Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

carved by the very same people who had been producing the pre-Turkish stones,
namely, by the locals who "became Turks." The liquidity and fluidity of
identities in those centuries is hard to imagine in the national age.
It was not difficult for a sixteenth-century Ottoman intellectual, however, to
appreciate the plasticity of identities that had gone into the making of the
neo-Rumis :
Those varied peoples and different types of Rumis living in the glorious days
of the Ottoman dynasty, who are not [genetically] separate from those tribes
of Turks and Tatars ..., are a select community and pure, pleasing people who,
just as they are distinguished in the origins of their state, are singled out
for their piety, cleanliness, and faith. Apart from this, most of the
inhabitants of Rum are of confused ethnic origins. Among its notables there
are few whose lineage does not go back to a convert to Islam ... either on
their father or their mother's side, the genealogy is traced to a filthy
infidel. It is as if two different species of fruitbearing tree mingled and
mated, with leaves and fruits; and the fruit of this union was large and
filled with liquid, like a princely Pearl. The best qualities of the
progenitors were then manifested and gave distinction, either in physical
beauty, or in spiritual wisdom.[28]
In that grand tableau, huge amounts of material — poetic, hagiographic,
epigraphic, archeological — still await gathering and sifting. This is not the
place to attempt such a tableau. It is the more modest ambition of this book to
problematize the origins of the Ottoman state by engaging the historiography and
thus hopefully opening early Ottoman history to wider debate. It is also my hope
that some of the related questions will be taken up by future researchers to
improve, alter, or disprove my suggestions.
― 29 ―
Chapter 1
The Modems
If yon have nothing to tell us exert that one barbarian succeeded another on
the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to us?
Voltaire, article on history, Encyclopédie
The Rise of the Ottoman State in Modem Historiography
Beginning in the fifteenth century, numerous historical accounts were composed,
by Ottomans and others, that relate a series of events delineating the emergence
and expansion of Ottoman power, but none of these would have passed Voltaire's
test. From the point of view of modem historiography, they contain no
explanation, no analysis of underlying causes or dynamics, and are only
narratives of events in succession about successive dynasties and states.
Naturally, a reader of Dumézil would be ready to trace implicit explanatory
models in these sources, as literary or nonanalytical as they may seem, through
an examination of their selection and ordering of events.[1] However, this would
not change the fact that "the rise of the Ottoman state" was not problematized
and explicit causal explanations were not sought until after the full impact of
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