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

interconnected, for the tribal warriors in the gāzi-mercenary bands were recruited among
immigrant pastoral nomads. Đnalcık rightly underlines that the population pressure under
Turkoman immigration fundamentally changed the social set up, and consequently
political formations, on the Seljukid frontier. 179 The point of eminence for the purpose of
the present study here is that the immigrant Turkish population, which constituted the
social base of the Ottoman Principality, was overwhelmingly pastoral nomads. Hence,
the structure of the early Ottoman society was predominantly tribal in character. 180
Indeed, Aşıkpaşazāde’s famous classification of the immigrant population
(müsāfir) in Rum, that is the Turkish inhabitants of Anatolia in the thirteenth and
fourteenth century, succinctly reflects both the major components and the basic nature of
the early Ottoman society, or in a broader sense, the Turkish society of the thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century Western Anatolia, and Rumelia as well. As is well-known, he
divides the contemporary society into four groups: the Holy Warriors (Gāziyān-ı Rum),
the Craftsmen (Ahiyān-ı Rum) 181 , the Popular Mystics (Abdalān-ı Rum), and the Women
first scholarly discussed by Fuat Köprülü. See his The Origins of the Ottoman Empire, especially pp. 27-
70.
179 See Đnalcık, , "The Question of the Emergence of the Ottoman State", p. 71. Đnalcık also calls attention
to the feudal structure of the early beylik, which is closely connected to the tribal character. See Halil
Đnalcık, “Osman I”, DIA, p. 445.
180 This was first throughly suggested by Fuat Köprülü in his famous work The Origins of the Ottoman
Empire (New York, 1992) and then attained wide-spread acceptance among scholars. The tribal character
of the early Ottoman society and state was recently re-evaluated by Rudi Paul Lindner, who additionally
employed some anthropological findings on the nature and organization of ‘tribe’. See his “What was a
Nomadic Tribe?” and Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia. It was further refined by Cemal
Kafadar in his Between Two Worlds.
181 The role of akhis in the foundation of the Ottoman beylik, with a quite exaggerated tone, was first put
forward by Friedrich Giese. (“Das Problem der Entstehung des osmanischen Reiches”, Zeitschrift für
Semitistik und verwandte Gebiete, 2, Leipzig, 1924, 246-71.) Mélikoff argues without providing sufficient
evidence that akhis co-operated with qizilbashes and hence became subjected to persecution during the
reign of Selim I. She repeats in her several articles a verse of Hata’ī as the source of this argument.
Şahun evlādına ikrar edenler,
Ahīler, gāziler, abdallar oldı. (The whole poem is published in Tourkhan Gandjei, Il Canzoniere di Sāh
Ismā’īl Hata’ī, p. 15) See, for example, her “Le Problème Kızılbaş”, p. 33. Before Mélikoff, however,
Fuat Köprülü made reference to this verse in order to prove the connection between abdals and Safavid
movement. See Fuad Köprülü, “Abdal”, Türk Halk Edebiyatı Ansiklopedisi, çıkaran M. Fuad Köprülü,
68