Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

the chronicles attribute gaza raids and some military success to Ertogril ,
others portray that generation as militarily and politically inactive, at least
after they came to Bithynia. The YF-Apz narrative, for instance, states that at
the time of Ertogril , after the tribe moved to Bithynia, "there was no fighting
and warfare, they just moved between the summer and winter pastures."[6] About
Samsa Cavus , who came to the region with Ertogril , we read that "he got along
with the infidels of Mudurnu."[7] The story of the conflict between Osman and
his uncle (analyzed in the previous chapter) also suggests a change in the
policy of the tribe. It seems from all this that a public and competitive
political bid was not made until Osman. The circumstances that propelled the
tribe to active participation in the political life of the frontiers, and thus
ultimately to historical record, may well have come about in the 1290s as Togan
suggests.[8]
At least so much is certain: the tribe enjoyed a fundamental upswing in the
level of its military success and visible political claims under Osman's
leadership so that it was the name of Osman and not that of any of his
forefathers which ultimately defined the polity. We do not know by what name the
tribe was known before his "coming our"; according to a nineteenth-century
tradition, which smacks of invention, Ertogril's tribe may have had the
impersonal and rather lackluster name of Karakeçili (Of the Black Goat).[9]
Whatever Ertogril and his "Karakeçili" may have accomplished, they were not
visible enough to appear in the sources of the literate cultures around them.
But as Osmanli (namely, "those who follow Osman"), the tribe and the polity went
a long way.
If there is any point at which it would make sense to replace secular notions of
heroism (alp -hood in medieval Turkic cultures) with gaza, this would be the
time. But even before that, it seems improbable that Ertogril's generation would
be unfamiliar with the notion of gaza. In any case, the main rivalry of Ertogril
seems to have been with the House of Germiyan, and it continued into the early
part of Osman's beglik. We
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have already seen that being a gazi was never understood to involve
indiscriminate warfare against infidels and that it could involve warfare
against coreligionists. If a unique passage in the Oxford Anonymous manuscript
is accurate, Ertogril's tribe was given pastureland around Sogut when the
neighboring area that later ended up as the land of Germiyan was still part of
"the abode of war," namely, before the Kütahya area was conquered and the House
of Germiyan had been settled in the western Phrygian uc.[10] Thus, Ertogril's
tribe may have seen its earlier freedom of movement threatened by the arrival of
the relatively more powerful Germiyan and resented it. It is well known that the
Germiyan played the role of an "elder brother" in those frontier areas until at
least the early fourteenth century. Tensions between Osman's tribe and the House
of Germiyan must also be due to the fact that the latter served the Seljuks in
the suppression of the 1239-41 revolt led by the Baba'i dervishes, many of whom,
such as Ede Bali, fled to Bithynia, where they eventually forged dose ties with
the proto-Ottomans.
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