Resumo de Between Two Worlds

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 favor of a centralizing 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 Köprülu 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 idealized 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.

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