Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

principles. Such sacrifices were made by the earlier generations, the
chroniclers imply, because worldly accumulation was not their main concern; they
knew they were merely mortal human beings.[140] This juxtaposition serves to
explain the major problem of early Ottoman historical consciousness: Bayezid's
defeat to Timur. Having been steered by cunning ulema toward a new political
orientation that abandoned the frontier spirit, he could not maintain the realm
of his ancestors, the glorious gazis.
The chroniclers were clear about the fact that the conflict of political
orientations was not a matter only of abstract principles. The structures and
practices introduced by the schoolmen are also decried in terms of their
concretely negative effects on those good old frontier folk. Çandarli `Ali Pasa
, for instance, "gathered pretty boys around himself and called them pages
[icoglan ]. When he had misused them for a while, he let them go and gave them
posts. Before that time there were the old-timers who were the heads of
families; these held all the posts; they were not sent away and not dismissed,
and their positions were not given to others."[141] Some of the "old-timer" gazi
and beg families were thus being reduced to dismissable appointees as a
centralized state started to take shape; but they had started to lose ground
against the centralizing orientation already in the former generation.
Among the nefarious innovations of Kara Halil , the patriarch of the Çandarli
family, was a tax that was dearly aimed at skimming the gaza booty of the
frontier warriors. The idea for this tax is said to have come from a certain
Kara Rüstem, a "Karamanian Turk," namely, an outsider to the world of the
frontiers, who was one of those who "filled the world with all kinds of cunning
tricks." The only "cunning trick" that is reported about this Rüstem is that he
suggests to Çandarli Kara Halil , who was serving as the kadi`asker (judge of
the affairs of the military-administrative class) at the time, that one-fifth
(hums ) of the slaves captured in the raids, like other kinds of booty, ought to
be taken by the state treasury. Çandarli finds the suggestion sound in terms of
the religious law and relays the message to Murad I, who adopts this ihdas
(novelty). That, of course, is the beginning of a new army under the direct
control of the House of Osman, yeñi çeri (Janissary), that was evidently staffed
at first through this tax called pençik (one-fifth).
The tax is obviously exacted from the gazis and possibly as a punishment for
their independent actions in Rumelia when the Gelibolu link was severed. It is
significant that Kara Rüstem is appointed to collect the
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tax in Gelibolu, the transit port of the massive war booty from Rumelia into
Anatolia. Naturally, he cannot have functioned as a pencik emini (supervisor of
the "fifth") there between 1366 and 1376, when that port city was lost to the
Ottomans. It is almost certain, therefore, that Rüstem oversaw the collection of
that levy only after the recapture of that city in 1376/77, when Muted I
reasserted his power over the gazis in Rumelia, who seem to have followed a
semiautonomous course of action during the previous decade, as we shall discuss
later. At any rate, the tax was imposed on the gazis by the bureaucratic central
state guided by scholars emigrating from the east, and it is dearly the
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