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

Ottomans took advantage of sedentary life, for pastoralism was no more profitable in the
limited plateaus of Bithynia, which, on the other hand, has fertile soils to cultivate. They
even established new towns such as Yenişehir. 249 “The Ottomans now had to adapt
themselves to the demands of administering a sedentary and sedentarizing society. In
such circumstances the chief became a settled ruler, and the nomadic tribesmen had
ultimately to settle or to accept secondary position. The institutions of the tribe
ultimately broke down before the complex task of bureaucratic record keeping and urban
organization.” 250 No doubt, the sedentarization process – of especially ruling elite -
gained impetus under Orhan and Murad I.
Closely linked to the sedentarization, the economic base of the tribe shifted from
pastoralism and predation to agriculture. Furthermore, using the Marxian scheme,
sedentarization fundamentally changed the ‘infra-structure’ of socio-economic set up so
that subsequent changes in the ‘super-structure’, i.e. nature of polity, military
organization, and religious mind, inevitably followed. 251
One of the foremost results of this process appeared as the alienation of
Turkoman milieu to the ‘imperializing’ state. Nonetheless, the alienation process did not
rest barely on ideological-religious basis, but it had a substantial economic and social
ground as well. Parallel to evolving of the Ottoman principality towards a bureaucratic
empire, an intrinsic tension developed within a certain branch of the Ottoman society
and the state. As J. R. Walsh has put it succinctly,
When gradually the concept of empire evolves and an effort is made to assume
the responsibilities which this implied, the independent and arrogant tribal
aristocracy had to be replaced by one of the sultan’s own creation selected from
249 See Lindner, “What was a Nomadic Tribe?”, p. 708.
250 Lindner, “What was a Nomadic Tribe?”, pp. 708-9.
251 Compare Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans, pp. 29-38.
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