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Preface

After decades of relative consensus and silence on the issue, the rise of the Ottomans, who established one of the longest-lived (ca. 1300-1922), yet least studied or understood, dynastic states in world history, is back on the agenda of historians as an open question. Until the twentieth century, no attempt was made to delineate the underlying factors or causes (in the postpositivist sense of the term) behind the fascinating development of the political enterprise headed by a certain Omn in the western Anatolian marches of the late thirteenth century into a centralized and self-consciously imperial state under the House of Omn in a few generations. The former occupied a tiny frontier outpost between the worlds of Islam and Byzantium, not only physically but also politically and culturally beyond the pale of established orders in either world; the latter, upon conquering Constantinople in 1453, represented itself as heir to the Eastern Roman Empire and leader of the Muslim world. Historians basically reiterated the legendary accounts received from frontier narratives that were first written down in the latter part of the fifteenth century—a century and a half later than the appearance in the historical record of Osmän (d. 1324?), the eponymous founder of the dynasty. With a controversial book in 1916, Herbert A. Gibbons initiated debate on the rise of Ottoman power, and this debate continued until the publication of two influential works in the 1930s by Fuat Kprl and Paul Wittek.¹

With these works, the gates of independent reasoning were closed, as it were. Wittek's “az thesis” in particular—the thesis that assigned a crucial role to the spirit of az (“Holy War ideology” in his unfortunate translation), which he claimed was prevalent among the early Ottomans—soon became textbook orthodoxy. This is not to say that there were no important studies whose coverage included that period in the context of broad developments in late Byzantine or medieval Turkish history. Except for a few cases that made no ripples, however, no direct discussion of the particular topic took place and no new hypotheses were presented until a flurry of publications in the 1980s took issue with the received wisdom, particularly on the basis of perceived contradictions between the az thesis and early Ottoman behavior displaying inclusiveness and latitudinarianism. This book grew partly out of the author's joy in seeing a fascinating problem reincluded in the agenda of historians and partly out of his discomfort with some of the directions taken in these new works.

The decline and comeback of the topic parallels broad trends in world historiography and in Ottomanist scholarship. The waning of interest in the question coincided with the opening of the Ottoman archives to scholarly study and the ensuing fascination with archival research. For one thing, there is a phenomenal quantitative difference between the extant materials related to early Ottoman history and those pertaining to the sixteenth century and beyond. There is still not one authentic written document known from the time of Omn, and there are not many from the fourteenth century altogether. Furthermore, the nature of the documents from later periods is such as to enable scholars to conduct social and economic studies of rare quantitative precision, while the prearchival sources are mostly legends, hagiographies, and annalistic chronicles. Naturally, this quality of the material coincided so well with the rising prestige of quantification-based social and economic history worldwide that the investigation of Ottoman “origins” lost its appeal, just as did historical linguistics (philology), which was among the most cherished areas of expertise for the generation of Wittek and Kprl. Although the field of Ottoman studies did not and still is often reluctant to directly engage in a theoretical discourse, the victory of structure over progression of events indirectly made its impact on Ottomanists.²

However, more recent intellectual currents reveal heightened concern with issues like “origins,” “genealogy” and “sequentiality of events” once again, though in a new manner. An example of this new spirit may be the popularity and esteem of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose in the 1980s. I am not referring to the historical setting and flavor provided by a scholarly concern with authenticity but something more intrinsic to the novel: its plot. After all, had William of Baskerville, the detectivemonk, inquired into the succession of head librarians in the abbey, had he pursued, as a traditional historian would have, the succession of events related to the library in chronological order, he would have discovered much sooner that Jorge of Burgos should have been the prime suspect.³

This trend is accompanied by a renewed interest in narrative sources, which were once seen as inferior to quantifiable records. Turning the tables around, historians now indulge in the application of literary criticism or narcological analysis to archival documents, to even such dry cases as census registers, which have been seen as hardly more than data banks in previous history-writing.⁴

It is not merely in the context of developments in world historiography that we should situate trends in Ottoman studies. For one thing, the two are hardly ever synchronized, since Ottomanists are often in the role of belated followers rather than innovators or immediate participants. Besides, history-writing, like any other kind of writing, needs to be viewed through its entanglements in the sociocultural and ideological context of its time and stands at a particular moment of an evolved intellectual/scholarly tradition. As the late classicist Sir Moses Finley has demonstrated in his Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, the temporal distance of the period under investigation does not necessarily provide it with immunity against the influence of present-day concerns.⁵

In Ottoman and Turkish studies, too, it is certainly true that the intensity of the ideological dimension in historical investigation does not diminish as one moves back in time. In fact, the period of Turkish migrations into and invasions of Anatolia and the eventual establishment of Ottoman power over what had been the Byzantine Empire must be one of the most ideologically laden, for reasons I hope will become apparent to the readers of this book. It may be due partly to such an awareness that lately more studies are published on the historiography of that formative period (pre-and early Ottoman) than straight histories. In fact the ongoing assessment of the az thesis can be seen as part of the same historiographic stocktaking.⁶

This book itself is partly an extended historiographic essay on the rise of the Ottoman state and on the treatment of this theme in historical scholarship. It is also an attempt to develop, through this dialogue with Ottomanist scholarship, a new appraisal of the medieval Anatolian frontier setting, with its peculiar social and cultural dynamics, which enabled the emergence of Ottoman power and thus played a major role in shaping the destinies of southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe from the fourteenth to the twentieth century.

Transliteration is the perennial problem of historical scholarship in different branches of Islamic studies. Materials in pre-modern Turkish rendered in the Arabic script, as in almost all the sources used in this study, are particularly difficult to standardize, and any transliteration system is bound to be esthetically displeasing. But the shortcut of using modern spelling throughout feels anachronistic and thus even more displeasing to this author.

Still, I have decided to give place names (e.g., Konya) as well as the names of principalities (e.g., Karaman) and states (e.g., Abbasid) in their modern forms since that might make it easier to look them up in geographical and historical atlases or reference works. Words that appear in English dictionaries (such as sultan, kadi) are not transliterated unless they appear as part of an individual's name.

Otherwise, all individual names and technical vocabulary are transliterated according to a slightly modified version of the system used in the Encyclopedia of Islam. The transliteration of Arabic compound names is simplified when used in reference to the Turkish-speaking Anatolian/ Balkan world: hence, Burhneddn instead of Burhn al-Dn.

Like many other books, this one took shape as a long adventure for its author. Along the way, I was fortunate to receive comments, guidance, encouragement, or admonition from a number of friends and colleagues, among whom it is a pleasure to mention Peter Brown, George Dedes, Suraiya Faroqhi, Jane Hathaway, Halil nalcik, Ahmet Kara-mustafa, Ahmet Kuya, Joshua Landis, Roy Mottahedeh, Glru Necipolu, Nevra Necipolu, rvin Schick, Ruen Sezer, inasi Tekin, senbike Togan, and Elizabeth Zachariadou. I am particularly grateful to Cornell Fleischer, whose thorough reading of and thoughtful commentary on the manuscript were of immense help in giving the book its final shape. They are probably unaware how much they contributed to the development of this book through not only intentional interventions but also casual remarks or general observations that I appropriated, and possibly twisted, to my own ends. Plunder, as I hope the readers of this book will come to agree, can coexist in harmony with the assumption, or presumption, of serving some good cause in the end.

The critical tone of my historiographic evaluations should not obliterate the profound indebtedness I feel toward all those scholars whose works on the rise of the Ottoman state are surveyed here. Their findings and ideas, even when I disagreed with them, opened many pleasant vistas and doors for me.

I also appreciate having had the chance to try out some earlier and partial versions of my arguments on audiences whose responses enabled me to focus on formulations that needed to be refined and paths that needed to be abandoned. Such opportunities were provided at the Brown Bag Lunch series of Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department, at Washington University in Saint Louis, at the Istanbul center of the American Research Institute in Turkey, and at the Murat Sanca Library workshop series in Istanbul.