TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

One should note that in the late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century western
Anatolia there was a complete political fragmentation. As is well known, after the
collapse of the Seljukid authority by the Mongolians at Kösedağ in 1243 235 , many
frontier governors of the Seljukid state or powerful tribal leaders established either
autonomous or independent principalities in the west half of the Anatolian peninsula. 236
The political fragmentation, however, was not limited to the semi- or fully-independent
structure of these Turkoman principalities. The partition of political authority and
military power prevailed within the internal structures of each principality as well, for
the troops of these Turkoman begs were composed of tribal warrior groups who were
loyal before all to their tribal leaders. One of the most eminent images of these
Turkoman warriors was their red cap (Kızıl-börg), differentiating them from the
immediate retinue of the beg, nöker, who wore a white-cap (Ak-börg), a symbol of
nobility among Turco-Mongolian peoples. 237
Osman Beg appeared, at the threshold of the fourteenth century in the Byzantine
borders, as one of those Turkoman begs, at the beginning among less significant ones,
and as the leader of his own tribe. The remarkable achievement of Osman and his
successors, before all, lies in their gaining of the allegiance of other tribal warrior groups
through successful employment of gazā ideology 238 as the motivating factor and
235 See Osman Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, Đstanbul: Ötüken Yayınları, 2004, pp. 451-7.
236 Halil Đnalcık, ”The Emergence of Ottomans”, The Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. I, eds., P. M. Holt,
Ann K. S. Lambton, and B. Lewis, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 263-4.
237 See Halil Đnalcık, “The Rise of the Turcoman Maritime Principalities in Anatolia, Byzantium, and the
Crusades”, in his The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire: Essays on Economy and
Society. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1993, p. 325; “The Yürüks”, p. 100. I will return to this issue in
the following pages.
238 For further reading on ‘gazā’ in the Ottoman context, see Fuat Köprülü, The Origins of the Ottoman
Empire, translated and edited by Gary Leiser, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992; Paul
Wittek, The Rise of The Ottoman Empire, London, 1965; Gyula Káldy-Nagy, “The Holy War (Jihad) in
the First Centuries of the Ottoman Empire”, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 3/4, 1979-80, 467-73; Ronald C.
Jennings, “Some Thoughts on the Gazi Thesis”, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 76,
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