Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

ensuing internecine wars among Bayezid's sons. There was not only a heightened
awareness of the need to understand what went well and what went wrong before
Timur but also the fact that his descendants continued to treat the Ottomans as
vassals, forcing the latter to represent themselves in a new mode.
It may not have been necessary for Murad I (r. 1362-89) and Bayezid I (r.
1389-1402) to account for the way they eliminated their rival siblings, but by
the time Mehmed I reached the throne in 1413, the rules of the game had changed.
At least two written accounts were produced to teleologically chronicle the
internecine strife among Bayezid's sons as an ultimately felicitous tale that
ended with the fairest conclusion, the victory of the best prince of course. One
of these two accounts remains anonymous; it is known to us not as an independent
work but as one embedded in later works.[103] The other one, like Ahmedi's work,
is a distinctly historical chapter in a larger text of a legendary nature, a
Halilname , written in 1414 by `Abdu'l-vasi Çelebi.[104] Yet the ultimate
manifestation of Ottoman historical consciousness in that post-Timurid juncture
may well be that Mehmed I spent some of his precious resources to build a mosque
in Sogut , the small and by then politically insignificant town where Ertogril
was believed to have settled down.[105] The legitimacy of the Ottoman enterprise
was ultimately based on its own adventure, its own dedication to gaza generation
after generation since Ertogril .
The new historiographic output was not necessarily produced directly under the
patronage of the House of Osman; nor was it uncritical
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of the Ottoman enterprise. In trying to understand the Timurid rupture, some
authors, even if they were loyal to the reemerging Ottoman state, were
apparently ready to question certain developments, especially what they
apparently felt to be departures from the "purity" of the earlier generations.
The two major ingredients of the later fifteenth-century output were in all
likelihood composed in the years following the Battle of Ankara. A certain Yahsi
Fakih , the son of Orhan's imam, sat down to write his memoirs in those years.
His menakib (tales), too, survive only embedded in a later work (the chronicle
of Apz). Another collection of early Ottoman and related historical traditions
was composed by 1422; it constitutes the common source of Apz, Uruç, and several
anonymous chronicles that came into being in the latter decades of the same
century. Those later chronicles constitute the largest body of historical
information, and misinformation, about early Ottoman history; their proper
evaluation is one of the most important tasks for historians of Ottoman state
building.
Other historical works, relatively independent of this set of interrelated
chronicles, were produced in the same century. Yazicizade's history of the
Seljuks, written in the 1430s, also contained a short account of Osman's begship
and, even more importantly, a major and influential attempt to use Oguzid
political traditions to legitimize Ottoman rule. In this version, Ertogril
descends from the glorious Kayi branch of the children of Oguz Han . Sukrullah ,
who wrote his universal history in Persian in 1457, seconded that. A grand vezir
of Mehmed II, Karamani Mehmed Pasa (d. 1481), composed another example of this
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