Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

Underlining the growth of trade and the proliferation of the ahi organizations
as well, they reached the conclusion that "the first sultans had more than a
mere horde of nomads to rely upon."[17]
The Köprülü-Witter Consolidation
The elaboration of that last point, as well as the most direct and detailed
criticism of Gibbons's views, had to wait until 1934 when Mehmet Fuat Köprülü
(1890-1966) Turkish scholar whose
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intellectual career spans the late Ottoman and early republican periods of
imperial dissolution and nation building, delivered a series of lectures at the
Sorbonne which were soon published as Les origines de l'empire ottoman.[18] Much
more than a rebuttal of Gibbons's theories, this book contained a detailed
discussion of methodology. Köprülü argued that the foundations of the Ottoman
state could not be studied as an isolated Bithynian phenomenon, and that
historians ought to concentrate not on detached politico-military incidents but
on the social morphology, cultural traditions, and institutional structures of
Anatolian Turks in general and of the late-thirteenth-century frontiers in
particular. His primary conclusion after applying that method to a broad range
of sources was that the material and cultural dynamics of Anatolian Turkish
society were sufficiently developed to nurture the growth of a state like that
of the Ottomans. A demographic push into western Anatolia in the latter part of
the thirteenth century mobilized these dynamics. Even though various forces
competed for control over these groups — and it is only here, in the last few
pages of his book, that Köprülü turns his attention to the Ottomans specifically
— Osman's beglik was favored due, primarily, to its strategic location and then
to various other factors (to be discussed in chapter 3). In short, the Ottoman
state was simply the culmination of certain dynamics, skills, and organizational
principles that had been imported to or had developed in Anatolian Turkish
society over more than two centuries. Osman just happened to be in the right
place at the right time.
In the meantime, Paul Wittek (1894-1978), who had been to the Ottoman Empire as
an officer of its Austrian ally during World War I and then moved on to a
scholarly career, was working on the same period and asking similar questions.
He published some of his findings in a 1934 monograph on the emergence and
activities of another emirate, the Mentese .[19] Soon after Köprülü, Wittek
outlined his own ideas on the rise of the Ottoman state in a series of lectures
delivered at the University of London in 1937 and published in 1938.[20] There
were some significant differences between the views of the two scholars; in fact
Wittek's work was partially intended to be a critique of Köprülü, as we shall
see below. Yet on one basic point they were in agreement: the rise of the
Ottoman state had to be studied against the background of centuries of warfare,
cultural transformation, acculturation, and settlement of Muslims and Turks in
medieval Anatolia.
Köprülü and Wittek did not always see the same things in the Anatolian-Turkish
background. Yet again they were in agreement on
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