Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

of an Akkoyunlu chief named Turali married the daughter of Emperor Alexios III
Comenos of Trebizond.[20] The two powers had been locked in a struggle that the
Akkoyunlu saw in a religious coloring, but this did not render such a union
impossible, and it led to reciprocal visits to the respective realms and further
intermarriages. It would be too simplistic, and unfair to the subtlety of Dede
Korkut or whoever the storyteller might be, to see this narrative as merely a
distorted rendering of "real" events surrounding this or another particular
marriage. But an ancient epic seems to have been customized to address late
medieval Anatolian realities, to assign them meaning within a flexible
understanding of the gaza ideology. If gaza were to be understood as zealously
as it was by Kan Turali at the beginning of the story, the narrator seems to
suggest, one is bound to go through many surprises; but as the warrior attunes
himself to the realities, he still ends up a winner, and so does his side.
The Dusturname , completed in 1465, takes us much closer to the Ottomans in both
time and geography. Embedded in a largely unoriginal history of Islamic states,
its core is an original epic that relates, with much more historical specificity
than the works so far mentioned, the exploits of Aydinoglu Umur Beg (d.
1348).[21] The House of Aydin went through various phases of cooperation and
competition with that of Osman until Umur Begs descendants were subdued and
their lands annexed in 1425. The Ottomans of the next generation could be
generous in recognizing his achievements and might even benefit from patronizing
Umur Beg's cult, which continued strong among the sailors of the Aegean for many
centuries. Much harassed by European navies until both channels of the
Dardanelles and the Bosphorus were secured, the Ottoman state was busily engaged
in building a navy under Mehmed the Conqueror.[22] The Dusturname was
commissioned by Mahmud Pasa (d. 1474), Mehmed's longest-serving grand vezir, and
it must have undergone some changes, perhaps making it more conformable to
political and/or religions orthodoxy, in the hands of its compiler/editor,
Enveri . Yet Enveri's own source for the epic, possibly an oral rendering of the
story of Umur Begs deeds originally told by one of his fellow-mariner
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gazis, is full of surprises. The internecine struggle between two gazi leaders,
Umur and Sasa, is recorded without inhibition: Sasa Beg is on one page praised
as a gazi who led pioneering raids into the Aegean region but is blamed on the
next for having cooperated with the Christians against Umur Beg.[23]
If this example were to be dismissed because ultimately it condemns Sasa Begs
cooperation with the Christians (but the title of gazi is not taken away from
him), we can note the further incident in the Dusturname of the favors shown to
Umur Beg by the baroness of Bodonitsa.[24] In fact, such help (and love?)
offered by Byzantine women who are incited in their dreams to fall for warriors
of Islam seems to have been a fantasy of the gazis, and such narratives may well
have served to attract adventuresome young men into the armies or to keep them
there. A similar legend is related in an Ottoman chronicle about Gazi Rahman ,
one of Osman's fellow warriors, and a Byzantine woman who allegedly helped the
Ottomans take possession of the Aydos fortress.[25]
Even more striking is the nature of the relationship between the "usurper"
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