ANST - Book Review - Between Two Worlds

[njones at ix.netcom.com]

Hello Friends,

A good friend of mine has been writing book reviews on a wide variety of
topics for many years.  Every once in a while something comes along that
I think is neat and would like to share.  Below is his review of a book
that deals with the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire.

Gio.

*****

     title: Between Two Worlds
          : The Construction of the Ottoman State
        by: Cemal Kafadar
 publisher: University of California Press 1995
     other: 221 pages, notes, bibliography, index, US$18.95

Early in the 14th century, Osman, son of Ertogril, became the leader of
a
minor beglik, one of many small political units on the Anatolian marches
of Islam.  Through a combination of commitment to _gaza_ (loosely,
"holy war"), alliances with other gazis (and a pragmatic attitude to
alliances with the heathen), an advantageous geographical location, an
unusual commitment to unigeniture, and a good deal of luck, this beglik
was to expand, under Osman and his successors, into the Ottoman Empire.
Despite defeat by Timur at the battle of Ankara in 1402, the Ottomans
were
to cross into Thrace and, in 1453, take Constantinople.  As the Ottoman
state expanded, politically centrifugal and religiously heterodox
elements
of the original _gaza_ ethos were discarded in favour of a centralising
ideology and religious orthodoxy.

It is not till the last chapter of _Between Two Worlds_, however,
that Kafadar describes the story of the Ottoman rise to power and
the construction of the Ottoman state.  He begins with an overview of
the background history and some brief remarks on national identity and
influence, trying to give the reader a feel for the struggles that have
been, and continue to be, fought over national histories.  Also helpful
for the novice to the period (or for those, like me, who only know it
from
a Byzantine perspective) are a chronology of events and a list of the
regnal years of the Ottoman begs and sultans from Osman to Bayezid II.
(The absence of a map is unfortunate, however, since many of the places
referred to don't appear, or appear under other names, in modern
atlases.)

After this introduction, Kafadar surveys the historians of the early
Ottomans: their engagements with issues of nationalism, their approaches
to the sources, and their differing stresses on religious, economic,
geographical, and ethnic factors.  He touches briefly on Knolles (who
wrote in the sixteenth century) and Gibbons, but his chief focus is on
Koprulu and Wittek and their attempt to place the Ottomans within the
broader context of Anatolian history.  The field has been dominated
by Wittek's gaza thesis, which stressed the role of gazis and the gaza
ethos in the Ottoman expansion.  Kafadar argues that "refutations" of
this thesis based on discrepancies between gaza ideology and Ottoman
practice miss the point, since the gaza thesis is not bound to idealised
and anachronistic definitions of _gaza_.

Kafadar devotes his longest chapter to a critical analysis of the
sources
for the period.  Little in the way of early Ottoman writing survives,
but there are two other important bodies of sources.  Stories from
Anatolian frontier culture provide essential background for
understanding
_gaza_ and gazis and the religious experience of the milieu, while the
later Ottoman chronicle tradition, though it has been filtered through
later orthodoxy and must be used with extreme care, provides critical
information.  Kafadar looks at several individual works and episodes
in detail, but stresses that the sources must be evaluated as parts of
evolving complexes of traditions.

And so, before they come to the actual history, the reader has an
understanding of the different ways historians have approached the
period
and of the sources and the debates over their use.  Such integration
of history and historiography is unusual, and makes for an elegant and
sophisticated study.  _Between Two Worlds_ is both a scholarly review
and an introduction accessible to the newcomer, and for me it was a
hundred and fifty pages of pure pleasure.

--

Disclaimer: I requested and received a review copy of _Between Two
Worlds_ from the University of California Press, but I have no stake,
financial or otherwise, in its success.

--

%T      Between Two Worlds
%S      The Construction of the Ottoman State
%A      Cemal Kafadar
%I      University of California Press
%C      Berkeley
%D      1995
%O      paperback, notes, bibliography, index, US$18.95
%G      ISBN 0-520-20600-2
%P      xx,221pp
%K      history, historiography, Islam

17 September 1997

        ------------------------------------------------
        Copyright (c) 1997 Danny Yee (danny at cs.su.oz.au)
        http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/book-reviews/
        ------------------------------------------------

============================================================================

To be removed from the Ansteorra mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe ansteorra".