Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

enterprises and of the Ottoman polity as a frontier principality. The most
succinct expression of that transformation may be Mehmed the Conquerors decision
not to stand up at the sound of martial music, as he well knew his ancestors
used to. He was thus abandoning one of the hallowed traditions of earlier
Ottomans as frontier warriors, who would show their respect for the call to gaza
through this practice. This was not an abandonment of the devotion to the
principle of gaza, since martial music as a reminder of the Ottoman duty to
struggle for the faith would still be regularly played at the gates of the
palace; it was rather the expression of a fundamental change in the relationship
of the House of Osman and of the Ottoman state to that principle and its
representatives. Being a gazi was not the primary component of the Ottoman
ruler's multiple identity anymore; he was first and foremost a sultan, a khan,
and a caesar, "the ruler of the two seas and the two continents," as Mehmed the
Conqueror called himself on the inscription at the gate of his new palace in his
new capital.
The making of Constantinople into a Muslim city was an ideal shared by Muslim
warriors and their followers for centuries, but making it into the capital of
the state or making it into the kind of capital envisioned by Mehmed II was by
no means the intention of all the conquerors. Mehmed's throne city was part of a
political project that was vehemently opposed in some circles. The project
involved building a highly centralized imperial administrative apparatus that
was to serve under the House of Osman, which took pride in its gazi past but
which now defined itself in a new fashion. The process of centralization can be
traced back to earlier Ottoman history of course, but now it was given its most
systematic and radical formulation. Hierarchies of power in Ottoman political
society were sharply delineated, and frontier warriors defini-
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tively subjugated, along with several other groups whose forerunners had been
partners in the early Ottoman enterprise, to the domination of the central
administration.
The process of centralization was not linear, because the nature of the
political configuration that was emerging through conquest was always contested.
It was one of the dynamics of earlier Ottoman history and turned out to be the
dominant one in determining the shape of the state that was built at the end of
that competitive process.
The century following the conquest of Constantinople witnessed not only further
conquests to expand the empire as territory but also institutional developments
that consolidated the empire as state. Codification, the creation of impersonal
bureaucratic procedures, the increased reliance on slave-servants as
administrators, and the institution of a state-controlled scholarly hierarchy
were the most important elements in the process of consolidation that brought
centralized absolutism to its apex (within limits set by various constraints, of
course). These were paralleled by the creation of an Ottoman imperial idiom in
architecture, poetry, and historiography. Both the institutional and the
cultural parameters that were set and finetuned around the mid sixteenth century
were considered the classical expressions of the Ottoman political technology
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