Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

surviving contender to the throne in 1413, however, Apz fell ill on the way and
had to stay behind.
Whatever disappointment this turn of fate led to must have been alleviated by
the fact that he thus became a guest of an old man by the name of Yahsi Fakih .
Why would the young dervish stay in the house of the fakih ? But then, isn't it
only to be expected that Yahsi Fakih , the son of Orhan's imam and a man of
letters, would know of the family of `Asik Pasa and Elvan Çelebi, Apz's
great-grandfather and grandfather, respectively? There is every reason to assume
Apz felt comfortable in the sociocultural milieu he was born into. He chose to
include Yahsi Fakih's menakib in his chronicle not merely because he happened to
have access to them (in that sense, it is true that our own access to the
fakih's narrative is partly due to an accident) but also because they made sense
to him. The menakib he inherited from the fakih were skillfully woven into Apz's
later fifteenth-century compilation because he wished to do so. A quick look at
some of the later developments in his life will help us understand his
preferences and his own approach to gaza.
Back again in his (overbearingly?) revered ancestors' community in Mecidözü,
Amasya, a young man in his twenties with no irresistible calling for a studious
intellectual or mystical vocation if we are to judge by his later career and
chronicle, Apz was offered an exciting adventure by Mihaloglu Mehmed Beg in
1422. The warrior-lord from the illustrious line of Osman's companion Mihal had
just been released from imprisonment in Tokat, where he had been confined due to
his earlier alliance with the wrong prince. On his way to join Murad II's
campaign against Mustafa (the Imposter), the renowned beg of the marches visited
the monastery and offered to take along his young namesake, Apz Mehmed , from
another illustrious family of those legendary days. Here
― 102 ―
we already have a telling case of gazi-dervish "networking." The young dervish
seems to have taken to this opportunity like Marlow in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness but with none of the latter's gloom. (Nor is Mihaloglu , the warrior, a
Kurtz.) Like others of the gazi-dervish milieu as reflected in their literature,
Apz appears to have been free of concern for any dark recesses in his soul;
rather, he cheerfully undertook his journey to participate in this saga played
out around the theme of spreading the light of Islam, which also promised
material gain and a good time.[115]
In his new life, he came into contact with various other gazis and dervishes,
who also make up most of the oral sources he cites in his history, and
participated in many raids and campaigns, which he relates with relish. A
difference can be noted in this regard between Apz and Nesri , who wrote only
slightly later but from a different perspective as a man from a different social
and educational background. A member of the ulema, whose oral sources and thus
presumably social connections are mostly from the ulema, Nesri aimed at bringing
together different Ottoman historiographic traditions that flowed more or less
independently of each other up to his time, as has been demonstrated by the
meticulous source criticism of Ménage. Nesri had in front of him one set of
traditions running through Apz (including YF),[116] and the anonymous chronicles
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