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 S
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