Download PDF |( Oxford Studies In Byzantium) Clive Foss, The Beginnings Of The Ottoman Empire Oxford University Press ( 2022)
281 Pages
Introduction
One of the great historical problems at the dawn of the modern age is the emergence of the Ottomans and consequent collapse of the Byzantine empire. At first sight, it seems astonishing that an insignificant Turkish group in a remote corner of Bithynia on the borders of Byzantium should rise so rapidly from obscurity to domination. When Osman, the eponymous founder of a mighty future empire, was born, his people were a tribe still wandering, or perhaps recently settled, in the land which was to give birth to their state. A century later, his descendants had crossed into Europe, soon to overwhelm all their enemies, and on the threshold of becoming a world power. Close investigation does little to resolve the problem. It has fascinated scholars in modern times almost as much as the Fall of the Roman Empire, and with no more satisfactory results: many theories of varying plausibility have been constructed, but the mystery remains.” This chapter has not the ambition to lift the veil which surrounds the origins of the Ottomans, but merely to suggest a way of approaching the problem, and present some material rarely considered in this context.
The earliest Ottoman history depends on Turkish chronicles written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with scattered information derived from earlier Byzantine and Arab writers. The oldest source is the Greek historian George Pachymeres (1242-c.1310), a contemporary of Osman who first mentions him in 1302, and concludes his narrative in 1308. He is followed by Nicephorus Gregoras (1295-1359) and John VI Cantacuzene (1292-1383), who were active in the reigns of Orhan and Murat I. The Arabic accounts of al-Umari and the observant traveler Ibn Battuta describe a situation in the early years of Orhan, around 1333-1335.” They are contemporary with the oldest epigraphical, numismatic, and archaeological evidence: the first dated Ottoman inscription is of 1333, the earliest coins from the beginning of the reign of Orhan, the first buildings or traces of them from the years following the conquest of Nicaea in 1331. These are the contemporary sources, adequate enough, perhaps, for the reign of Orhan (c. 1320-1360), but revealing little of the crucial half-century previous when the state had its origins and first grew under the leadership of Osman (1281-c.1320).* The Arabic sources present a vivid image of their own time, but don’t look back, while the Greeks treat the Ottomans only after they came in contact with the Byzantines; they tell, and no doubt knew, nothing of their earlier history or of events in other parts of their domain.
If these were the only sources, little would be known of the reign of Osman, the beginning of Ottoman history (I shall refer to earlier events as “Ottoman prehistory”).* Yet much is recounted, and in considerable detail, by later Turkish narratives that have provided the base for reconstructing this period.” The most important of these are Asikpasazade, who wrote around 1485, the anonymous chronicles edited by Giese compiled about the same time, and the history of Nesri written about 1490 and largely based upon the other two.° Together, they provide what appears to be a full account of the early conquests and expansion of the Ottomans, with a wealth of specific places where the events are supposed to have happened. Such material may be of considerable value, if it represents genuine traditions, or worthless, if all fabricated later to fill an uncomfortable void. The early history of Rome might provide an ominous parallel, in which a highly detailed and dramatic account of three centuries of “history” is to be considered the unreliable wishful thinking of later writers anxious to provide a suitable beginning for a great power, and at best a quarry from which some genuine history or traditions may be extracted. If this is the case here, most of the later narratives will have to be rejected, the bare skeleton provided by contemporary sources retained, and the mystery deepened.
It is my aim here to test the accounts of the earliest Ottoman history by seeking out the places which they mention to determine not only whether they existed but also whether they are appropriate for the period and events described. The first is easy enough: the existence of most of the sites has not been doubted, and a large-scale map will reveal them; for sites that have disappeared or changed their name, older maps, or accounts of travelers may profitably be consulted. Yet such identifications might have little meaning: events could have been retrospectively situated in places which were later important, or a schoolmaster’s fancy could have associated present remains with places or buildings mentioned in the chronicles. Here, too, the dawn of Rome provides many discouragingly instructive parallels: the Alban Mount, well-marked on maps, need not have been the home of the ancestors of Romulus any more than the Tarpeian rock be taken to authenticate the legend of Tarpeia. More complicated, and potentially more rewarding, is the search for sites which may be considered appropriate to the period. To some extent, this may be done by comparing the sources, and considering places which also appear in contemporary independent writers (in these cases, Greek and Arabic) as authentic. Yet these are a small proportion of the total; for the rest, it is necessary to consider the material record of standing or ruined structures.
Monuments of the first sultans, whether mosques, baths, caravansarays, castles, or anything else which may be attributed to the period have been carefully studied in an admirable and indispensable work to which there is surely nothing to add.’ The studies of E. Hakki Ayverdi make it easy to draw up a list of buildings from the period, but this, too, has its pitfalls, for as the author clearly shows, it is easy to state but difficult to prove that a structure owes its origin to Osman or Orhan. Local tradition is as likely to obscure as to aid identification; it has a natural tendency to attribute venerable buildings or ruins to the first sultans (if they are Islamic; otherwise, Nimrod, Solomon, the Genoese, or the Jews might have been the builders). It is therefore necessary to use the care of Ayverdi and other students of Ottoman architecture in dealing with early monuments.
The warriors of Osman conquered many places from the Infidel, in this case the Byzantine emperor or his subordinates. By definition, therefore, most sites of early Ottoman history will be those of the last ages of Byzantium, and as likely to have Byzantine as Ottoman monuments. Since many seem to have been taken by siege or stratagem, fortifications might be expected, solidly built monuments more able than most to withstand the ravages of time and man. There is thus another category of evidence which may be brought into account; the Byzantine monuments, especially castles, which may be dated to the latest period of their rule. Although Byzantine churches are well-known and can be dated with some accuracy, the castles have been little studied, but comparative studies have produced a typology that allows many structures of the thirteenth century to be identified.* In the area to be considered, Nicaea alone preserves churches or their remains; for the rest, the fortifications will be of some importance. The present investigation, therefore, will attempt to integrate the physical and the written records of earliest Ottoman history and thus to test the accuracy of the sources on which it has depended.
Such a study is only one step. Once the sites have been identified, recorded, and put on the historical map, it is possible to consider their significance, and with it the role of geography—of the physical environment— in the early history and conquests of the Ottomans. Was it suitable, for example, for the development of a centralized state, or the wanderings of nomadic tribes, or something else? Most writers have paid least lip service to geography, often with quite misleading results. Did the Ottomans, for example, settle on a “high and rather barren tableland? or on the “grasslands” of the frontier, or were they in a broken country with considerable “vertical range between summer and winter pastures?” The inaccuracy of the first two could be shown by a good relief map; the other definition needs to be checked on the spot.’ If this study has any merit, it will be because it is based on autopsy: I have visited the great majority of the sites mentioned in the chronicles, recorded the remains in them, and noted their relation to each other and to the local environment.
Visiting and identifying sites may help to accomplish the first aim of testing the sources, but the consideration of historical geography involves another real or potential pitfall. Although the mountains and rivers which form its most powerful component will be the same, many aspects of the environment now visible may be quite different from those which confronted Osman: forests have been cut down, swamps drained, agriculture, and with it population increased. Plainly, there is no way to reconstruct the Bithynian scene in the thirteenth century with the resources available. If one day studies of lake cores and sediments, of micro-fauna and flora, have been made, it might be possible to speak with some precision.’ For the moment, it is necessary to be aware of the problem, and to attempt to reach as far into the past as possible, relying on old as well as new observations. For this, I have made extensive use of early travelers, a body which progressively increases from a trickle in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to an almost unmanageable stream in the nineteenth.’ Through their eyes, a more accurate image of the past environment may be obtained which, if not that of Osman’s time, at least is far closer to it than the present somewhat tamed image which the country presents.
Whatever the success of this effort, the travelers are a delight to read and the country to visit. In the words of John Macdonald Kinneir, Captain in the service of the honorable East India Company and political agent at the Durbar of his Highness the Nabob of the Carnatic, who observed this country in 1818: “Bithynia is now included in the great province of Anatolia and governed by a pasha of three tails who resides at Nicomedia; it is a romantic and. beautiful country, intersected by lofty mountains and fertile valleys; rich in fruits and wine and abounding in forests and fine trees.’!” The pasha of three tails and most of the forests are long since gone, but the country remains to provide pleasure and knowledge.
In treating this material, I have used a chronological arrangement, with occasional digressions, mainly following the narrative of Asikpasazade, the most detailed of the Turkish chroniclers, and supplementing it with additional information to be found in other sources. I have attempted to identify and describe the places mentioned, using my own observations and those of my predecessors, and to discuss whatever appropriate remains they may contain. Consideration of some places give rise to problems of a more general kind; these will be treated individually as they occur, and correlated at the end in a general discussion of the geography and its significance. I shall begin at the beginning and survey the century from 1261, when the Byzantine empire was restored in Constantinople, when the Mongols consolidated their hold on Asia Minor and when the first tribal Turcoman states were formed, and continue until 1354, when the Ottoman crossing into Europe introduced a very different period.
Ideally, a study like this should produce a life-and-times of Osman and Orhan or a coherent narrative of the rise of the Ottomans, but the sources don’t permit any such comprehensive treatment. Instead, this work will consist of a series of related chapters aiming to provide the evidence for the period it treats, with the aim of seeing what the physical environment and the historical sources can reveal about the first two Ottomans. Each chapter can be read independently of the others, though this necessarily involves a certain amount of repetition, where the same material is presented from different viewpoints. The survey of the Homeland will be followed by the Byzantine view of their own decline, then by whatever information can be derived from other kinds of sources—coins, inscriptions, buildings, and documents. Two chapters will then attempt some synthesis by considering Osman in the broader context of the contemporary emirates of western Asia Minor and the dominant Seljuks and Mongols; and a survey of western Asia Minor in a period that sees a rare abundance of sources, the 1330s. In each case, the sources will appear as a kind of raw material, not yet capable of producing a pleasing narrative. The result, I hope, will be to see the earliest Ottomans from a different point of view, without trying to impose a theoretical framework on the reader.
The project, when first conceived, seemed original, yet I noted that an earlier traveler of superb acuity, Andreas David Mordtmann, suggested that such an investigation might be of use. On his way from Eskisehir to Sogiit in 1858, he wrote: “All these and the following places as far as the sea played a major role in the history of the first Ottoman sultan, Osman J; and thus deserve a more thorough investigation by an historian; until now, however, no one has given himself this trouble?!’ The problems which faced Mordtmann and a host of others have largely disappeared: paved roads prevent the traveler from sinking in mud and speed his journey; modern accommodation, even in remote places, spares him the inedible food and swarms of vermin; and present security has long since eliminated the bandits who struck fear into most. Yet, with some notable exceptions, and those for quite specific or different purposes, scholars who could most profit from knowing this geography as a potential key for understanding the history seem not to have ventured far into Bithynia. This work, therefore, may represent a step toward the study which Mordtmann recommended.
In 1927, Franz Taeschner made a beginning with a one-week excursion by automobile into the homeland, investigating Yenisehir, Iznik, Eskisehir, and Kiitahya along with some lesser sites and reported on their Ottoman remains. This pioneering work, which made use of the Ottoman sources, paid especial attention to the network of roads.'* Otherwise, the works cited above show little if any trace of autopsy. The architectural historians, notably E. Hakki Ayverdi, are an exception; so, to some extent is Prof. Inalcik who visited the region and inspired an excavation at a site important for this subject, Karacahisar.
In 2003 appeared a monumental work of French scholarship, La Bithynie au moyen age, edited by Bernard Geyer and Jacques Lefort. Its nineteen collaborators covered every aspect of the subject from pollen to fortifications, with detailed attention to the geography and the physical remains, from the seventh century until well into the Ottoman period. There would seem to be little to add to this massive learning. Yet, there is still room for the present work, for La Bithynie does not cover the Ottoman homeland south of Bursa and Nicaea and is not primarily directed toward the early Ottomans or the historical problems considered here.
This work has a long history. It was undertaken out of curiosity in 1983, in indirect connection with the survey of medieval castles in Anatolia which I was directing for the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara. Rudi Lindner’s works and conversations provided inspiration and encouragement, as did discussions with Prof. Halil Inalcik, who took much interest in an early stage of the project. Exploration was greatly facilitated by generous friends who allowed themselves and their cars to be pressed into service in remote and unknown regions: my special thanks go to Mr. and Mrs. Rab Shiell, Consul-general and Mrs. Timothy Gee, and to Stephen Mitchell and David Barchard for their ever perceptive and helpful comments. The first stage of the work (which appears here as the long introductory chapter on the Homeland) was completed in the tranquility of All Souls College, Oxford, where I spent the academic year 1983/84.
It benefited from comments of Mme Irene Beldiceanu and especially from the meticulous attention of the late professor Victor Ménage whose detailed suggestions and corrections saved me from many mis-statements and errors. Then the incomplete project was set aside and not revived for thirty years. I have brought the references up to date as far as possible, but left the descriptions of sites as they were in 1983, before the drastic transformations of the countryside in recent decades.
In 2015, an invitation to address a conference in Nicaea provided the occasion to return to this project, which insensibly turned from a chapter into a book where the original material could be put into a broader context. For that, I owe thanks to Kutlu Akalin who organized the meeting and to my indefatigable and enormously helpful driver Cagla Altintas. I am grateful to David Mitten and Laura Johnson for help with practical matters and to Julian Baker and Lutz Ilisch for answering numismatic questions. My thanks to all these friends and colleagues and especially to the villagers of the Homeland who willingly shared their knowledge of the antiquities in their midst.
Cambridge MA and Oxford August 2019
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