Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

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present earlier than depicted in the frontier narratives, which describe an
egalitarian, institutionally naive enterprise until the arrival of the Çandarli
family. They conveniently omit, for instance, the existence of vezirs (perhaps
three) before Çandarli Kara Halil .[51] Starting with Halil , three generations
of this family monopolized top offices in the administration and played a major
role in the building of sophisticated structures of governing that buttressed
the centralizing tendency of the Ottoman polity, much to the resentment of the
gazis and their supporters. The sources that voice that resentment, given their
ideological position and narrative strategies, tend to associate the "beginning"
of all evils and tensions with the Çandarli and with Bayezid I, as we saw in the
last chapter.
Despite their hypercritical reception, or outright rejection, of these sources,
many modem scholars seem to have fallen for the image of a pristine community
before the arrival of those nasty sophisticates. Particularly those who argue
against the gaza thesis fail to appreciate how early in its formation the
Ottoman polity had contact with its relatively sophisticated neighbors and came
under the influence of sedentary administrative traditions in both the
Perso-Islamic and the Byzantine modes.
Sedentarization, which entailed eventual alienation from nomadic ways and from
nomads themselves, was only one aspect of this transformation, and the nomads
were only one of the elements to be adversely affected by it. That is a
relatively better known part of early Ottoman history and will not concern us
here. A more comprehensive view of the emergence and trajectory of Ottoman power
is gained by looking at it as a coalition of various forces, some of which were
eventually driven to drop out of the enterprise or subdued or marginalized. In
other words, it was a history of shifting alliances and conflicts among various
social forces which themselves were undergoing rapid transformation while
constantly negotiating their position within the polity.
Indeed, if anything characterized medieval Anatolian frontiers, and possibly all
frontiers, it was mobility and fluidity. The Ottoman success was due to the fact
that they harnessed that mobility to their own ends while shaping and taming it
to conform to their stability-seeking, centralizing vision. Of course there were
limits on both set by natural and social parameters, but still one could move
from place to place, allegiance to allegiance, and identity to identity with an
ease and acceptability hard to even imagine in more-settled societies. People
not only crossed from one side of the frontier to the other but also moved from
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one faith to another and from one ethnic identity (which usually also meant from
one name) to another with frequency. All this commotion had a solemn cosmic
significance in the minds of the actors because it was, or one could
occasionally and selectively remember it to be, played out in the name of a much
larger struggle between two competing transcendental visions: Islam and
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