Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

gazis, warriors of the faith, who spread across the frontier areas as Seljuk
power diminished and formed aspiring emirates, among which the band led by Osman
Gazi carried the day because of its fortunate position. The earliest Ottoman
sources, an inscription from 1337 and Ahmedi's chronicle, completed ca. 1410,
both full of references to the House of Osman as gazis, confirmed in Wittek's
opinion the significance of the gaza ethos for the early Ottoman thrust.
These gazi bands may have drawn members from some tribes but were not composed
of tribal groups as such; rather, they consisted of warrior-adventurers from
various backgrounds. In relation to the Mentese emirate, for instance, he had
argued that the "gazi pirates" who founded this stateling were "originally a
mixture of Turks and indigenous elements from the neighborhood of Byzantine
territory" who were soon joined by "a large number of Byzantine mariners ...
owing to their unemployment."[21] To borrow more recent terminology, gazi bands
were "inclusive" entities for Wittek, and tribes were not. Since he held that
tribalism required consanguinity (which, he argued, later Ottoman genealogies
were unable to establish anyway), and since the warrior bands whom he deemed
responsible for the creation of the principalities were anything but
consanguineous, he rejected the notion that a tribe could have been instrumental
in the foundation of the Ottoman state. The cohesiveness of the
political-military cadres of the emirates came from shared goals and faith, not
blood.
The differences between Köprülü and Wittek were never explicitly discussed in
later scholarship because the issue was encumbered by nationalistic or
counternationalistic consideratious. From that viewpoint, the role of Byzantine
"dissidents" and converts in one of the major political achievements of
Turco-Muslim civilization was obviously a highly charged issue. The Polemic
against Western historiography, which often tended to show Turks as uncreative
barbarians, should be an object of inquiry in itself as part of late
Ottoman/early republican intellectual history. (And its intensity must be seen
against the fact that Western historiography had been particularly aggressive in
its attempt to barbarize and delegitimize the "Turkish" empire, with territories
right within the European continent and lording it over Christian peoples.)
Köprülü,
― 39 ―
from his youthful poetry to his postacademic career as a politician, was
certainly part of that discourse as an outspoken nationalist (though his
nationalism was different from the official version in many ways). Before his
lectures on the rise of the Ottoman state, he had published what turned out to
be a highly influential study criticizing then prevalent views with respect to
Byzantine influences on Ottoman institutions, primarily in the administrative
sphere.[22] Given all this, Köprülü's account of the Ottoman foundations, where
he insisted on the presence of a lineage-based tribe as well as an ethnic stock
and spoke against emphasizing the conversions, was very easy to read as
nationalistic propaganda. And indeed his book is not free of blatant excesses.
On the other hand, Köprülü's version of events lacked the convenience of a
singular "motive force." Shaped under the influence of the Durkheimian tradition
39