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l
's account was suspect not necessarily because its contents were analyzed but merely because he was known to have indulged in nationalist polemics and to have given in to notions of ethnic purity. At any rate, Wittek's theory obtained general recognition in the international scholarly community writing in the western European languages, while K
l
's ideas, if indeed considered, were relegated to the status of the best-possible account of a nationalist historiography, albeit with due respect paid to his stature as a scholar. His works on medieval Turkish literary and religious history were used as indispensable sources, but it was Wittek's “gaza thesis” that became the definitive account of the origins of the Ottoman state for a large part of the scholarly world and, with the chivalresque imagery that it conjured, entered many popular treatments.
Still, to present Wittek's thesis as the consensus of the whole field, as some of his critics tend to, would be to overlook the scholarly community in Turkey and to some extent also the Balkans, where the K
l
Gibbons controversy continued to be important.
31 In Turkey, K
l
's tribalist-ethnicist views as well as his emphasis on the Turco-Muslim origins of the Ottoman administrative apparatus came to enjoy nearly the status of dogma and were eventually taken in a more chauvinistic direction as they were increasingly stripped of his demographic and sociological concerns.
32 And there always were some, in Turkey and elsewhere, who developed alternative views, as we shall see below. By and large, however, the terms of debate as they were developed from the First to the Second World War constituted the larger canvas within which the rise of the Ottoman state was depicted until recendy; Wittek's depiction in particular was copied and recopied until it was reduced to a mere sketch or a textbook orthodoxy in a large part of the world, while the same fate overtook K
l
; in Turkey.
The opening of the Ottoman archives to scholars changed the course of Ottoman studies starting in the 1940s. Both the quantity and the quality of the archival materials, mostiy hard data kept by a meticulous bureaucracy, coincided so well with the rising prestige of social and economic history worldwide that the question of Ottoman “origins,” like questions of origins in general, started to look awfully dated, especially since it required all kinds of “drudgery” that a new historiography reacting to the nineteenth-century philological tradition felt it had better leave to old-fashioned historians.
There is one noteworthy exception to this generalization, however. In a book published in 1947, George G. Arnakis questioned the methodology and the conclusions of both K
l
and Wittek.
33 In a review of that book, an eminent Byzantinist highlighted the main positions of these scholars while summarizing Arnakis's conclusions:
Gibbons' celebrated conclusion that the Ottoman Empire was essentially a creation of a European rather than of an Asiatic people receives endorsement. K
l
's opposite view that the Osmanlis were the very incarnation of every thing Moslem and Turkish is severely criticized as modern Turkish “ethnicism.”…Wittek emphasizes Ghazi ideology rather than Turkish race, as K
l
does; and indeed rejects the views of Houtsma…that the Osmanlis were part of the Kay1 tribe of the Oghuzz branch of the Turks. Arnakis, however, believes that the
Iskendername of Ahmedi breathes a heroic spirit rather than a historic one, and that the references to the Ghazis in his poem and in the Brusa inscription do not mean what Wittek says they mean. He emphasizes that the sources indicate no Moslem fanaticism in the military activities of the early Osmanlis: their goal, Arnakis maintains, was not the spread of Islam or the destruction of Christianity but simply plunder. He further points out…that the early Osmanlis made it easy for the Greeks to join them In sum, Arnakis believes that all the students of the problem of Ottoman foundations since Gibbons have gone astray in their emphasis upon the primarily Islamic or essentially Turkish character of the first Osmanlis; that local conditions in Bithynia must be intensively studied before one can arrive at a fair picture.
34
This short passage, whatever its bias, succinctly encapsulates the different positions and issues involved. Methodologically, the central issue in studying the rise of the Ottoman state was whether one should focus one's attention on the local conditions in Bithynia or treat the early Ottomans as part of broader Islamic and Anatolian-Turkish traditions; the latter position would involve at least some use of fifteenth-century Ottoman sources which were dismissed by the former. Partially in tandem with one's position on that issue, one was then presumably led to put the emphasis either on Byzantine decay and the human resources that situation placed at the service of the early Ottomans or on the constructive capabilities of the Turco-Muslim heritage. It is difficult to see any but ideological reasons for treating these alternatives as mutually exclusive, but most of the scholars seem to have been keen on figuring out whether the Ottoman state was “essentially a creation of a European” or “of an Asiatic people” rather than on combining a narrow Bithynian viewpoint with the broader context of Turco-Islamic traditions. Wittek was somewhat more flexible than the others in that he attempted to mesh his account of the Ottomans as heirs to the gazi traditions with a portrait of Byzantine decay in Bithynia and with observations on defections of Byzantine subjects, but ultimately his singular reliance on “holy war ideology” did not leave much room for a serious consideration of the other factors.
In any case, there seems to be unanimity among these scholars in terms of their appreciation of the early Ottoman state, but the burning question was: whose achievement was it? Next to K
l
's position cited above was Arnakis's assertion that with the conquest of Bursa, “the Osmanlis were now strengthened by the socially advanced townspeople. Making Brussa their capital, the Osmanlis…carried on reforms, and organized a model state. Their advance and rapid spread into Europe is largely due to the administrative experience and the civic traditions of the citizens of Brussa, Nicaea and Nicomedia.”
35 Obviously then, Arnakis, like Gibbons, focused on Bithynia and on what he considered to be the “actions” of the early Ottomans rather than on the “fictions”
