Trépanier|27religious master would have identified himself and been identified by others
as socially closer to the (secular) palace crowd than to mendicant dervishes, as
would have been the case if “religious professional” was an important form of
social identity.
Within the historiography of Anatolia from the end of Byzantine rule in 1071
to the rise of the Ottomans as an empire in the early fifteenth century, research
on social history is still in its infancy. For many decades, scholars have simply
filed the topic away in a box marked “Not Enough Sources.” But much more than
new sources, what the period needs are fresh sets of eyes and brand-new ques-
tions. And indeed, the issues I discuss in this chapter do leave us with the strong
impression that traces of this past are plentiful enough for us to go down to the
street level and ask those who were about to become Ottomans how they un-
derstood the interactions between the identities that crisscrossed the society in
which they lived.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Kafadar, Cemal. Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995. This book is a thorough survey and reinter-
pretation of debates among historians on the rise of the Ottoman state.
Karamustafa, Ahmet T. God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later
Middle Period, 1200–1550. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994. This book
discusses the little-known Qalandar dervishes, whose religious outlook made
them seek rejection by the societies in which they lived.
Lindner, Rudi Paul. Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2007.
———. Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia. Bloomington: Research Institute
for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1983. Both of Lindner’s books show a
creative use of anthropology to study the early Ottoman population.
Vryonis, Speros. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of
Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971. By far the most extensive study of late medieval Anato-
lian society, this study, based on sources in a variety of languages, is marred by the
author’s anti-Turkish sentiments.
Zachariadou, Elizabeth, ed. The Ottoman Emirate (1300–1389). Rethymnon, Greece:
Crete University Press, 1993. This collected volume covers many aspects of the
early Ottoman experience.
Notes
. The outcome of this research appears in Trépanier, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval
Anatolia.
. The great classic on the topic is Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason for
Exchange in Archaic Societies. Natalie Zemon Davis, in the introduction to her The Gift in