Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

Èek deveyi güt koyunu
Bir gün olur beglenirsin
Do not cultivate a vineyard, you'll be bound.
Do not cultivate grains, you'll be ground.
Pull the camel, herd the sheep.
A day will come, you'll be crowned.
The poem was recorded by an ethnographer in the earlier part of this century
among the seminomads who survived in the hills of the Bithynian Olympus where
Osman's tribe once roamed. Maybe the thirteenth-century tribesfolk did not know
this particular quatrain, but its lesson was certainly not lost on them. While
they roamed rather than settling down to agriculture, "a day came," and a
certain Osman, who seems to have been a leading member of the tribe's leading
house (or rather, tent), imagined that he could carve a body politic under his
leadership, that he could be Osman Beg. He decided to seize that opportune
moment and never looked back.
Determining the auspicious "day" to assert one's will over a tribe in such a way
as to make explicit its political nature was a matter of sensing the opportune
moment and seizing it.[1] As implied by the term used in premodern Islamic
sources for the making of a political bid, huruc (com-
― 119 ―
ing out), the earlier history of the bidder is often obscure. There must have
been many "closet begs" at any given moment waiting for their opportunity to
come out; many brave men must have thought their moment had come to be begs and
failed. When a "sortie" is not successful, it is of course no more than an
assault or revolt, and the word huruc is commonly used in that sense as well,
which gives a good indication of the problem of legitimacy involved in such a
claim. But a very rigorous test of verifiability was built into any claim of
this sort: you would succeed only if your bid had divine sanction; if you
succeeded, you could claim to have divine sanction and thus legitimacy — an
argument a bit circular perhaps, but not sloppy.
This transformation, the assertion of a political will by the proto-Ottomans,
seems to have occurred in Osman's generation, as will be discussed below. It is
impossible to say anything with certainty about the earlier history of that
tribe and the process whereby it started to play the role that it did.
Once it did initiate its political bid, the small tribe of Osman entered into
competition with various Turco-Muslim and Christian rivals in the area. The
tribe was eventually able to establish its hegemony, but it was no foregone
conclusion that there would be one power as the ultimate winner and that it
would be the House of Osman. Even if by the end of the thirteenth century it
could be expected — and that is highly doubtful — that the Turco-Muslim forces
would consume the Byzantine Empire, there was no reason to assume that all of it
would fall into the hands of one dynasty. And even if that were to be expected,
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