trade and intermarriage. One of Osman's wives was the daughter of a rich and respected sheikh of a dervish community; one of Osman's sons married the daughter of a tekvur. The chieftain of a Christian village near Osman's base was a scout and an ally in some early expeditions. It cannot be imagined that other begs of the frontiers failed to appreciate the value of such ties and to forge similar alliances. Cliental relations with wonder-working dervishes, who indeed worked wonders in capturing the hearts and minds of tribesfolk as well as of Christian or ex-Christian peasants through syncretism, were not the monopoly of the Ottomans. Nor were the Ottomans the only ones who could claim to be “raiders in the name of the faith.” Moreover, a policy of fiscal leniency (relative to late Byzantine practices), which worked well toward gaining Christian producers as subjects, was followed not only by the Ottomans but also by their rivals. They all benefited from the military potential in the restless energies and martial skills of the nomads and adventurers who had been “going West” in search of pastureland and other opportunities since around the mid thirteenth century.
Though it is difficult to assess whether the Ottomans had any comparative advantages in the use of any of these means toward expanding their sphere of control, it must at least be noted that Osman and his followers made effective use of them. Osman's political career seems to have started during the last years of the thirteenth century and to have carried him from the leadership of a community of nomadic pastoralists to the chieftainship of a beglik after he seized a few Bithynian fortresses. One particular advantage of his beglik was its location, since this base provided its forces with relatively easy access to poorly defended Byzantine territory. Successful military expeditions brought fame and riches, which were essential in attracting more warriors and dervishes as well as scholar-bureaucrats from the centers of Islamic culture. By the time of Osman's death (1323 or 1324), his small polity had the material and organizational means to strike coins, issue endowment deeds, and use siege tactics that required much more than competency in nomadic warfare. Particularly with the conquests of Bursa (1326) and Iznik (Nicaea) (1331) under Or
n, Osman's son, the Ottomans controlled all the major towns of Bithynia and were in a position to build lasting institutions. Some recognized scholars, such as
andarli
ara
al
l (d. 1387), seem to have arrived in Ottoman lands around this time, occupied top administrative positions (judicial and vezirial), and initiated new institutional mechanisms. The first Ottoman medrese, or college, was established in Iznik in 13 31 and started to train scholar-scribes and judges. But the Ottomans were not the only ones who undertook lucrative expeditions, and at first they were not the most renowned of the emirates. Even their location right next to Byzantine territory to the southeast of the Marmara Sea was matched by that of the Karasi emirs, who controlled the southwestern half of the region. Insofar as the extension of gazi activity into southeastern Europe constituted the next significant step in the imaginations of the begs of western Anatolia, the Karasi were in fact more favored in terms of their location and more knowledgeable in military-strategic terms. Factional strife in Byzantine imperial politics in the 1340s invited both emirates to Thracian ventures, where the Ottomans and the Karasi were called to aid the factions, respectively, of Kantakouzenos and his rivals (including Batatzes, the father-in-law of a Karasi beg). The former won, and the Ottomans overran the Karasi emirate and incorporated its experienced gazis. By 1354, Gelibolu (Kallipolis), the strongest Byzantine fort across the Dardanelles, was captured, and the gazis could now hope that their engagements in Thrace would be more than temporary. The goal of permanent control in this new territory was buttressed by the colonization of kindred populations there.
In taking charge of the raiding and settlement in Thrace, which eventually paved the way for conquests in southeastern Europe, the Ottomans gained a decisive advantage over other emirates, since this role brought not only immense prestige but also access to substantial material resources in the form of booty and tax revenues. But they soon faced the quintessential Ibn Khaldunian predicament of tribal war-band leadersturned-state builders: namely, the loosening of the bonds of solidarity among members of the war band as the administrative mechanisms and stately pomp of imperial polities are adopted by the leaders of the successful enterprise. In other words, as the House of Osman was being transformed into a dynasty at the head of an emerging administrative network of controls, the relatively egalitarian community of gazi commanders was giving way to a widening hierarchical space between central power and subordinate begs; not all of the latter were content with this role.
The disruption of communications between Asia Minor and Thrace for a decade after 1366, when Or
n's son Mur
d I (1362-89) lost control of Gelibolu, encouraged some of the gazi warlords in Thrace to imagine themselves at the head of autonomous enterprises, especially because they could claim that many of the Thracian conquests were their own achievements. Many former states in the Muslim world, as Ibn Khald
n observed, had begun a process of disintegration at a similar stage; the nature of the challenge might differ somewhat from case to case, but the basic problem was one of dissolving cohesiveness. The Ottomans rose to the challenge, however, not only by eliminating the challengers after Gelibolu was recaptured ca. 1377 by also by creating an institution of artificial kinship, the Janissary standing army, that functioned as an extension of the royal household. This institution was the centerpiece of what hereafter would be a self-consciously centralizing administrative apparatus under “sultans” from the Ottoman family.
The goal of the sultanate thereafter was to enlarge its territory on the one hand and to control fissiparous dynamics on the other. Deftly making use of divisions among feudal polities, either by carrying out fierce raids or by gaining the loyalty of local populations through fiscal concessions and/or religious propaganda and of some of the local lords through incorporation, the Ottomans rapidly extended their power in the Balkans in the final decades of the fourteenth century. Of their major rivals, the Serbian kingdom was reduced to vassalage after the Battle of Kosovo (1389), and the Bulgarian one eliminated by 1394. Keeping almost a geometric sense of centralism, the Ottomans pursued a symmetrical expansion in Anatolia and reduced some of the weaker begs—first to unequal partnership, then to vassalage, and then to incorporation as removable appointees—just as they had done to many early Bithynian allies, gazi commanders, and Balkan local lords. It should be added that the forcefulness of Ottoman expansionism was also due to their extrapolitical logic in targeting important routes of commerce and sites of production.
In both the subjugation of gazi emirates and the building of bureaucratic mechanisms to buttress central government control over resources, B
