Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State

283 Pages·1996·1.67 MB·English

by  Cemal Kafadar

Between Two Worlds

The Construction of the
Ottoman State
Cemal Kafadar
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley / Los Angeles / London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England First Paperback Printing 1996
© 1995 by
The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kafadar, Cemal, 1954-Between two worlds : the construction of the Ottoman state /
Cemal Kafadar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-20600-7
I. Turkey—History—Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918. 2. Turkey—
History—Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918—Historiography. I. Title.
DR486.K34 1995
956.1'0072—dc20
94-21024
Printed in the United States of America 08 07
10 9 8 7
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
bana okumayi sevdiren, sonra bu i i
abartti imi araya giren gurbete ra men
hi bir zaman yüzüme vurmayan
Annemeve Bahama / To My Parents
Calabim bir r yaratmi
ki cihan resinde
Bakicak d dar görünür
Ol rin ken resinde N gih n ol re vardim
Ani ben yapilir gördüm
Ben dahi bile yapildim
Ta ü toprak resinde Haci Bayram Vel (d. 1429–30) My Lord
has created a city
In between two worlds.
One sees the beloved if one looks
At the edge of that city.
I came upon that city
And saw it being built.
I too was built with it
Amidst stone and earth.
Contents
PREFACE
CHRONOLOGY
Introduction
Background and Overview
Identity and Influence in the History of Nations
1: The Moderns
The Rise of the Ottoman State in Modern Historiography
The Wittek Thesis and Its Critics
2: The Sources
Gaza and Gazis in the Frontier Narratives of Medieval Anatolia
The Chronicles of the House of Osman and Their Flavor: Onion or
Garlic?
3: The Ottomans: The Construction of the Ottoman State
Strategizing for Alliances and Conflicts: The Early Beglik
Into the Limelight and the Rise of Tensions
Epilogue: The Creation of an Imperial Political Technology and
Ideology
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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 O m n in the western Anatolian marches of the late thirteenth century
into a centralized and self-consciously imperial state under the House of O m n
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 K pr l 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 O m n, 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 K pr l . 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, Burh nedd
n instead of Burh n al-D n.
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, G lru Necipo lu, Nevra Necipo lu, rvin Schick, Ru en
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.