Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

alt="images"/>d was routed when his Anatolian Muslim vassals defected to the other side and his gazi commanders abandoned the battlefield, where the sultan was left with only his Janissaries, still a small force, and Balkan Christian vassals.

      The Timurid debacle did not end the Ottoman empire-building project, especially since Timur soon left Asia Minor to pursue higher ambitions as a conqueror in Asia itself, but only led to temporary confusion until the whole realm was reunited under one heir after eleven years of internecine strife among B

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d II (r. 1421-44, 1446-51), state-controlled expansionism and raider activity coexisted with relatively little tension, partly due to pragmatism on both sides and partly due to the great success of the expeditions in enlarging the pie of redistribution. The new modus vivendi with the gazi warlords (and with formerly independent begs of gazi emirates who had been rendered Ottoman appointees) entailed their subordination but did not totally undermine their ability to take independent action or their access to booty and glory. Centralizing and fiscal policies were not abandoned, but neither were they pursued as aggressively as under B

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d I.

      Starting around 1440, strains emerged again between the level of Ottoman centralization and the empire-building project. A number of Hungarian-led “anti-Turkish” leagues undertook incursions that made the Ottomans feel on the brink of losing the Balkans; internal factionalism rose to the fore between a “war party,” headed by gazi warlords, and a “peace party” headed by representatives of a central administration that was still led by the

andarli family. With the conquest of Constantinople, however, the young sultan Me

med II (r. 1444-46,1451-81), who rode on the tremendous prestige of that feat, eliminated the leaders of both factions as well as the significance of both types of forces in Ottoman politics. A newly conceived imperial project was set in motion that spelled the ultimate victory, in terms of the internal dynamics of Ottoman state building, of the centralist vision.

Identity and Influence in the History of Nations

      The larger story of medieval Asia Minor, within which the early history of the Ottomans would have been but one of many analogous episodes had they not turned out to be the ones who wrote the concluding chapter, had its counterpart in Iberia. From the eleventh to the fifteenth century, in the two peninsulas at the two ends of the Mediterranean, there raged a long series of confrontations that were fought between people who considered themselves, or found their means of legitimation as, representatives of their respective religio-civilizational orientations, Islam and Christianity.

      It should be pointed out that this grand clash of two world religions did not determine each and every action of each and every actor on this scene. Nor were Muslims and Christians constantly engaged, in their actions or thoughts, in a struggle against each other. Coexistence and symbiosis were possible and probably more common. Besides, even these provisos set the scene in terms of a match between two teams, that is, in terms of two clearly designated different people who lived either at peace or at war with each other. This overlooks the fact that many individuals or groups changed sides and identities. Through conversion or enslavement, one could over time “become a Turk,” within limits set by social and ideological structures, as in the case of “becoming an American.” Furthermore, the sides were at any given moment divided within themselves into hostile camps or polities that did not think twice about establishing alliances with camps or polities from the other side.

      Nonetheless, against these complex and shifting loyalties, a larger pattern over those four centuries can be reconstructed as a competition for political hegemony between powers that saw themselves as members of different religio-civilizational orientations. The periods of fragmentation in the political life of both peninsulas in the medieval era are in fact referred to by the same term, mulk al-tavif,16 by Muslim historians (Spanish, taifas), who clearly saw the structural affinities. In Asia Minor, the Muslims, whose own competition was won by the Ottomans, ended that struggle with the conquest of the last remnants of sovereign Christian power, Constantinople (1453) and Trebizond (1461), only slightly before the Catholic king of Spain captured the last stronghold of Muslim power in Iberia, namely, Granada (1492). The two victors, the Ottoman Empire and Spain (after passing into the hands of the Habsburgs), were soon to lock horns over what they would deem world supremacy, basically the old Roman world and its suburbs. Perhaps it was part of the same synchrony that S

n the Magnificent abandoned the use of luxury items and adopted a more pious orthodox image for the sultanate at around the same time that Charles V withdrew into a monastery. Maybe the emperors were just feeling the signs of strain that would become much more obvious in the public consciousness of their empires around the end of the sixteenth century when a decline and reform discourse appeared in both.

      Like the Anatolian case, the Iberian one has been an ideological quagmire of modern historiography. The best example of this can be seen in the trials and tribulations of Américo Castro (1885-1972), the Spanish historian, who had to suffer disfavor and unpopularity in his homeland for writing of the Arabo-Muslim past of the peninsula as part of the Spanish heritage.¹⁷ This is not the place, nor the author, to discuss the nature of the Spanish heritage, but it is impossible to overlook the parallels in the historiographies that have been forged in the age of national consciousness and nation-state building. In that context, the meaning of medieval Muslim invasions has been a particularly problematic one to deal with among many nations of Eurasia.¹⁸ It does not seem so farfetched to imagine that long periods of coexistence, with both warlike and peaceful encounters (eight centuries in Spain, four centuries of instability in Anatolia followed by five centuries under relatively stable Ottoman rule), would shape peoples and cultures on either side in profound ways, and not just in the sense of developing a sense of enmity or in the mechanical sense of “influences“ as cultural commodities taken from one side to the other. Taking one's commingling with the “other”seriously in the historical reconstruction of heritages, however, seems to demand too much of national historiographies.

      National historiographies (indeed modern historiography in general, to the extent that it functions as the history of nations) have tended to assume more or less sealed cultural identities of peoples (Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Arabs, etc.) who have come into contact within the framework of a larger bipolar division of equally sealed civilizational identities (East/West, Muslim/Christian, etc.). Spain was Spanish before the Muslims and reverted to its “Spanishness” after expelling the invaders (after eight centuries!). Greece, Bulgaria, or any other post-Ottoman state did the same in terms of national history-writing, though the situation is not always as clear-cut as in Iberia, where systematic expulsions and forced conversions followed the reconquest. In the Balkans, as in India, it remains complex because of the intertwined existence of peoples who identify with different layers of a given country's past; so long as each layer remains exclusive of other layers in historical consciousness, such identification also has the potential of turning to exclusivism (“cleansing,” to invoke the most notorious recent example) in reality. In terms of history-writing, all this implies that historicizing the identities of those peoples, and thus underlining their plasticity and multiplicity over time, is taken, as was the case for Castro with respect to “Spanish-ness” as questioning the essence