Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

turbulences. The early thirteenth-century acquisition of the port towns of Sinop (by the Black Sea) and Alanya (by the Mediterranean) brought the Seljuk system and the Turco-Muslim-dominated economies of Anatolia that it controlled at the time into direct touch with the Levantine sea trade. By the end of that century, more than one hundred caravanserais in the peninsula provided lodging and protection to merchants (and other travellers)⁷

      It is revealing, for instance, that what is no more than a remote backwater in modern Turkey, an obscure plateau between Kayseri and Mara

once entertained a lively international fair where Middle Eastern, Asian, and European merchants exchanged commodities like silk textiles, furs, and horses. True, the fair does not seem to have survived long into the era of Mongol Ilkhanid direct rule, but trade is not known to have suffered in general. The chiefdoms that emerged in western Anatolia, where even Mongol power could hardly reach, to some extent built their power on raids and pillaging, but the western Anatolian coastline was integrated into a brisk Levantine trade around 1300, and the chiefs were signing commercial treaties with the likes of Venice in the early fourteenth century.⁸ In fact, fragmentation and the emergence of small local powers may well have increased the possibility for a more local redistribution of resources that would otherwise have been siphoned off to distant imperial capitals.

      One of those small chieftains, situated in the northwest in what was still partly Byzantine Bithynia, belonged to the clan of a certain Osman. He belonged to an exceptional generation (or two) of creative minds and social organizers who, either personally through their deeds or through their legacy as it was constructed and acted upon by followers, became the pivotal figures, the magnets, around whom the vibrant yet chaotic social and cultural energies of the Turco-Muslims of medieval Asia Minor ultimately found more-regular paths to flow. Since then, these figures, as embodied in the rich lore that has been built around them (whatever the relationship of such lore to their “real” or “historical” life), have represented the “classics” of western, or one might also say Roman, Turkish culture. Mevl

Vel

, for example, are the spiritual sources, respectively, of the two largest and most influential dervish orders in Ottoman lands. But their influence reaches far beyond any particular set of institutional arrangements, however large these may have been, and cuts across orders, social classes, and formal institutions. They have rather been fountainheads of broad cultural currents and sensibilities over the centuries. Y

n of thirteenth-century Anatolia seems to have been at least the excuse for the creation of the lore of Nasreddin Hoca, the central figure of a corpus of proverbial jokes that now circulate, with many later embellishments of course, from the Balkans to central Asia. Ah

Evren may be the least well known of these figures in the modern era, but his cult once played the most central role in the now defunct corporations of artisans and tradesmen, providing the basic structures and moral codes of urban economic and social life, at least for Muslims. Widely popular legends of a certain

an

al

u

, who also is honored at numerous burial sites, portrayed him as the most pivotal character in spreading Islam in the Balkans.

      It is much more coincidental but still worthy of note that Osman was also a near contemporary of two figures, very remote from his sphere of action in thirteenth-century terms, whose descendants were to share with his house the limelight of international politics in the sixteenth century. One of these was Rudolf of Habsburg, who acquired his Erblande in 1278. The Habsburg dynasty was to become the main competitor of the Ottomans on the central European and Mediterranean scenes, and the two states were to follow more or less the same rhythms until both disappeared as ruling houses in the aftermath of the First World War. And the other relevant member of the cohort, a much less likely candidate at that time for inclusion in our comparison here, was Sheikh

al-D

n (1252-1334) of Ardabil, whose own political role as a renowned Sufi may have been considerable but was primarily indirect. His legacy and the huge following of his order would eventually be shaped by late-fifteenth-century scions into the building blocks of the Safavid Empire, the main competitor of the Ottomans in the Muslim world in the early modern era.

      Osman, a near contemporary of theirs, is the founder of a polity that rose over and above all its Anatolian and Balkan rivals to be eventually recognized, whether willingly or reluctantly, as the ultimate resolution of the political instability that beset Eastern Roman lands since the arrival of Turkish tribes in the eleventh century. He is a much more historical (i.e., much less legendary) character than Romulus of course. Nevertheless, he is equally emblematic of the polity that was created after his name and legacy. As Marshall Sahlins points out in his study of the stranger-king motif in Hawaiian and Indo-European political imagination, “it is not significant that the exploit may be ‘merely symbolic’ since it is symbolic even when it is ‘real.’ ”⁹

      One of the most influential legends concerning Osman is the one that depicts his whole conquering and state-building enterprise as having started with an auspicious dream. Variants of this legend were retold in dozens of sources until the modern era, when the dream was dismissed in terms of its historicity but still, by some vengeful intervention of ancestral spirits perhaps, did not fail to occupy a central place in much of the debate among historians, as we shall see in the next chapter. According to one of the better-known versions, Osman was a guest in the home of a respected and well-to-do Sufi sheikh when he dreamt that

      a moon arose from the holy man's breast and came to sink in Osman Ghazi's breast. A tree then sprouted from his navel, and its shade compassed the world. Beneath this shade there were mountains, and streams flowed forth from the foot of each mountain. Some people drank from these running waters, others watered gardens, while yet others caused fountains to flow. [When Osman awoke] he went and told the story to the sheykh, who said, “Osman, my son, congratulations for the imperial office [bestowed by God] to you and your descendants, and my daughter M

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