Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

including the tendency to overlook conflicts in Turco-Muslim society in general and among its warriors in particular⁴⁶ Since he made only scanty use of the sources in Islamic languages and clung to a rigid Marxist-Leninist position with a rather facile application of the notion of class struggle,⁴⁷ his views were not seriously considered in the guildlike mainstream of Ottoman studies, which, despite the considerable impact of quasi-Marxian materialism beginning in the 1960s, stood on the western side of the cold war divide. Although Werner identifies K

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had underlined the importance of “research on the stratification of various elements which constituted Anatolian Turkish society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their positions with respect to each other, their strengths and weaknesses, the causes of conflict and solidarity among them,” but his agenda simply included too many other questions that he preferred to focus on.⁴⁹

      Whatever the merits of the insights they brought to the rise of the Ottoman state, these works had agendas that assigned higher priority to other matters. Thus, their comments on our specific theme remained by and large buried. Surveys (and syllabi?) of Ottoman, Islamic, and world history framed the activities of the state founders in terms of the gaza thesis. It should be obvious, however, that not all the scholars in the field were compelled by Wittek's gaza thesis even when it reigned supreme. Their works rather represent a continual, if not direcdy critical or widely influential, search for alternative explanations. Even if the gaza ethos was accepted to have played a role, there was an obvious urge to consider other factors, mostly social and economic, like trade, demographics, nomad-settlded relations, as well as societal conflict, as the dynamics that produced an empire. In the beginning of the 1980s,

nalcik wrote a concise and masterly synthesis, to be discussed later, that brought many of these elements together with the gaza ethos.⁵⁰ It turned out to be not the last word on the subject, as one might have expected, but only the harbinger of a decade that saw a flurry of publications aiming to dismande the gaza thesis altogether.

The Wittek Thesis and Its Critics

      It is time now to go over the gaza thesis in more detail and then turn to its critics. As indicated above with respect to the methodological position he shared with K

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, Wittek could not have formulated his thesis without assuming some sort of diachronic continuum in the gazi traditions of Anatolia, and of medieval Islam in general, reaching the early Ottomans, as well as some level of synchronic communication and similarity between the gazis in Bithynia and elsewhere in Anatolia. That is precisely why he prefaced his account of the rise of the Ottomans with a survey of the gazi traditions in Anatolia starting with the D

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mendids of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. And that is also why he found the experiences of other emirates broadly contemporaneous with the Osmanli relevant for an understanding of the uniquely successful case of the latter.

      The political and military leadership of the frontiers always belonged to the gazis, according to Wittek. Since the late eleventh century, Anatolian frontier areas were dominated by gazis, whose independent, sporadic, and unruly activities did not always conform to the stabilityoriented Realpolitik of the Seljuk administration. There were frequent clashes between Seljuk authorities and the gazis, whose most notable representatives were the D

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mendids in the twelfth century. In the early thirteenth century, there was a rapprochement between the gazis and the Seljuks, but the Mongol invasions brought this situation to an end.

      In the second half of the thirteenth century, the western Anatolian marches were swollen not only by new influxes of nomadic groups and their holy men pushed by the Mongol invasions but also by “prominent Sel

e emirate led Wittek to attribute the formation of this polity to the successful piratical expeditions of the gazis joined by “the seafaring inhabitants of the coastal districts” and “a large number of Byzantine mariners.”