namely, the fifteenth-century chronicles. In terms of their specific conclusions, both of them emphasized the contributions of originally non-Islamic and non-Turkish elements to the rise of the Ottoman state, whereas K
pr
pr
l
and Wittek, though aware of their problematic nature, preferred to make use of them after applying what they considered to be rigorous means of textual analysis.
We can clearly identify two distinct lines of approach to early Ottoman history: the one followed by Gibbons and Arnakis and the other by K
pr
l
and Wittek. Many elements of the new critical discourse on the gaza thesis can be read as a rekindled interest, though not necessarily in the sense of a self-conscious intellectual legacy, in some arguments of the former approach.
These lines should not be drawn too rigidly, however. Some of the differences between K
pr
l
and Wittek have already been noted. It is also to be underlined that Gibbons's emphasis on the proselytizing zeal of the Ottomans in the early days and their loss of ideals in the empire's latter phase is to some extent paralleled by Wittek's views on the gaza. And this role assigned to religious motives by both Gibbons and Wittek is precisely what Arnakis, as well as the new critics of the gaza thesis, refused to see in the emergence of the Ottoman state.
THE SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES
Before moving on to the gaza thesis and its dismantling, we ought not to overlook some important contributions made to the study of that particular period in the meantime, if only to indicate that Wittek's thesis was not compelling for many scholars in the field.
Zeki Velid
Togan (1890-1970), a Turcologist who held the office of premier in the short-lived republic of Bashkiria before its incorporation into the Soviet Union (1922) and who then migrated to Turkey, brought quite an unusual perspective to Turkish history thanks to his background and training. In his magnum opus on the general history of the Turks, written while he was in prison on charges of pan-Turanianism, and in other studies, he often emphasized the importance of the Ilkhanid legacy as well as non-O
uz, or eastern Turkish, elements as if he wanted to remind the western Turks, the heirs of the Ottoman tradition, of their non-Mediterranean cousins.
36 To the extent that the gaza ethos played a role, for instance, Togan argued that it was not the legacy of former Arab frontier traditions direcdy inherited by the Oguz Turks who settled in Anatolia as their new homeland. It was rather brought to western Anatolia at the turn of the fourteenth century by those Muslim Turks who were forced to migrate there from eastern Europe since their lands were lost to Islamdom when Prince Nogay of the Chingisid Altunorda, a Muslim, was defeated (1299) by Toktagu Kh
n, a Zoroastrian.
37 In addition to this newly imported enthusiasm (supported by the Ilkhanids) for the (re) conquest of lands for Islam, the internal weakness of Byzantium, and the lack of “Islamic fanaticism” among the early Ottomans that facilitated the incorporation of quasi-Islamic Turks and Mongols as well as renegades from Christianity, Togan cited the location of Osman's tribe right near the major Byzantine-Ilkhanid trade route as the factors that made it natural for Turkish warriors to conceive of expanding their power and building a state.
38 The rest was good leadership, adoption of sound administrative practices (thanks primarily to the Ilkhanid legacy), support given to and received from a
s and dervishes, and a wellregulated colonization policy after crossing to Rumelia.
The significance of commerce was to be considered from another perspective by Mustafa Akda
pr
l
, Halil Inalcik, who was to emerge as the leading Ottomanist of his generation and make his own contributions to various problems of early Ottoman history.
39 Even though Akda
elaborated the same views in a later book,
40 with a yet stronger emphasis on commerce, symbiosis, and rosy relations between Turks and Byzantines or Balkan peoples, his views were not supported by any new evidence that responded to former criticisms; the book failed to have an impact on professional historians though it was widely read by the public. Considering that its author suffered imprisonment for his leftist views after the military intervention of 1971, the book is rather a curious reminder of the fact that certain significant strands of the nationalist discourse such as the purely positive assessment of the Turkish conquests cut across both sides of the political spectrum in Turkey.
41
Speros Vryonis, a Greek”American (and a Byzantinist, as some reviewers noted, much to his resentment), published his monumental work on medieval Anatolia in 1971.42 It covered the period that saw the rise of the Ottoman state but was not directly concerned with that specific phenomenon. Vryonis rather traced the broad currents of demographic movement, nomadization, and religious and cultural change in Asia Minor that, over four centuries, transformed what was a Hellenic/ Greek Orthodox peninsula into a predominandy Islamic one dominated by a Turcophone political elite. In the shortest summary of the set of conclusions he reached at the end of his exhaustive research, he wrote that “the Turkish success ultimately was a product of the dynamics of Byzantine decline and Turkmen (nomadic) demographic pressure.”43 As for the role of frontier warriors in that process, whose absence in the book was noted by a reviewer, Vryonis commented that “the Wittek thesis was of interest and stimulus some two generations ago, but only as a tool to stimulate further discussion. To accept it as an established fact and then to apply it here and there to different areas and periods is erroneous methodologically.”44
To Ernst Werner, a Marxist-eninist medievalist of the former East Germany, the first two centuries of Ottoman history represented the framing of a feudal system through the subjugation of pre- and antifeudal
