Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

there was no reason to assume that it would be accomplished by the Ottomans. Why
were they able to harness the frontier dynamism and the gaza ethos, as well as
the mixed cultural heritage they all shared to some extent, more successfully
than the rival polities? Or rather, what were the factors that enabled the
Ottomans to eventually do better than the other statelings and even the Seljuk
state?
Insofar as the gaza ethos played a role, it must be remembered that the Ottomans
were not the only ones who could claim to be fighting in the path of God. A
similar Point can be made about "tribalism" or any other notion, concept, ethos,
principle, ideology, or institution that one can neither show nor logically
expect to be uniquely Ottoman. In other words, the investigation of the rise of
Ottoman Power must always proceed comparatively.
Furthermore, the question must be continually reformulated with respect to the
different stages in the development of Ottoman power.
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The empire was not built by 1337, the year the Bursa inscription went up, which
has been pegged as marking the supersession of tribalism by the gaza ideology.
Even if a phenomenon like inclusivist tribalism looms large in the earliest
Ottoman success, how are we to explain the rest of Ottoman state building? The
question of the "cause(s) of Ottoman success" cannot be expected to yield a
unitary answer for the whole period one needs to consider. It must be raised and
reraised in, say, 1300 or 1330 or 1360 or 1410. The answers in each case might
differ, at least in terms of the emphases one needs to place on different
factors.
An ideological commitment to gaza was in all likelihood common to all these
periods, but its character and intensity kept changing, just as inclusivism was
never fully abandoned by the Ottomans but was constantly redefined. It may be
more significant that in all these phases there were warriors who wanted to see
and present themselves as representatives of that ideological complex of
heroism, honor, and striving in the name of Islam. As we shall analyze in this
chapter, however, their standing within the principality and their relationship
to the House of Osman also kept changing, as did those of other social forces
like the dervishes. The social and political configuration as a whole kept
changing while power, shared and contested in varying degrees at any given
moment, was gradually concentrated in the hands of an administration serving a
dynasty. This chapter will focus on the general dynamics of that change and its
important phases in order to understand the rise of the Ottoman state as a
process rather than as a mechanical relationship between a particular cause and
an outcome.
Many scholars have noted that the location of Osman's beglik provided it with a
unique advantage, which will be reconsidered below, in the earlier stages of its
development. But it was not just a matter of the circumstances in which the
Ottomans happened to find themselves. They also acted upon those circumstances
in certain ways and forged their destiny. In this respect, the Ottoman practice
of unigeniture, for instance — of keeping their territories intact in each
succession under the full control of a single heir — stands out as a significant
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