Changing Perceptions

along the Frontiers

The Moving Frontier with Rum in Late

Medieval Anatolian Frontier Narratives

Zeynep Aydoğan

When Humayun [Hümayun Şah of India, d. 1556] asked him [Seydi Ali Reis] a

tricky question as to which country was bigger, the country of Rum (vilayet-i

Rum) or Hindustan, he had boldly answered: “If, by Rum, one means Rum,

strictly speaking, that is, the province of Sivas (called Rum in Ottoman admin-

istrative division), then Hindustan is bigger. But if one means the lands under

the rule of the Padishah-ı Rum, Hind does not amount to one-tenth of it.”

In the early Islamic sources, Bilad al-Rum (countries of Rum) meant Byzantine
territory, and Muslim scholars such as Bukhari, Tabari, and Masudi referred
to these lands as “Rum.” The natural frontier of Bilad al-Rum was defined by
the Taurus Mountains and the Euphrates. The term began to be applied to the
Seljuks in Anatolia, who were called Selçukiyan-ı Rum, setting them apart from
the Seljuks in Baghdad. For the Ottomans, the term was used to refer to, among
other meanings, the country that they inhabited, Memleket-i Rum (t he cou nt r y
of Rum).
Nizameddin Şami (fl. 1392), who accompanied Timur in his military cam-
paigns, referred to the Ottomans as Rumiyan, “the heirs of the Romans,” and to
the Ottoman ruler as the “Sultan-ı Rum.” Indeed, as the conquerors of Roman
territory in the Balkans and in Asia Minor, the Ottomans relied on the Byzantine
legacy as much as they did on Islamic and Turkic nomadic traditions.
Like other principalities that came into existence after the disintegration
of the Seljuks of Rum, the Ottomans appeared on the scene as a small frontier
polity driven by a desire for conquest. The political setting in Anatolia was still
dominated by struggles among various competing powers and did not become
stable until the Ottomans gained supremacy and established their unitary rule at
the end of the fifteenth century. The political disarray that prevailed in Anatolia
generated various political and military compositions that were not necessarily

