The Empire in the Making 31
group of crusaders;2 most critics focused on the absence of religious zeal in the
entourage of the first sultans and maintained instead that the early Ottoman
emirate had mostly tribal (Rudi P. Lindner) or syncretistic (Heath Lowry) con-
notations. On the other hand, scholars closer to Wittek’s thesis (Halil İnalcık,
Cemal Kafadar) stressed that, for the nomadic or semi-nomadic warriors that
formed the core of Osman’s and Orhan’s armies, gaza had a meaning closer to
plunder than to “Holy War”.3 An Anatolian text on gaza, probably originating
in the Karasi emirate, has recently been used to suggest that the frontier under-
standing of the term was different from the “more tolerant” cihad ( jihad) of the
ulema, making it more fitting for fourteenth-century freebooters. Colin Imber,
however, analyzed the same text and showed that, in fact, it only recapitulated
“the standard Hanafi rules of Holy War” and that gaza was never any differ-
ent from cihad, always being one of the obligations imposed on the Muslim
community.4 However, Imber’s interpretation may reinforce this alternative
understanding of the gazi-thesis (one may call it the akıncı-thesis, since it
stresses the role of raiders rather than holy warriors): the ulema were quick
to try to embrace the heterogeneous freebooters of the Anatolian emirates
and tried to instil the notion of gaza in order to proclaim the religious nature
of their plundering the infidel.
Indeed, the nature of the emergence of the Ottoman state produced some
peculiarities in the creation of its early intellectual elite, an elite that could
articulate a fully-fledged political ideology. The very presence, let alone influ-
ence, of educated ulema and other individuals among the warrior entourage
of the first decades of the fourteenth century, is an object of scholarly debate;5
the same goes, even more so, for the ideas that motivated the warriors them-
selves. As noted above, it has been posited that their Weltanschauung was
2 I believe that Rudi P. Lindner, for instance, oversimplifies when he claims that Wittek’s
“extraordinary solution” can be reduced to “single-minded devotion to the holy war as a pow-
erful engine of Ottoman history” (Lindner 2007, 10). In a way, the modern debate on “Wittek’s
thesis” has moved the subject from whether the unifying factor of the early Ottomans was
their tribal unity or war opportunities to whether gaza meant religious fervor or just plun-
dering the enemy. Wittek, however, never insisted on the religious character of the early
Ottoman gaza (or, at any rate, never made this character his central argument). I find, for
instance, that Heath Lowry’s definition of the Ottoman gaza (Lowry 2003, 45ff.) is not as far
from Kafadar’s or even Wittek’s as he considers it to be.
3 On the debate see the recent works of Kafadar 1995; Lowry 2003; Lindner 1983 and 2007;
Imber 2011, 201ff.; Darling 2011.
4 Tekin 1989; Imber 2011, 59ff. and 201ff. On the other hand, Kate Fleet showed that gazi was
not the par excellence title of early Ottoman sultans, as declared by Wittek and his followers
(Fleet 2002).
5 Kafadar 1995, 109ff.; Lindner 2009, 120; Imber 2009, 212–214; Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 43ff.