803 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS LXX N° 5-6, september-december 2013 804
TURCICA
WITTEK, P. and Edited by C. HEYWOOD — The Rise of the Ottoman Empire. Studies in the history of Turkey, thirteenth-fifteenth centuries. A Royal Asiatic Society, London, 2012. (24 cm, XVI, 194). ISBN 978-0-7007- 1500-8. £ 85.00.
The book under review is an impressive monument both to the work of the, by origin, Austrian Orientalist Paul Wit- tek (1894-1978), famous for his invention of the ‘Ghazi the- sis’ on the origin and subsequent history of the Ottoman Empire, and to the critical ingenuity of his erstwhile student, the historian and Ottomanist Colin Heywood. The book con- tains an edition of nine essays and articles by Wittek origi- nally published between 1933 and 1955, among them his famous essay “The Rise of the Ottoman Empire” of 1938. Some of them are here for the first time translated into Eng- lish, and one of them for the first time published with foot- notes resurrected from the manuscript copy. These publica- tions, apart from two essays on Mehmed the Conqueror, are all ‘precursors’ of “The Rise” in which the aforementioned thesis is developed. The edition of Wittek’s work is preceded by an Introduction (with the sub-title ‘A Critical Essay’) by Heywood in which he summarizes his critical evaluation of Wittek’s work in the context of the author’s life and times as it had earlier been expressed in a series of articles published since 1988. From the Bibliography it appears that the series is not complete yet and that we may look forward to another article with the promising title of ‘Spectrality, ‘Presence’ and the Ottoman Past: Paul Wittek’s Rûmtürkische Studien and Other Ghosts in the Machine’. Heywood’s Introduction is, in turn, preceded by a Preface by İlker Evrim Binbaș, which elegantly anticipates some of the themes of the book and is perhaps the most original contribution to the book. In this Preface Binbaș approaches Wittek’s ideas and methods by analysing one of his articles which discusses the capture of Aydos Castle (about 20 km south-east of Constan- tinople) during the reign of Osman, the supposed founder of the Ottoman dynasty. In it Wittek, who was clearly more of a visionary philologist than a conventional historian, tried to show that the Ottoman fighting spirit by about 1500 had (ominously!) changed from one that was inspired by reli- gious fervour to one that was motivated by netherworldly calculation. This interpretation rests on a seemingly trivial change in the name of the Ottoman military commander from Ghazi Rahman (God) in the earliest surviving chronicle of the dynasty by Așık Pașazade to Ghazi Abdurrahman (Slave of God) in a later one, written by Neșri around 1500. In the story the daughter of the commander (tekfur) of Aydos falls in love with the Ottoman ghazi, but whereas in the older chronicle the love is pure and mystical, in the latter it is erotic and human. This interpretation by Wittek is clearly rooted, Binbaș argues, in the personality of the author him- self, who, as an admirer of the lyrical, neo-Romantic poet Stefan George, was in the thrall of strong Romantic and German-nationalistic feelings. On another level, the ghazi in the story, who became the beloved (friend, dost – the word occurs in Așik Pașazade) of the princess, stands for Wittek’s ‘friendly helper’ who, like the princess, saved him, Wittek, from a bad dream, as he curiously and cryptically explains in the article. This friend, as Binbaș convincingly argues, was H.A.R. Gibb (1895-1971), professor of Islamic history 805 BOEKBESPREKINGEN — TURCICA 806 and literature – the article was published in a festschrift ded- Osman is even characterized as a peasant!2) In fact, accord- icated to him in 1965 – who recommended that Wittek be ing to Imber, ‘all the traditional tales of Osman Gazi are appointed Special University Lecturer at the University of fictitious… the earliest history of the Ottomans is a black London in 1936-1937, when he gave three ‘university lec- hole.’3) But even if the Ottomans were heroic ghazi’s, why tures’ from which “The Rise …” was distilled. In 1940 Wit- should ghaza be considered to be some sort of militaristic tek fled from the Nazis to England and in 1949 he was finally state ideology? Why should a state, Imber wondered, only appointed as the first professor of Turkish at the same uni- be successful if it could bring its basic ideology (boosted versity. morally by national feelings and customs) into practice, and The basic question that lay behind Wittek’s thesis was: disappear if it could not, as Wittek presupposed? Imber how can we explain that this small principality ruled by an rightly points to the fact that the Ottoman Empire was actu- obscure tribal chief at the border of the Byzantine Empire in ally not a national state, developing an ideology, but a dynas- North West Anatolia succeeded in growing out to be a multi- tic state, which was interested in accumulating wealth and ethnic empire and major power in the Middle East that lasted power by all kinds of means, including ghaza against ‘treach- for six centuries? According to Wittek, it was rooted in the erous’ neighbouring Islamic dynasties and marriage of Chris- development of a specific robust warrior, ghazi/akritai (name tian ladies (as in the case of Bayezid I). Then the dichotomy of Byzantine ‘ghazis’) culture in the ‘marches’ that had in Wittek’s thesis between Turkish and Islamic zones, and existed for centuries on both sides of the border with the Byz- between a frontier culture and a hinterland culture, was not antine Empire where Islam clashed with Christendom. This really rooted in historical facts but in misinterpreting texts; warrior culture, again according to Wittek, developed at the both warrior on the path of God and Islamic scholars were cost of a softening, one could even say feminine, bookish figures of the same, traditional Muslim culture, both at the attitude cultivated by the academics/administrators, ulema, centre and the periphery, and relevant in both learned and which reigned in the heartland of Islam. According to this folk traditions. As well, the picture of the corrupt and deca- view, Osman was foremost a ghazi (and not just an ordinary dent figure of Bayezid I was, as is clear from Imber’s analy- Turcoman tribal chief), and the Ottoman principality a ghazi sis, based on a false interpretation of sources.4) state. This ghazi state was, moreover, the most successful Heywood’s contribution to this debate in his Critical Essay of a number of rival Anatolian ghazi principalities such as is not so much a critical assessment of Wittek’s thesis as an Germiyan or Karaman, because their land was situated attempt to put Wittek’s scholarship in its historical context. directly on the Byzantine border and Osman and his followers Doing so, Heywood indulges in a dazzling and somewhat thereby could not afford not to fight on, and thus had no occa- rambling attempt to evoke the Zeitgeist of Wittek’s continen- sion to soften up. The feminine tendency at the centre later tal years, sketching (not in this order) his days as a student caused, according to Wittek, the defeat of Sultan Bayezid I, in Vienna, his contact with the pioneer-Ottomanist Friedrich subject to unmanly, ‘Latin tendencies’ of his Serbian wife, von Kraelitz-Greifenhorst –both served in the Austrian army against the invader from the east, Timur Leng, in 1402, and during the First World War–, the seemingly apocalyptic it even, ultimately, led to the defeat of 1918 when the Young demise of the Habsburg Empire (parallel to that of their Otto- Turk triumvirate ruling the Empire formed an alliance with man allies!), the influence of Stefan George whose mystic their former enemies, the Habsburgs. ‘By this alliance both ethos he made his own, the articles by the German Ottoman- the empires of Austria and Turkey broke with their most ists Friedrich Giese and Theodor Menzel on early Ottoman essential traditions and thus showed that they had outlived history published in the 1920s,5) his possible exposure to the themselves’, Wittek concluded in “The Rise …” (p. 35). Pirenne thesis (on the shattering of the unity of the Mediter- It took more than forty years for Wittek’s thesis to come ranean world by the rise of Islam) in Brussels (where he under severe scrutiny. From the early 1980s onward, it begun lived between 1934 and 1940), his lecture of messianistic to be seriously challenged by a number of scholars, among Islamic texts predicting the fall of Constantinople and the whom Colin Heywood, and in particular, the Manchester positive reception of his work, replete as it was with adjec- Ottomanist Colin Imber, and finally by Heath Lowry who tives like ‘heroic’, ‘chivalric’ and ‘romantic’, in Germany in more or less devoted a monograph to the deconstruction of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Although Wittek’s ideas Wittek’s ideas (in The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, found a willing reception among the few people who were New York, 2003). An important point of criticism was that there was little proof for much of what Wittek claimed. As 2) Ibidem, p. 74. is already clear from Wittek’s publications themselves, 3) Ibidem, p. 75. sources for the early period of Ottoman history are extremely 4) Imber, ‘Paul Wittek’s “De la défaite d’Ankara à la prise de Constan- scarce and he mentions (p. 44) only two sources for his the- tinople”’, Osmanlı Araștırmaları V (1989), pp. 65-81. An English version ory: an inscription in stone of 1337 found in Bursa and a few of the article by Wittek mentioned in the title is found in our book on pp. 135-60 and preceded by a commentary by Heywood, where he mentions verses in a rhymed encyclopaedia of c.1400 in which the Imber’s ‘harsh’ criticism. Ottomans are called ghazis. Colin Imber, moreover, is not 5) In the same context Heywood mentions the Ottomanist Franz Babin- convinced that a ghazi in these sources means much more ger (1891-1968), of whom he writes (p. 10): that he ‘had served - inaccu- than an ordinary raider; in the encyclopaedia verses them- rately, according to Wittek, in the ranks - in Turkey during the war, and for selves it is explicitly stated that the Ottoman meant raid whom Wittek came over the years to develop an extreme and in some ways 1 unjustified antipathy’. Two remarks: Babinger did serve in the ranks of the (akın) when they talked about ghaza. ) In one early source, Ottoman army during the war, see Barbara Flemming & Jan Schmidt, The Diary of Karl Süssheim (1878-1947), Orientalist Between Munich and Istanbul, Stuttgart 2002, p. 139; Wittek’s feelings of antipathy are under- 1) Colin Imber, ‘The Legend of Osman Gazi’, in Elizabeth Zachariadou standable in view of the fact that he accused Babinger of thriving on his, (ed.), The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389), Rethymnon 1993, pp. 67-75, Wittek’s, Ghazi thesis, claiming it for himself, even stealing it from him p. 73-4 – the article is not mentioned in Heywood’s bibliography. See also (as he told Barbara Flemming in the 1960s, e-mail from Flemming to me in our book, p. 18, where Heywood quotes another article by Imber. of 9 September 2013). 807 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS LXX N° 5-6, september-december 2013 808 interested in Ottoman history (‘Clio’s poor relation’, pace Victor Ménage) until at least the 1980s, his work was hardly read by historians in general, to which may have contributed the fact that “The Rise …” proved to be the end of the road for Wittek’s engagement with the early Ottomans and that he never produced a ‘big book’ as did some of his contemporar- ies and fellow-exiles such as Erich Auerbach or Ernst Kan- torowicz. But perhaps there is hope for our post 9/11 age. ‘May [there not] be a new relevance in a somewhat more presentist critique of Wittek’s ideas’, Heywood wonders, ‘[in] a new age of global crisis, where pre-modern attitudes have re-emerged’? Was Wittek in ‘apotheosing the four- teenth-century ghazis of Bithynia and Thrace’ not ‘romanti- cising the terrorists of the age’? (p. 23). The edition of Wittek’s work is concluded by an After- word by Heywood in which he, quoting philosophers of his- tory such as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, ponders on the nature and merits of modern historiography, the way in which Wittek’s work could be used in arguments about his- toriography and be appreciated as a work of art, almost as fiction. And then there was the strange phenomenon that the study of the early history of the Ottomans became, or at least has been for many years, a discourse about Wittek’s thesis; this was perhaps due to the fact that no other consistent or attractive interpretations, let alone a competing all-embracing thesis, have since come forward. (Binbaș had in his Preface already pointed to the flexibility of Wittek’s scholarship, the fact that it was ‘a form of ideology, or a metaphor, [that] could be incorporated into various other explanatory frame- works…’, p. xiv.) This persistence of Wittek’s ideas among Ottomanists and the attractive, literary and sometimes dra- matic way, in which they are expressed, Heywood concludes, justifies the reissue of Wittek’s work, making it accessible to generations who have not known the master and to those ‘who wish to discover more about one of the most remark- able pioneers in the study of the early history of the Ottoman state.’
Leiden, 9 September 2013 Jan SCHMIDT