Chapter One:
Our conventional image of an Ottoman owes much to Gentile Bellini's portrait
of Mehmet the Conqueror. In 1479, nearing the end of his reign, Mehmet invited
Bellini to paint a European view of the sultan. Adding crowns, Latin inscriptions,
an arch, and a jeweled textile, later artists only reinforced Mehmet's purpose.
The Conqueror, whose troops were investing Otranto, had come a long way,
and he was looking to the future rather than back to the past.
There is little in Bellini's Mehmet to remind the viewer that the earliest Ottomans were pastoral nomads. The distance from the felt tent to Bellini's canvas is too great for a passerby, seeing the one, to catch sight of the other in the same field of view. As however, the subject of this essay is Anatolian nomadism in old Ottoman time it is necessary for us to understand how the ruling Ottomans changedd from nomads to sedentary ruleres of a vast bureaucratic enterprise. The purpose of this chapter is to outline and explain that transformation. in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
At the outset it will be convenient to describe the path which this chapter's argument follows. The rnost important element in the argument -- the leitmotif of the essay in fact -- has to do with the nature and limits of the tribe as a device for organizing society. Moreove since the tribe will be defined as an inclusive rather than an exclusive body, we will have to start with a discuss!on of the view that an exclusivc or adversary ideology -- the Holy War (jihad or ghaza) and its warriors (ghazis) -- dominated early Ottoman history. After a consideration of this view the following pages will unfold the story of the early Qttomans in their Byzantine, Seljuk, and Mongol environment. I shall not tell all of that story, nor shall I dwell on its parts at equal length. It is my object to place before the reader only those aspects of old Ottoman history which bear directly upon the nomadic, pastoral, and tribal themes of this book. As most Ottoman histories view their subject from the perspective of its later cultural complexity and sophistication, this treatment will shed a different light on our view of Ottoman origins. Having given a selective chronological treatment of this era, we will move to a more analytic review. We will view the early Ottoman trsformation through those categories which are most important to a student of nomads: How did the early ottomans make their living, that is, how did they pass from pastoralism and predation to agriculture and settled commerce? Second, how did they fight -- why and how did mounted archery give way to infantry and cavalry tactics? Finally, what was the political import of these developments? What happened to the Ottoman tribe?
Having examined the careers of Osman and his son Orkhan from a nomad's perspective, and having analyzed the transformation of their enterprise from the economic, military, and political point of view, we may conclude with a consideration of the ideology which emerged and became dominant at the Ottoman court in the fifteenth century. Possessed of a romantic view of their nomadic origins, the Ottomans nonetheless kept the nomads of their own day out of the way and well out of their image of the perfect world. While a ceremonial herd of sheep grazed near Bursa as a memento of the past, the Ottoman present and future in cosmopolitan Istanbul was starkly different, as a closing text will demonstrate.'
* * * * There is some significance for the purposes of this essay in the famous theory that zeal for the Holv War powered early Ottoman history. First, in whole or in part, this theory plays a major role in modern treatments of Ottoman history. Scholars have publicly or privately adjusted or altered the theory, added additional factors or redefined the vocabulary, but its simplicity, directness, and elegance render it as attractive today as it was over a generation ago when Professor Paul Wittek first formulated it. No treatment of old Ottoman history can avoid Wittek's theory. There is, in addition, a second reason for an essay on nomadic historv to begin with the Holy War. As I shall demonstrate, the tribe was a political orgnism whose membership was defined by shared interests (and, in medieval Eurasia, subordination to a chief). In thirteenth-century Bithynia the pool from which a tribe could form and grow consisted, for all practical purposes, of Byzantines and Turks, Greek-speaking Christians and Turkish-speaking nomads. If fervor for the Holy War played an important role in this frontier area, then our pool would clearly exclude Byzantines, for they would have become the detested enemy of the faithful. Since this essay will, later on, develop the notion of an early Ottoman tribe embracing both Byzantines and Turks under Osman's leadership, we must begin with an attempt to decide just how important the Holy War was in Osman's time. I shall trv to convince the reader that it was unimportant.
Although traces of Wittek's theory appear in his work as early as 1925, it will be most convenient to review his argument on the basis of his English summation, a series of London lectures published in 1938. Wittek began with a demolition of the tribal genealogies of the Ottomans, and we shall return to his discussion of them shortly. He then drew the conclusion that without a proven genealogy there could have been no Ottoman tribe. Hence, tribalism was not a factor in early Ottoman history. How, then, had the Ottomans risen to power? In examining the early Ottoman chronicles, and in particular the rhymed chronicle of Ahmedi (d. 1412-13), he recognized the leitmotif, or in Ahmedi's case the solo strain, of the Holy War. But Ahmedi's treatment of the Ottomans was composed, at the earliest, in 1390; could there be earlier literary evidence for this zeal? Wittek soon came to recognize the significance, for his case, of an Arabic inscription, clearly dated 1337, now in the citadel of Bursa. In part the text reads: "The great and magnificent emir, the warrior of the Holy War, . . . Sultan of the ghazis, ghazi son of ghazi, hero of the world and of the faith . . . Orkhan son of Osman." This precisely dated inscription brought the vocabulary of the Holy War much closer to the foundation of the ottoman enterprise. Wittek now concluded that this text clinched his argument that the impact of the Holy War caused the Ottoman unity and expansion: "From the first appearance of the Ottomans, the principal factor in this political tradition was the tstruggle against their Christian neighbors . . . " The ghaza spirit came to have an almost physical reality. Formation of a state on that ideal, which served as "the motive force" of such a state, made the expansion of the emirate "only a necessary consequence and a matter of time." Indeed, one demonstration of the strength of the ghaza as a historical force had occurred in his own lifetime, when the Ottomans abandoned the ghaza by allying themselves with their traditional Habsburg enemies in World War I: "By this alliance both the empire of Austria and Turkey broke with their most essential traditions and thus showed that they had outlived themselves. It is not surprising, that both empires failed the test of the Great War and disappeared for ever."
Before we embark ori a discussion of Wittek's thesis and its proof from the medieval sources, let us set it within its own framework: German intellectual life of the Weimar years. Most scholars have glossed over the exuberance of tone and animation of spirit which adorn Wittek's claims for the role of the ghaza (not to mention the penalty for abandoning it), but we may keep in mind that his words accord well with certain popular notions during the interwar years: that ideas have a special life of their own, and second, that they are the direct motivation and fuel for action. These assumptions of Wittek's history-writing make plain his debt to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber's influence on the scholars of the interregnum was great, and the Geistesgeschichte which those years spawned must have appealed greatly to a scholar and textual critic of Wittek's caliber. As far as I am able to tell, Wittek never questioned these assumptions about history as the play of ideas.
In contrast to Wittek's emphasis on ideas and the claims of propaganda, I propose to examine the behavior of the early Ottomans. Rather than rely solely upon the summary claims of the authors, let us look at their accounts of early Ottoman acts and then decide whether that story reflects the ideology of the Holy War. It seems to me that only an examination of Ottoman deeds will help us decide whether such a text as the 1337 inscription reflects the Holy War as the true stimulus behind early Ottoman history, or rather a justification which later viewers used to glorify and romanticize the pragmatism of Osman and Orkhan.
We begin with the goal of early Ottoman conquest. More frequently than one might expect of Holy Warriors who strive to expand the lands of Islam and to shrink the influence of the infidel, Ottoman enmity and action was directed against neighboring Muslims. One of the earliest, if not indisputably the first, of Ottoman conquests was the citadel of Karacahisar, which looms above the southwestern suburbs of Eskisehir. The Ottoman chronicles imply that the lord of Karacahisar was Christian, but such a claim is false. Eskisehir, the nearby site of Dorylaeum, Karacahisar, and the southwesterly city of Kutahya/Cotyaeum, all had been in Muslim hands for over a century before the Ottomans arrived on the scene. Since Karacahisar defends the low road from Eskisehir to Kutahya it is reasonable to suppose that the Ottomans captured it from the neighborlng Muslim emirs of Germiyan, rulers of Kutahya and pretenders to overlordship of the frontier emirates. There were in any case no Christian frontier lords anywhere near Karacahisar in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.
Such a reconstruction of the story of the fall of Karacahisar helps to explain the long-standing enmity between Germiyan and the Ottomans. Warfare and quarreling between the emirs of the two powers began no later than the youth of Osman and ended only with Ottoman acquisition of the emirate late in the fourteenth century. Ottoman expansion at the expense of Muslims was, however, not limited to Germiyan. During the 1320s and 1330s the Ottomans swallowed up their western neighbor, the emirate of Karasi. To the north, the last years of Osman's reign and the first decade of Orkhan's rule saw Ottoman expansion down the Sakarya/Sangarius as far as the Black Sea. These campaigns were against Muslim, not Christian beys. It is important, then, to bear in mind that while the early Ottomans did conquer Byzantine lands and towns, they were also engaged in campaigns of conquest against their Muslim neighbors. It was no accident that the Ottomans spread their rule over Muslim Anatolia in step with their expansion into the Christian Balkans.
In addition to conquering infidel lands, one of the presumed duties of the ghazi was coaxing the inhabitants of those lands to convert to Islam. Neither Osman nor Orkhan, on the other hand, seem to have placed much emphasis on converting their Christian neighbors. At least as late as 1340, Christians could serve as judges in Ottoman Bithynia. " In 1354, late in Orkhan's reign, a Byzantine observer commented that there was no persecution of Christians or pressure to convert to Islam in the Ottoman domains. Further, conversion was not a condition for advancement to relatively high office, as the example of two Christians demonstrated. There was considerable Turkish interest in conciliation and mutual adaptability. As one of the Muslims put it, "The time will come when we will be in accord with each other." These are words of moderation, not of zeal.
If fact, early Ottoman conquest seems associated more with cooperation than with coercion. One of our most valuable sources for this period is the chronicle of Asikpasazade, which contains material from mid-fourteenth century Bithynian witnesses. We learn that the young Osman liked to hunt in remote areas. A certain Kose Mihal, the Christian lord of Harman Kaya, always accompanied him. Our source calls Kose Mihal a ghazi and states that 'Most of these ghazis' attendants were Christians from Harman Kaya." It is important to note that Kose Mihal did become a Muslim, but much later. Here we must conclude that if Mihal had really been a ghazi, the term must have been a label in no sense describing the character and behavior of a Muslim Holy Warrior. While Mihal is perhaps the most famous "Christian ghazi" his story is only the most dramatic example of Ottoman-Byzantine cooperation in the early days: dramatic because it is ultimately a story of military cooperation. There are other. more common, stories of cooperation: exchanges. trade and protection aginst other Muslims, and these will be related in the course of the narrative. The rationale for this co-existence appears in a "conversation" between Osman and his brother Gunduz. Osman inquired of Gunduz the best way to subdue the land and raise an army. In response to his brother's suggestion that they simply lay waste the entire area, Osman pointed out that the villages and towns would cease to prosper. He thought it better for the long run to gain their Christian neighbors' confidence. Although the conversation is probably no more accurate a transcription than the speeches of Thucydides, the supposed dia!ogue neatly covers the alternatives that were open to the new Turkish immigrants, and it is a sensible gloss explaining the ties with Kose Mihal and the trade between Byzantine and Turk.
The co-existence which Osman urged on his brother may explain a singular fact which defenders of the Holy War ideology must puzzle over: this "motive force" left so little impress on the mind of the enemy that no Byzantine text composed in the early Ottoman period mentions the ghaza or ghazis. Three of the Byzantine Short Chronicles refer to Murad I as Murad Ghazi, but all three belong to a family of chronicles composed after 1512. One chronicle refers to Osman as Osman Ghazi, but it stems from a text of 1540. When chroniclers of the stature of the Byzantines George Pachymeres, John Cantacuzenus, and Nicetas Gregoras know nothing of such a zeal animating their enemies, it is reasonable to doubt its existence.
My final ground for questioning the Wittek ghaza theory here reflects the religious practices of the early Ottomans. It seems reasonable to suppose that religious zeal would find some sort of reflection in religious practice; but if so, the fact that the early Ottomans allowed heterodoxy freedom in their midst argues against their commitment to an untarnished Islam. The Anonymous Chronicles preserve the folk-tale of the conversion, through the magic of a dervish's conjurings, of a village near Yalova, on the south shore of the Marmora. The acts and impact of such a man reveal an atmosphere of tolerance and latitude, of symbiosis rather than separation. Further, there is -evidence that the Ottomans (and others) may have practiced ritual human sacrifice and mummification in the fourteenth century. Osman's nephew Aydogdu fell in battle at Koyunhisar. Ceremonies at his grave were sure to cure fever-stricken men and colicky horses. Saruyatl, one of Osman's brothers, died in battle. A pine tree grew on the spot where he fell, and from time to time a mysterious flame spouted from its top. The mixture of mystery and magic in these accounts tempts us to see only the first stirrings of Muslim influence upon the warriors of Osman.
At this point the reader may wish to object: must we require Holy Warriors to be observant believers? What of the "folk Islam" which, although more lenient, is still a profoundly religious experience? I would respond that popular folk religious practices are usually marked by syncretism and latitudinarianism, not by single-minded and exclusive zeal. The role of popular religious practices is to accommodate, not to repel, and their appeal is to crowds more than to isolated puritans. If we are to view the Ottomans as missionary zealots in a religious cause, the episodes in the preceding paragraph would seem to mark them as crusaders for Shamanism rather than for Islam.
The constellation of events and evidence in these last few paragraphs should have left the clear impreccion that the Holy War played no role in early Ottoman history, despite the later claims of Muslim propagandists. Economic and social cymbiosis, political cosmopolitanism, and religious syncretism all combined to exclude the ghaza as an effective influence on the early Ottomans. To deny the ghaza a role in this period is, however, simply to raise another question. How, then, did this terminology and titulture come to permeate the Ottoman tradition? Even more to the point, what gave rise to the 1337 inscription? We have a hint to the answer in a passing remark of the Arab chr,onicler Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 1449), who states that it was in Orkhan's time that Muslim scholars began to gather in the Ottoman domains. Sukrullah, an Ottoman chronicler whose source is shared by Ahmedi, makes a parallel statement. Orkhan had need of the expertise of such men, for after the surrender of the towns of Byzantine Bithynia he had to secure the organization of a settled administration. Since, as we shall soon see, the administrative heedlessness and occasional oppression of the Byzantine rulers Michael VIII and Andronicus II had failed to rally the Bithynians of the previous generation, Orkhan had to seek elsewhere for a model and for bureaucratic manpower. As they did elsewhere, the schoolmen provided the basis for the first Ottoman bureaucracy. In the earliest days the most visible representatives of Islam were dervishes, but soon thereafter more orthodox figures emigrated from the east in order to serve, and be well served by the Ottomans. In order to understand why the schoolmen left the interior of Anatolia for the western frontiers, we must recall that the 1320s and 1330s were decales of insecurity and disquiet on the plateau, as the Mongol governors quarrelled, fought among themselves, and rebelled against the central government.. Patronage of religion and its representatives suffered from the diversion of resources to civil war; the scholars sought employment elsewhere, wherever a need for their skills (or at least their administrative skills) appeared. Orkhan afforded protection and power to these men at a time when the Mongol authority was insecure and parsimonious. The arrival of the schoolmen in numbers thus provided the Ottomans with a sedentary tradition and a pool of capable, literate men to staff an administration.
The men of religion had other benefits to bestow on their new benefactors, and to the secure revenues accruing from the settled administration of the Ottoman future they added the gift of an orthodox heroic past. Looking at the frontier life of Osman's youth, they saw not nomad pragmatists but clever Holy Warriors. Religious zeal, to them, was obviously a worthier motivation for the creation of the Ottoman enterprise, an enterprise they were busily fitting into a classical administrative mould. After all, the schoolmen professionally could never be supporters of a declasse pastoralism. Thus, in my mind, the significance of the 1337 inscription lies not in its evidence of an early Ottoman mind but in its revelation of the transformation and encapsulation of that mind in a safe, orthodox setting. The inscription's ideological content, its ex postfacto purification of early Ottoman deeds, speak more of later propaganda than of early history.
The Bursa inscription of 1337 is our first evidence of an important change in Ottoman society, one of many which spanned the first half of the fourteenth century Ihe ghaza became a useful convention for interpreting, to orthodox and sedentary audiences, the formative years of the dynasty. The fifteenth- century chrgnicles, beginning with Ahmedi, did their best to fit the recalled facts of Ottoman history to this ideological justification. It made sense to these later Ottomans to do so; it is, however, not incumbent upon us to continue in that task. The Holy War should instead, take a rightful and honored place in Ottoman intellectual history.
* * * *
Up to this point, the discussion of Wittek's work has been critical, for the Holy War must be proven a negligible factor in the historical events of early Ottoman history if the tribe is to be given credit as an organizing factor in that history. An exclusive doctrine such as the ghaza, and an inclusive social organization such as the tribe, may not both work and grow in a multi-cultural environment at the same time. I have therefore contended that Wittek placed far too much emphasis on the Holy War as a historical actor. It is only fitting and proper for me to point out here how Wittek also took the decisive step towards demonstrating that the early Ottomans were tribally organized.
Let us recall that Wittek devoted much space to a discussion of the dynastic genealogies contained in almost all the Ottoman chronicles. He was concerned with refuting the notion, which he erroneously ascribed to the dean of Turkish historians, Fuad Koprulu, that because the Ottomans appeared to be descended from the premier Kayi clan of the old Oguz tribe, their prestige as representatives of this clan rendered them the natural heirs to leadership of the Anatolian Turks. In a precise, restrained manner Wittek demonstrated that the Ottoman "tribal" genealogies are not only incompatible with one another but also that they all stem from the fifteenth century. This analysis led Wittek to the conclusion that tribal links forged in the fifteenth century could not have existed in the thirteenth. In fact, no matter how hard one were to try, the sources simply did not allow the recovery of a family tree linking the antecedents of Osman to the Kayi of the Oguz tribe. Without a proven genealogy, or even without evidence of sufficient care to produce a single genealogy to be presented by all the court chroniclers, there obviously could be no tribe; thus, the tribe was not a factor in early Ottoman history.
Wittek's demolition of the genealogies was a masterful display of textual criticism, an art in which he was pre-eminent. The conclusions that he drew, however, rested upon an assumption common among scholars of his day (including Koprulu), that a tribe is a patrilineal descent group, a clan whose members all share blood ties. He could not have known that later developments in anthropology undermine this assumption. Neither actual nomadic tribes nor clans admit of such a neat definition. What is a clan? To begin with, the basic unit of pastoral nomadism is the family, "an autonomous of production and consumption;" The actual organization of nomadic and pastoral activity requires cooperation in selecting personnel for herding, in composing a herd of optimal size for management, and in the efficient performance of the daily routine. Cooperation and self-protection necessitate the creation of (temporary) residence groups, such as camps, and the perpetuation of lineages composed of real and fictitious relations, clans. Shared membership in a clan removes a potential source of suspicion and makes possible the cooperation which nomadism imposes on the family. The ideology which comfortably expresses this process resides in an idiom of kinship, but the reality is harsher, and ability or shared interest count for as mas blood. As for the tribe itself, clans may contribute to its membership, and its members may claim that they are all related, each to the others, but here membership is actually the result of a political choice to follow, or continue in the next generation to follow, the leadership of a particular chief in response to external pressures. Turkish tribes in the Near East and in Inner Asia were pragmatic, often temporary political groupings around a successful chief. Each tribesman may boast a genealogy demonstrating his connection with the other tribesmen: these genealogies, however, tend to display their common ancestors at some great distance up the genealogical tree. Characteristically, such genealogies contain very vague notions about the generations intervening between the common ancestor at the apex and, say, the great-grandparents of the tribesman in question. This vagueness about the middle generations, which Wittek took to be proof that the early Ottomans were not tribal, is the necessary mechanism allowing new members to graft themselves onto the kinship tree of tribal ideology. In any tribe whose membership waxes and wanes with success or failure in leadership, the hunt, or finding pasture, the tribal genealogy is a necessary fiction, a sort of political charter. In brief, then, the clan results from the nomad's social response to the conditions of a harsh and often insecure life; the tribe is his political response to external pressures. Both ideas find expression in terms of blood lines, but both in practice can and do ignore those constraints. Thus, while Wittek proved that the Ottomans were not a blood-linked clan, his revelation of the inconsistencies in their genealogies was in fact the major step in a demonstration that their social organization was in fact tribal. That the state of anthropological investigation during his early years had not yet reached as far as it later would can in no way be a reproach to Wittek.
It is now time to watch the tribal and nomadic aspects of the Ottomans' early days unfold. Let me again remind the reader that what follows is not, nor is it intended to be, a chronological review of early Ottoman history; rather, it is an attempt to highlight certain aspects of that history of nomadism and of nomadic tribes in their Anatolian setting. We shall look at those aspects of Ottoman history from the time when the Mongols entered the eastern sections of Anatolia up to the time when, in my opinion, the transformation of the Ottoman enterprise fro a tribe to something like a state was a virtual certainty.
The Seljuk victory over the Bvzantine armv at Manzikert, near Lake Van, in 1071 destroyed the last barrier against a land rush by Turkish nomads. The geography of western Anatolia rendered it an especially inviting destination for nomads over the next few centuries. It is a land of valleys and rivers flowing down to the sea. Separating these river valleys are high ridges, western extensions of the central Anatolian plateau. The river valleys are fertile and offer prosperous opportunities for cultivators. The finger-like ridges channel access to the valleys from the plateau and abound in nutritious summer pastures. To the nomads such a combination was irresistible. The lowland valleys contained rich possibilities for predation as well as snow-free, fertile winter pasture. The highlands and ridges contained excellent summer pasture and their broken terrain made them difficult for the less-mobile Byzantine armies and castle lords to penetrate or to defend.
The Byzantines could not prevent the nomad immiration. In the summer, when their armies went on campaign, the nomads were in the rough terrain of their highland summer pastures. They were difficult to catch, thanks to their light equipment and remount reserve of horses, and they easily avoided the few Byzantine fortresses. In the winter the Byzantine troops did not campaign, and so the river valleys were open to the nomads' descent. The Byzantine emperors complained that the Seljuk sultans were fostering these nomadic movements, and they treated this assumed breach of agreements as grounds for war. The Byzantines did not realize that the Seljuks also could not control the pastoralists' search for pasture, always more suitable below the plateau and across the frontier zone. After the Seljuk victory over Manuel I Comnenus at Myriocephalon in 1176, Byzantine efforts to maintain a foothold on the edge of the plateau were limited to occasional summer forays in the north and south. The hope was to keep the Turks above the river valleys, especially those of the Gediz/Hermus and Menderes/Maeander. To do this, however, winter campaigns would have been necessary. In Bithynia, the approaches to the lower Sakarya/Sangarius and the main road down from the plateau via Bozuyuk/Lamunia were poorly defended. Nomads regularly wintered on the San Su/Bathys, a tributary of the Sakarya, and in the spring of 1198 Alexius III Angelus led troops from Iznik/Nicaea and Bursa in a vain attempt to prevent their raiding the upper reaches of the river and descending from the plateau. The plains here average 1000 meters in elevation and were long a fvored summer grazing area, or yaylik, for pastoral nomads. In the 1830s Hamilton, a careful observer, noted the frequency of their camps on the river banks and throughout the Haymana, the plain southwest of Ankara. When the sons of Kilij Arslan II, the victor of Myriocephalon, partitioned his legacy, Mesud received Eskisehir, Ankara, and points west, along with lands in Paphlagonia and the Pontus. The Turks now had a foothold in Bithynia.
The advance of the nomads and their activities, pastoralism and predation were based on economic and ecological need. Sheep and goat husbandry in the valleys was much warmer and safer in winter than weathering the uncertain frosts of plateau elevations. In order to maximize grazing opportunities and minimize herd losses, good herding strategy led to the infiltration of the better, if Byzantine, farmland for pasture. As a Greek author put it, " . . . because of grassy meadows the whole race invades the borders of the Romans." The predation of which the Byzantines complained had little to do with political or religious animosities. Predatory acts are a natural accompaniment to nomadic life. Cereals, manufactures, and the work of skilled artisans, all are difficult for pastoralists to produce by themselves. Pastoralism is not a self-sufficient mode of adaptation. Many commodities must be gotten from settled society through one form of economic exchange or another. Predation is a normal and inexpensive means for nomads to obtain necessities or desired goods which the pastoral round does not produce. It became an exceptionally inexpensive means when Byzantine defenses were weak. As such, predation may be viewed as the logical extension of the hunt. The Fourth Crusade, the loss of Constantinople, and the foundation of the Latin Empire constrained the Byzantines to devote considerable energy to Anatolia and the eastern extremities of their former state. The Lascarid emperors, first at Nicaea, then (for the remainder of their Anatolian exile) at Nif/Nymphaeum in the southwest, attended to the economic, military, and physical reconstruction of west Anatolia below the plateau in order to finance their European campaigns and threats against Constantinople. They meant to revive Anatolia, but for the sake of Constantinople. They wanted Anatolia to prosper, but only so they could leave it. The agricultural prosperity achieved during the half-century of Lascarid rule centered in the south, in the valleys of the Gediz and Menderes rivers. The silk production of Nicaea was Bithynia's major contribution. John Ill Ducas Vatatzes (1222-1254) fostered a more intensive exploitation of farm resources in the lands surrounding Manisa/Magnesia. His egg ranch is perhaps best known for the crown its profits bought. During his reign, the state obtained hard currency by selling commodities to the Seljuk Turks for gold and luxury goods. At the same time, the gold content in the coinage fell to sixteen carats. The revenues in gold were spent on the objects of Lascarid foreign policy rather than for bolstering the fineness of the coinage.
The Lascarid military might rested on the shoulders of two categories of men: holders of pronoiai or "fiefs" and border guards, akrltai. Information concerning the pronoiai derives largely from the Lembiotissa monastic documents, which only cover the neighborhood of Izmir. While there is no surviving record of pronoiai in Bithynia, although some were presumably granted there, the military organization of the south, around Izmir, is much clearer. Theodore I Lascaris confiscated lands of the Latin-held Constantinopolitan churches and transformed them into pronoiai for his high officials. These large holdings were to produce incomes appropriate to the rank and responsibilities of his councillors. Later, John III created pronoiai of more modest extent, termed stratiotikai pronoai, whose beneficiaries owed military service. These small holdings supplied manpower for a large army. For example, Vatatzes granted some of these farms in Phrygia to Cumans from Europe. Decentralization and thrift were essential features of this extension of the pronoiai. The larger grants, to the aristocracy, bore rights of inheritance. Pronoiars dealt directly with the peasants who owed them dues epiteleia) and services (ongareia, douleia). The pronoiars appointed managers for their new lands in place of the imperial officials. While imperial revenues diminished, administrative expenses dropped accordingly.
The akritai or frontier warriors dotted border stations along the ridges from the south up into Bithynia. Some of their leaders held imperial diplomas and pronoiai. The akritai were exempt from taxation and enjoyed full disposition of booty won in raids on the plateau. Little is certain about these borderers. They were left to fend for themselves in the expectation that they would keep the Seljuks away, or, at least, occupied defending their own settlements. Unfortunately, the loyalty of the akritai was assumed, not earned. Freebooters, they found no difficulty in switching sides when more promising opportunities beckoned. The Nicene military did a creditable job of preserving order inside the borders. The success of the army against the Latins and other Byzantine competitors in Europe implies that the extension of pronoia grants secured its purpose. There were no complaints against the akritai. The eastern front calmed down. When the Seljuks campaigned, they chose to annex the routes leading due north and south rather than to contend with the Lascarids for the Aegean littoral. So for much of the Nicene era, Seljuk expansion was limited to the north and south coasts (especially Cilicia), while after the Mongols imposed their protectorate in 1243, the Seljuks were in no condition to expand at all. Taking quick advantage of this weakness, independent tribal turbulence was directed against the Seljuks much more than against the periphery of the plateau. Good examples are the early raids of the house of Karaman on the Seljuk capital, Konya/Iconium. In short, Lascarid Anatolia lived at peace.
Besides undertaking economic and militarv measures to strengthen their state, the Lascarids were active in monumental reconstruction. Bithynian evidence comes from the reports of the German excavations in Nicaea. Theodore I Lascaris constructed an outer wall for the city just beyond the main walls, and he repaired the broken sections of the main walls. Vatatzes contitlued work on the outer walls. Within the walls, new buildings included a hospital, an elementary school, the patriarchal residence (although the emperors had moved to Nymphaeum, the patriarchs remained in Nicaea), a church in honor of St. Anthony (a local martyr), and perhaps a church dedicated to the archangel Michael. An inscription also states that Theodore I refortified Bursa. Excavations and literary monuments confirm similar building, as well as artistic, programs elsewhere in the state.
Reduced to western Anatolia, the Lascarid enterprise sought renovation and recovery. It is difficult to judge how deep the broad measures of two generations reached. Certainly most of the monuments bearing Nicene additions preserve little trace of such upkeep during the preceding centuries. From the Persian invasions of the seventh century up to the Lascarids' resuscitation, there were no such building programs in the area. The majority of the monuments restored during those centuries are Roman or late antique.
The point of this excursus on the Lascarid era is to demonstrate that two generations of Anatolian Byzantines hcome to expect good goveFnment and economic stability from their rulers. For those born in the 1240s and 1250s, every expectation of continuing and improving upon their parents' prosperity seemed justified. The denial of their expectations, of what they considered to be no more than their just due and the traditional order; would damage their loyalties much more than it would the loyalties of those who had lived through harder times. And yet the reigns of Michael VIII and Andronicus II dashed just those comfortable illusions of the generation born during the 1240s. I contend that the Anatolian Byzantine acceptance of Ottoman rule, and indeed occasional cooperation in that enterprise, finds its best explanation in the history not only of Palaeologan misrule, but especially in the history of that misrule framed against the dim memory of Lascarid prosperity.
Michael VIII Palaeologus, who usurped the Byzantine throne in 1258, found himself in possession of a pacific Anatolian domain. Its frontier began on the Black Sea east of Amasra/Amastris, cut west to the Sakarya, followed the line of the plateau, excluding Eskisehir and Kutahya, and then ran south over the Carian highlands to the Dalaman Cay/Indus on the Aegean. On Michael's accession there was peace in the east. After the recovery of Constantinople, however, he neglected and even antagonized his Anatolian subjects at a time when Turkish tribesmen and Seljuk successors were beginning to look west to their fortunes, away from the increasingly threatening Mongols.
Michael was no stranger to the Turks and their capabilities. In 1256 he had fled to the Seljuk court for refuge from Lascarid suspicions and had served Konya as head of the contingent of foreign soldiers. On the way across the frontier zone east of Nicaea nomads had ambushed him. The Byzantine chronicler Acropolites described his captors. The Turkmen, according to him, lie in ambush on the farthest frontiers of the Seljuks. Filled with irreconcilable hatred against the Romans, they take pleasure in looting them and seizing booty. Acropolites notes also that at the time Michael passed they were particularly rapacious, for Mongol pressure had set many tribes in motion. Such Mongol pressure exerted a number of times in the years of Michael's youth and adulthood, had a decisive effect on the size of the nomadic population at the western edge of the plateau. In the 1230s the Mongols had assigned four tumens, each of which contained ten thousand men, to pasture in Azerbaijan. Their apparition brought some 200,000 people and the equivalent of three or four million sheep and goats, who displaced the nomads already there and pressed them westward. It is no surprise that from 1239-1240 central Anatolia suffered from the series of nomad risings known as the Baba'i revolt. The Seljuks barely managed to put down the nomads before succumbing themselves in defeat to Mongol arms in 1243. Later on in the 1250s the Mongols forced the Seljuks to allow more tumens into Anatolia, and these newcomers forced yet another stream of refugees westward. The same Mongol pressure on the Seljuks in 1277 brought still more nomads west. An Arab geographer, writing in mid-century, describes the results: some 30,000 tents of nomads in the mountains of Gerede Bolu, east of the Sakarya, and another 100,000 tents near Kastamonu. Thus, in search of pasture, unsure of their proper niche in their new home on the Bithynian frontier, the Turkmen were even more dependent on predation for survival and well-being.
What Acropolites terms irreconcilable hated was in fact nomadic necessity, cupidity rather than loathing. In any event, the nomads robbed Michael of his belongings and held him until he got a message to Konya. The sultan freed Michael but was unable to recover his possessions. We do not know what Michael made of this experience. After the recovery of Constantinople, however, he saw the main foreign threat as western and his actions reflected this concern. At the moment when pressure on nomads on the plateau was increasing their numbers just east of the Sakarya, Byzantium was ruled by a man who was destined to fulfil the Lascarids' Constantinopolitan dream and ignore their Anatolian successes. The generation of the 1240s paid the price and learned a new lesson.
Anatolian discontent with Michael began with his usurpation, which brought on him opposition from the Arsenite faction in the church, a loose grouping supposed to have been strong in Anatolia. Michael, in turn, sought the support of his fellow aristocrats, in this case at the expense of the small holder and soldier on the land. He recalled troops serving in Anatolia to deploy them in the Balkans. Future Anatolian operations were undertaken by expeditions from Europe, not by local garrisons. To the populace, then, Byzantine military responses were tardy and manned by soldiers sharing no ties with, and perhaps little care for, the land and citizens to be protected. The military forces on the borders, the akritai, lost their privileges and many consequently deserted. In 1265 Michael confiscated lands held from the state by some akritai and replaced their revenues with a pension of forty hyperpyra. He also tried to enrole the akritai in the regular army. His brother John persuaded him to reconsider, but the akritai were not convinced of their emperor's good intentions.
In dealing with his Anatolian subjects Michael showed less concern for defense and security than for political and personal loyalty, which always came first as !ong as the Arsenites seemed to pose a threat. In 1261 or 1262 some of the residents of the high ridge northeast of Nicaea, and in particular the keepers of the fort Tricoccia, recognized as their emperor a supposed son of Theodore Lascaris. Michael dispatched troops to return them to obedience. In order to strip the mountaineers of their cover the troops burned the surrounding forests. Those who did not immediately make their peace had to pay heavy fines.The contemporary chronicler Pachymeres claims that the imperial officers wanted to expel the rebels from the country, an action which would have even further denuded the passes to the plateau of defenders. Loyalty, then, bought freedom from imperial persecution, but it was not sufficient to procure from Constantinople an adequate border defense.
The impact of the withdrawal of defense forces from the frontiers was palpable. On 23 February 1265 the unfounded rumor swept through Nicaea that the Mongols were at hand. Panic ensued, and those who were able are said to have fled to Constantinople. This hysterical episode was a rnanifestation of fears which the chroniclers lamented at length and connected with a slow steady rnigration of Byzantine subjects to Europe. The size of this migration cannot be gauged. It would have a depressing effect on the morale andi expectations of those who remained.
Mongol pressure on central Anatolia, and a falling-out among the Seljuk princes, increased the danger in the west. Michael took this as an opportunity to enlist Turks in his service. Pachymeres gives a picture of the frontier chaos in the 1260s. According to Pachymeres, some persons called tent-dwellers, who found the idea of government odious, desired independence. They attacked the Byzantine forts. Some, recognizing the danger of an open attack, joined with the emperor. Others waited nights in ambush and plundered Byzantine property. In the end, says Pachymeres, the damage was not so great, since "our own" did the same sort of thing. There was considerable local collaboration with the Turks.
.These comments are precious. After the Mongols usurped pastures in the east, numerous nomads shifted west. Some of them found their way to Bithynia. They sought easy pickings from the Byzantine frontier stations, but, as nomads without mechanical engineers and as pastoralists governed by the necessity of periodic moves to new pastures, they could not undertake siege warfare. Some, ignoring differences of cult and culture, became mercenaries for Byzantium. Others turned to canonical nomad tactics to extract a living from the countryside. They were not alone. Were "our own" the disaffected akritai? Loyalties, in Bithynia, were founded increasingly on mutual advan- tage rather than on competing ideologies. All the ingredients for a tribe were present, save only one -- the chief. The results were predictable. By 1269 travelers could no longer reach Pontic Heraclea overland in safety, thanks to the Turkish nests along the Sakarya. The town was accessible by sea alone. The Turkish occupation of the lower Sakarya implies that by ca. 1280 the Turks had broken through the network of castles erected by the later Comneni.
During the last two years of his reign, freed at last by the Sicilian Vespers from fear of an invasionbaeAnjou, Michael turned his attention to Asia Minor. Once again the Byzantine goal was to defend the routes down from the plateau. In 1282 Michael's son Andronicus led a force up the Maeander to rebuild and resettle Aydm/Tralles. He planned to create a large and prosperous city, and a friendly estimate of the population of his new foundation endows this "Andronicopolis" with 36,000 residents. When Andronicus departed without engaging the Turks in the surrounding countryside, they cut the water supply and forced the city's prompt capitulation.
Failure also marked Michael's own effort in Bithynia. There, frontier garrisons which had not received their wages left their posts. In early 1282 Turks on the lower Sakarya had already repelled Byzantine troops. Michael's expedition took the field late in the summer. He advanced up.the Sakarya east of Nicaea and was soon surrounded by the desolation which his western concerns had crowded out of his mind. He was unable to catch the Turks. There were very few people tilling the soil, and it was difficult to provide even the coarsest of bread for the soldiers. A mute witness, samples of the bread, the brown harvest of Michael's hopes blasted, was sent to Constantinople. The emperor turned back, marched west of Bursa, and fortified the cities of Achyraous and Ulubad/Lopadion. Michael's resolve to protect these cities, far below the plateau, distant from the Sakarya, reveals the collapse of the frontier defenses. After Michael's death late in 1282, many of those still living near the Sakarya and some of the troops enrolled there quit their stations and crossed to Europe. Marino Sanudo summed up Michael's campaigns with the lament that he " . . . abandoned the custody of one of his provinces, the best and most powerful, which was called Paphlagonia and which was taken by the Turks...."
During the long reign of Andronicus II, Michael's son and successor, the Byzantine chroniclers found more cause to lament lost Anatolia. To their plaints we may add the letters of Athanasius I, Patriarch of Constantinople. Athanasius was concerned about the state of the church in the east, and he described its travails in much the same fashion as the chroniclers Pachymeres, his contemporary, and Gregoras, who was a young adult at the turn of the century.
Andronicus did not dispatch troops to Asia Minor until 1290. However, a letter of 1285 or 1286 from Patriarch Gregory II proves that danger had already touched Bursa. Andronicus had imposed a fine on the city, and the patriarch had received complaints of its severity. He advised Andronicus of the difficulty in raising such a large sum, as the nearby Turks would remain a threat to the city's prosperity and, if there were no resources left locally, might bring about its ruin. Gregory claimed that the proposed fine of 600 hyperpyra was excessive: 300 would be quite enough. For the sake of comparison, the proposed pension to be granted the akfftai of Asia Minor under Michael VIII in the 1260s had been forty hyperpyra each. Bursa's commerce and the silk trade must have been languishing indeed, if a single levy of 600 hyperpyra was considered a crushing blow. More than sporadic raids themselves, constant fear of raids must have affected planting and the harvests and thus eroded the Bursan economy. A high fine combined with low income could only lead the Bursans to wonder how they might find a protector.
Andronicus spent the years from 1290 to 1293 in Anatolia arranging defenses. He went to Bithynia and examined the fortified keeps near the Sakarya. He then turned west to Nicaea and Lopadion. After lengthy stays in these two cities he moved south to Nymphaeum, where he passed two years in the former Lascarid capital. He concerned himself with the cities and their security, if not with their provisioning. He made no sorties into the countryside, and the chroniclers do not record any encounters with Turkish forces. Aydm/Tralles, his showpiece, had already fallen.
The intimate relationship between rural security and a city's food supply may have become clearer to Arldronicus while he traveled in Anatolia, for he took hesitant steps to defend the peasants. In 1277 a certain Lachanes had rebelled without success against Michael VIII. In his turn Andronicus put down the revolt of a man claiming to be Lachanes redivivus. This Pseudo-Lachanes, however, seemed able to inspire men, and so in early 1294 Andronicus sent him to the Sakarya frontier to help the peasants. They welcomed him, many abandoning their holdings to join his militia. As this army and the prestige of its leader grew, Andronicus for his part grew concerned about its potential for revolt. He recalled Pseudo-Lachanes and jailed him. While Pseudo-Lachanes was enjoying too much support in the north, in 1293 Andronicus sent Alexius Philanthropenus, a soldier with much experience (but also with Arsenite connections), to the south to secure the Maeander. Philanthropenus successfully protected Miletus from Turkish bands, securing booty in gold, silver, sheep- and donkey-skins. His accomplishments, and his generosity to his enemies in victory, won over some Turks, who formed a separate corps among his men. His soldiers and the populace he was protecting rose in revolt in 1294 under his banner: to the farmers he represented a blow against high taxes, and to the Turks (in my view) he was a successful (tribal?) chief. Andronicus and his advisors had to rely on deceit to put down the revolt and, in late 1295, imprison and blind its leader. These two episodes il!ustrate the failure of the Byzantine army to meet the threats of the daIt was indeed weak if any appealing field commander, such as Philanthropenus or even Pseudo-Lachanes, could so easily raise a potential threat to the regime. The imperial concern meant that none of the armed forces operating on the frontiers could be allowed such strength. Loyal or not, the peasants had to bear the consequences of their emperor's fears.
Andronicus again marched forth for the east in late May 1296. After a series of earthquakes ( 1 June - 17 July) which he interpreted as an admonitory omen he gave up the campaign. Two years later, general John Tarchaneiotes went south, and in another attempt to rebuild the local armed forces he equalized the size of soldiers' holdings so that all could afford to serve. Unwilling donors among the larger pronoiars and the bishop of Alasehir/-Philadelphia turned against him and secured his recall in the summer of 1299.
These efforts betray lack of care, resources, and consistency. A piecemeal restructurmg of mlhtary holdings occurred only once and was soon abandoned. Farming in Bithynia continued, but its comparative advantage over predation was slight, to judge by the farms abandoned in favor of service under Pseudo-Lachanes. Military leaders left behind no replacement. There is no evidence of any imperial policy other than fear of revolt and poorly- financed, badly-managed expediency. Perhaps there was no money left. Perhaps, also, there was no consuming or continuing interest in the east.
In 1301 a mass of "Alan" families from the Balkans estimated at 8,000 men with an equal number of dependents sought refuge on Byzantine soil. In 1302 Andronicus determined to send them to Anatolia. Michael IX, Andronicus' son, led some of the Alans to the south to dislodge Turks from Manisa/Magnesia. This southern prong of the campaign failed, and the Alans were transported back to Thrace.82 Mouzalon, the commander at Izmit/-Nicomedia, took other Alans in his charge. Once across the Bosphorus, however, they began looting and had to be subdued. Mouzalon had another struggle that summer. ILutside Nicomedia and Mouzalon went forth to confront them. Their chief was a certain Osman.
* * * *
It is now time to cross the frontier and examine the Turkish setting for early Ottoman history. So far, the Byzantine failure to protect Bithynia, and the discontent felt by Anatolian subjects at their emperor's heedlessness, have been the main themes of the exposition. I have been preparing the ground for a claim, which I shall elaborate upon shortly, that some of the Byzantines joined Osman's tribe. Now, however, it is necessary to look at the beginnings of that,' tribe from the Turkish perspective.
At this point it is no longer possible to ignore the Ottoman chronicles. They display a tempting panorama of personal glory and institutional success extending from the thirteenth century through the era of the Conqueror. To the eye of a medieval historian their smooth, clean surface shines with the light of Einhard's life of Charlemagne. Behind the sheen lie the questioning shadows that cannot be scrubbed away: how much of this is Einhard, Suetonius, Charlemagne? Before us the chronicles play a karagoz, a shadow-play. The high quality of the performance ought not to divert us from seeking a glance behind the curtain at the puppeteer and his patron, the puppet- master.
Aware of discrepancies among their sources, realizing that thirteenth century fact did not square with fifteenth century romance, the Ottoman chroniclers hastened to devise a story harmonizing the discordant notes. To be a chronicler at court was also to be an amanuensis, of course. Sometimes a chronicler saw the Ottoman enterprise as an eternal structure, whose fifteenth century institutions had existed in Osman's day. Such cleansing and polishing to reflect the imperial ideology has resulted in the extant texts.
The study of these chronicles is therefore to be conducted with an attitude of suspicion, shunning the smooth and flowing account, embracing the "lectio difficilior." The incongruous, the unexpected statement, by its very clash, may reveal an older tradition truer to past life than to present ideology. Thus, as a historian of medieval Europe has characterized similar material, "We may take it as an axiom of historiography that in source-materials of this age and kind a good, glaring contradiction is worth a square yard of smooth, question-begging consistency." This does not reflect a perverse love of the outre. It took the entire fifteenth century for the Ottoman orthodoxy to emerge, and the stages of the Ottomans' "recovery" of their past remain in the early chronicles. Passages which conflict with that orthodoxy should a fortiori reect an earlier memory. The following analysis thus explicitly rests in part on material which the received tradition, ungrateful descendant, has denied.
Very little may be advanced with certainty about Osman's ancestors. The Ottomans claimed that they entered Asia Minor as nomads, displaced by the Mongols and seeking new pastures. Their family claimed descent from the Oguz Turks through a line which, as we have seen, Ottoman chroniclers had some difficulty clarifying in the fifteenth century. Towards the middle of the thirteenth century they found themselves in the mountains near Ankara Some decided to turn back east, others to go south towards Cilicia, while yet another group banded together about Ergrul. Osman's father. The families with Ertogrul are generally held to have entered Seljuk service not in the regular army, but as nomad raiders. The chronicle of Karamani Mehmet PaSa, composed in the sultanate of Mehmet II, claims that Ertogrul's father had already fought independently against the Byzantines. Ertogrul received pasture rights in return for his services.
All the chroniclers are agreed about the ancestral pastures of the Ottomans, and a brief discussion of their geographical setting will place some of our later conclusions upon a firmer footing. The winter pastures (klslak) lay in the vale of Sogut, a fertile glen Iying on the most direct route linking Bilecik/Belocome and Eskisehir. Summer pasture (yaylak) lay in the mountains of Ermeni Beli ("Armenian" Pass) and Domanic, southeast of the Bithynian Olympus and west of Eskisehir. The route up country from winter to summer pastures passed by Bilecik, Yarhisar, and Inegol on the way to Domanic. The heights range from 1500 to 2000 meters, and the vertical range between winter and summer pastures was therefore some 1000 to 1500 meters. The migration was relatively short: from the Sakarya below Sogut to the slopes southwest of Bozuyuk is perhaps fifty kilometers, and from the same departure point to Domanic no more than one hundred. The herds probably took no more than ten days to cover this distance. Thus the Ottoman tradition here makes geographical and pastoral sense. We will return to this geographical setting later and analyze its economic import, for later developments demonstrated that this land was simply too good for pastoralism.
Not all the Ottoman traditions involving Ertogrul inspire such confidence. He is said to have impressed the Seljuk Sultan with his performance at the siege of Karacahisar. His men were assigned the southern watch over against the walls. An invasion of central Anatolia by the Mongols, however called away the Seljuks, who entrusted Ertogrul with the siege. He took the fort by storm and proceeded to other raids against Byzantine holdings in the area.90 The difficulty with this inspiring tale is that, as we noted earlier, Eskisehir had been in Muslim hands since the beginning of the thirteenth century, and Karacahisar lies a few kilometers southwest. Thus, the story appears to be a fabrication. Either it was devised from whole cloth to advance Ertogrul at the expense of the Seljuks, or it is a post-dated, revised version of the story of the fall of Dorylaeum and its environs to the Turks nearly a century before. Again, if Karacahisar was in fact the proto-Ottomans' first conquest, it must have been achieved at the expense of the Muslim Germiyan. he sources then mention that Ertogrul died soon thereafter. The traveler may see a tomb assigned to him at Sogut.
No source provides a firm and factual recounting of the deeds of Osman's father. The figure of Ertogrul, however, served the chroniclers well. They had him bring the family to the Byzantine borders, and they made him careful enough to find a Seljuk sanction for his presence. This sanction did not lead to dependence, for Erogrul's success was attained outside the shadow of the Sultan, who left the field for Ertogrul to celebrate the victory. All of this is smooth and attractive; none of it, unfortunately, allows of proof at the moment, but it would be surprising if Ertogrul were to be as significant in Ottoman history as he was useful in Ottoman historiography. The simple matter of dynastic attribution reinforces the suspicions about Osman's father, since the dynasty is not his but Osman's, as the term "Ottoman" tells us. The Ottomans impressed enemies, as well as enemy chroniclers, and gained followers in Osman's time and in his name, so it is with him that Ottoman history begins.
While Osman's father remains a shadowy figure, who left so few traces that later Ottoman ideologists could freely enlarge his deeds to fit the magnitude of their preconceptions, Osman is real and palpable.Orkhan, his son and successor, refe}red to him on inscriptions and coins, and the contemporary Byzantine chronicler Pachymeres wrote of him. Nonetheless, his own dates and the sequence of his deeds remain to be clarified. It would, for instance, be very helpful to know just how Osman came to power.
The late fifteenth-century Anonymous Chronicles claimed that Osman "took Ertogrul's place" and became deputy (kaymakam) for his father's lands. A number of questions immediately arise from this statement. Who appointed Osman as deputy? And whose deputy was he? Our source is silent, for good reason, it attributes to the thirteenth century an Ottoman administrative organization which did not arise for another century. Neither the Seljuks, nor the Bithynians, nor the nomads had such an of fice. In the age of the Anonymous, however, the past was perceived as embryo of the present, and events had to fit a recognizable, legitimized and eternal framework. The Anonymous knew, then, that something had lifted Osman out of obscurity, but he was less interested in reporting the past than foreseeing the present in it.
The chronicle of Karamani Mehmet Pasa gave a fuller, more studied account. Here Ertogrul, having performed many feats of war against the Byzantines, died at the advanced age of 93. Osman succeeded his father and became Sultan in 699/1299-1300. The Seljuk Suitan, his neighbor to the southeast, sent him worthy gifts, symbols of authority, a,nd exhorted Osman to persevere in the Holy War. When it is not in obvious error, this account is as anachronistic as it is picturesque. The symbols of authority became a feature of Ottoman ceremonial only much later. As for their donor, no Seljuk Sultan could authorize a ruler's accession at the turn of the fourteenth century, as the Seljuks were themselves under notice of eviction. Not a late Seljuk but his Mongol overlord should have granted Osman his license. To pardonable errors of history Mehmet Pasa added slips of sense. Involving another dynasty granted the Ottomans a legitimate succession, but terming Osman Sultan to avoid the implication of dependence strains the reader's credence. Sultans may be pleased to appoint emirs, but they do not create rival Sultans. Sukrullah, writiing in the 1450s, recounted the same story, but the copyist of the Vienna manuscript could not resist setting down his, and our own, reservations at the end, "God knows best."
Other sources, however, cast clearer light on the problem of Osman's accession. Commenting on the traditional date of 1299-1300, Mahmud Beyati's short essay on Ottoman genealogy remarks that by then the fall of the house of Seljuk had been accomplished. The death of the last Seljuk, Ala ed-Din Keyqubad III, had brought confusion to the affairs of the sultanate, and so the frontier ghazis chose Osman as their Sultan. One element at least of Mahmud's tale is faulty, for Ala ed-Din died sometime after 1300. What then of his claim that Osman came to power by election? It is significant that Mahmud composed his work in 1481, the year of Mehmet II's death. A struggle for the throne ensued between Mehmet's sons, Cem and Bayezid II and this contest was in the wind as Mahmud wrote. His work is dedicated to Cem, who lost the protracted struggle. Mahmud may have presented Osman's election to the sultanate by frontier ghazis as a historical parallel to and sanction for the support of Cem by his partisans and thus opposed it to that of Bayezid II, the choice of bureaucrats and janissaries. Osman's election, then would be merely a historiographical calque on the present.
Yet Mahmud's account finds independent corroboration in Aslkpasa- zade, who writes that at Sogut "they" (the pronoun has no referent) found Osman suited to succeed his father. Now, the choice of events to recount in Asikpasazade, their order, and also their dates, are sufficiently unlike those in Mahmud's essay to preclude borrowing or a common source. On the other hand, it is true that Aslkpasazade used his chronicle, as did Joinville, to direct barbs at Bayezid lI's tax collectors. But this particular passage is not contaminated by Asikpasazade's preferences, and it is also true that he had no stake in the Cem-Bayezid war, which had ended as he was writing. Further this episode in Asikpasazade has no parallel in the text of the Anonymous Chronicles. Passages which are not shared by the Anonymous are probably derived from Aslkpasazade's early source, the tales of Yahsi Fakih, which he read in 1413. These tales themselves go back to Orkhan's reign, so they represent a layer of the Ottoman historiographical onion considerably closer to the core than the other versions.
We have further evidence for an elective chieftaincy among the early Ottomans. In the 1420s Yazlcloglu Ali reworked the Persian chronicle of the Seljuks by Ibn Bibi into Turkish, and in the process he added certain items about Osman's early days. One is a passage describing the nomads' election of Osman as their chief. Although laden with romantic verbiage, the essence of the tale, that Osman was elected chief, is worth serious consideration. There is, finally, another independent version of Osman's election. Occasionally the chronicle of Nesri provides material from Bursan sources whose memories have not found their way into other chronicles. One of Nesri's independent Bursan sources related the aftermath of Ertogrul's death: some of the nomad tents wanted to make Osman their chief, while others preferred his uncle Dundar. But his own family preferred Osman: they informed him in secret and they all consulted. When Dundar came before the people and saw their preference for Osman, he gave up his hopes for the chieftaincy and swore allegiance to Osman. There are, then, grounds for belief that at the end of the thirteenth century the chieftainship of the Ottomans was elective. Not necessarily the eldest or youngest son but the son best equipped for leadership in the eyes of the community received its support.
None of this should seem strange or anachronistically "democratic," for an elected chieftaincy is standard among the nomads of Inner Asian and Turkish history. The ablest candidate gathers followers by his deeds; if none of the close relatives of the deceased chief seem able to protect and further the interests of the tribesmen, an outside candidate may emerge, or the tribesmen may choose to join another tribe. The tribesmen vote in the most basic manner, with their feet. On the other hand, they may gravitate to that pretender, be he Osman or Dundar, whose effective exercise of authority . makes him a successful candidate. As tribesmen themselves put it, "the horse feels the rider's thigh." The chronicles' evidence for Osman's election as leader is, in this light, excellent evidence for viewing the earliest Ottoman institution as a tribe.
The chronology of Osman's activities until 1302 cannot be accurately determined. He and his men were in a geographical position to carry out the raids attributed by Byzantine authors to Turks in Bithynia. The Turkish chronicles recount sufficient numbers of tales, and folk tales, of ambush and combat to satisfy the Byzantine moralists and fulfil the need for a heroic Ottoman past. But the Turkish sources also contain hints and allusions about the processes afoot in frontier society which help to define the nature of Osman's support and clarify his relations with his neighbors.
These hints and allusions about Osman and his nomads deal more with predation than with pastoralism. Both of these activities have been staples of nomadic life in the past. The mix of the two has varied in response to the changing comparative strengths of sedentary and nomadic societies. When sedentary society is weak, nomads may prefer to extort, rather than pay for, agricultural products and luxury manufactures. When, as in modern times, the military resources of settled governments predominate, nomads are forced to rely on pastoralism and the patrolled marketplace for their livelihoods. The questions facing Osman were therefore the perennial ones for nomads on the move: on what options would they rely, and in what proportions? Or should they settle?
Others, of course, saw predation in a different light. Such raids might seem to some heroic, or to others inspired by zeal for the true faith, or to yet others grounded in sheer malevolence, but the acts themselves were identical. Only the labels changed, to protect the historians, not the nomads. The point is worth elaborating because, as we have seen earlier, the later Ottoman authors term Osman and his followerc hazis, raiders in the Holy War. I have already suggested that this was not the nomenclature of Osman's time. Ibn Battuta and al-Umari, whose information derives from the early 1 330s, used the term neither for Osman nor for his son Orkhan. On the other hand, some of Osman's comrades-bore the title "alp," for example Gunduz Alp, Hasan Alp, Turgud Alp. The alp or alp-eren was the heroic figure of old Turkic saga, the warrior-adventurer whose exploits alone justified his way of life. For men who thought themselves cast in such a mold, predation had an appeal, not for a rehglous justification but for booty and the exhilaration of combat. Since the predation would be largely directed against Byzantines, the actions of a nomad would easily be transmuted by some into the heroics of an alp and by others into the religious feats of the ghazi. Only the label would change. This view makes it easier to understand some of the texts. For example, according to Asikpasazade, after succeeding Ertogrul Osman began to hunt in remote and far-away places. Kose Mihal, the Byzantine lord of Harman Kaya, always accompanied him. Osman was not the only Ottoman with Christian allies and friends, for his colleague Samsa Cavus also had friendly relations with Byzantines in his neighborhood. I think it clear that Osman's own entourage was, from a religious point of view, heterogeneous. The common interests of these "strangers" bound them together and allowed Kose Mihal to join the tribe. It is important to keep in mind that such a "multi-ethnic" phenomenon is not the exception in tribal formation and growth, as the quick accretion of disparate elements to the Huns or the Mongols shows. Common mterest, be it in politics, predation, pasture, or simple survival, was at the heart of the Ottoman (and every other) tribe.
How did Osman stand with his Christian neihbors when he was neither hunting nor campaigning? Asikpasazade calls the relationship one of friendship or, with fifteenth-century hindsight, feigned friendship. Popular Byzantine response determined the extent of the friendship. Even were this unfavorable, the Turkish reprisals were modest. On one occasion the Turks are said to have taken booty but no prisoners in order to earn respect. When the farmers submitted to Osman's chieftaincy, he left them in their former tenures and status. Symbiosis followed. We learn that the Byzantine lord of Inegol was harassing Osman's movements from winter to summer pastures. To ease the journey and increase his mobility, Osman arranged to leave heavy goods with the Byzantine lord of Bilecik for safekeeping when his families were on the march. The women loaded their belongings on oxen and placed them in the citadel of Bilecik. When they returned in the fall, they offered cheese, carpetin, rus and sheep as payment. This became a routine arranement. Kose Mihal became a close and trusted friend to Osman. We learn that Osman set up a market place in Eskisehir near a bath, and Christians from Bilecik came there to sell water glasses, for which Bilecik was known. Even when these Christians had complaints against Muslims, Osman gave them justice. We may say that as a tribal chief, an acted as a fulcrom or mediator, protecting the rights of "ethnically and ecologically diverse groups. Acting to keep the peace arid to help his tribesmen prosper, the chief renders himself indispensable; and if he succeeds, his tribe grows.
While Osman and his Byzantine neighbors were beginning to perceive their common interests, hostility arose between Osman and his Muslim neighbors to the southwest, the emirs of Germiyan, whose headquarters were at Kutahya. Except for an episode in the last half of the 1280s the emirs of Germiyan had been Seljuk allies, and they seem to have inherited some of the Seljuk pretensions to authority, weak though it may have been, over the marches. It is my belief that the enmity between the Ottomans and Germiyan goes back to the Ottoman seizure of Karacahisar, to which I have already alluded. It also seems that Germiyan favored harsher treatment of the Byzantines than did Osman. Under these conditions, living with hostile neighbors to the south and threatening Mongols to the east, Osman's interest in co-existence with the relatively weak Byzantines makes sense. Some of these Byzantines found him a promising leader and they joined the tribe, becoming his followers, or Osmanlis.
* * * *
. ; We may now rejoin Mouzalon and his troops at Bapheus, outside Izmit, on 27 July 1302. The positions of the Byzantines and Ottomans at this moment were not to be envied. Mouzalon needed to clear the Ottomans away so that the harvest could proceed, while the Byzantines within the city walls were becoming more and more restive. for without the benefit of the harvest their lives would han in the balance during the coming winter. Mouzalon may also have been worried about the possibility of the city's population going over to Osman in order to obtain peace. Oe other hand, the Ottoman campaign in the coastal lowlands was also a.matter of necesslty. Spring flooding of the Sakarya and its tributaries, thanks to a series of violent storms, had devastated the higher valleys and washed away much vegetation: such a spring deluge had ruined the crops in 1282 and remains a problem for the Bithynian peasant in our own day. Thus, a wet spring had ruined the crops in the vale of Sogut and the high valleys near Bilecik. The same rains and floods also wrought havoc on the pastoral base of Osman's nomads. for the bad weather coincided with the lambing season, decimating the newborn. In the summer of 1302, then, pastoralism could not support the Ottomans, so they took to predation. Domanic may have been denuded, but Izmit was fruitful. It appears from the account of Pachymeres that the Alan mercenaries with Mouzalon decided the battle in Osman's favor: first, because they stood apart and seemed to misunderstand Mouzalon's plans in the early part of the encounter, and last, when Alan reinforcements covered the Byzantine retreat from an Ottoman cavalry charge. Bapheus proved that Osman could and did look out for the interests of his followers, while it cast doubt once again on Constantinople's ability to reward the loyalty of its subjects.
Thus, both northern and southern prongs of the Byzantine campaign of 1302 had failed of their purpose. The immediate effect in Bithynia was the capitulation of many leaders to Osman, who became their lord and allowed them to retain their lands and perquisites. Bilecik became Osman's within two years. The larger cities held out: their high, heavy walls, which the Lascarids had prudently repaired, could easily withstand the light arms of the Ottoman forces. A flow of refugees from the countryside into the cities and across the straits to Constantinople grew in 1302-1303.
Andronicus did not raise an army for further campaigning.l30 He turned to diplomacy. Some time before May 1304, he attempted to bring Mongol pressure to bear on the Anatolian emirs through an embassy to Ghazan Khan in Tabriz and, after Ghazan's death, to his successor Uljaytu. The llkhans, recent converts to Islam, did not accept the offer of a marriage alliance as inducement sufficient for a Mongol attack against the west. Andronicus also made arrangements with a certain Kocabahsi, a former official of the Mongol Golden Horde, who was to win the emir of Kastamonu in Paphlagonia over to the Byzantines through a marriage alliance. Kocabahsi was then to replace Mouzalon at Nicomedia. None of these strategems bore fruit. Diplomatic pressure brought no respite from the Ottomans.
The military sequel indicates that Andronicus was concerned more with the south than with the advance of Osman. In 1303 Andronicus hired the Catalan Company under its famous leader, Roger de Flor. The Catalans were retained to cross over to Anatolia and drive out the Turks "who, at that place had taken from the emperor land to the extent of more than thirty days journeys, covered with good cities and towns and castles which they subdued and which paid tribute to them." In the fall of 1303 the Catalans established a base at Erdek/Artace north of Cyzicus. After wintering at Erdek they skirmished with the Turks and then marched south in early April 1304. Adyancing rapidly, the Catalans defeated a Germiyanid army in Phrygia and then freed Philadelphia and Ephesus. Soon, however, great friction arose between the local Byzantines and their new masters, who exacted limitless tribute in preference to regular (but lower) taxation from those whom they had liberated. In the fall and winter of 1304-1305 the Catalans sailed away from the south coast to Thrace, eager to obtain redress of some recent grievances against the emperor. They never returned. The Catalan Company had not campaigned in Bithynia, nor had it left behind agents or deputies to preserve the advantages it had gained at Cyzicus.
The desperation of the emperor is manifest in his reaction to events that followed the departure of the Catalans. A young monk named Hilarion, of the monastery of Peribleptos in Constantinople, managed its lands situated at Kursunlu/Elegmoi, near Cius, on the Marmora. In retaliation for Turkish raiding in the fields he formed a militia which drove off the Turks and also kept the land under cultivation. Patriarch Athanasius ordered Hilarion, as a monk, to desist from physical combat, and the monk appealed to the emperor. Noting that the Turks had been able to slip past the forts and imperial garrisons, Andronicus encouraged Hilarion to return to his militia as long as the Turkish peril lasted. Andronicus' willingness to foster self-help, even at the expense of monastic vows, demonstrates the gravity of his dilemma. It is even more revealing to realize that Hilarion's amateur host is the only local example of resistance of which the chronicles feel able to boast.
Support for the Byzantine regime and resistance to Osman dwindled as the power of the Bithynian cities to continue in either of these declined. A symptom of this process was the continuing presence of the Anatolian bishops in the capital rather than at their sees. From 1303 to 1305 Athanasius addressed numerous unheeded letters to the emperor, imploring him to force the bishops to return to their posts in order to preserve the faith as well as to win the goodwill of their flocks.l36 One reason why the bishops might have preferred the capital was the severe grain shortage in Bithynia in 1305. Crops were so poor that the government received no tax revenues from the province. Garrisons suffered famine because they could not gather crops in distant areas now lost to their control. To feed them Andronicus requisitioned surplus grain wherever he could from the larger monasteries and sent it east. The shipments were inadequate and there followed risings against the tax collectors. Athanasius complained that even Osman was more generous with grain for his subjects.
Between 1305 and the fall of Bithynia's major cities a generation later, there is little precise information to guide the historian. The small forts fell before the cities: in 1306 Kite/Katoikia, a small keep west of Bursa, surrendered to a surprise attack which befell the garrison as it was being mustered. A year or so later, the garrison of Gubekler/Koubouklia, a small fort near Ulubad, betrayed their post to the Ottomans. The Bursans, now isolated, had to pay tribute to Osman. By 1318 the remaining inhabitants of Bursa were too few or too poor to provide their bishop with the necessities of life, and so the partriarchal synod granted him as a supplement the revenues of the see of Apameia in Phrygia and a monastery in Bursa which had been in patriarchal hands. For a time in 1321 Andronicus contemplated a campaign in Asia Minor with an army of one thousand horse, a force (and an ambition) considerably less than Mouzalon's of not quite twenty years before. The death of Osman in 1324 and the election of Orkhan brought no relief. The Byzantine chroniclers ignore the surrender of Bursa on 6 april 1326, after a lengthy blockade. Ulubad fell on 13 May 1327, Nicaea on 2 March 1331.Two years later Emperor Andronicus III agreed to pay Orkhan tribute; Andron- icus purchased the books, relics, and ecclesiastical finery of Nicaea and took them to Constantinople.
Two Arab authors provide a glimpse of Orkhan's enterprise at this moment. The traveler Ibn Battuta arrived in Nicaea in October 1331, seven months after its surrender. He found the city ". . . in a mouldering condition and uninhabited except for a few men in the sultan's service." Inside the city walls there were orchards, farms, and cultivated fields. In contrast Bursa, taken half a decade earlier, was a thriving city. Its connection with the hinterland established once again without the necessity of paying tribute to a besieger, and having resumed its traditional character as market and silk town, Bursa had prospered to the point that it was the Ottoman mint, producing silver coins and supporting the early Ottoman bureaucracy. Orkhan spent his time making the rounds of his fortresses and keeping them in good order; he kept the Byzantines under blockade in Nicomedia. The geographer al-Umari, whose sources provide information on the Ottoman domains ca. 1331, presents a more critical assessment of Orkhan's strength. According to his informants, Orkhan had 25,000 or 40,000 mediocre horse and an almost innumerable infantry, more warlike in appearance than in reality.
It might seem that the rise of Osman and the conquest of Bithynia simply recast in miniature an eternal battle between steppe and sown familiar to hlstorians, m the first instance, as seen from the Great Wall of China:
"In the new pattern of war, therefore, the great Chinese victories were won when the state was vigorous enough to plan and mobilize carefully and to send out expeditions that moved quickly and won at the first shock. When they could not do this, and frontier warfare was desultory and chronic, the Chinese frontier provinces were slowly drained and exhausted and the prestige of the state eroded, while the nomads profited economically, grew stronger every year, and In the nvalry between chiehains eventually produced one of the Chingis Khan stamp who could not only lead a band of warriors but impose a control of imperial sweep over a conglomerate of tribes."
The transformation of Byzantine into Ottoman loyalties was, however, not so slmple.
We have already discussed the processes, and alluded to the events, that would turn many Byzantinesin Bithynia into accepting, and even willing, Ottomans. The implication of the preceding summary of the earliest Ottoman decades has been that Byzantines could and, in some numbers, did join the Ottoman tribe. That tribe, however, also included the nomads who had originally elected Osman chief. We must now look at the impact onte transformation of Bithynia into Ottoman territory upon the original Ottomans, the nomad Turks. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, I intend to simplify the discussion by focusing in turn upon three aspects of the process of transformation: domestic economy, military resources and practices, and political organization. In each of these areas the nomads saw a complete change in their familiar world, a change which turned them from willing comrades to untrustworthy subjects.
First, let uslook at the Bithynian repercussions for the pastoral side of Ottoman nomadic life. At the outset we must understand that the introduction of nomadic pastoralism into the area was a historically, not ecologically, determined event. No geographic or climatic feature predisposed any Bithynian to live as a pastoralist. Only their previous custom, not a rational economic choice, had led the Turks in western Anatolia to prefer pastoralism to cultivating crops. The Bithynian soil, even the high ground above Sogut, was rich and better suited to tillage than to pasture. There, and in all directions downstream towards the Marmora, the environment favored the raising of crops. The potential agricultural earnings from cultivation were steadier and involved less hazard than the livelihood of a pastoralist. From predatlon and herding the nomads could do well; as landlords and proprietors they might do even better. The distance between Osman's winter and summer pastures was short, and increasing material wealth, in booty if not in sheep, combined with the shortness of the route to create a transhumant routine, in which at least one of the seasonal dwellings was fixed and permanent. A fixed dwelling would soon be encumbered with the sorts of goods which earlier had been eschewed or deposited with, say, the lord of Bilecik while on the march up country. Such transhumance preserves the pastoral routine at the expense of nomadic life. It is a stage of settlement. The lands into which the Turks descended from the plateau had been under cultivation and there is no reason to suppose that agriculture ceased completely during the occasional raids. If the agricultural population dwindled, larger and richer holdings resulted. Osman granted lands to his followers both inside and outside of the cities and villages. He confirmed the Byzantine farmers in their tenures. The slow settlement of Osman's comrades followed as they perceived the advantages and wealth guaranteed thereby.
There is some evidence to help trace the stages of this transiion. In a description of the early Ottoman arrival in Bithynia, Asikpasazade has the Byzantines complain that Osman and his followers were not the sort to settle and irrigate land, the sort with whom the Byzantines might reach an understanding. In short, they were nomads. His lightly-armed and agile horsemen at Bapheus may imply that Osman's armed forces retained at least a nomadic element in 1302. In late 1303 the Catalans surprised nomads raiding in the neighborhood of Cyzicus. These Turks traveled with their families, and their horse were by far more numerous than their footsoldiers. At this stage these nomads all seem able to have lived the boast of the Yomut tribesmen of Iran: "I do not have a mill with willow trees. I have a horse and a whip. I will kill you and go." Soon, however, many must have settled. The large loads kept in storage at Bilecik during the migration provided attractive and weighty grounds for settlement.
Bapheus was won on horseback, but it did not prevent Osman himself from settlement. He founded Yenisehir ("New Town") and settled some of his troops there. The Yenisehir plain, an eastern broadening of the lowland north of Bursa, is a breadbasket of the Marmora region. Rather little animal husbandry was practiced there, for the pastures were scattered; on the other hand, the region was wealthy in crops, gardens, and olive orchards. The foundation of Yenisehir marked, in my opinion, a decisive step in the settlement of the Ottomans.
The assumption behind the preceding few paragraphs is that the pastoral Ottomans followed their own economic self-interest, that is, they settled because they made a much better and more secure living as landlords or cultivators in Bithynia. Stronger than the Byzantines, with little need to field a mobile cavalry against the slow Byzantine infantry, it was unnecessary to preserve their capital in movable form. There is, however, a second argument which I would present to buttress my contention that the Bithynian landscape caused the Ottomans to jettison pastoral animal husbandry as their major economic support. A given area used for cultivation, if it is as fertile as Bithynia, can support a much larger population than it can if used as pasture alone. The yield, in calories, of a plot of good land used for crops is much higher than the ultimate yield if that land is merely grazed. Thus, the manpower available to Osman depended to some extent on the method of land utilization which he supported and fostered. Even among nomads, total military manpower is a quantity to be maximized, and it was glaringly clear that Bithynia would support more farmers than it would nomadic herdsmen. Early Ottoman settlement, then, made excellent sense.
So pastoralism, the economic aspect of nomadism, ceased to be a factor in the early Ottoman tribe. Let us now turn to the military aspect of nomadism and see how, in Osman and Orkhan's time, the Ottoman army was transformed from a tribe of archers into a sedentarv source of infantry. It will be useful first to summarize some of the relevant characteristics of steppe warfare. Nomadic warfare depends on speed, mobility, surprise, and the use of.archery to avoid the uncertainties of pitched battles. It follows from this that the nomad warrior of Inner Asian history is an archer on horseback. His tactics rest on ambush, the feigned retreat, the shower of arrows loosed from a distance, and the confusion and consequent disruption of his enemy's marching order. These procedures work well in the steppe, when problems of supply prevent determined pursuit by a sedentary power, or in mountamous areas. They can lead to the conquest of settled areas, forts, and clties only when there is sufficient manpower or imported sedentary labor and talent to undertake siege warfare. While the huge Mongol forces were able to conscript such manpower from all of Inner Asia, such reserves were not available in Bithynia.
Thus, early Ottoman military history is, as is its economic parallel, a story of sedentarization for military advantage. To reduce the Bithynian cities, patient negotiations and long sieges were necessary. The levying of troops for blockades and sieges, however, required a settled population, for the necessity of locating fresh pasture prevents the prolonged concentration of nomads in a small area. Thus, early Ottoman siege warfare reflects the sedentarization of the Ottoman military point of view. In the earliest days, forts were taken by ambushing the defenders when they sallied forth, not by the use of engines. Tricoccia was the only fort which Osman stormed. He did this not by the use of engines but by the laborious process of constructing a ramp of rubble up the walls. All this must have impressed on him the importance of a strong infantry. He began to use sedentary armies' siege techniques, and set up stokades to guard the approaches to Bursa; it is instructive that siege engines, which other emirates used in the 1320s, do not appear in the Ottoman sources until later in Orkhan's reign.
Orkhan brought about the sedentarization of the Ottoman army. We have already seen that he was concerned for the maintenance of his forts; let us see what caused him to intensify the growth of his infantry. In my view, the decisive action was the battle of Pelekanon in June 1329. Orkhan's force consisted of nomad archers. A series of brief encounters was indecisive, but the Byzantines were able to repulse two larger Turkish attacks. It would seem as though the two armies had fought to a draw, although the Byzantines began to return to camp as victors. It was only during the undisciplined retirement of the Byzantine infantry that the Turks were able to sow panic and turn an indecisive encounter into a rout. It was the aftermath of the battle, not the direct encounter itself, which furnished Orkhan with victory.
We cannot look over Orkhan's shoulder as he analyzed the lessons of Pelekanon; but we do know the sequel and it may be possible to reconstruct one plausible line of argument connecting it with the battle. A larger nomadic force might well have overcome the Byzantines, but a larger nomadic force of cavalrymen, horses, and remounts could not flourish on the limited Bithynian pastures. And as Orkhan's nomads had failed to force the issue during the battle, the perpetuation of the status quo made little sense. The realistic, possible and sensible alternative was to base a larger army not on expensive horsemen but on infantry. We know that Orkhan did just this, and the creation of the yaya infantry corps at this time reflects the Ottoman leaders' resolution that the successful military future of their enterprise demanded the creation of a sedentary army. The mounted archer became an anachronism in Ottoman history, and with its fall from prestige another step in the movement away from nomadism, and respect for nomads' needs, was firmly taken. The success of Orkhan's sieges indicates that his army was founded on settled recruits. Al-Umari's statement that Orkhan had a large infantry and a second- rate cavalry shows how far the sedentarization had gone. One source of the manpower for infantry and siege warfare may still have been nomadic, since nomads who had poor flocks, i.e., under-capitalized nomads, would be available for service on foot or for a longer term. It would, therefore, be an exaggeration to see the settlement of the Ottomans as complete by the 1330s. After all, Orkhan did assign one of his sons to the herding of sheep. If Ibn Khaldun is correct, Orkhan adopted Bursa as his capital but occasionally lived in a tent on the outskirts of the city. The emirate of Orkhan was hardly a nomadic enterprise, even if Orkhan may have seemed somehow still attracted to nomads' ways. A nomadic host did not bring the Ottomans to power, and the Ottomans remembered this.
We have now seen that both economic and military motives acted to settle the Ottomans and to decrease their concern for the welfare of lhose who remained nomads. Let us now turn to the third aspect of nomadism which is at issue here, that political manifestation that we call the tribe. We may begin from the comparative perspective of another frontler area:
The Tenr of Osman, The House of Osman 33 "As the Chinese pithily expressed it long ago, an empire could be conquered on horseback hut not ruled from horseback; civii servants more sophisticated than harbarian warriors were needed to extract a reguiar fiow of taxes and tribute from the civilized part of the empire, they could be recruited oniy among the upper ciasses of the conquered civilized peopie, and they and their families had to he protected and allowed to perpetuate themselves." [Owen Lattimore. Studies in Frontier History, Oxford 1962, p. 508] Osman's role in this process was that of a chief elected by his tribesmen. As the tribe's representative he successfully organized and directed the semi-annual migrations. He helped the tribe cope with outside pressures such as the lords and fortifications of Bilecik and Inegol. He was the leader in the nomadic enterprises of hunting and predation. As non-pastoralists joined, however, his success brought its own problems.
Osman did not stem from a sedentary, farming family. He was, or was soon to be, an ex-nomad. His concerns: the freedom of the marketplace at Eskisehir, the welfare of his foundation of Yenisehir, the transformation of predation to siege and blockade, all are aspects of sedentary statecraft, and the bureaucratic trappings of sedentary administration are alien to the steppe pastoralist. In anarchic Bithynia, where rumors of Mongols aroused and emptied cities, where such government representatives as Pseudo-Lachanes and Hilarion could raise and support their own establishments, and where the tax collectors were enemies to be abused, how was the untutored Osman to organize his nomads, ex-nomads, and Byzantine allies? We have seen that the Byzantine governmental paradigm was inappropriate if not completely unwelcome. What else did Osman have at his disposal? He had the tribe. Bithynian tribalism, the early Ottoman enterprise, was simply the political legacy of the Turks' former pastoral nomadic society. Tribalism, or the chiefdom is the political aspect of nomadism, and as such was the sensible way for Osman to organize his followers. As their practlce of pastoralism gave way to settled revenue sharing Osman's fellow ex-nomads remained Osman's fellow tribesmen. Osman was that successful Bithynian about whom a multi-confessional, Polyglot group crystallized. Historians call this group the. Osmanlis, the tribe of Osman. It is high time to take Ihat label seriously.
The tribe was a useful device for pulling together such seemingly disparate groups as Turkish pastoralists and Byzantine settlers. Modern anthropologists' field studies show that tribal, clan, and even camp membership are more open than tribal idiom or ideology might indicate. For instance, the camp consists ideally of a small group of consanguineous members. In fact, however, many camps have members without blood ties to their campmates. These "sharers of the same shade" belong because they can share and serve well, not because they belong to the family: "the camp is, simply, an economically cooperative unit, containing a mixed labor pool, each segment of which is reliant on the others." To the extent that blood ties seemed essential for those who joined the enterprise, clan genealogies were "recalled" which forged distant relationships among lineages much as the Turkmen do today. Wittek discovered this phenomenon when he destroyed the literary clan genealogies of the Ottomans: his hazy area and gaps between generations were just those fertile spots where, in conversation, two men could discover a link between their houses. The idiom of tribal ideology was one of kinship, but the tribal reality was formed of shared interest, advantage, and service.
The tribe was, then, a useful political institution. Kinship, in fact, neither necessarily nor sufficiently defined it. While external dangers may promote the rise of a chief, other criteria help to promote the shared interests that define the tribesmen: "There is no larger group who, besides recognizing themselves as a distinct local community, affirms their obligation to combine in warfare against outsiders and acknowledge the rights of their members to compensation for injury." Membership in the tribe allows groups from varied backgrounds to live in close proximity and carry on their independent affairs in peace, and some Byzantines found this a means of survival and success in Bithynia. How did Osman manage to lead this tribe? Pehrson's study of the Marri of Baluchlstan provides a clue:
"What defines and delimits the Marri as a social unit is thus, not common origin and descent but pollocal identity as an organized tuman, or politically independent tribes. The critical office in this tribal organization is that of the central chief, the tumandar or sardar.... At its inceptlon, Marri tribal organization may have been primarily an organization of fighting men for military expeditions and the division of spoils."
The most successful leader at predation, at the hunt, at finding pasture or water for survival, and, in Bithynia, at governance, may form his own tribe: "It [was] the fact of political unity under the Basseri chief which in the eyes of the trlbesmen and outsiders alike constitute[d] them into a single tribe in the Perslan sense." Such was the achievement of Osman.
That achievement reverberated over the next two centuries of Near Eastern history. When the Safavid Persians fought the Ottoman Turks in the early sixteenth century, the "Persian" forces were largely Turkish and the "Turhsh" soldiers largely Balkan peoples. It was not only the conscription of chlldren which turned Serbs or Albanians into Ottomans. The Bithynian Bvzantines were hardly the only non-Turks who became Ottomans, they were merely the first.
Since, in recruiting members, the tribe may disregard family, language and religion, it fitted the settled Byzantine Bithynians as well as the nomads Since the tribe was called the Osmanlis, we know its development was due to Osman himself. Not only his own blood descendants but also the families of Kose Mihal, Evrenos, and their descendants, became Ottomans. Many Greeks were not happy under their new master and his ways, of course. Some who embraced Islam in the hope of advancement through religious conformlty alone later returned to their former faith. Others did not. Byzantine sources affirm that Christians served as Ottoman officials in the 1340s and 1350s. An author who had every reason to hate the Ottomans filled his account with evldence of the tolerant modus vivendi established in Bithynia. Descent falth, occupation were all secondary to the shared political concerns which united men under Osman. This ad hoc element in the early development of a tribe is not uncommon in areas of near anarchy. In Afghanistan, an elderly mformant described the nineteenth century growth of the Marri Baluch in the lollowing way: "In those days there was war and anarchy. Nobody asked who is your father, brother. You joined in the fighting force, moved and conquered and moved again. Later only did it become fixed and settled like now." Osman's first success as a tribal chief was due to his ability to protect the few, strong, common interests of his tribesmen: pasture, the hunt, and survival. His authority grew because he served as a fulcrum between tribal and external interests, between his followers and their former Byzantine masters or their Mongol overlords. He gained new tribesmen as he demonstrated success m representing the tribe to those forces threatening Bithynians. His success brought new opportunities and new problems in the form of non- nomad and non-Turkish recruits, such as Kose Mihal.
The tribe, however, is not fitted to serve the needs of a more complex society with disparate and ramifying goals and institutions. The Ottoman foundations at Yenisehir and later at Bursa complicated Osman and Orkhan's role as nomadic chief with the necessities of urban administration and settled agricultural economies. The interests of the Osmanhs were no longer so simple nor were they wholly nomadic. In a more complex environment a more complex government was necessary. And here we see that our third, political, aspect of nomadism gave way to sedentary models. As the Ottoman chlefs dropped their last ties to nomads' ways, nomads' needs no longer drove them -- and in fact no longer concerned them. They now had different aspirations and a different clientele, and if differences occurred, it was now the nomads' interests which suffered and became minimal to the chief -- or should we now call him sultan? The settled institutions and ideology for such a bureaucratic enterprise were ready, in the hands of the men of the Muslim schools. They already appear in a pious foundation deed composed for Orkhan in 1324. The schoolmen also, as we have seen, had a ready-made ideology for the next stage of growth in Ottoman government. As the Holy War, the jihad, was invoked for the initial bedouin operations in early Islam, so was the early Ottoman nomad predation justified by the ghaza. The 1337 inscription, then, is a commentary on the state of Ottoman bureaucratic development and not the key to Ottoman origins.
There is another measure of the administrative transformation which Ottomans felt to have occurred as Orkhan's rule achleved its mature form. At the conclusion of many of his tales, the chronicler Asikpasazade sums up his feelings with a short poem. After discussing Orkhan's conquest of the neighboring emirate of Karasl (1334-1336), Asikpasazade's concluding poem remarks that a cadaster (defter) was drawn up: the warriors' conquest was complete only when the land was written up. Thus, in later eyes, administration was a keynote of Orkhan's rule - but nomads do not have secretaries. There is no extant evidence that Orkhan did in fact have Karas surveyed and registered; nonetheless, the later view saw in his rule the final transformation of Ottoman society to a settled polity and society.
The ghaza became the creed of the Ottomans in their histories and on their buildings. In the early days, however, the need to ward off Germiyan, the slow penetration of the soldiers by Islam and the slower transformation of heroes with powerful graves into martyrs of the faith, all rendered it unlikely that a religious sanction drove Osman on his hunt for power. His descendants were right to boast, in the words of Namlk Kemal, "We raised a world-conquering state from a tribe."
Osman made a tribe, the Osmanhs, of his nomad followers. The political program supporting this tribalization was regular predation that overburdened the supportive capacities of Bithynian nomadism, with its limited pastures and manpower. Both Osman and Orkhan, therefore, opened their tribe and its enterprise to others, especially to the ex-nomads and ex-farmers ruined by other Turkish competition and Byzantine severity. The tribe grew with these new recruits, but it was no longer a nomadic tribe. Successes forced changes in its very nature. Voluntary association was inadequate to raise the numbers and maintain the impetus required in Balkan campaigning. Osman and Orkhan's successors separated themselves entirely from tribal powers and obligations. They were no longer the chiefs of tribesmen. They became the lords over subjects both settled and nomadic. Nomads did not appreciate the transition from chosen chief to distant lord. The Ottomans soon tried to enforce the status of subject upon the nomads through taxation and registration procedures no different from those applied to peasants. The next chapters examine this process.
* * * *
It is time to recapitulate the stages of our journey. The first task we set ourselves was to examine the theory which holds that the spirit of the Holy War promoted the Ottomans to power. It was a necessary task, since any contribution which nomadic tribalism might make to old Ottoman history would be vitiated by the presence of as exclusive a feeling as enthusiastic religious zeal.The result of our preliminary excursion into Ottoman historio- graphy was that the Wittek theory of the Holy War no longer finds support in the evidence. This result allowed us to turn to the history of thirteenth century Bithynia with an eye to following the traces of pastoral nomads and their impact upon settled Byzantines. Here there were two main strands defining the outlines of the tapestry. Discontent spreading among the Byzantines after their leaders forsook Anatolia for Constantinople, and exchanged investment in the welfare of the East for a concern in its taxes and loyalty: this set of processes colored the first strand. The second, setting off the first, was the growth of Osman's leadership based upon his chieftaincy of Turkish pastoralists and his appeal as leader and protector to some of the discontented Byzantines. We then moved from a more or less chronological resume of Bithynia's late medieval nomadic history to a threefold analysis of the legacy of nomadism to the early Ottoman enterprise. All three aspects of this analysis, economic, military, and political, pointed the way to nomadism's demise and growing disrepute in the last years of Osman's life and the flowering of the career of his son Orkhan. Ecological considerations dictated the settlement of Osman's pastoralists. Military necessity pointed to the increase of an Ottoman infantry and the decline of mounted archery. And the complexity of administering farms, markets, religious institutions, cities, and secretaries all led to the transformation of a chief illto a sultan.
The Ottoman enterprise's settlement, in short, was the story of this chapter. With that sedentarization came the appropriation of sedentary values. These values grew to be so important that it became unthinkable to presume that Osman had ever embraced other notions. Old Ottoman historiography had now to demonstrate that the founder of their greatness reflected the same social views as his descendants. The chroniclers found a simple device with which to express this firm conviction, the dream of future power, and this dream's spurning of nomadic values provides a fitting end to our story.
The dream or portent of future power and grandeur is common in historical literature. Herodotus told of Astyages, ruler of the Medes, and his dream of Cyrus' empire. Later legend held that the grandfather of Muhammad dreamed of his descendant's powerful destiny. Similar dreams adorn the chronicles of such later Turkish dynasties as the Ghaznavids and Seljuks. None of these accounts, however, evidences as much detail and careful revision as the Ottoman version. Let us read the story of Osman's dream:
Osman Ghazi prayed (for new raids against the Christians) and briefly wept (for fallen comrades). Then sleep won him over, so he lay down and rested. He saw that among (his acquaintances) was a highly-esteemed sheykh, whose many miracles were well-known and whom all the people followed. They called him a dervish, but his dervish qualities were deep within him. He possessed much in the way of worldly goods, comforts, and sheep. He also had both students and knowledge. His guest house was never vacant and Osman Ghazi himself used to come from time to time and be a guest of this holy man. As Osman Ghazi slept he saw that a moon arose from the holy man's breast and came to sink in Osman Ghazi's breast. A tree then sprouted from his navel, and its shade compassed the world. Beneath this shade there were mountains, and streams flowed forth from the foot of each mountain. Some people drank from these running waters, others watered gardens, while vet others caused fountains to flow. (When Osman awoke he went and) told the story to the sheykh, who said, "Osman, my son, congratulations, for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants, and my daughter Malkhun shall be your wife." He married them forthwith and gave his daughter to Osman Ghazi."
Here Vergil's Aeneas and Bonaventure's Francis find a worthy cousin in the fifteenth century's official Osman. The arboreal image with its firm roots and branches protecting fountains and gardens reflects the purpose of the Ottoman enterprise. The Ottomans represented peace and plenty for settled agriculture, a bucolic promise ma-de explicit in the dream. The Ottoman dream was for farmers and merchants, not for nomads.
Not only were the nomads deprived of a place in the shade, they were now potentially a source of trouble. As the sequel will show, the Ottomans soon went to some trouble to settle the "problem" of the nomads. The nomads, who had been present as artners at the creation of the Ottoman entity, became its unwilling and unwanted subjects. Ultimately, they sought for a Ieader and a dream of their own, and we shall see how they found theirs. Harrassed by their sultan, they created a shah. To the Ottoman dream of peace, they brought the vision of a sword. Let us now see how the Ottoman vision in Anatolia became the Safavi nightmare.
Please enter your name:and your E-Mail address:
Type in here which week this assignment is for:
Please answer one of the following questions in the space provided. Please type in the question to be answered first:
1. What is Lindner's main thesis? And how does he distinguish his views
from those of others, such as Wittek [whose views were discussed in class?
2. After considering Lindner's views, those of Wittek and Inalcik, what is
your view of the relationship between the "Holy War" and the emergence of
the Ottomans?