darling-contested territory: ottoman holy war

Maisonneuve & Larose

Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative ContextAuthor(s): Linda T. DarlingReviewed work(s):Source: Studia Islamica, No. 91 (2000), pp. 133-163Published by: Maisonneuve & LaroseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1596272 .Accessed: 30/01/2012 12:36

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Studia Islamica, 2000

Contested Territory : Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context

The question of the nature of the early Ottoman conquests, once thought to have been exhausted (if not resolved), has been dramatically reopened in recent times. A pair of papers given at the opening and closing sessions of the 1998 Congress on the Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire voiced contrasting views on the role of holy war in the foundation of the Otto- man state. (1) The presentation of these papers reflects a recrudescence of interest in the well-known "ghazi thesis" of Paul Wittek, the controversial pro- position that ghaza, or "holy war," was the foundation and driving force of the early Ottoman state. (2) Although ghazai is not identical to jihad, this interest is probably not unconnected with public anxiety over extremist groups like Islamic Jihad or with the spate of publications on jihad since the Iranian revolution of 1979. (3) The reassessment of Wittek's thesis has generated a search for new sources on the early Ottoman period and a reinterpretation of sources already known for the cultural history of western Anatolia in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The investigation of these new sources, however, has not settled the question of the place of ghaza in the early Ottoman state but has simply introduced more positions on its meaning for the early Ottomans and its role in the development of their empire.

This ongoing lack of resolution suggests that it is time to rethink the way the question is structured and the strategies by which it might be answered. Despite a near absence of direct evidence for the role of ghaza in early Ottoman experience, the question of Ottoman ghaza has primarily been posed within the nar- row context of the culture of the Turkish principalities in western Anatolia (one of which, the Ottoman, would soon dominate the region). This tactic might have been understandable as a product of the historiography of the infant Tur-

(1) Halil Inalcik, "New Researches on Osman Gazi," and Heath Lowry, "The Nature of the Early Otto- man State as Reflected in the 14th Century History of Bursa," given at the opening lecture and the final panel of the VIII. Uluslararasi Tirkiye'nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi Kongresi, Bursa, Turkey, June 18-21, 1998. I am grateful to the participants in the History Department Brown Bag at the University of Arizona for

helping to clarify the ideas in this paper. (2) Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938). (3) Expressions of this anxiety in English include, on the academic level, Samuel P. Huntington, "The

Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22-49; and on the popular level Karen Armstrong, Holy War (London: Macmillan, 1988).

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kish republic, but in fact it emerged much later in the context of the mature development of a number of nationalist historiographies, Turkish and non- or even anti-Turkish, and of increased academic specialization. The Ottoman conquest, however, did not take place in a vacuum, and the Ottomans did not arise in western Anatolia untouched by the cultures of the past and the problems of the lands through which they moved. Researchers must broaden the scope of investigation of the problem beyond western Anatolia and Turkish sources in order to see its full dimensions, let alone to resolve it.

This paper surveys some of the directions in which that contextualiza- tion might be extended and proposes a more productive formulation of the question. Rather than asking whether the early Ottoman state was a ghazl state or not, or seeking to identify some kind of foundational essence, it takes a potentially more fruitful path, defining the Ottoman state as a product of contestation among groups with different agendas and different concepts of the relevance and value of ghazad for their own interests and goals. Most students of Ottoman origins, whether or not they considered "the ghdzis" to be the dominant element in the state, have sought to define their role as a group vis-a-vis other groups in the development of Ottoman institutions, ideas, and activities. But ghaza was not the property of a homogeneous group; people advocated or engaged in it from different standpoints and for different reasons. The coexistence of such conflicting interests can be attested, not on the Ottoman frontier alone, but on frontiers around the Muslim world where ghaza was practiced and for centuries prior to the Ottoman conquest. Consequently, the debate about Ottoman origins should be reformulated in terms of the interests that were at stake in the establishment of the new state of Osman and in the pursuit of ghazai by its members. Such a reformulation cannot be fully accomplished in this short space, but this essay seeks to provide a basis on which it can take place by examining the production of our sources on ghaza and the interests they represent or portray.

The debate to this point has centered around the meaning of the term ghaz.a and its applicability to the situations and personnel of the Ottoman frontier. Wittek's thesis, that the founders of the Ottoman state were a group of frontier warriors (ghazifs) motivated by an ideology of holy war (ghaza), was put forth to counter previous assertions that the early Otto- mans were simply unlettered Turkish tribesmen whose state owed its cohe- sion and growth to traditions of imperial government and sedentarized bureaucracy borrowed from the Byzantines or the Saljuqs. (4) Since Wit- tek's time, however, both the tribal organization of the Ottomans and their

(4) For the position that the Byzantines were behind Ottoman greatness see Herbert A. Gibbons, The Founda- tion of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916); for the argument for the Saljiqs see M. Fuad Koprulii, Les origines de l'empire ottoman (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1935); trans. Gary Leiser, The Origins of the Ottoman Empire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Vryonis's formulation embraces both influences, reducing the role of the Ottoman Turks in the foundation of their own state to conquest and destruction (see Speros Vryonis, Jr., "The Byzantine Legacy and Ottoman Forms," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23-24 [1969-70]: 249-308).

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engagement in holy war have been questioned. Later scholars share a certain skepticism toward claims by fifteenth-century Ottoman chroniclers that the conquests of their forebears were motivated by religious devotion and zeal for the faith. (5) The heterogeneous nature of Ottoman armies and alliances, mixing Christians with Muslims and often directed against co- religionists, their focus on booty and territorial expansion rather than conversion, and elements of unorthodoxy or even shamanism in Ottoman religious practice argue against literal readings of the portrayal of the early Ottomans as Islamic holy warriors. The construction of the Ottomans as ghazis is now often considered to be a later overlay, while the chroniclers' inaccuracies and obviously tendential reconstructions call attention to their own personal agendas as well as their lack of reliable information on the times of their ancestors. At the same time, conflicting versions of the Otto- mans' tribal origins presented in the chronicles raise doubts about their validity. These contradictions have been resolved in different ways. The interpretation of tribalism made by Lindner demands a rejection of ghadz ideology and orthodox Islam in favor of an Islam heavily influenced by Central Asian shamanist traditions, later repudiated, and an organization that regarded bureaucratic traditions as alien and corrupt. (6) On the other hand, Inalcik considers that the disruption of tribal organization by migration and service in Byzantine mercenary bands made a space in which a ghaizi ideology could act as a uniting force and recruiting mechanism for people of tribal origin who were no longer tribally organized. (7)

More recently, the prevailing skepticism toward the Ottoman chronicles has motivated two authors to try to determine what can be reliably ascertai- ned about Ottoman origins and ghizi ideologies from other sources. Colin Imber's articles deconstructing historical incidents and mythological narratives in the chronicles cleared the way for a minimalist political history of the early Ottomans incorporating only information verifiable from contem-

(5) This skepticism is based in part on detailed study of the chronicles and their antecedents; see especially Halil Inalcik, "The Rise of Ottoman Historiography," and V. L. M6nage, "The Beginnings of Ottoman

Historiography," in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt, Historical Writings on the Peoples of Asia, 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). For recent work in the same vein, see Studies in Ottoman History in Honour of Professor V. L. Menage, ed. Colin Heywood and Colin Imber (Istan- bul: Isis Press, 1994).

(6) Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, Uralic and Altaic Series, n? 144

(Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1983); this viewpoint is shared by Gyula Kaldy-Nagy, "The Holy War (jihdd) in the First Centuries of the Ottoman Empire," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3-4 (1979-80): 467-73; and Ronald C. Jennings, "Some Thoughts on the Gazi-Thesis," Wiener Zeitschriftfiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes 76 (1986): 151-61. Rudi Paul Lindner, in "Stimulus and Justification in Early Ottoman History," Greek Orthodox Theological Review 27 (1982): 207-24, describes ghazd as a justification after the fact rather than a stimulus to conquest.

(7) Halil Inalcik, "The Question of the Emergence of the Ottoman State," International Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1980): 71-79; he combines mercenary service with population pressure due to Mongol advances to

explain the Ottomans' westward expansion. However, it should be noted that what Inalcik calls a warrior band is exactly what Lindner calls a tribe, in particular a "new tribe," that is, a mobile political organization with recruitment not based on kinship in which leadership went to the most successful war leader (Rudi Paul Lind- ner, "What Was a Nomadic Tribe?" Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 [1982]: 700).

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porary non-Turkish sources. (8) On that basis, authentic evidence identifying the early Ottomans as ghazis is almost nonexistent (the Byzantines, for

example, never seem to have noticed a ghazi identification among their Ottoman allies/opponents), and what little evidence there is can be explai- ned away as later interpolations. Imber's negative move of breaking down the traditional narrative of Ottoman origins based on chronicle evidence was followed by the positive one of reconstructing an Ottoman Empire resem-

bling that of Kopruilu in its derivation from the Islamic empires of the past. In place of the imperial administration of the Saljuqs, however, Imber sees the sharl'a as the formative impulse of the Ottoman state. His study of legal manuals supports an argument that the Ottomans from the first conducted their warfare and organized their territories in accordance with the strictures of Islamic law, the portrayal of unorthodox tribal ghazis on the warpath being purely a fifteenth-century reconstruction. (9) In his view, the pursuit of ghaza as mandated by the shar'a legitimated the Ottoman sultans as Mus- lim rulers, and chroniclers "adjusted" their narratives to account for anoma- lies and to make the Ottomans heirs to the Saljuqs as ghazi leaders and thus

justify their takeover of Muslim lands in Anatolia as well. Although Imber admits that the portrayals of ghaza in epic poetry and in the chronicles

appealed to different groups in Ottoman society, he does not accord the tension between them any formative role.

Cemal Kafadar's study of western Anatolian literary sources leads him to

quite a different position despite a certain similarity of approach. He argues that although hard evidence for Ottoman identification as ghazis in the early years is extremely thin and can be argued away, expansion of the field of

inquiry to the western Anatolian principalities as a whole brings out an entire post-Saljuq tradition and literature of ghazi activity. ('1) Late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Turkish leaders routinely considered themselves to be

engaged in ghaza, were granted and used the title of ghadzi, and were celebrated as such in song and story as well as inscriptions and letters. In that context, the Ottomans may be regarded as having almost been required to

engage in ghazli warfare if they were to attract support for their expansion. But what did the term ghadzl mean to those who used it? They considered

(8) Colin Imber, "Paul Wittek's 'De la defaite d'Ankara a la prise de Constantinople'," Osmanll Arastlrmalar 5 (1986): 65-81; "The Ottoman Dynastic Myth," Turcica 19 (1987): 7-27; "The Legend of Osman Gazi," in The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389), ed. Elizabeth Zachariadou (Rethymnon: Crete Univer- sity Press, 1993); all reprinted in Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1996; citations are from this edition); "Canon and Apocrypha in Early Ottoman History," in Studies in Ottoman History in Honour of Professor V. L. Menage, 117-38; The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1481 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990).

(9) Colin Imber, Ebu's-su'ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 73; idem, "Paul Wittek's 'De la defaite d'Ankara'," pp. 294-301; idem, "The Ottoman Dynastic Myth," pp. 305-9.

(10) Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The need to expand the context in which Ottoman origins are considered was pointed out by Kopruili and Wittek already in the early twentieth century, but instead of broadening, since that time the context has drastically narrowed (K6priili, Origins, pp. 89-90; Wittek, Rise, pp. 17-19).

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themselves good Muslims, not holders of tribal beliefs outside the Islamic mainstream, yet they did not see their ghazi activity as holy war in any purist sense. Ghazai was not jihad and did not adhere to jihad's legal norms; rather, it was an activity in which people of any faith or origin could join, though it benefitted the Islamic state as well as the warriors themselves. Anatolian epic poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries depict ghdzt warriors, the main agents of conquest, as living for battle and booty, glory and girls. The struggle for Islam did not preclude cooperation and intermarriage with non- Muslims, religious syncretism, or this-worldly motivations; ghaza2 was inclusive rather than exclusive, aiming at the attachment of new territories and new adherents by whatever means proved successful, whether violent or pacific. (1) Fifteenth-century chronicles written mainly by members of the 'ulama' reinterpreted the ghazt warfare of the early days in more exclusive terms as holy war for the faith pursued by nomads uncorrupted by civilization. This reinterpretation was addressed to fifteenth-century problems: explaining Timur's breakup of the empire by the loss of an original Mus- lim/tribal purity, legitimizing the reconstituted post-Timurid empire by linking its rulers with Central Asian nomadic royalty, or criticizing the imperial recruitment and taxation policies of Mehmed the Conqueror. Tensions between these sources reflect tensions in Ottoman society between groups contending for the spoils and credit of conquest, and that contention became a significant aspect of Ottoman experience.

Although Kafadar criticized views expressed in the introduction to Imber's minimalist history, (12) he did not use the ample evidence in Imber's text which supports his own construction of the Ottomans' ghazi experience. His call for an expansion of the context in which the early Ottoman conquests should be considered did not go beyond the strictly Turkish field; in particular, it did not include a consideration of the Ottomans' non-Turkish allies or enemies, despite an interesting analysis of border epics and the conditions of border warfare. According to borderlands scholars, however, one defining characteristic of border society is that the groups facing each other across the border tend to resemble each other more strongly than they do the hinterland societies of which they are the extensions. (13) A consideration of the other armies in the field is thus not irrelevant. (14) Imber's narrative, like earlier histories, provides abundant evidence that the context in

(11) As Halil Inalcik had earlier stated, "Holy War was intended not to destroy but to subdue the infidel world" and to redirect its profits toward the Muslims (The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; rpt. New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, 1990; rpt. London: Phoenix/Orion Books Ltd., 1994], p. 7).

(12) Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, p. 164, n. 31; see Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 12-13. (13) Oscar Martinez, Border People (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), pp. 18-20; Michael

Baud and Willem van Schendel, "Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands," Journal of World History 8 (1997): 216, 221-22. Wittek made this point earlier (Rise, pp. 18, 20).

(14) Comparison of the Normans and the Turks in the medieval Mediterranean brings out some startling similarities; see Michel Balivet, "Normands et Turcs en M6diterranee m6di6vale: Deux adversaires 'syme- triques'?" Turcica 30 (1998): 309-29.

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which the Ottomans established their state was that of the later Crusades. The impact of the Crusades, although it did not alter the legal definition of jihad, strongly affected the culture of the eastern Mediterranean, generating a twelfth-century literature that romanticized the original Muslim conquests and the role of Jerusalem as a Muslim holy city. (15) Subsequent events tar- nished this aura of holy war, and by the fourteenth century it existed only in memory, to be drawn upon for other purposes. A Muslim commentator of the early twelfth century could convincingly portray the Crusade of his time as ajihad, (16) but the Crusader attack on Christian Constantinople in 1204, like Sunni-Isma'ili warfare on the Muslim side, made holy war a more complex concept for later participants.

The Ottoman conquests took place in a lull between two major crusading phases, during a period of minor expeditions mounted for a variety of less worthy motives. (17) The deployment of religious ideology to legitimize warfare and territorial acquisition had become a standard tactic among the peoples of the many small states, Christian and Muslim, of the thirteenth- century Balkans and western Anatolia, including the Frankish Crusaders, the Venetians, Serbs, Bulgarians and Catalans, the Byzantines, and several groups of Turks. In pursuit of territory, booty, and power, all of the above were prepared to attack co-religionists, ally with former enemies, or hire warriors from any background at all. (18) The Ottomans' emergence took place in a context in which Christians as well as Muslims engaged in warfare often motivated by greed, self-aggrandizement, and, as Kafadar put it, victory for "our team," but legitimated by calls to faith and holy war. This is not to say that there were no sincere warriors for the faith on either side, but that the uniformity of motive implied by terms like "the ghdzis" is illusory.

(15) Fred M. Donner, "The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War," in Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace on Western and Islamic Traditions, ed. John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 53-54; Hadia Dajani-Shakeel, "Al-Quds: Jerusalem in the Consciousness of the Counter-Crusader," in The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. Valdimir P. Goss and Christine Verzar Born- stein, Studies in Medieval Culture, 21 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), pp. 201-21; see also Emmanuel Sivan, L'Islam et la croisade: Ideologie et propagande dans les reactions musulmans aux croisades (Paris: Libraire d'Amerique et d'Orient, 1969).

(16) 'Ali b. Tahir al-Silami, Kitdb al-Jihdd (1105); cited by Robert Irwin, "Islam and the Crusades, 1096-1699," in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 225.

(17) Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1938), p. 282. (18) For examples see Norman Housley, "Frontier Societies and Crusading in the Late Middle Ages,"

Mediterranean Historical Review 10 (1995): 107-8; Elizabeth Zachariadou, "Holy War in the Aegean during the Fourteenth Century," in Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204 (London: Frank Cass, 1989), p. 214; Halil Inalcik, "The Rise of the Turcoman Maritime Principalities in Anatolia, Byzantium, and the Crusades," Byzantinische Forschungen 9 (1985): 179-211; rpt. in The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire: Essays on Economy and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1993), pp. 312-13. The intermingling of Muslim, Byzantine, and western European peoples and states in the eastern Mediterranean emerges vividly from J. M. Hussey, "The Later Macedonians, the Comneni and the Angeli, 1025-1204," in The Cambridge Medieval History, ed. J. M. Hussey, vol. 4, pt. 1 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press), 1966), pp. 232-39.

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We cannot say that the Ottomans were not ghazis, any more than that the Fourth Crusade was not a crusade, but we cannot assume that ghaza meant the same thing to all participants. The battles and maneuverings of the Cru- sades are familiar ground, but closer study of the culture of crusading warfare in the eastern Mediterranean in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries might illuminate Ottoman origins considerably.

The border epics studied by Kafadar suggest another expansion of the context in which ghaza should be interpreted, that is, an expansion of the time scale. The warfare depicted in these epics is usually not grand battles but desultory frontier raiding involving close and often friendly interactions with "enemy" warriors and much border-crossing by the protagonists, indi- cations of the development of a cross-border society over a long period of time. The Byzantine frontier, as we know, had been a feature of Islamic society almost since its beginning, and it is unlikely that the customs and traditions of the border were completely overturned by the Saljuq invasions. In fact, the circulation of epic tales and themes from Arabic through Persian and Turkish literatures indicates a high level of continuity in attitudes and practices. This should not be surprising, since even a cursory examination of the frontiers in the tenth to twelfth centuries demonstrates a high level of continuity in personnel, not only over time but over space, as ghazis moved from one Islamic frontier to another. Thus, Ottoman ghazi activity must be investigated in the context of the history of ghaza in the larger Islamic world. Kafadar points to the need for such an expansion of the context but confines himself strictly to Turkish sources. Material for such a quest, however, can be gleaned from sources questioned by Kafadar for their Turkish background alone.

Two types of sources used by Kafadar, frontier narratives and catechetical works, circulated in late Saljuq-early Ottoman times but embodied the traditions of an earlier era. Frontier narratives, in the forms of epic poetry and hagiography, contain elements traceable to earlier frontier epics and saints' tales in Arabic and Persian (e.g., the Abiumuslimnima, exploits attributed to Abui Muslim, the 'Abbasid-propagandist-turned-folk-hero on the Central Asian frontier, and the Battalnama, the story of Sayyid Battal Ghazi, a hero of seventh-century Arab/Byzantine frontier warfare). (19) Such narratives indicate the presence on the Ottoman frontier of concepts and approaches developed in those distant settings and conveyed through song and story. These poems closely resemble epic poetry from other frontier milieux, such as the poems of the Byzantine Digenis Akrites or the Spanish Cid, and they had a long history of oral transmission and re-creation by sto- rytellers among the ghadzi warriors themselves before being stabilized in written form. In them ghaza is portrayed as an ongoing activity of raiding

(19) Irene Melikoff, Abu-Muslim, Le 'porte-hache' du Khorassan dans la tradition epique turco- iranienne (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1962); idem, ed., La geste de Melik Ddnismend, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1960).

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and small-scale conquest starring individuals whose personal qualities and experiences are the focus of attention; religious loyalties are more important than religious beliefs, and ethical, honorable, courageous behavior is more important still. (20)

The second type of work having earlier antecedents is of a very different nature: the catechism ('ilm-i hal) or articles of faith (aqa'id), giving rules for religious behavior, in some instances including definitions of ghaza and jihad and rules for behavior on ghazd. (21) Produced by 'ulamd' for the purpose of instruction, this type of text also has a long history, as exemplified by the research of ?inasi Tekin on a fourteenth-century Anatolian catechism containing a section on the rules of ghazd, as opposed to jihad in general. (22) The oldest Turkish antecedent Tekin found for his Anatolian text was a translation of a tenth-century catechism by the famous theologian Abu al- Layth al-Samarqandi (d. 983); the rules themselves are presumably even older. Samarqandl's text proved so popular that it circulated widely in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish versions. (23) Tekin notes that another text containing the rules of ghazd, a Persian catechism written in the twelfth century by another Samarqandi author, also appeared in several early Anatolian Turkish translations, and that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Ana- tolian Turkish 'ulamd' such as Molla Hiisrev composed similar texts of their own. The presence of these texts in Anatolia implies either a tradition of instruction in the rules of ghazd emanating from the Central Asian frontier and transferred to the Anatolian frontier by literate migrants, or a migration of intellectuals from Samarqand to Anatolia, where they engaged in the codification of the ghazd. These works make a distinction between ghazac and jihad: in them jihad, a duty incumbent upon all Muslims, refers to defense of Muslim cities against invasion by "infidel" armies, while ghaza, a duty that may be discharged by a sufficient portion of the Muslim community, refers to invasion of "infidel" lands by Muslims authorized by the caliph or to defense of far-distant parts of Muslim territory. (24) The rules in themselves strongly suggest an attempt to impose a modicum of control over a chaotic situation; they seek to regulate the making of war, peace, and truce,

(20) Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, pp. 62-77. (21) Ibid., p. 64. (22) Sinasi Tekin, "XIV iinci Yuzyila ait bir Ilm-i Hal: Risaletii'l-Islam," Wiener Zeitschrift fur die

Kunde des Morgenlandes 76 (1986): 279-92; idem, "XIV. Yiizyllda Yazilmi? Gazilik Tarikasl 'Gaziligin Yollan' Adll bir Eski Anadolu Turkcesi Metni ve Gaza/Cihad Kavramlan Hakklnda," Journal of Turkish Stu- dies 13 (1989): 139-204.

(23) Tekin, "Gazi/Cihad Kavramlan Hakklnda," p. 139 and n. 3. (24) In these works Anatolia appears to be still considered "infidel" territory where the applicable rules are

those of ghaz.d (ibid., p. 143; see also Claude Cahen, "La premiere penetration turque en Asie-mineure [second moiti6 du XIe s.]," Byzantion 18 [1946-48]: 64-65; rpt. in Turcobyzantina et Oriens Christianus [London: Variorum Reprints, 1974], I). For a list of "provinces" considered to be part of the Dar al-Islam and what that status involved, see Fadl-Allah b. Ruzbihan Isfahani, Muslim Conduct of State, based upon the Suluk-ul-Muluk, trans. Muhammad Aslam (Lahore, University of Islam Press, 1974), p. 459. Like most works onjihad, this work distinguishes between offensive and defensive warfare, but without using the term ghaz.d (p. 464).

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the division of booty and the consumption of perishables, the commission of atrocities, the sale of arms to the enemy, and the offer of conversion or sub- mission to those about to be attacked.

The circulation of these two very different types of works on the Anato- lian frontier reveals the existence of divergent interests and worldviews within the border context. (25) While frontier epics and catechetical works ostensibly operated from the same definition of ghaza, they embodied vastly different impulses. The epic celebrated individual heroism that took advan- tage of the boundarylessness of border society to make friends, converts, and marriages among the putative enemy, extolled the bonds of comradeship and the acquisition and generous disposal of personal wealth, and in general embodied the romantic and individualistic aspects of border warfare. The catechism, on the other hand, sought precisely to set controls on the fluidity of border society, to impose boundaries between warriors identified primarily as Muslims and their unbelieving opponents, and to interpose the state and its demands into the collection of wealth and the disposition of the spoils of campaign. The tension between these powerful interests, and between the border warriors and 'ulama' who embodied them, is far older than the Otto- man state; the killing of the caliph 'Uthman in the first century of the hijra already involved a conflict between the same interests. (26) Kafadar noted this tension in the Ottoman chronicles of the late fifteenth century, which attempted to reinterpret Ottoman origins to suit the demands of contending forces in post-1453 society. Here, however, it appears already in the process of composition of the early Anatolian sources on ghazd.

Although these contrasting sources were not written down in Turkish until the fourteenth century or later, their circulation in written Persian and, we may presume, oral Turkish versions during the formative period of the Ottoman state points to a tension lying at the very foundations of the state. Rather than being a creation of the ghazis or the 'ulama', of tribal or seden- tary social formations, of the Greeks or the Turks, the Ottoman state was a product of the coincidence and divergence of the interests of all these groups and more. At heart, the nascent Ottoman state in Anatolia was contested territory. In place of assessing the success or failure of the state by its closeness to or distance from an original essence of whatever nature, we can better conceptualize Ottoman origins and subsequent ups and downs in terms of conflict and its management, interests and the balance of powers. This is not a new procedure for Ottomanists, as a consideration of the historiography on

(25) Wittek and Imber both noticed this tension but did not accord it any formative role (Wittek, Rise, p. 18; Imber, "Paul Wittek's 'De la d6faite d'Ankara'," pp. 294-95; idem, "The Ottoman Dynastic Myth," p. 306); for Kopriili (as for Kafadar) the differences of approach reflected the separate social spheres in which they were expressed, and he drew attention only to the tension between orthodox and heterodox SufT orders (Koprulii, Origins, pp. 88-98, 103-6).

(26) Abf Ja'far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari, The History ofal-Tabari, vol. 15: The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, trans. R. Stephen Humphreys (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 221-22.

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the Tanzimat or on Mehmed II's reforms in the late fifteenth century would show, but it needs to be applied to the question of the nature of the early Ottoman state. With respect to the ghazd, individuals and groups competed for the right to define its parameters, determine its role, and reap its rewards. Rulers, 'ulamd', and border warriors all had a stake in the prosecution of ghazd, but their stakes were different, sometimes even at odds. Other groups (Christians or peasants, perhaps) could be seen as having a stake in the limi- tation or elimination of ghaizi activity. The very meaning of ghaza must be seen as contested between conquerors who perhaps wanted to acquire religious sanction and prestige along with territory and power, 'ulamd'who perhaps wanted to bring the conquests under religious control and establish religious institutions, saints who perhaps wanted to spread their faith or live up to its demands, and soldiers who were perhaps not interested in justification or organization or faith but in booty and glory.

This brings us to a third interest operative on the pre-Ottoman frontier, that of the distant central state, located in the hinterland but claiming authority in the borderland. The identity of the "distant central states" attempting to control and direct the activity of the frontier warriors varied over time, but their interests and capabilities, or lack thereof, also helped shape the final Ottoman product. Among the types of sources examined so far, the central state is represented in a text containing the same rules of ghazd as the catechisms but in a different genre. The anonymous Bahr al-Fava'id, cited by Tekin as an antecedent for the fourteenth-century catechisms, is a mirror for princes produced in Aleppo around 1160 under Nfr al-Din Zangi (1146- 1174), a ghazi and fighter against the Crusaders. (27) The book was compiled from a variety of existing sources, including both manuals of religious practice and earlier mirrors for princes. In fact, the resemblance of the portion on ghaza to the corresponding section of the catechetical works discus- sed above prompts the speculation that Samarqandi's text was among those available to its author in the western Saljuq lands in the mid-twelfth century. But in addition to the rules of ghazd, the book includes advice to kings to pray, consult the 'ulamd', protect their domains and treasury, and dispense justice in open court; these values, stemming from the Perso-Islamic tradition of the Great Saljuqs of Iraq and Iran, are enforced by stories of pious men and rules for royal grants, the lives of caliphs and the wonders of the world. (28) The text, despite its dependence on the catechisms, depicts a viewpoint in which ghaza is only one among several ways in which the royal time and treasure might be spent.

The author of this book was an anonymous member of the 'ulamd', quite possibly one of those whom Nufr al-Din brought in from Persia and the east to staff the Sunni schools and courts he built in Syria in the twelfth

(27) The Sea of Precious Virtues (Bahr al-Favd'id): A Medieval Islamic Mirror for Princes, trans. and ed. Julie Scott Meisami (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); rules of ghazd on pp. 27-32.

(28) Ibid., pp. 147, 215, 299, 301, 324.

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century. (29) His work was among several mirrors for princes written for Sal- juiq and contemporary rulers in the wake of al-Ghazali's Nasihat al-Muluk, works that sought to reconcile the Perso-Arabic tradition of state with Islamic norms more fully than in earlier periods when they had been regarded as alternatives. Rather than choosing between the roles of royal autocrat, just judge, cultured aficionado, pious devotee, and zealous ghdzi, rulers now tried to combine them, an endeavor that gained poignancy after the end of the caliphate. If the border epics and hagiographies placed the personal rewards of ghaza (material or spiritual) above its communal benefits, and the catechetical works tried to harness individual heroism by the constraints of law, the mirrors for princes sought to deploy the approval obtained through ghaza to enhance the legitimacy and glory of the ruler and the state.

In Anatolia, a number of books of advice to kings were written by refugees from the east who fled from the Saljuq breakup and the Mongol invasions and migrated to the Rfim Saljuq court in the early-to-mid thirteenth century, men such as the secretary Yahya b. Sa'ad b. Ahmad, the Sufi Najm al-Din Razi, and the 'Alim Siraj al-Din Urmawi. (30) These authors, together with others of eastern origin--as well as artists, architects, poets, and mystics orthodox and antinomian, the most famous of whom is of course Jalal al-Din Ruimi--created an Anatolian Turkish culture that had close connections with that of northern and northeastern Iran. The route from the east, more open than the southward road to Syria which was closed by the Crusaders, had been traversed by the Saljuqs themselves, and before that by ghdzis from the Central Asian frontier. The work of eastern refugees and migrants strengthens the suggestion of the epics and catechetical works that a prominent source for thirteenth and fourteenth-century Anatolian ideas about ghaza was the Iranian frontier of an earlier period. An investigation of that region is thus in order.

In contrast to the relatively static Arab/Byzantine frontier, the Iranian/Cen- tral Asian frontier in the early centuries was a creative matrix for the whole Islamic world. It was, of course, the hotbed of the 'Abbasid revolution and the home of most of those who shaped that dynasty's outlook and policies, including members of the dynasty itself, such as al-Ma'miun, its most important servants, such as the Barmakids, and the troops that were its mainstay, both Khurasanians and Turks. The northeastern frontier was also the home of developing Sufism, and it was there that the link between the Sufifs and the

(29) Nikita Eliss6eff, Nur ad-Din: un grand prince musulman de Syrie au temps des Croisades (511-569 h./1118-1174), 3 vols. (Damascus: Institut Francais de Damas, 1967), 2: 461-62; cited in Sea of Precious Vir- tues; p. x and n. 27. For Nur al-Din's constructions see Nikita Eliss6eff, "Les monuments de Nfr ad-Din," Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales 13 (1949-51): 5-43; idem, "La titulature de NOr ad-Din d'apres ses inscriptions," Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales 14 (1952-54): 155-96.

(30) C.-H. de Fouch6cour, "Haddyeq al-Siyar, un Miroir des Princes de la cour de Qonya au VIW- XIII siecle," Studia Iranica 1 (1972): 219-28; Najm al-Din Razi, The Path of God's Bondsmen from Origin to Return, trans. Hamid Algar (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1982); on Urmawi see Ann K. S. Lambton, "Changing Concepts of Justice and Injustice from the 5th/l Ith Century to the 8th/14th Century in Persia: The Saljuq Empire and the Ilkhanate," Studia Islamica 68 (1988): 27-60; Louise Marlow, "Kings, Prophets and the 'Ulama' in Mediaeval Islamic Advice Literature," Studia Islamica 81 (1995): 101-20.

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ghdzts was forged, although surviving sources are too few to shed light on the process. (31) In the eighth to tenth centuries, the Muslim warriors' main opponents were the pagan Turks of the steppe, but Turks also lived within the Islamic frontier and fought on the Islamic side in increasing numbers, both as independent warriors and as official members of the Umayyad, 'Abbasid, and Samanid armies (some were of noble status; others, interestingly, were cooks). In the process many became Muslims and some achieved high office. (32) In the chronicles of the region ghdzis appear as volunteers (10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 in number) accompanying Samanid and Ghaznavid armies on campaigns against pagan opponents, as defenders of cities such as Samarqand and Bukhara in the absence of government troops, and as robber or rebel bands. (33) The style of border warfare was modeled on that of nomadic warfare, whose tactics were incursions and raids rather than set-piece battles and territorial occupation. (34) The title of Ghcdzt was given to numerous princes and generals in command of ghazi expeditions. (35) At the same time, Samar-

qand was an important commercial center, slave market, paper manufacturing center, and home of scholarship, and some ghazis may well have engaged at times in occupations other than fighting. (36)

(31) Richard N. Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), pp. 115-17. It must have been in the tenth century that the ribdts or frontier fortresses exchanged their military character for a religious one. In the eleventh century, the communal Sffism of the ribdts was

spread westward by Khurasani shaykhs (El2, s.v. "Saldjiukids"). On the conquest and Islamization of Cen- tral Asia see Devin DeWeese, "Yasavian Legends on the Islamization of Turkistan," in Aspects of Altaic Civilization III, ed. Denis Sinor (Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 1-19.

(32) Daniel Pipes, "Turks in Early Muslim Service," Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1978): 85-96; Richard N. Frye with A. M. Sayili, "The Turks in Khurasan and Transoxania at the Time of the Arab Conquest," Mus- lim World 35 (1945): 308-15; rpt. in Richard N. Frye, Islamic Iran and Central Asia (7th-12th Centuries) (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979), XIII; Fukuzo Amabe, The Emergence of the 'Abbdsid Autocracy: The 'Abbdsid Army, Khurasdn and Adharbayjdn (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 1995), pp. 130-33. Inalcik

points out the influence of this background on the subsequent development of the Anatolian Turks: Halil Inal- cik, "Islam in the Ottoman Empire," Cultura Turcica 5-7 (1968-70): 19-29; rpt. in Essays in Ottoman His-

tory (Istanbul: Eren, 1998), pp. 229-45. (33) According to Bayhaqi, Ibn al-Athir, and Gardizi, cited in W. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mon-

gol Invasion, 3rd ed. (London: Luzac, 1968), pp. 215, 242, 287, 295, 345. For a similar description of the

ghdzis of Sicily see Robert S. Lopez, "The Norman Conquest of Sicily," in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 6 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969-), 1: 58-61. Both Koprul and Wittek speak not just of an undifferentiated mass of ghdzis but of ghdzf organizations or corporations, linking them with akhis andfutuwwa organizations, topics that are outside the scope of this paper. Members of these organizations, full-time ghazis, possessed no means of support other than warfare and in the absence of ghdzi raiding became mercenaries or bandits (Koprulii, Origins, p. 89) or, in an urban setting, ayydrs (C. E. Bosworth, "The Armies of the Saffarids," BSOAS 31 [1968]: 538; rpt. in idem, The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia [London: Variorum Reprints, 1977], XVII).

(34) Claude Cahen, "The Turkish Invasion: The Selchiikids," in A History of the Crusades, ed. Setton, 1: 138.

(35) This included Saljuq, the eponymous founder of the Saljiq dynasty, whom later historians called al- Malik al-Ghazi (Ibrahim Kafesoglu, A History of the Seljuks: Ibrahim Kafesoglu's Interpretation and the Resulting Controversy, trans. Gary Leiser [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988], p. 25 and n. 55).

(36) E12, s.v. "Samarkand;" Barthold, Turkestan, pp. 237, 256.

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On the Central Asian frontier, the interests of the distant 'Abbasid state were represented by the Samanids (874-999). They were in charge of the ghaza, but their court also became, as we know, the center for the development of Perso-Islamic culture. The most outstanding product of that culture, Firdawsl's Shahnama, is precisely a story of tension between the central state and the warrior hero, a theme that must have been quite familiar to the region's rulers and warriors. (37) Abu al-Layth al-Samarqandi's influential catechism, embodying the 'ulamd"s attempt to contain the practices of ghazi warfare within a legal framework, had appeared not long earlier. We thus find the same constellation of interests that were present in Anatolia represented on the Central Asian frontier in the tenth century. At that moment, this frontier was on the point of closing, as the conversion of most of the steppe Turks to Islam had caused the ghdzis to lose their employment (perhaps explaining their appearance as robbers). The Samanids began to send expeditions southward into Afghanistan, and about the same time the Byzantines broke through the northwest frontier, taking Aleppo, Tarsus, and Antioch during the 960s. (38) In the second half of the tenth century, ghazis left Central Asia in large numbers to join the fighting in the south and west. We have reports of the havoc caused in Rayy as ghazis heading for Anato- lia passed through in 966. (39) Soon afterward, Samainid territories in the northeast were taken over by the Muslim Karakhanids from the east, and there was no longer a frontier in Transoxiana.

The sponsorship of ghaza into India by the Turkish Ghaznavids of Afghanistan (999-1161) attracted many ghazis from the north. Several Ghaz- navid rulers bore the title of Ghdzi, as did some of the Ghfrid rulers who succeeded them. (40) It is unclear how this title was bestowed or by whom; in later times it was either conferred by the 'ulamd' on the leader of an officially proclaimed ghaza or self-awarded for raids into non-Muslim territory. (41) The

(37) See Dick Davis, Epic and Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi's Shahndmeh (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), p. 20.

(38) For details see Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025 (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1996), pp. 310-37.

(39) Clifford E. Bosworth, "Military Organisation under the Biyids of Persia and Iraq," Oriens 18-19 (1965-66): 157, from the chroniclers Miskawayh and Ibn al-Jawzi. The Bfyids, regarding these ghdizis as a Samanid invasion, defeated them and threw them out (idem, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963; 2nd ed. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1973], p. 167). Similar troubles arose in Baghdad in 971-72, according to Ibn al-Athir, instigated by people arriving "from everywhere" in response to a call for ghazd (Koprului, Origins, p. 90).

(40) Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, pp. 33, 114; the third sultan Mas'id (1030-1041) had plans to wage holy war in Anatolia as well as India (Bayhaqi, cited in Bosworth, "The Imperial Policy of the Early Ghaznavids," Islamic Studies 1 [1962]: 57, 73; rpt. in idem, The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia [London: Variorum Reprints, 1977], XI); see also 'Abdu-l-Qadir ibn-i-Muluk Shah al-Badaoni, Muntakhabu- t-Tawdrikh, vol. 1, trans. George S. A. Ranking (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1848; rpt. Patna: Aca- demica Asiatica, 1973), pp. 64, 74-75.

(41) Hamd Allah Mustawfi Qazwini, The Ta'rikh-i-Guzida or "Select History", abridged trans. Edward G. Browne (Leiden: E. J. Brill; London: Luzac, 1913), p. 161; Babur Mirza, "Babumama," in A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, trans. W. M. Thackston (Cambridge: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1989), p. 250.

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ghadz activity of the Ghaznavids and Ghurids is known mainly from references in contemporary and later chronicles, but to a large extent it must have continued the ghdzi traditions of the Central Asian frontier, just as Ghaznavid imperial government maintained the Samanid traditions of its origin. The importance of the ghdzi ideology can be seen in the Chahar Maqala by Nizami Arufdi Samarqandi, which put ghazl valor before justice and order in the praises of the Ghiurid prince to whom it was addressed. (42)

According to the history of 'Utbi, the Ghaznavid ghaza entailed the submis- sion of non-Muslims to Muslim rule, the incorporation of their territories into the lands of Islam, and the official renunciation of idolatry by conquered rulers, but mass conversion was not a central issue even for Indian troops serving in the Ghaznavid armies. (43) Besides the Ghaznavids' own slave troops, the army included "various tribes of Turks, Khiljis, and Hindus and Afghans, and the Gozz (sic) troops," and a force of Arabs is also mentioned. In addition, there were warriors from Central Asia; on one occasion "nearly twenty thousand men had come from the plains of Mawarannahr, through zeal for Islam, and they sat down waiting the time for the Sultan's move- ments, striking their numerous swords, and uttering the shout of the holy war, 'God is great!"' (4)

The chronicles unfortunately do not portray the culture of the ghazis; they give detailed descriptions of battles, but cultural information is confined to the rulers and their courts. 'Utbi's history presents the Ghaznavid regime as an amalgam of Islamic orthodoxy, astrology and miracles, drinking parties, and bureaucratic administration, Bayhaqi's simply as a snakepit of intrigue. (45) As on the Anatolian and Central Asian frontiers, however, so on the Indian frontier the tradition of the ghdzis was preserved in epic form. The hero of this tradition was the "Prince of Martyrs," Salar Mas'fd, "nephew" of the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud and general (sipahslair) of a ghadzl army. Mahmuid reigned in the early eleventh century, but the region of Mas'ud's exploits was not actually conquered by the Muslims until the early thirteenth century, so it is not clear who this Mas'ud really was. By the late thirteenth century, however, the poet and traveler Amir Khusraw could see his tomb in Bahraich, and in the fourteenth century it was a popular pilgrimage site visited by Ibn Battfta, who recorded the tales he was told of the martyr's

(42) Edward G. Browne, "The Chahar Maqala ("Four Discourses") of Nidhami-i-'Arfud-i-Samarqandt," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1899): 619-20.

(43) al-'Utbi, The Kitab-i-Yamini, trans. James Reynolds (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1858), pp. 283, 322, 326, 362; C. E. Bosworth, "The Political and Dynastic History of the Iranian World (A.D. 1000- 1217)," in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Richard N. Frye, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 5: 177-80.

(44) 'Utbi, pp. 363, 335-36, 333, 450. (45) On Bayhaqi see Marilyn Robinson Waldman, Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative: A Case

Study in Perso-lslamicate Historiography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980); Julie Scott Mei- sami, "Dynastic History and Ideals of Kingship in Bayhaqi's Tarikh-i Mas'udi," Edebiyat, n.s. 3 (1989): 57-78.

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miraculous deeds. (46) The legend of Salar Mas'ud, who was given the title Ghazi Miydn, survives in an early seventeenth-century rendition, the Mir'ct- i Mas'udf or "Mirror of Mas'ud" by 'Abd al-Rahman Chishti. (47) According to its author, this work, besides quoting from extant histories, contains information which had "not found a place in any historical work of repute" but was extracted from a very old book with the aid of "directions he graciously received from the spirit of the departed" and "verified by oral communica- tions with the author's spiritual visitors." (48) These assertions functioned as testimony to its accuracy on both the historical and spiritual levels.

Although the work's later date of composition, and the fact that the ghadzs' opponents were idolators rather than people of the Book, separate it from the Anatolian frontier narratives, it has several things in common with them. One is a certain lack of religious orthodoxy "despite its self-conscious religio-political correctness"; (49) according to this text, "the Prince of Martyrs was most spotless in body and mind" and "free from sin"; he performed miracles and exhibited supernatural insight; and his goal was "to convert unbelievers to the one God and the Musulman faith. If they adopt our creed, well and good. If not, we put them to the sword." (50) Related to this unorthodoxy is a connection with a Sfif milieu: Ghaiz Miyan was portrayed as an ascetic and spiritual hero, and his tomb became a shrine. His biographer moreover took pains to link the exploits of Mas'uid to the later career of the Suif saint Mu'in al-Din Chishti through the device of clarifying the separation between the two. Another similarity is a willingness to cooperate and ally with infidels; after conquering Delhi, Salar Mas'ud orders the commander of the garrison to raise troops, most likely non-Muslim, "from among the people of the country," and confirms on their thrones rulers who submit to him without demanding their conversion. Yet another likeness is a fascination with the worldly pursuits of the hunt and the collection of booty. (51) None of these acts, clearly, was considered inconsistent with a ghdzzi lifestyle either by the originators of the legends or by the later audience for this version.

While the publication of these tales in the seventeenth century may have been meant as a contribution to the discourse on syncretism that followed

(46) Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, "A Note on the Dargah of Salar Mas'ud in Bahraich in the Light of the Standard Historical Sources," in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 45-47; see also Tahir Mahmood, "The Dar- gah of Sayyid Salar Mas'ud Ghazi in Bahraich: Legend, Tradition and Reality," in ibid., pp. 24-43.

(47) 'Abdu-r Rahman Chishti, "Mirft-i Mas'udi," partial English translation by R. B. Chapman, in The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson (London: Triibner & Co., 1869; rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1966), 2: 513-49. This work was brought to scholarly attention by C. E. Bosworth, "The Development of Persian Culture under the Early Ghaznavids," Iran 6 (1968): 41-42; rpt. in idem, The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia (London: Variorum Reprints, 1977), XVIII.

(48) Chishti, pp. 513-14. (49) This phrase is Kafadar's, referring to the Ddnishmandndma (Between Two Worlds, p. 66). (50) Chishti, pp. 520, 522, 525, 530. (51) Ibid., pp. 548-49; 532-34; 530, 538, 541.

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the religious innovations of the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605), their role in earlier times can be seen as embodying a call to faith and conquest that contrasted dramatically with the acknowledged corruption and bureaucratic intrigue of the Ghaznavid central state. This tension resembles that seen on the Anatolian frontier but differs in the absence of the law-bound orthodoxy of the 'ulami', although we noted above the existence of a legal tradition of ghaza in Samarqand that was transferred to the Anatolian frontier. Does its lack of representation in the Indian sources mean that 'ulama' from Central Asia did not go to Ghazna or for some reason played a lesser role in Ghaznavid and Ghurid society? Or are there still undiscovered sources to be found on the ghaza in India?

A major influence on the ghadzt tradition of North India was the Mongol incursions, beginning in 1220 with the Mongols' pursuit of the Khwarazm- shah to the Indus valley. The ghdzis of the Delhi Sultanate turned from the conquest of India to its defense, and in some chronicles the term ghazd came to refer only to warfare against the pagan Mongols, in which Muslims and Hindus both participated. (52) The historian Juzjani described all Mongol leaders as "accursed" and saw their irruption as a sign of the end of the world.(53) Ghazd against them legitimated Indian Muslim rulers; Sultan Ghazi Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq (earlier known as Ghadzt Malik) won the title of Ghazi by his successful defense against the Mongols, and Frfiz Shah's defense of Delhi from a Mongol raid demonstrated his right to rule. (54) North Indian usage, defining ghazd as defensive warfare rather than offensive war and raiding, was thus the opposite of that developed on the Anato- lian frontier. There were westerners, however, among the Indian frontier warriors; several of the generals and governors of the Delhi Sultanate were Rumis or Anatolian Turks, and troops were sent from the court of the caliph in Baghdad. (55) In fact, fighters came from all over the Muslim world, par- ticularly from Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran as those regions fell under Mongol control, to participate in the Delhi Sultans' successful opposition to the Mongols. The understanding of ghazd in India must surely have been affected by the ghdzi traditions of the migrating warriors as well as by India's historical circumstances. So far, however, the topic has scarcely been studied; a recent book alluding to the ghaza in India was forced to fall back on research on the Ottoman ghaza. (56) One indication of a shift in align- ments, however, is that "carrying on holy war" and "attending to the pros-

(52) See, for example, Minhaj-i Siraj Jfzjani, Tabakdt-i Ndsiri, trans. H. G. Raverty, 2 vols. (London: Gilbert & Rivington, 1881-97; rpt. Osnabriick: Biblio Verlag, 1991), 2: 1007, 1009, 1039, 1053, 1117, 1123, 1135.

(53) Ibid., 2: 935. (54) Zia al-Din Barani, "TTrikh-i Firoz Shahl," in The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, 3:

226; Shams-i Siraj 'Afif, "Tarkh-i Firoz Shahi," ibid., 3: 278. In this milieu, Ghazi appears sometimes to have been used as a proper name.

(55) Jizjani, 2: 724, 752, 787, 1117. (56) Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993), pp. 71-77.

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perity of the peasants"--that is, ghazia and good administration--were no longer treated as contrasting impulses but were linked together in praises of good rulers written after the start of the Mongol invasion. (57)

On the Anatolian frontier as well, changes over time in the way ghaza was depicted can be related to changes in the balance of forces contending for its control. The Anatolian frontier was for Muslims the archetypal site of ghaza; the status of its leader approached that of the leader of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and conditions there largely shaped the official Islamic legal definitions of ghazd. (58) The Muslim forces never became large enough to ensure a successful offensive war, and perpetual raiding rather than permanent conquest became the goal of frontier combat. This necessity brought the ghaza closer to the original pre-Islamic definition of ghazw as camel- raiding, a redistributive economic activity governed by an elaborate set of rules. (59) After the abandonment of the initial Umayyad policy of universal jihad, the 'Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (754-775) established permanent frontiers (thughur) against the Byzantines and institutionalized the Umayyad pattern of more or less annual summer raids by combinations of caliphal troops and miscellaneous volunteers, led by princes of the royal house. (60) Emigrants from the east were prominent among both volunteers and government troops from the earliest period of the frontier's history. The official 'Abbasid army consisted largely of easterners from Khurasan; further eastern forces, led by 'Abbasid princes, continued to be sent at intervals to reinforce the western frontier. Both caliphal troops and volunteers counted Turks among their numbers. (61) Harin al-Rashid created what became the frontier's "classical" organization by expanding and reorganizing the institutions of al-Mansur. He also began to lead expeditions in person and became the first "ghalzi-caliph," one who fought not only as the leader of the Muslim community but as a ghaczi in his own right. (62) In so doing, he was clearly

(57) Jfizjani, 1: 665, 676, 698. (58) J. F. Haldon and Hugh Kennedy, "The Arab-Byzantine Frontier in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries:

Military Organixation and Society in the Borderlands," Zbornik Radova Byzantoloskog Instituta 19 (1980): 106, 115.

(59) John Walter Jandora, Militarism in Arab Society: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 4-5; E12, s.v. "Ghazw." On the relationship of Islamic definitions of ghazd to pre-Islamic Arabian raiding practices and their adaptation by Muhammad to warfare against the enemies of Islam, see Donner, p. 35.

(60) For Umayyadjihid policies and summer raids see Khalid Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hishdm Ibn 'Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); on the 'Abbasids see Michael Bonner, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War: Studies in the Jihad and the Arab-Byzantine Frontier (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1996).

(61) Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, pp. 53, 66; C. E. Bosworth, "The City of Tarsus and the Arab-Byzan- tine Frontiers in Early and Middle 'Abbasid Times," Oriens 33 (1992): 272, rpt. in The Arabs, Byzantium and Iran: Studies in Early Islamic History and Culture (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), XIV. For the numbers of Turks see Peter von Sivers, "Taxes and Trade in the 'Abbasid Thughir, 750-962/133-351," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25 (1982): 86.

(62) Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, pp. 99-106; the term was introduced by C. E. Bosworth in his introduction to The History of al-Tabari, vol. 30, The 'Abbdsid Caliphate in Equilibrium (New York: SUNY Press, 1989), p. xvii.

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"playing to an audience which included religious scholars," whom he culti- vated throughout his reign. (63) Haruin's presence on campaign tied the Ana- tolian ghazd more closely to the central state, and the state to the 'ulamd', than was the case in Central Asia or India.

The 'ulama' were an active force on the Byzantine frontier during the 'Abbasid period, and most were fighters as well as intellectuals. In contrast to the theological ferment of the Central Asian frontier, however, Islamic intellectual activity on the Anatolian border centered on law and historical precedent; early books on the law of war were written at the time of al- Mansur's reestablishment of the frontier. In the eighth century the frontier was home to fighter-thinkers such as Abu Ishaq al-Fazali of Kufa, "sahib sunna wa-ghazw" and author of a Kitab al-Siyar, whose work on maghazi was continued by Hanbali legists; 'Abdallah b. al-Mubarak al-Khurasani, author of a Kitdb al-Jihad addressing the needs of the volunteer groups; and Ibrahim b. Adham al-Balkhi, the famous ascetic, frontier ghazi, and hero of the faith. (64) The codification of the rules ofjihad during the early ninth century enshrined into Islamic law the defensive definition of jihad developed on the Anatolian frontier (65). The stabilized frontier became a permanent feature of Muslim society and led to the development of institutions of accommodation such as the aman or safe-conduct, providing for commercial contact with the putative enemy, and the ribdt, the combination of frontier fortress, hostel, and religious retreat. (66) In the late ninth and tenth centuries the towns of the border region became well-established and prosperous, maintaining an active commercial and intellectual life as well as serving as bases for ghazi expeditions. (67) It has been argued that because of 'Abbasid policies preventing the development of a warrior aristocracy, the urban mer- cantile classes, from which the 'ulamd' rose, dominated the ranks of the volunteers sharing the task of frontier warfare with the official government troops. (68) This description of the frontier forces omits the rabble and robbers characteristic of ghadz groups in the east; robber barons and condottieri apparently were not considered ghazis as they were elsewhere, although beggars and tricksters were known to claim the title. (69) It also seems remarkably irenic; were there no tensions on the Arab/Byzantine frontier?

(63) Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, p. 105. (64) Ibid., pp. 68, 108. For biographies of these frontier intellectuals see ibid., pp. 109-34; and idem,

"Some Observations Concerning the Early Development of Jihad on the Arab-Byzantine Frontier," Studia Islamica 75 (1992): 5-31.

(65) Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, pp. 40, 131. The defensive definition of jihdd may have been a tem-

porary strategy within an overall offensive purpose, but it has had considerable influence on later generations. (66) C. E. Bosworth, "Byzantium and the Arabs: War and Peace between Two World Civilizations,"

Journal of Oriental and African Studies 3-4 (1991-92): 5, 9-11; rpt. in The Arabs, Byzantium and Iran (Alder- shot: Variorum, 1996), XIII.

(67) Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, pp. 150-51. (68) Ibid., pp. 8, 137. Bonner concludes (ibid., p. 156) that during the Crusades, the Zangids and Ayyu-

bids were finally able to create an alliance between the professional military and merchant classes. (69) Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, pp. 48-49, 154; Bosworth, "Byzantium and the Arabs," p. 12.

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The main fault lines on the Arab-Byzantine frontier appear in the chronicles as struggles for authority between caliphs and their major commanders or struggles for control over taxation. (70) Scholars have interpreted these struggles either as competition among government troops, volunteers, and merchants for revenue and its maximization (whether in the form of spoils of war, commercial gains, or tax revenues), or else as competition among actual or would-be political leaders for the legitimacy granted by the exercise of border functions such as leadership of ghaz.d and redemption of captives. (71) However, in view of the directions which frontier development took in other times and places, these fault lines acquire a new significance. The financial conflict between the military-fiscal interests of the state and the commercial interests of the merchants, 'ulama', and volunteers foreshadows the tension between the values of the central state and the volunteers on the Ghaznavids' Indian frontier. Likewise, the differences in emphasis between Fazali's legal and historical interests and al-Balkhi's asceticism and individual heroism, despite these men's common classification as frontier intellectuals, are later reflected in the differing attitudes toward boundary-marking and control exhibited by the Saljuq 'ulama"s catechisms and the Anatolian ghazts' folk epics or by the Abu al-Layth al-Samarqandis and the Samarqandi robbers of the Central Asian frontier. The epic of Delhemma (Dhat al-Himma, "the stout-hearted lady" of the Arab/Byzantine frontier) contrasts the eager ghzits with a qadit who represents the lackluster, even traitorous government forces, apparently in collusion with the Byzantines. (72) The inclusiveness of the Ottoman and Indian ghazls is matched by the heterogeneity of the Arab/Byzantine frontier, where slaves, renegades, and volunteers from each side filled the ranks of the other, brigands and barons alike were bilingual in Arabic and Greek, and goods, ideas, horses, and women crossed the border in both directions. (73) The tension in medieval Islamic society between the 'ulama' and the central state is too well known to require comment. Once again, polarization among (at least) the representatives of the state, the 'ulama', and the warriors can be identified in the frontier context.

Moreover, in the tenth century the border region itself became a bone of contention, as the ghaza became a legitimating device not only for individual caliphs but for entire regimes. The Fatimids (909-1171), seeing how their success in the naval ghaza validated their independent caliphate, tried to gain control of the Anatolian border area as well. The Hamdanids (905-1004) justified their seizure of northern Syria and their autonomy there

(70) Peter von Sivers, "Military, Merchants and Nomads: The Social Evolution of the Syrian Cities and Countryside During the Classical Period, 780-969/164-358," Der Islam 56 (1979): 222.

(71) Idern, "Taxes and Trade," 73, 80, 90; Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, 153-54. (72) This contrast may go back to the original version of the story, as it forms the basic plot structure

(Marius Canard, "Delhemma, epopee arabe des guerres arabo-byzantines," Byzantion 10 [1935]: 285). (73) Idem, "Les relations politiques et sociales entre Byzance et les Arabes," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18

(1964): 45-46; rpt. in idem, Byzance et les musulmans du Proche Orient (London: Variorum Reprints, 1973), XIX.

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by their successes in holy war. (74) The powerful Byzantine counterattack in the 960s, which broke the frontier and captured several of the major cities, temporarily intensified "the spirit of militant jihad." (75) The Byzantines' goal, however, was control rather than reconquest; once having reestabli- shed their preeminence in the frontier region, they preferred to see Aleppo as the capital of an independent buffer zone ruled by Arab tribal polities that became Byzantine proteges, receiving Byzantine military support against the still dangerous Fatimids, their major opponents. (76) During the next hundred years, the return of stability along the border favored raiding over conquest and commercial interests over political ones, encouraging the central states of the hinterlands to turn their attention away from the frontier area once again. On the frontier itself we can see the routinization of the dominant interests in the works of 'ulamd' such as Abu 'Amr 'Uthman al-Tarsusi, an 'alim of Tarsus, who compiled a handbook on the procedures of the summer raids of the ghdzis, the summons to arms, the ribats of the fighters, the lives of the 'ulamd', the revenues of the tithes and the endowments they benefitted, and the walls that defended that outpost of the Dar al-Islam, or Muhammad b. 'Umar, whose father had been a faq.h of al-Andalus stationed in Crete for the jihad, but who became the author of a book on chartering merchant ships. (77)

This comfortable balance was upset in the second half of the eleventh century by the arrival of two new forces, Turks and Crusaders, both of which had holy war on their minds. Their invasions created a new configuration of states in the eastern Mediterranean and renewed the ability of holy war to legitimate their rulers. The old border region of northern Syria became a new focal point of contention between Crusader states and ghazi princes like Nur al-Din Zangi ("if not the creator, at least the conscious and uncontested head and hero of an enormous rebirth of Muslim ardor"), whose capital of Aleppo

(74) Hamilton A. R. Gibb, "The Caliphate and the Arab States," in A History of the Crusades, ed. Set- ton, 1: 88.

(75) Bosworth, "The City of Tarsus," pp. 283-84. The fiery sermon preached by the khatib Ibn Nubata on the Byzantine arrival survives; see Marius Canard, ed., Sayfal Daula: Recueil de textes relatifs a lemir Sayf al Daula le Hamdanide avec anotations, cartes etplans, (Algiers: Editions Jules Carbonel, 1934), pp. 167-73; also that preached at the taking of Aleppo (ibid., pp. 155-60) and one preached to rouse enthusiasm for the jihdd (ibid., pp. 129-32; French trans. in A. A. Vasiliev, Byzance et les Arabes, vol. 2, La Dynastie Macddoine [867- 959], ed. Henri Gegoire and Marius Canard [Brussels: Editions de l'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orien- tales et Slaves, 1950], pp. 292-94); see also selections in Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, trans. Sala- huddin Khuda Bakhsh and D. S. Margoliouth (London: Luzac and Co., 1957), pp. 319-25.

(76) Claude Cahen, La Syrie du nord a 'depoque des Croisades et la principaute franque d'Antioche (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1940), p. 177; Pieter Smoor, Kings and Bedouins in the Palace of Aleppo as Reflected in Ma'arri's Works (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1985), pp. 31, 183-88; Marius Canard, Histoire de la dynastie des H'amdanides de Jazira et de Syrie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953); Suhayl Zakkar, The Emirate ofAleppo, 1004-1094 (Beirut: Dar al-Amanah and El-Risalah Publishing House, 1971).

(77) C. E. Bosworth, "AbO 'Amr Uthman Al-Tarsfisi's Siyar al-Thughur and the Last Years of Arab Rule in Tarsus (Fourth/Tenth Century)," Graeco-Arabica 5 (1983): 183-95; V. Christides, "Raid and Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Treatise by Muhammad bn. Umar, the Faqih from Occupied Moslem Crete, and the Rhodian Sea Law, Two Parallel Texts," Graeco-Arabica 5 (1983): 63-102.

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was redefined as part of the Holy Land and the gateway to holy war. (78) In the Syria of the Zangids (1128-1174) and Ayyubids (1171-1250), it was the state's interest in ghaza as a legitimizing and organizing force that appeared most prominently, as rulers maneuvered to maintain central control over the holy war and direct it where they pleased. A different pattern manifested itself in Anatolia, where the unexpected defeat of the Byzantine army in 1071 by Turkish tribal forces and their invasion of the peninsula allowed the interests of nomadic raiders and antinomian ghazts to predominate over those of the central state. (79) Saljuiq princes were unable to exert full control, and the balance shifted away from the 'ulama"s rule-bound approach to ghaza toward the heroic and the mystical. The fortified frontier with its fighting according to established rules on a well-known schedule gave way to the unpredictable sweeps of nomadic bands led by chieftains who were indifferent to, or anxious to escape from, the imperial hand of the Saljufqs.

The chiefly family of the Danishmands, whose title of Malik was bestowed by the caliph for their zeal in ghazd, most prominently represented the raiding interests of the nomads. (80) That title was first held by the third Danishmand, Muhammad, the grandson of the conqueror, and was projected backward onto his ancestors by the myth-makers. (81) The legend of the Danishmands linked them with the frontier capital of Melitene and with the hero of the Arab/Byzantine frontier, Sayyid Battal Ghazi. The old border culture continued in the ghazis' easy intercourse across religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and in the active commercial life in the frontier region. The Saljiuqs were known as tolerant and just rulers, full of charity for their Christian subjects. (82) During the twelfth century the invading forces, relatively few in number, were interspersed among the remaining Byzantine population as urban garrisons, villagers, and pastoral nomadic groups. (83)

They easily intermingled with their new subjects and may have been of

(78) For the quotation see Cahen, La Syrie du nord, p. 374; Cahen sees the ghazd as the form into which the "Sunnite war" of the Saljfiqs was transformed on the frontier, but it might be the other way around, the "Sunnite war" as an extension of ghazd. For the new definition of Aleppo see the table of contents to Ibn al- 'Adim's biographical dictionary in David Morray, An Ayyubid Notable and His World: Ibn al-'Adim and

Aleppo (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), p. 202. On the rise of NOr al-Din and his taking up the gauntlet of the Cru- saders see Hamilton A. R. Gibb, "The Career of Nur al-Din," in A History of the Crusades, ed. Setton, 1: 513- 27; on his devotion to jihdd see Yasser Tabbaa, "Monuments with a Message: Propagation of Jihad under Nur al-Din (1146-1174)," in Meeting of Two Worlds, pp. 223-40.

(79) Cahen, "The Turkish Invasion," pp. 144, 147-48. For a summary see F. Taeschner, "The Turks and the Byzantine Empire to the End of the Thirteenth Century," in The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 737-52.

(80) Cahen, "La premiere p6entration turque," pp. 59-60; E12, s.v. "Saldjukids." (81) Melikoff, Geste, p. 104. The Danishmands, as well as the Ayyubids, also seem to have used the term

ghdzi as a proper name; Muhammad's father was called Amir Ghazi, Saladin's son was al-Zahir Ghfzi, and there was an Ayyibid princess named Ghaziya.

(82) Osman Turan, "Les souverains seldjoukides et leurs sujets non-musulmans," Studia Islamica 1 (1953): 69-72, 76.

(83) Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamiza- tion from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 170, 180-85.

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rather mixed origins themselves; a poem on the Saljuiq forces attacking Cairo says that they included "Armenians, Arabs and Edomites, Greeks and Germans, Paphlagonians and Turks." (84) With time, continued migration altered the ethnic balance; Turks continued to move into Anatolia and the Byzantines relocated much of their Anatolian population far to the west. In eastern Anatolia, western Iran, and the Caucasus, Muslim and Christian royal families freely intermarried. (85)

A struggle between ghadz and raiding interests, patronized by the Danishmands and others, and those of the Saljuq scions who sought to control the ghdzi activity in Anatolia, to establish a centralized state, and to make alliances and border agreements with the Byzantines, occupied the next hundred years. The twelfth-century Saljuq ruler Kiliq Arslan's moves toward subjecting the Danishmands and accommodating the Byzantines roused the disapproval of the great ghadzi, Nfr al-Din Zangi, and attempts to mollify NOr al-Din led to a rupture between Saljiuqs and Byzantines. (86) The Saljuqs at last defeated both the Danishmands and the Byzantines in 1176, after which they worked to subordinate the ghdzis to an imperial state modeled on that of the Great Saljiuqs of Iraq. The influence on the Rum Saljuqs of Perso-Islamic statecraft and literary culture is apparent in the court histories, advice literature, and scribal manuals created by the representatives of Islamic civilization who flocked or fled to the court at Konya, mostly during the thirteenth century. (87) Byzantine influence came through exchanges of personnel by marriage, conversion, service to rulers, and the taking of refuge; it is evidenced in part by the reconsolidation of the Rum Saljufq state by Kai-Khusraw I (1204-1211), eight years a refugee at the Byzantine court, after whose time the Saljfqs bequeathed their realm undivided, although previous sultans including his own father had followed the steppe tradition of parceling it out among their heirs. (88) The eclec- ticism of this state is well illustrated by the walls of Konya, its capital, which were decorated with reused inscriptions, reliefs, and ancient statues that had been looted from the Byzantines "with the sword of Khusraw," as well as with quotations from the Qur'an and the Shahndma, thus

(84) Joseph Ha-Kohen, quoted by Taef Kamal El-Azhari, The Saljiuks of Syria during the Crusades, 463- 549 A. H./1070-1154 A. D. (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1997), p. 45.

(85) Kafesoglu, p. 97; Haldon and Kennedy, p. 85; V. Minorsky, "Khaqani and Andronicus Comnenis," in Iranica: Twenty Articles (Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1964), p. 127; Michel Balivet, "The Long- Lived Relations between Christians and Moslems in Central Anatolia: Dervishes, Papadhes, and Country Folk," Byzantinische Forschungen 16 (1991): 321, n. 19.

(86) Cahen, "The Turks in Iran and Anatolia," pp. 676-79; Ralph-Johannes Lilie, "Twelfth-Century Byzantine and Turkish States," Byzantinische Forschungen 16 (1991): 37-39. Ironically, the eponymous Sal- jQq himself is reported to have engaged in ghazd and to have been awarded the title of al-Malik al-Ghdzi (Ibrahim Kafesoglu, A History of the Seljuks, trans. and ed. Gary Leiser [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni- versity Press, 1988], p. 25).

(87) E12, s.v. "Saldjikids." (88) Vryonis, Decline of Medieval Hellenism, pp. 223-44; Cahen, "The Turks in Iran and Anatolia,"

p. 681. The realm was divided again by the Mongols as part of their pacification policy.

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assimilating the ghaza against the Byzantines to the legendary heritage of the Sasanians and the Perso-Islamic state tradition. (89)

The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries also saw a rapprochement between the Rum Saljuq state and the 'ulamad', with greater numbers of 'ulamn' serving the state and increased official support of 'ularm' interests such as madrasa-building. (90) The 'ulamn' at the Saljuq court seem to have succeeded in accommodating themselves to a government they viewed as less corrupt and more orthodox than that of the Ghaznavids. The adherence of thirteenth-century Anatolian rulers to the Caliph al-Nasir'sfituwwa embodied their connection to the official representatives of Sunnm Islam as well as their commitment to the chivalric ethos of the ghazts. At the same time, the construction of Sufi lodges and shrines and the writing of saints' lives and SOfi handbooks suggest a certain domestication of the mystical impulse, in which sultanic patronage played an important role. (91) Commercial interests were also attended to, as the state pursued the revenues of trade, mining and resource exploitation, capturing seaports and building caravanserais to promote trade. A survey of Persian works written in Anatolia in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries reflects this sedentarizing trend: at first works of poetry and Sufism outnumbered the rest, but later catechisms and literary works became more numerous, accompanied by works on science and government. (92) The arrival of the Mongols diminished the activity of the Saljuq rulers, who became Mongol vassals, but cultural patronage continued to flow from the bureaucrats and great amirs. (93) Eventually, Mongol administration in the Perso-Islamic tradition began to have an influence of its own on Anatolian culture, to judge by the writing and copying of administrative manuals. Thus, thirteenth-century Anatolia saw the incorporation of warriors, 'ulama', and the central state into a single, perhaps uneasy, whole.

The vacuum of authority on the western frontier left by the Byzantine return to Constantinople in 1261 made the area attractive to rebels, tribal groups, and urban elements fleeing the Mongols, especially from the region of the Danishmands where Mongol control and taxation intensified with the suppression of the revolt of 1277. (94) On the frontier, antinomian attitudes

(89) Scott Redford, "The Seljuks of Rum and the Antique," Muqarnas 10 (1993): 153-55. (90) Vryonis, Decline of Medieval Hellenism, pp. 352-55; E12, s.v. "Saldjikids"; Cahen, "The Turks in

Iran and Anatolia," pp. 677-80; idem, Pre-Ottoman Turkey (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968), pp. 249- 53. This flurry of construction was made possible in part by a significant growth in trade through Anatolia.

(91) Forthcoming work by Ethel Sara Wolper pursues this theme (personal conversation). (92) Ahmet Ates, "Hicri VI-VIII. (XII-XIV.) Aslrlarda Anadolu'da Farsca Eserler," Turkiyat Mecmuast

7-8, pt. 2 (1945): 94-135; I. Hakkl Uzunqanh, Anadolu Beylikleri ve Akkoyunlu, Karakoyunlu Devletleri (Ankara: Tirk Tarih Kurumu Baslmevi, 1937), pp. 209-11.

(93) Howard Crane, "Notes on Saldjfiq Architectural Patronage in Thirteenth Century Anatolia," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36 (1993): 22.

(94) A. Peter Martinez, "Bullionistic Imperialism: The I1-Xanid Mint's Exploitation of the Rim-Saljfiqid Currency, 654-695H./1256-1296 A.D.," Archivum Ottomanicum 13 (1993-1994): 172. An Ottoman origin in northern Anatolia, though not supported by the chronicles, would do much to explain their mixture of tribalism and urbanism, orthodoxy and antinomianism, Mongol and Perso-Islamic institutions.

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could flourish side by side with more orthodox impulses, as indeed they did even in more central parts of Anatolia. Like the initial Anatolian conquests, the later thirteenth-century border raids on the Byzantines were pursued without the help and sometimes without the sanction of official Saljuq or Mongol sources. (95) The most opportune moments for such activity were times when existing polities were in flux and the central state was too weak to control nomad activity, as was the case after 1277. (96) In the last decades of the thirteenth century, Byzantine chroniclers of western Anatolia noted a massive increase in pastoral nomads whose raids captured booty and prisoners and drove the agricultural population off the land. (97) This raiding was as successful as the early Turkish incursions into Anatolia at gaining pastureland for the nomadic elements and ensuring their dominance in the border region, and it could as easily be dignified by the title of ghazd.

In contrast to earlier times, however, when Saljufq sultans (like the early Islamic caliphs or the Samanid amirs) had been able after the incursions to control and incorporate the tribal chiefs or ghazi leaders of the newly conquered lands and give their raiding official sanction, in the late thirteenth century the demands of Mongol suzerains turned the Saljuqs' attentions to the east, constrained their ability to act, and finally eliminated their power altogether. Since the Mongols themselves were unwilling or unable to control the western Anatolian frontier, the new acquisitions were not fully incorporated into a centralized state. The chronicles show Osman and other frontier leaders treating with tekfurs and local officials rather than with imperial Byzantine representatives; the absence from the borderland of any central state activity--Mongol, Saljuq, or Byzantine--is striking. (98) It was left to the conquerors themselves to fill the vacuum at the top.

In the endeavor to govern what they had conquered, it is unlikely that Turkish rulers in the borderland spured any of the governing techniques or legitimating ideologies available to them that could rally their disparate followers, among whom nomads and ghdzis formed a greater percentage than

(95) Cahen, "La premiere penetration," p. 65; Spero Vryonis, Jr., "Nomadization and Islamization in Asia Minor," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29 (1975): 45; rpt in Byzantina kai Metabyzantina: Studies on Byzantium, Seljuks, and Ottomans, 2 vols. (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1981), 2: IV. This was true despite the acquisition of Mongol investiture by Turkmen leaders such as Ali Bey of Denizli and the presence of Mon- gol troops throughout Anatolia (Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, pp. 280, 283).

(96) In contrast, when the Saljfq state was strong it was able to exert control over ghdzi activity and put down nomad uprisings such as that of Baba Rasil in 1240 (Vryonis, "Nomadization and Islamization," p. 47); on this revolt see A. Yasar Ocak, La revolte de Baba Resul ou la formation de l'hettrodoxie musulmane en Anatolie au XII' siecle (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1989).

(97) Vryonis, "Nomadization and Islamization," p. 48-57; Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, p. 318; Inalcik, "The Question of the Emergence of the Ottoman State," pp. 73-74. Some of these nomads were probably dis- placed Byzantines who turned to pastoralism for survival in the abserce of effective protection for agricul- ture (Keith Hopwood, "Nomads or Bandits: The Pastoralist/Sedentarist Interface in Anatolia," Byzantinische Forschungen 16 [1991]: 185).

(98) Elizabeth A. Zachariadou, "Histoires et legendes des premiers Ottomans," Turcica 28 (1996): 73. The Saljfq ruler was fully occupied in attempting to control the frontier leader closest to him in Denizli (Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, p. 279).

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under the settled Saljuq state. Consequently, creating new political entities in the border region meant, among other things, developing forms of legitimacy that tilted farther toward the ghdzt and tribal elements than Saljuq legitimacy claims had done, while still making room for 'ulamat', former Byzantine subjects, and representatives of the Perso-Islamic state tradition. As an ideology, ghaza was flexible enough to be represented as an orthodox Islamic activity to/by the 'ulama', an unorthodox activity to/by antinomian Suifis, an economic activity to/by tribesmen, and a political activity to/by aspiring rulers. As such, it may have been the most powerful and inclusive unifying device available to conquerors on the frontier, more so than tribalism, origin, religion, language, or culture.

Among these border chiefs, it was the Ottomans who were the most successful in the long run at transforming themselves into sultans and establishing an imperial state. Trying to decide whether ghaza was "the" foundational element in that state is a singularly futile exercise. The lack of direct evidence means that we may never know whether Osman himself was the leader of a ghazi band, the chief of a nomadic tribe, the son of a Salju- qid officer, a peasant, or all of the above. We may never be able to assess his degree of Islamic orthodoxy or his level of religious zeal. The arguments built on the scraps of evidence that remain to us appear to be based more than anything on the amount of faith their authors choose to place in the fifteenth-century chroniclers and their selection among interpretations of clues that could point in several directions.

But how much does it really matter? Knowing Osman's correct label would significantly increase our understanding of Ottoman history only if we assume an organic theory of nationhood (as the seed, so the tree). Instead, we must acknowledge the agency of statebuilders over the generations, while recognizing the power of tradition to legitimize their statebuilding and mobilize their followers. If Osman grew up in the western Anatolian borderlands in the decades after 1261, then we know that he attained adulthood in a region and a period when central state authority was receding and local leaders of all types were left to maintain themselves and their followers with only their own resources. In any one area these resources probably included intact nomadic tribes and nomads whose tribal affiliations had been broken, warriors and brigands, local villagers (Byzantine or Turkish), pastoralists (Turkish or Byzantine) and urban refugees from disturbed areas farther east, converts and "renegades" from the Byzantine, Catalan, Venetian, and other eastern Mediterranean states and later from the less successful Turkish principalities, unemployed Saljuq functionaries and intellectuals, losers in Mongol political struggles, and more. There were also people who straddled these categories; it has been suggested, for example, that Osman in his youth led the still- nomadic wing of a body of Turks who were in the process of sedentariza-

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tion. (99) A mobile band of this type may well have included Turks from other groups and perhaps some adventurous Byzantines, making it diffi- cult to define the nature of Osman's leadership, especially since it changed over time. Resources available to him also included advantages of loca- tion, opportunities for conquest, sources of wealth, and ideologies of legitimacy, including the ideology of ghazdi. What we need to discover is the roles these resources played at different points in the creation of the principalities and ultimately the Ottoman Empire, which interests were at stake in the various actions of Osman and his peers, and which groups benefitted from the outcomes and became able to shape the direction of their state and the memory of its past.

It would be a mistake to visualize these varied interests as belonging to homogeneous and mutually exclusive groups of people. During the first half of the fourteenth century, for example, some of the same individuals probably served at different times as nomadic raiders, Byzantine mercenaries, and ghdzi warriors; their interests doubtless changed to some degree, but not completely, with their changes of occupation. The existence of conquests organized on shar'i principles might indicate the presence of the 'ulama' and the influence of 'ulamd' concerns, or it might simply mean that shar'l principles were part of the normal conquest tradition shared by Middle Eastern rulers no matter what their predilections. Osman's original followers may have been mostly Muslims, but it was not long before a majority of Ottoman subjects and a certain number of troops were Christian; this must have affected the understanding of ghazai as much as mercenary service with the Byzantines. It would be more useful to inquire how rulers deployed the traditions and resources at their disposal in these ever-changing circumstances, and how these moves were justified by later historians writing in very different contexts for audiences with very different priorities.

This is not the place to begin a reinterpretation of Ottoman origins, but it can be suggested how taking this contestation of interests into account may affect our assessment of the sources, drawing our attention not only to their contents but to the time and manner of their composition. For example, the legend of Malik Danishmand, which drew on a fund of Anatolian oral narrative, on the one hand, and on the other the romance of Sayyid Battal, written in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, was itself put into writing for the Saljuq Sultan 'Izz al-Din Kaikavus II (1246-1259) not long after the arrival of the Mongols. Its composition at that point in time testifies not only to a partial reconciliation between the Danishmands and the Saljfiqs but also to the fact that even at the sophisticated court of Konya, subjection to the Mongols created an audience for the ghazi' tradition, depicted as a holy war carried on by tribal forces whose simple faith, though scarcely orthodox,

(99) Haldon and Kennedy, p. 101; Keith Hopwood, "Low-Level Diplomacy between Byzantines and Ottoman Turks: The Case of Bithynia," in Byzantine Diplomacy, ed. Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), p. 152.

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was strongly felt. (10) Such faith permitted, even encouraged, alliance with local Christian powers to fight the pagan enemy, whose presence on the peninsula was the most important challenge facing the warriors of Anatolia in the second half of the thirteenth century. Epic narratives and saints' lives and the ethos they embodied were well-known in thirteenth-century Anato- lia, not only in ghazi and nomadic circles but among educated city-dwellers as well. Side by side with orthodox legal definitions of ghazad in the works of the 'ulama', there existed a coherent image of the ghdzi as a romantic and heroic figure of the past that doubtless served as a model for aspiring raiders and warriors but could also provide inspiration for subjugated courtiers and rulers, and perhaps for 'ulama' as well. The same image lived on into the fifteenth century in the history of Ashikpashazade, and in all these settings it embodied an element of resistance to an encroaching authority. (101) Rather than being a pure expression of a group's ethos, then, in each case it was a deployment of representations of that ethos for particular purposes.

In this light, Ottoman claims to delegation by the Saljuqs take on a new meaning: not only were the Saljuqs the only ones who could authorize a ghazai against the Byzantines in the absence of the caliph, but also their authority had priority over any Mongol claims. (102) This priority was cer- tainly recognized by Bayazid I, who deployed it (unsuccessfully) against Timur's attempt to restore Mongol suzerainty in 1402. (103) Fourteenth-century Mongol finance manuals indicate that the Mongols at that time still considered the western Anatolian states, including Orhan's, as their own border principalities (ucat), although they did not seem to expect any revenue from them. ('04) Claims of Saljuq authorization would have supported an Ottoman resistance to Mongol domination, a resistance hinted at by the fact that in the earliest sections of the Ottoman chronicles Osman's greatest hos- tility is directed not against the Byzantines but against the "Tatars," a people who did not follow the etiquette of ghaza as it was understood on both sides of the Byzantine/Turkish divide. (105) The Tatars were troops of the Mongols,

(100) Melikoff, Geste, pp. 56-60, 162. (101) Was it also one of the sources for the image of the Balkan haiduk? (102) Real or fictitious claims to investiture by the Saljfqs or Mongols, useful in legitimizing tribal

leaders on the frontier, corresponded to Saljiq and Mongol claims of suzerainty (and, potentially, revenue) in the border region (see Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, pp. 313-14).

(103) E12, s.v. "Bayazid I." On the logic of Timur's campaigns, including his campaign in Anatolia, see Beatrice Forbes Manz, "Temir and the Problem of a Conqueror's Legacy," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, vol. 8 (1998): 23-26.

(104) 'Abd Allah b. Muhammad b. Kiya al-Mazandarani, Risala-yi Falakiyya, ed. Walther Hinz (Wies- baden: Franz Steiner, 1952), p. 162; Ahmet Zeki Velidi Togan, "Mogollar Devrinde Anadolu'nun iktisadi Vaziyeti," Turk Hukuk ve Iktisat Tarihi Mecmuasi 1 (1931): 33; trans. Gary Leiser, "Economic Conditions in Anatolia in the Mongol Period," Annales Islamologiques 25 (1991): 233. The finance records date from after the disappearance of the Saljfiqs; prior to 1307, however, the interposition of some Saljfq authority in the borderlands was probably recognized by the Mongols (see Ahmet Zeki Velidi Togan, Umumi Tirk Tarihine Giris [Istanbul: Ismail Akgiin Matbaasl, 1946], pp. 237-38).

(105) Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, p. 85. At the beginning of Ahmedi's historical epic, the faith and justice of the Ottomans are juxtaposed to the unbelief and oppression of the Mongols (Ahmedi, "Dastan ve Tevarih-i Al-Osman," in Osmanh Tarihleri, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Tiirkiye Baslmevi, 1949), pp. 6-7).

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whose state was not even nominally Muslim in Osman's early years. It was

consequently a prime target for ghaza and a significant factor in western Anatolian politics. The chroniclers, however, seem to have avoided dwelling on the Mongol presence, perhaps in order to emphasize the Saljuq connection, and this suppression has had a distorting effect on our understanding of Ottoman origins, focusing attention on the Byzantine frontier to the neglect of the larger Anatolian context.

Parenthetically, Osman and Orhan may have been ghazis in the sense of the epic narratives, but whether they were awarded the title of Ghazl is a different question. Hard evidence that both Osman and Orhan received this title is limited to an inscription on a 1337 mosque calling Orhan "Ghazi son of Ghdzi," but it has been argued that this inscription was not original but was part of a later restoration of the mosque. (106) As we have seen, the title of Ghdzi was generally bestowed on the most prominent leader of ghaza; the protocol surrounding its use has not been clarified. Correspondence manuals prescribed the proper use of the term, and inscriptions in other western Anatolian principalities indicate that it was borne, in different forms, by the rulers of Aydin, Mehmed Bey (1310-1334) and Umur Bey (1334-1348), and by rulers in Germiyan, Sinope, Karaman, Menteshe, and Manisa. (107) In the first half of the fourteenth century the rulers of Aydin were the most active ghazt leaders in the west, carrying the ghazd into the

Aegean with their naval forces. (108) Only after 1354, when the Ottomans established their beachhead at Gallipoli and began their European conquests, did they become the undisputed leaders in ghaza. The title of Ghdzi in building inscriptions announced the prominence of a ruler's

leadership and legitimated his rule; thus, if the 1337 inscription is authentic, it represents a claim by Orhan parallel to that of Umur Bey. Its inauthenticity by itself would not disprove Orhan's claim to the title, as he may have received it only after Umur Bey's death in 1348. During the reign of Murad I (1362- 1389), however, the Ottomans were clearly the most prominent ghazi leaders; it is also possible that it was Murad who was first awarded the title of Ghdzi and that, as in the case of the Danishmands, because of their descendants' success the first two Ottoman rulers later received the title by courtesy. (09) Their lack of the title would not necessarily mean that they

(106) ?inasi Tekin, "Turk Dunyaslnda Gazd ve Cihad Kavramlan Uzerine DUiisnceler, II: Gazi Terimi- nin Anadolu ile Akdeniz Bolgesinde Itibannl Yeniden Kazanmasl," Tarih ve Toplum 19, no. 110 (;ubat 1993): 73-80.

(107) Feridun M. Emecen, "Gazaya Dair: XIV. Yuzyll Kaynaklar Arasinda Bir Gezinti," in Prof: Dr. Hakkl Dursun Yildlz Armagani (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Baslmavi, 1995), pp. 195-96; Paul Wittek, "Deux chapitres de l'histoire des Turcs de Roum," Byzantion 11 (1936): 305 and n. 3; Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, pp. 76-77.

(108) Irene Melikoff, Le Destdn d'Umur Pacha (Diisturndme-i Enveri) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), p. 45.

(109) Bayazid I, despite his conquests, his defeat of the Crusaders, and his attempt on Constantinople, was apparently never granted the title of Ghdzi. This in itself would suggest that the title was usually conferred ex postfacto, as an acknowledgement of a career of ghdzi-like deeds.

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were not engaged in ghazd, but only that their preeminence was not recognized until after the middle of the fourteenth century.

The mid-fourteenth century seems in general to have been a turning point in the culture of ghaza; it was then, in the contested principality of Eretna, that the legend of Malik Danishmand received its second redaction, which gave it a "mystico-religious" Sufi veneer. (110) A number of saints' lives, catechetical works, and other types of literature were also produced at this time, as various elements of the complex Anatolian society found voice. By the end of the century, fine distinctions in the use of the term ghdzi seem to have become irrelevant. The earliest compilation of Ottoman history (finished in 1402, already a century after the events) labeled the whole period of the Ottomans one of ghaza, seen not as the activity of mar- ginal nomads but as the function of a powerful ruler, a conquering state. This "history", part of Ahmedi's epic poem Iskandarndma, has been understood by some scholars as depicting "the" ghazi tendency in the early Ottoman state (an antinomian ghaza according to Wittek, a shar'i ghaza according to Imber). (111)

In contrast, Pail Fodor sees the poem not as a depiction but as an instrument, an effort to support Ottoman legitimacy after the defeat by Timiir. (112) But with what weapons? The ostensible message of the poem, as analyzed by Fodor, Imber, and others, is the legitimization of the Otto- mans through their support of ghaza, the one criterion on which their qualifications were clearly better than Timur's. This message is conveyed mainly through the poem's language, but its structure conveys another message as well. Its linking of the Ottomans with the legend of Alexander the Great and the rulers of pre-Islamic Iran, as well as its panegyric nature, place the poem squarely within the tradition of court poetry best exemplified by Firdawsi's Shahnama; in prose, the histories of Juvayni and Rashid al-Din served the same function for the Ilkhanids of Iran. The dedicatees of such works were great conquerors turned Perso-Islamic emperors, like Hiilegii, Ghazan Khan, or Mahmud of Ghazna (although the latter did not appreciate what the Shdhndma could do for him). Already during the Mon- gol period, the Shahnama had received a Sufi interpretation that Islami- cized the ancient wisdom of the pre-Islamic Iranian past and applied it to the Ilkhanid rulers. (113) Ahmedi's iskandarndma followed this tradition, emphasizing the role of the mystical teacher Hizir, Iskandar/Alexander's

(110) Melikoff, Geste, pp. 61-62. (111) Wittek, Rise, pp. 14; Imber, "The Ottoman Dynastic Myth," pp. 308-9. Implied is a critique of

Bayazid I for his adoption of Byzantine mores and his failure against Timur. (112) Pal Fodor, "Ahmedi's Dasitan as a Source of Early Ottoman History," Acta Orientalia Hungarica

38 (1984): 50-51. (113) Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, "Le Shdh-ndme, la gnose soufie et le pouvoir mongol,"

Journal asiatique 272 (1984): 312-15; Robert Hillenbrand, "The Iskandar Cycle in the Great Mongol Sdhndma," in The Problematics of Power: Eastern and Western Representations of Alexander the Great, ed. M. Bridges and J. Ch. Birgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 220.

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search for spiritual truth, and his relationship to previous sovereigns of the world. (114)

The original version of the poem, lacking the section on Ottoman history, was probably completed in 1390 for a Germiyanid prince during the reign of Bayazid I, who subsequently gained control of Germiyan and became Ahmedi's patron. Bayazid was the first Ottoman ruler to be recognized as an emperor and to develop an imperial administration in the Perso-Islamic tradition. Previously the Ottomans were not famed as good rulers, pious men, or patrons of the arts; conquest was their only outstanding accomplishment (thus the appropriateness of the association with Alexander). Only in Bayazid's time did the interests of Ottoman bureaucrats and state servants first begin to outweigh those of the conquerors and raiders. Ahmedi was surely aware that Bayazid claimed descent from Alexander and possessed a set of tapestries portraying Alexander's life. ("5) Even though the revised version of the Iskandarndma with the Ottoman history attached was not presented until after the defeat by Timur and so was given to Bayazid's son, by its structure the poem supported Bayazid's imperial ambitions at the same time that it critiqued his failure to attain them. Rather than being simply a celebration of the ghazi spirit, however defined, it was an attempt to harness that spirit to a regularized Perso-Islamic regime.

In contrast, the prose histories of the fifteenth century assumed an opposition between ghazda and imperial rule and portrayed the early Ottoman rulers as standing on one side or the other of that divide. (16) Ghazd became a political football struggled over by different groups who sought to score with it; it could be used either to support or to critique the central authority. The very attack of Timur legitimized and perpetuated the use of ghdzi ideology through much of the fifteenth century, since even Timur saw their ghdazi role as reason enough not to obliterate the Ottomans completely. Inalcik and Menage showed that Ashikpashazade used stock images of pure nomads and noble ghazis to critique the imperial tendencies of Mehmed II and the corruption of the 'ulama' and bureaucrats, and that this critique was driven by the gradual political subordi- nation of the ghdzl warriors and nomads to the centralized state. As Kafadar argues, the 'ulamal' who wrote the next generation of histories had an interest in representing ghazd as an ordered activity in compliance with the sharna, and as Imber argues, the state had a growing interest in ghaza as a Sunni activity opposed to "heretical" versions of Islam like that of the Safavis. We recognize the coexistence of conflicting interests in ghaza in the fifteenth century when those interests were attached to identifiable groups with differing political agendas.

(114) Caroline Sawyer, "Sword of Conquest, Dove of the Soul: Political and Spiritual Values in Ahmadi's Iskandarndrma," in ibid., pp. 135-38, 141.

(115) Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, p. 94; Hillenbrand, pp. 222-23. If the Ottoman section of the poem was largely composed before the battle with Timur, it may even have been intended to celebrate Bayazid's ghazi achievements: the victory at Kosovo, the defeat of the Crusaders, and the attack on Constantinople.

(116) See Zachariadou, "Histoires et legendes," pp. 60-61, and the sources cited there.

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The foundation of a state, however, is a different story; subsequent generations have a need to understand its existence as somehow necessary, the inevitable product of the "genius" of its founder and the irresistible for- ward momentum of its first generation. They quarrel only over the precise quality of the founder's genius and the exact direction in which the initial momentum pointed. The decision whether the original Ottomans were or were not ghazis, then, is thought to govern the interpretation of their entire subsequent history and to give their state a specific meaning from the first. Not only is the evidence inconclusive, however, but the examination of other frontiers also shows how diverse were the motives of those who interested themselves in ghaza. Even Ahmedi's poem reflects a contest among the ideologies of warriors, 'ulami', and the central state. Analyzing these ideologies in a comparative context will yield a more complex view of the nature of the early Ottoman state, a clearer picture of the conditions under which it was founded, and a more nuanced understanding of the sources.

Linda T. DARLING

(University of Arizona, U.S.A.)

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darling-contested territory: ottoman holy war

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