Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

d I 1362–89 B

yez

d I (the Thunderbolt) 1389–1402 Me

ed I (

elebi or Kyritzes) 1413–21 Mur

d II 1421–44 and 1446–51 Me

med II (the Conqueror) 1444–46 and 1451–81 B

yez

d II 1481–1512

      Introduction

Background and Overview

      Osman is to the Ottomans what Romulus is to the Romans: the eponymous founding figure of a remarkably successful political community in a land where he was not, according to the testimony of family chronicles, one of the indigenous people. And if the Roman state evolved from a peripheral area to represent the center of the Graeco-Roman civilization, whose realm it vigorously expanded, so the Ottoman state rose from a small chieftainship at the edges of the abode of Islam eventually to become the supreme power within a much enlarged Islamdom. Once they came to rule, the Ottomans, like the Romans, gained a reputation as better administrators and warriors, even if less subtle minds, than the former representatives of their civilizations; they possessed less taste for philosophical finesse perhaps but had greater success in creating and deploying technologies of power. The “Romanesque” quality of the Ottoman political traltion has been noted before and was expressed recently by an eminent scholar of the Islamic Middle East: “The Ottoman empire…was a new and unique creation, but in a sense it also marked the culmination of the whole history of Muslim political societies. The Ottoman Turks may be called the Romans of the Muslim world.”¹

      They were indeed called just that when they, like various other peoples of medieval Asia Minor, were referred to as R

ml

m, a frontier region from the point of view of the central lands of Islam, had their own peculiar ways that distinguished them from both the rest of the Muslim world and from other Turks. Namely, being a R

m

Turk also implied belonging to a newly emerging regional configuration of Islamic civilization that was on the one hand developing its own habitus in a new land and on the other engaged in a competition to establish its political hegemony over a rival religio-civilizational orientation. The proto-Ottomans, of whom we know nothing with certainty before the turn of the fourteenth century, were a tiny and insignificant part of this new configuration at first but their descendants and followers eventually came to dominate it and to shape it toward the creation of a new imperial order under their rule.

      According to most historical traditions, the immediate ancestors of Osman arrived in Anatolia with the second great wave of Turkish migrations from central Asia, which took place in the wake of the Chingisid onslaught in the early thirteenth century. Once in Anatolia, they would have encountered a variety of Turkish-speaking communities—some in urban centers, some settled down to agriculture, but the majority engaged in pastoral nomadism like Osman's ancestors, most but not all of them speaking the O

uz dialect, most but not all of them Muslim, and even then divided into communities that understood different things about being Muslim—living in a complex ethnoreligious mosaic that included Christian and non-Turkish-speaking Muslim communities (especially Arab, Kurdish, and Persian).

      The earlier wave, the tail end of the Vlkerwanderungen in a way, had occurred in the eleventh century when large numbers of Turkish tribes, belonging primarily to the O

uz dialect group and to the O

uzid idiom of Inner Asian political discourse, crossed the Oxus and moved toward western Asia. While the Seljuk family from among these tribes soon became involved in politics at the highest levels in Baghdad and ended up as a dynasty that held the sultanate, many tribes moved further west and piled along the eastern borders of the Byzantine Empire. Their incursions into Asia Minor were independent of and at least occasionally contradictory to the will of the Seljuk sultanate.

      The Byzantine Empire had faced a similar and at first more threatening pressure from a more southerly direction in the seventh century with the appearance of Arab-Muslim armies. While raids and counterraids continued to rage in the next few centuries, however, these were relatively localized in a fluid frontier zone that developed in southeastern Anatolia with its own borderland institutions, heroes, traditions, and lore. The Turkish-speaking settlers and conquerors of the later medieval era were to inherit a good deal of those traditions from both the Muslim and the Christian sides.

      In any case, ongoing friction in eastern Anatolia in the eleventh century led to the fateful encounter of the Seljuk and Byzantine armies in Mantzikert in 1071, the same year that the Eastern Roman Empire lost Bari, its last possession in the Italian peninsula, to other tribal warrior bands led by the Normans. The Byzantine defeat at Mantzikert was to be followed by deeper and more frequent raids or plain migration by T

aka Beg, who was based in the Aegean, was murdered (in 1093, with the help of the Seljuk ruler) and the crusaders recaptured Nicaea from the Seljuks of R

m for the empire (1097).

      Among Turco-Muslims, who were largely restricted to the inner plateau after some very early excursions to the coastal areas and who were replenished by continued migrations of T

rkmen tribes, two powers