30 | Changing Perceptions along the Frontiers
organized along religious or ethnic lines. Alliances were also established across
religious, ethnic, and tribal lines. Likewise, the frontier areas did not constitute a
barrier between Muslim and Christian societies, but despite the permanent state
of war, they might have functioned as an area of contact and cohabitation where
cultural and religious practices diffused and commercial ties intensified.
The dynamic conquest policy, to which the frontier society owed its very
existence, created a high degree of physical mobility, with a moving frontier that
set people in motion and displaced and resettled them at an astonishing pace.
Accordingly, the way the people of the frontiers envisioned their political and
cultural environment kept changing, requiring new terms of defining self and
others. Against the background of fluidity of frontiers and of identities, I look
at the concept of Rum, an essential component of Ottoman identity, in three
warrior epics, the Battalname, Danişmendname,and Saltukname. After giving a
brief introduction to Ottoman frontiers and sources, I draw the moving frontier
with Rum. I then examine more closely the concepts of Rum and Rumi (a person
from the land of Rum) and show how these concepts that had once belonged to
the rival religion and culture gradually came to be adopted and used by the Mus-
lims of that geography.
Frontiers
Although frontiers have long received considerable attention by geographers and
political scientists, until relatively recently historians have avoided conceptual
discussions of them, because each frontier area was unique and hence had to be
studied as an isolated phenomenon without any attempt at generalization. Ge-
ographers and political scientists consider frontiers and boundaries as belonging
to distinct categories: frontiers are zones evolving organically between states or
societies; boundaries, on the other hand, are state-defined artificial lines of sepa-
ration. Although this definition of “frontier” is of considerable importance for
modern conceptualizations, it cannot be easily applied to premodern frontiers.
Recently, historians have begun to respond to the need for further conceptualiza-
tions and have adjusted these terms to apply to their specific areas of study.
Colin Heywood defines the Ottoman frontier as “a region of colonization
and settlement involving both military action and proselytization, and thus both
a zone of passage and interaction and a political barrier.” Heywood further char-
acterizes the Ottoman state as “a frontier polity which, from 1300 to 1700, pos-
sessed an active expansion frontier,” which came to an end in 1699, when the
Ottoman state for the first time accepted “a European-style demarcated frontier”
with the Treaty of Karlowitz. The Ottoman terminology for “frontier” distin-
guished between frontier as a line, a demarcated boundary—hudud or sınır—and
frontier as a zone or marchland. The Ottoman term for “marchland” was uc (pl.
ucat), which can be translated as “farthest point,” “extremity.”