Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf
Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf
Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf
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he went and told the story to the sheykh, who said, "Osman, my son,<br />
congratulations for the imperial office [bestowed by God] to you and your<br />
descendants, and my daughter Mahun shall be your wife." He married them<br />
forthwith.[10]<br />
― 9 ―<br />
Thereafter, it is a story of success that culminated in the phenomenal expansion<br />
of the territories controlled by the House of Osman. In the early twentieth<br />
century, after various parts of the empire had been gobbled up or seceded<br />
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ottoman forces were still<br />
defending what they considered to be their own territory in as diverse parts of<br />
the world as Macedonia, Libya, Yemen, and the Caucasus.<br />
Phenomenal as it was, however, the Ottoman expansion was slow when compared to<br />
the empire-building conquests of some other Inner Asian/Turco-Mongol tribal<br />
formations, such as those led by Chingis and Timur, or when compared to the<br />
swift rise of the House of Seljuk to the sultanate in Baghdad, the fabled seat<br />
of the Islamic caliphate. That is probably why it was so much more durable.<br />
Relatively speaking, the Ottomans took their time building their state and it<br />
paid off. They took their time in constructing a coalition of forces and<br />
reconstructing it as it changed shape, while they were also keen on<br />
institutionalizing their political apparatus. It was a gradual and conflictual<br />
process of state building that took more than a century and a half from Osman's<br />
earliest ventures to the conquest of the Byzantine capital by his<br />
great-great-great-great-grandson, Mehmed II (r. 1451-81), when the Ottomans can<br />
finally be said to have graduated to an imperial stage.<br />
When Mehmed the Conqueror visited Troy later in his reign as sultan, khan, and<br />
caesar, he seems to have been aware of the explanation of Ottoman successes by<br />
the theory, upheld by some in Europe, that Turks were, like the Romans before<br />
them, vengeful Trojans paying back the Greeks.[11] Standing at the fabled site,<br />
the sultan is reported to have inquired about "Achilles and Ajax and the rest"<br />
and then, "shaking his head a little," to have said: "It was the Greeks and<br />
Macedonians and Thessalians and Peloponnesians who ravaged this place in the<br />
past, and whose descendants have now through my efforts paid the right penalty,<br />
after a long period of years, for their injustice to us Asiatics at that time<br />
and so often in subsequent times."[12]<br />
Historiography<br />
Modem historiography, of course, has had little patience with dreams and legends<br />
as explanation. Still, both the dream story mentioned above and, even more so,<br />
the "true origins" of the proto-Ottomans have functioned as pivotal issues in<br />
twentieth-century discussions of Ottoman state building.<br />
The first study devoted to the rise of the Ottoman state, published in<br />
― 10 ―<br />
1916 by H. A. Gibbons, held that that successful enterprise could not have been<br />
built by "Asiatics." The dream story, contended Gibbous, though not to be taken<br />
15