the views of Houtsma…that the Osmanlis were part of the Kay1 tribe of the Oghuzz branch of the Turks. Arnakis, however, believes that the Iskendername of Ahmedi breathes a heroic spirit rather than a historic one, and that the references to the Ghazis in his poem and in the Brusa inscription do not mean what Wittek says they mean. He emphasizes that the sources indicate no Moslem fanaticism in the military activities of the early Osmanlis: their goal, Arnakis maintains, was not the spread of Islam or the destruction of Christianity but simply plunder. He further points out…that the early Osmanlis made it easy for the Greeks to join them In sum, Arnakis believes that all the students of the problem of Ottoman foundations since Gibbons have gone astray in their emphasis upon the primarily Islamic or essentially Turkish character of the first Osmanlis; that local conditions in Bithynia must be intensively studied before one can arrive at a fair picture.³⁴

This short passage, whatever its bias, succinctly encapsulates the different positions and issues involved. Methodologically, the central issue in studying the rise of the Ottoman state was whether one should focus one's attention on the local conditions in Bithynia or treat the early Ottomans as part of broader Islamic and Anatolian-Turkish traditions; the latter position would involve at least some use of fifteenth-century Ottoman sources which were dismissed by the former. Partially in tandem with one's position on that issue, one was then presumably led to put the emphasis either on Byzantine decay and the human resources that situation placed at the service of the early Ottomans or on the constructive capabilities of the Turco-Muslim heritage. It is difficult to see any but ideological reasons for treating these alternatives as mutually exclusive, but most of the scholars seem to have been keen on figuring out whether the Ottoman state was “essentially a creation of a European” or “of an Asiatic people” rather than on combining a narrow Bithynian viewpoint with the broader context of Turco-Islamic traditions. Wittek was somewhat more flexible than the others in that he attempted to mesh his account of the Ottomans as heirs to the gazi traditions with a portrait of Byzantine decay in Bithynia and with observations on defections of Byzantine subjects, but ultimately his singular reliance on “holy war ideology” did not leave much room for a serious consideration of the other factors.

In any case, there seems to be unanimity among these scholars in terms of their appreciation of the early Ottoman state, but the burning question was: whose achievement was it? Next to Kprl's position cited above was Arnakis's assertion that with the conquest of Bursa, “the Osmanlis were now strengthened by the socially advanced townspeople. Making Brussa their capital, the Osmanlis…carried on reforms, and organized a model state. Their advance and rapid spread into Europe is largely due to the administrative experience and the civic traditions of the citizens of Brussa, Nicaea and Nicomedia.”³⁵ Obviously then, Arnakis, like Gibbons, focused on Bithynia and on what he considered to be the “actions” of the early Ottomans rather than on the “fictions” of later generations, namely, the fifteenth-century chronicles. In terms of their specific conclusions, both of them emphasized the contributions of originally non-Islamic and non-Turkish elements to the rise of the Ottoman state, whereas Kprl and Wittek stressed the role of Turco-Islamic traditions (understood more in a cultural than in an ethnic sense by the latter). In terms of their interpretation of the sources, Gibbons and Arnakis tended to dismiss Ottoman chronicles as later fabrications, whereas Kprl and Wittek, though aware of their problematic nature, preferred to make use of them after applying what they considered to be rigorous means of textual analysis.

We can clearly identify two distinct lines of approach to early Ottoman history: the one followed by Gibbons and Arnakis and the other by Kprl and Wittek. Many elements of the new critical discourse on the gaza thesis can be read as a rekindled interest, though not necessarily in the sense of a self-conscious intellectual legacy, in some arguments of the former approach.

These lines should not be drawn too rigidly, however. Some of the differences between Kprl and Wittek have already been noted. It is also to be underlined that Gibbons's emphasis on the proselytizing zeal of the Ottomans in the early days and their loss of ideals in the empire's latter phase is to some extent paralleled by Wittek's views on the gaza. And this role assigned to religious motives by both Gibbons and Wittek is precisely what Arnakis, as well as the new critics of the gaza thesis, refused to see in the emergence of the Ottoman state.

THE SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES

Before moving on to the gaza thesis and its dismantling, we ought not to overlook some important contributions made to the study of that particular period in the meantime, if only to indicate that Wittek's thesis was not compelling for many scholars in the field.

Zeki Velid Togan (1890-1970), a Turcologist who held the office of premier in the short-lived republic of Bashkiria before its incorporation into the Soviet Union (1922) and who then migrated to Turkey, brought quite an unusual perspective to Turkish history thanks to his background and training. In his magnum opus on the general history of the Turks, written while he was in prison on charges of pan-Turanianism, and in other studies, he often emphasized the importance of the Ilkhanid legacy as well as non-Ouz, or eastern Turkish, elements as if he wanted to remind the western Turks, the heirs of the Ottoman tradition, of their non-Mediterranean cousins.³⁶ To the extent that the gaza ethos played a role, for instance, Togan argued that it was not the legacy of former Arab frontier traditions direcdy inherited by the Oguz Turks who settled in Anatolia as their new homeland. It was rather brought to western Anatolia at the turn of the fourteenth century by those Muslim Turks who were forced to migrate there from eastern Europe since their lands were lost to Islamdom when Prince Nogay of the Chingisid Altunorda, a Muslim, was defeated (1299) by Toktagu Khn, a Zoroastrian.³⁷ In addition to this newly imported enthusiasm (supported by the Ilkhanids) for the (re) conquest of lands for Islam, the internal weakness of Byzantium, and the lack of “Islamic fanaticism” among the early Ottomans that facilitated the incorporation of quasi-Islamic Turks and Mongols as well as renegades from Christianity, Togan cited the location of Osman's tribe right near the major Byzantine-Ilkhanid trade route as the factors that made it natural for Turkish warriors to conceive of expanding their power and building a state.³⁸ The rest was good leadership, adoption of sound administrative practices (thanks primarily to the Ilkhanid legacy), support given to and received from as and dervishes, and a wellregulated colonization policy after crossing to Rumelia.

The significance of commerce was to be considered from another perspective by Mustafa Akda (1913-72), a Turkish historian who chose to focus on some references in the Ottoman chronicles concerning exchange between Osman's tribe and their Christian neighbors; from those, he developed a bold theory proposing the existence of a “Marmara-basin economy” that emerged as an integrated unit at the time of Ertoril and Osman. The state that was created by them gave political expression to that economic reality and expanded along routes that linked the Marmara basin to other regional economies. This thesis never had a chance to gain any recognition, however, since it was soon demolished on the grounds of flimsy evidence and sloppy reasoning by a student of Kprl, Halil Inalcik, who was to emerge as the leading Ottomanist of his generation and make his own contributions to various problems of early Ottoman history.³⁹ Even though Akda elaborated the same views in a later book,⁴⁰ with a yet stronger emphasis on commerce, symbiosis, and rosy relations between Turks and Byzantines or Balkan peoples, his views were not supported by any new evidence that responded to former criticisms; the book failed to have an impact on professional historians though it was widely read by the public. Considering that its author suffered imprisonment for his leftist views after the military intervention of 1971, the book is rather a curious reminder of the fact that certain significant strands of the nationalist discourse such as the purely positive assessment of the Turkish conquests cut across both sides of the political spectrum in Turkey.⁴¹

Speros Vryonis, a Greek”American (and a Byzantinist, as some reviewers noted, much to his resentment), published his monumental work on medieval Anatolia in 1971.⁴² It covered the period that saw the rise of the Ottoman state but was not directly concerned with that specific phenomenon. Vryonis rather traced the broad currents of demographic movement, nomadization, and religious and cultural change in Asia Minor that, over four centuries, transformed what was a Hellenic/ Greek Orthodox peninsula into a predominandy Islamic one dominated by a Turcophone political elite. In the shortest summary of the set of conclusions he reached at the end of his exhaustive research, he wrote that “the Turkish success ultimately was a product of the dynamics of Byzantine decline and Turkmen (nomadic) demographic pressure.”⁴³ As for the role of frontier warriors in that process, whose absence in the book was noted by a reviewer, Vryonis commented that “the Wittek thesis was of interest and stimulus some two generations ago, but only as a tool to stimulate further discussion. To accept it as an established fact and then to apply it here and there to different areas and periods is erroneous methodologically.”⁴⁴

To Ernst Werner, a Marxist-eninist medievalist of the former East Germany, the first two centuries of Ottoman history represented the framing of a feudal system through the subjugation of pre- and antifeudal elements.⁴⁵ Though his conceptual framework is dated and forced, Werner was quite astute in focusing on social conflicts within and around the growing polity in detail as the dynamic that shaped political developments. He explicitly criticized Turkish historiography for its chauvinistic tendencies, including the tendency to overlook conflicts in Turco-Muslim society in general and among its warriors in particular⁴⁶ Since he made only scanty use of the sources in Islamic languages and clung to a rigid Marxist-Leninist position with a rather facile application of the notion of class struggle,⁴⁷ his views were not seriously considered in the guildlike mainstream of Ottoman studies, which, despite the considerable impact of quasi-Marxian materialism beginning in the 1960s, stood on the western side of the cold war divide. Although Werner identifies Kprl as “Kommunistenhasser und extremer Nationalist”⁴⁸his methodological position has an obvious affinity with that of the latter, the only Ottomanist of the earlier generation to have a serious interest in sociological history. In his Origins, Kprl had underlined the importance of “research on the stratification of various elements which constituted Anatolian Turkish society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their positions with respect to each other, their strengths and weaknesses, the causes of conflict and solidarity among them,” but his agenda simply included too many other questions that he preferred to focus on.⁴⁹

Whatever the merits of the insights they brought to the rise of the Ottoman state, these works had agendas that assigned higher priority to other matters. Thus, their comments on our specific theme remained by and large buried. Surveys (and syllabi?) of Ottoman, Islamic, and world history framed the activities of the state founders in terms of the gaza thesis. It should be obvious, however, that not all the scholars in the field were compelled by Wittek's gaza thesis even when it reigned supreme. Their works rather represent a continual, if not direcdy critical or widely influential, search for alternative explanations. Even if the gaza ethos was accepted to have played a role, there was an obvious urge to consider other factors, mostly social and economic, like trade, demographics, nomad-settlded relations, as well as societal conflict, as the dynamics that produced an empire. In the beginning of the 1980s, nalcik wrote a concise and masterly synthesis, to be discussed later, that brought many of these elements together with the gaza ethos.⁵⁰ It turned out to be not the last word on the subject, as one might have expected, but only the harbinger of a decade that saw a flurry of publications aiming to dismande the gaza thesis altogether.

The Wittek Thesis and Its Critics

It is time now to go over the gaza thesis in more detail and then turn to its critics. As indicated above with respect to the methodological position he shared with Kprl, Wittek could not have formulated his thesis without assuming some sort of diachronic continuum in the gazi traditions of Anatolia, and of medieval Islam in general, reaching the early Ottomans, as well as some level of synchronic communication and similarity between the gazis in Bithynia and elsewhere in Anatolia. That is precisely why he prefaced his account of the rise of the Ottomans with a survey of the gazi traditions in Anatolia starting with the Dnimendids of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. And that is also why he found the experiences of other emirates broadly contemporaneous with the Osmanli relevant for an understanding of the uniquely successful case of the latter.

The political and military leadership of the frontiers always belonged to the gazis, according to Wittek. Since the late eleventh century, Anatolian frontier areas were dominated by gazis, whose independent, sporadic, and unruly activities did not always conform to the stabilityoriented Realpolitik of the Seljuk administration. There were frequent clashes between Seljuk authorities and the gazis, whose most notable representatives were the Dnimendids in the twelfth century. In the early thirteenth century, there was a rapprochement between the gazis and the Seljuks, but the Mongol invasions brought this situation to an end.

In the second half of the thirteenth century, the western Anatolian marches were swollen not only by new influxes of nomadic groups and their holy men pushed by the Mongol invasions but also by “prominent Seluks seeking refuge, leaders from dispersed armies, old gazis whose rapprochement with Konya had come to an end.” The chronicles of that period are therefore filled with accounts of central armies undertaking campaigns against unruly uct. Against the backdrop of the decay of Byzantine defenses in western Anatolia after the end of Lascarid rule from Nicaea, the revitalization of the marches from the Turkish side led to new political configurations, signified by the appearance of several small emirates. According to Wittek, nomadic Turks took part in the invasions, incursions, and emerging emirates, but they were subordinated to gazis, “those march-warriors who for generations had attacked and overrun the frontier…the leaders of thcgazis became the princes of the emirates.”⁵¹We have already seen that his detailed study of the Mentee emirate led Wittek to attribute the formation of this polity to the successful piratical expeditions of the gazis joined by “the seafaring inhabitants of the coastal districts” and “a large number of Byzantine mariners.”