Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

published after that juncture, in a context that was ready to hear those voices,
when Bayezid was searching for the right dose of appeasement after his father's
harsh centralism, and still hoping to tame cults that had not yet become fully
anti-Ottoman by patronizing them (e.g., Haci Bektas ).
All of these works and the rising number of hagiographic works, which included
their own version of the history of the conquests, must be read with another
aspect of fifteenth-century ideological developments in the Ottoman world in
mind. From the early fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, the House of
Osman and the order of Haci
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Bektas achieved supremacy in their respective spheres while also developing a
historical vision of themselves that confirmed, explained, and legitimized that
supremacy. In other words, two organizations laid a claim to the energies that
had made possible what was by then a dear victory of Islam over Eastern
Christendom: the Ottoman state and the Bektasi order. These two by no means
monopolized all former accomplishments but were able to present themselves in
paramount position with respect to the other forces. The two large institutional
umbrellas seem to have started this adventure in some harmony and cooperation
but ended up as the two opposing poles of Ottoman religio-political culture; in
the sixteenth century, the Bektasi order emerged as the main representative of
anti-Ottomanism and as the rallying point for various religious and
religio-political movements that found themselves on the wrong side of the dogma
battles.
It is neither possible nor desirable to present an exhaustive survey of early
Ottoman historiography here.[108] My purpose is basically to deal with selected
problems in order to assess the usefulness of fifteenth-century Ottoman
historical consciousness, shaped in large part by the ideological and political
currents mentioned above, for understanding earlier Ottoman realities. From the
brief sketch just given, it should be clear that by the time the major
chronicles (of Apz and others) were composed, there were many different layers
of oral and written historical traditions. To envision them only as layers of a
linear progression would be misleading, however, since they also included
competing or at least mutually incompatible accounts representing different
politico-ideological positions. Since Gibbons, a strand of scholarship has
tended to lump these sources into a relatively undifferentiated mass of
unreliable information, while another strand, dominant in Turkey, has simply
followed the old line of raiding them and the calendars for raw data.[109]
Lindner, for instance, is all too ready to treat the fifteenth-century
chroniclers as a homogeneous block: court historians. "To the eye of a medieval
historian their smooth, clean surface shines with the light of Einhard's life of
Charlemagne .... To be a chronicler at court was also to be an amanuensis, of
course." The only reliable information in these "court chronicles" about the
Ottoman past, according to Lindner, is provided by "the incongruous, the
unexpected statement," which may reveal "an older tradition truer to past life
than to present ideology .... It took the entire fifteenth century for the
Ottoman orthodoxy to emerge. ... Passages which conflict with that orthodoxy
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