Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

Zoroastrian.[37] In addition to this newly imported enthusiasm (supported by the
Ilkhanids) for the (re)conquest of lands for Islam, the internal weakness of
Byzantium, and the lack of "Islamic fanaticism" among the early Ottomans that
facilitated the incorporation of quasi-Islamic Turks and Mongols as well as
renegades from Christianity, Togan cited the location of Osman's tribe right
near the major Byzantine-Ilkhanid trade route as the factors that made it
natural for Turkish warriors to conceive of expanding their power and building a
state.[38] The rest was good leadership, adoption of sound administrative
practices (thanks primarily to the Ilkhanid legacy), support given to and
received from ahis and dervishes, and a well-regulated colonization policy after
crossing to Rumelia.
The significance of commerce was to be considered from another perspective by
Mustafa Akdag ( 1913-72), a Turkish historian who chose to focus on some
references in the Ottoman chronicles concerning exchange between Osman's tribe
and their Christian neighbors; from those, he developed a bold theory proposing
the existence of a "Marmara-basin economy" that emerged as an integrated unit at
the time of Ertogril and Osman. The state that was created by them gave
political expression to that economic reality and expanded along routes that
linked the Marmara basin to other regional economies. This thesis never had a
chance to gain any recognition, however, since it was soon demolished on the
grounds of flimsy evidence and sloppy reasoning by a student of Köprülü, Halil
Inalcik , who was to emerge as the leading Ottomanist of his generation and make
his own contributions to various problems of early Ottoman history.[39] Even
though Akdag elaborated the same views in a later book, [40] with a yet stronger
emphasis on commerce, symbiosis, and rosy relations between Turks and Byzantines
or Balkan peoples, his views were not supported by any new evidence that
responded to former criticisms; the book failed to have an impact on
professional historians though it was widely read by the public. Considering
that its author suffered imprison-
― 46 ―
ment for his leftist views after the military intervention of 1971, the book is
rather a curious reminder of the fact that certain significant strands of the
nationalist discourse such as the purely positive assessment of the Turkish
conquests cut across both sides of the political spectrum in Turkey.[41]
Speros Vryonis, a Greek-American (and a Byzantinist, as some reviewers noted,
much to his resentment), published his monumental work on medieval Anatolia in
1971.[42] It covered the period that saw the rise of the Ottoman state but was
not directly concerned with that specific phenomenon. Vryonis rather traced the
broad currents of demographic movement, nomadization, and religious and cultural
change in Asia Minor that, over four centuries, transformed what was a
Hellenic/Greek Orthodox peninsula into a predominantly Islamic one dominated by
a Turcophone political elite. In the shortest summary of the set of conclusions
he reached at the end of his exhaustive research, he wrote that "the Turkish
success ultimately was a product of the dynamics of Byzantine decline and
Turkmen (nomadic) demographic pressure."[43] As for the role of frontier
warriors in that process, whose absence in the book was noted by a reviewer,
45