Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

be your wife.” He married them forthwith.¹⁰

      Thereafter, it is a story of success that culminated in the phenomenal expansion of the territories controlled by the House of Osman. In the early twentieth century, after various parts of the empire had been gobbled up or seceded throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ottoman forces were still defending what they considered to be their own territory in as diverse parts of the world as Macedonia, Libya, Yemen, and the Caucasus.

      Phenomenal as it was, however, the Ottoman expansion was slow when compared to the empire-building conquests of some other Inner Asian/Turco-Mongol tribal formations, such as those led by Chingis and Timur, or when compared to the swift rise of the House of Seljuk to the sultanate in Baghdad, the fabled seat of the Islamic caliphate. That is probably why it was so much more durable. Relatively speaking, the Ottomans took their time building their state and it paid off. They took their time in constructing a coalition of forces and reconstructing it as it changed shape, while they were also keen on institutionalizing their political apparatus. It was a gradual and conflictual process of state building that took more than a century and a half from Osman's earliest ventures to the conquest of the Byzantine capital by his great-great-great-great-grandson, Me

med II (r. 1451-81), when the Ottomans can finally be said to have graduated to an imperial stage.

      When Me

med the Conqueror visited Troy later in his reign as sultan, khan, and caesar, he seems to have been aware of the explanation of Ottoman successes by the theory, upheld by some in Europe, that Turks were, like the Romans before them, vengeful Trojans paying back the Greeks.¹¹ Standing at the fabled site, the sultan is reported to have inquired about “Achilles and Ajax and the rest” and then, “shaking his head a little,” to have said: “It was the Greeks and Macedonians and Thesalians and Peloponnesians who ravaged this place in the past, and whose descendants have now through my efforts paid the right penalty, after a long period of years, for their injustice to us Asiatics at that time and so often in subsequent times.”¹²

      HISTORIOGRAPHY

      Modern historiography, of course, has had little patience with dreams and legends as explanation. Still, both the dream story mentioned above and, even more so, the “true origins” of the proto-Ottomans have functioned as pivotal issues in twentieth-century discussions of Ottoman state building.

      The first study devoted to the rise of the Ottoman state, published in 1916 by H. A. Gibbons, held that that successful enterprise could not have been built by “Asiatics.” The dream story, contended Gibbons, though not to be taken at face value, implied that Osman and his tribe, who must have been pagan nomads of Inner Asian background, converted to Islam at some point and set out to Islamize their Christian neighbors in Byzantine Bithynia. Converts among the latter made up the majority of the proto-Ottomans and provided the expertise for setting up an administration.

      In the charged environment of the early twentieth century, where nationalism was linked with racialism even more explicitly than it is today, this argument was obviously loaded. The emerging Turkish nationalism of the republican era (1923-), busily occupied with redefining the role of Turks in world history, was not entirely sympathetic to the later and “corrupt” phase of the Ottoman Empire that the Republic replaced; however, the same nationalists could not but proudly appropriate the earlier history of invasions, settlement, and state building, including the most successful case, represented by the Ottomans, that established the Turkish presence in the region.

      In the formulation of M. F. K

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's vision was hailed and continues to serve as a building block of Turkish national historiography.

      It was Paul Wittek's theory, however, formulated in the 1930s and partly as a response to K

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, that was to gain international recognition as the most convincing account of Ottoman success. Wittek found the rhetoric of tribalism unconvincing; nor did he dwell on the question of ethnicity as such, though he underlined continuities in Turco-Muslim culture without failing to note the occurrence of conversions and Christian-Muslim cooperation in some passages. For him, what fueled the energies of the early Ottoman conquerors was essentially their commitment to gaza, an “ideology of Holy War” in the name of Islam. Ottoman power was built on that commitment, as expressed in an inscription erected in Bursa in 1337, which referred to Osman's son as a “gazi, son of gazi.” Wittek found the same spirit in the earliest Ottoman histories, none of which, however, dates from before the fifteenth century. While a shared ethos provided warriors who banded together with cohesion and drive, the realm they brought under their control was organized according to the administrative experiences of scholars and bureaucrats from the Islamic cultural centers. There was some tension between the two elements because the gazis belonged to a heterodox frontier culture; over time, orthodoxy prevailed as the Ottomans established a stable administration. Wittek's formulation, which has much in common with Köprülü's but avoids the ethnicist controversy and seems to place singular emphasis on religious motivation as the root cause of Ottoman power, was widely accepted and recycled in the pithy formula of “the gaza thesis.”

      Lawrence Stone, historian of early modern England, has described the fate of historical theses in terms of a tongue-in-cheek quasi-Hegelian spiral of generational cycles.¹³ The dominant view of one generation is turned on its head by the next but is then reclaimed, hopefully in an improved version, by the next. It may be due to the ambiguous nature of “generation” as an analytical concept or the backwardness of Ottoman studies that the beat seems to have skipped a generation or two with respect to the gaza thesis, which was formulated in the 1930s. Alternative or supplementary explanations were occasionally aired in more-general studies, but there was no lively debate producing new research and ideas—until, that is, the 1980s, when many voices were raised, independently of each other, against the Wittek thesis.

      The main tenor of those voices reflected a dissatisfaction with an explanation that put so much emphasis on “Holy War ideology” when early Ottoman behavior, it was claimed, displayed heterodoxy vis-à-vis Islam and accommodation vis-à-vis Christian neighbors.