No matter how radical a departure they claimed to represent from the consensus of the former generations, however, all of these critical voices still subscribed to the essentialism of earlier historiography. Its legacy, in other words, has proven sufficiently powerful even in the hands of critics to perpetuate a dichotomous analysis that wishes to see the early Ottoman conquerors and state builders as fundamentally Turkish, tribal, and driven by pragmatism and plunder or fundamentally Muslim and driven by zeal for holy war.
It is argued in this book that early Ottoman history and the statebuilding process cannot be properly appreciated within the framework of such dichotomous analyses. While the identities, beliefs, values, and actions of the early Ottomans are naturally bound to constitute the basic material for analysis and explanation, they do not need to be framed in terms of ahistorical either /or propositions. Human beings display many complex and even contradictory behaviors, and it is in that very complexity that explanations for historical phenomena must be sought. To be more specific, it is argued that the recent debate over the normative “Muslimness” of the gazis obscures the historical reality of the distinctive culture and ethos of the march environment within which the Ottoman state was born. Beyond reassessing the historiography, it is my aim to reconstruct that distinctive ethos as well as the social and political environment of the marches in late medieval Anatolia in order to reach a better understanding of the rise of the Ottoman state.
PLAN AND APPROACH
This book analyzes its problem and elaborates its perspective in three layers. Chapter 1 is a discussion of modern scholarship on the rise of the Ottoman state. It introduces, in a much more detailed canvas than the sketch given above, the specific issues that have been raised and the main perspectives developed with respect to that particular theme. It is not a survey of scholarship on medieval Anatolia, the way Norman Cantor, for instance, has recently examined the history of medieval European studies as a field.14 Rather, this chapter is only a narrowly focused treatment of history-writing on the problem of the Ottoman state's emergence. It maps the wiring, as it were, of modern historiography on that problem in order to highlight the currents of tension and the nodes that are charged; any new conceptualization or reconstruction, including that of this author, will need to be assessed in terms of such a map.
Chapter 2 presents first a survey and analysis of the sources emanating from the Turco-Muslim frontier milieux of Anatolia, legendary accounts of the lives of warriors and dervishes, in order to illuminate how the people of the frontiers conceptualized their own actions and assigned meaning to them. This is the first attempt to reach a historicized understanding of the complex of values and attitudes embodied in or related to the notion of gaza, which both Wittek and his critics were more or less content to treat in terms of its dictionary definitions. This first part of the chapter demonstrates that the frontier ethos was intricately bound up with the gaza spirit, ubiquitous in the relevant sources, but nonetheless incorporated latitudinarianism and inclusiveness.
The second part of chapter 2 turns to a close reading and comparison of certain passages in a particularly relevant body of interrelated sources: the chronicles of the House of Osman, which were at least partly based on earlier oral narratives but were not rendered into writing before the fifteenth century, the more substantive compositions not emerging until the latter decades of that century. While enmeshed in frontier legends and myths, these sources at the same time present themselves as straight histories. As such, they have by and large suffered from either an uncritical adoption as factual accounts—a naive empiricism—or a nearly wholesale dismissal as myths—a hyperempiricism. The latter attitude or an outright neglect has severely limited the use of relevant hagiographical works that also develop their own historical arguments, in terms of the parameters of that genre of course, with respect to the early Ottomans.
Methodologically, my discussion is an attempt to transcend the positivistic attitude, still dominant in Ottoman studies, that every bit of information in the sources can and must be categorized as either pure fact or fiction. More specifically, my reading of the sources reveals that representatives of different political tendencies tried to appropriate the symbolic capital embedded in claims to success as gazis in their own ways through differing historical accounts. It is established through this discussion that the pertinent hagiographies and “anonymous” calendars and chronicles are far from being the inert products of accretion of oral tradition or chance coagulation of narrative fragments but rather represent internally coherent ideological positions articulated by authorial or editorial hands. By drawing out these several historiographical strands embedded in variants, the chapter enables an understanding of the gazi milieu as a social and cultural reality that sustained political and ideological debate. It identifies the major point of tension in the early Ottoman polity between centralizing and centrifugal tendencies, which shaped its trajectory until the conquest of Constantinople, when the triumph of centralized absolutism was sealed.
Chapter 3 proceeds to the old-fashioned task of reconstruction and is intended to be neither exhaustive nor definitive. It deals selectively with aspects of the process whereby the political enterprise headed by a certain Osman in the western Anatolian marches of the late thirteenth century was shaped into a centralized state under the House of Osman in a few generations. The discussion here moves from the gaza ethos to the gazis and other social agents in that scene and aims to re-present the preimperial Ottoman polity as the historically contingent product of a culturally complex, socially differentiated, and politically competitive environment rather than as the necessary result of a unitary line of developmental logic. It focuses on the sociopolitical plane, with particular emphasis on locating gazi warriors and dervishes, as well as their neighbors—tribal or settled, Christian or Muslim, rural or urban—within a matrix of shifting alliances and conflicts in late medieval Anatolia.
Insofar as it is a narrative of early Ottoman history, it is a highly selective treatment, intended only to highlight the process of coalition formation and dissolution and some of the most significant steps in the institutionalization of Ottoman power along a contested path that succeeded in circumventing the fault lines of medieval Turco-Muslim polities mentioned above.15 A brief overview is provided here for the reader who may need an introduction to the orientation of the author and to the discussion of specifics before the third chapter. It might also be worthwhile to consult the chronology of events (pp. xvii-xix) after reading this introduction.
OVERVIEW
The scene is set in terms of the political wilderness and competition that characterized western Anatolia at the end of the thirteenth century. Byzantine, Mongol-Ilkhanid, and Seljuk powers still had some control over the region, but a number of chieftains or community leaders engaged relatively freely in acts that would determine their political future. A Turco-Muslim leader with a following and a recognized realm was called a beg or emir, and his competitive, expansion-oriented enterprise was called a beglik or emirate. Some local Christian lords, called tekvur in Turkish sources, controlled fortified or naturally protected settlements and surrounding agricultural areas that constituted raiding territory for the forces of the begs. This frontier environment also witnessed a high degree of symbiosis, physical mobility, and religious conversions that facilitated the sharing of lore (legends about earlier heroes, for instance), ideas, institutional practices, and even warriors among inclusive political formations that were at the same time steeped in the ethos of championship of the faith.
Like his competitors, Osman Beg not only undertook raids with forces under his command and carried off booty (mostly slaves and precious objects) but also constructed a set of alliances with some of his neighbors with an eye to increasing his sphere of influence. Bonds of solidarity would be formed in joint raids or through neighborly relations