Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

difference from the other principalities, which allowed for fragmentation by
recognizing the rights of the different heirs according to Turco-Mongol
tradition.
This was just one of the means whereby the Ottomans pursued a centralizing logic
and protected the expanding realm under their grip from fragmentation much more
consistently than any other polity that
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existed in those four frontier centuries of Anatolia. The other, and much more
complicated, story is of the way the Ottoman state builders manipulated, often
with success, a constantly shifting matrix of alliances and tensions with other
sociopolitical forces. This was a process consisting of a series of carefully
selected exclusions as well as inclusions, improvisations as well as
continuities. To put it comparatively, the earlier or contemporaneous
Turco-Mongol and Turco-Muslim polities in the region were unable to resolve the
tensions between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies as effectively as did
the Ottomans.
All the principalities were heirs to the political culture of Seljuk Anatolia,
which Köprülü deems so important in Ottoman state building, but the Ottomans
were much more experimental in reshaping it to need, much more creative in their
bricolage of different traditions, be they Turkic, Islamic, or Byzantine. A
comparison made by a historian of art between the architecture of the early
Ottomans and that of their longest-lasting rivals, the Karamanids, can also be
read in terms of its relevance to the political plane:
The Ottoman architect delved into the basic principles of architecture and
concentrated his energies on problems of space, form and structure. The
Karamanid architect, on the other hand, was unable to graduate from the frame
of medieval Seljuk architecture ... and looked for monumentality in surface
plasticity. And this attitude prevented Karamanid architecture from going any
further than being a continuation of Seljuk architecture, or further than
preserving a tradition instead of creating something original as the
culmination of a conscious development.[2]
This chapter attempts to retrace some of the significant steps in the path of
Ottoman state building. As a narrative, it is a highly selective one that does
not aim to cover all the events in early Ottoman history that even this author
happens to know. My goal is rather to follow the trajectory of the Ottomans'
centralizing thrust, which supplemented the expansion but was carried out at the
expense, whenever necessary, of the forces that were included in the
expansionary process. Along the way, I will point to their selective use of
several strategies to bring about or dissolve a network of alliances to
consolidate and expand power while maintaining dynastic control over it. While
this process kept producing tensions, the Ottoman success was in overcoming
those tensions, real or potential conflicts, and eventually developing a vision
of a centralized state, shaping it according to circumstances, and maintaining
their drive toward it.
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