38 | Changing Perceptions along the Frontiers
or ex-Byzantine Christians. In the Danişmendname, written in the first half of
the fifteenth century but likely based on an original composition of the mid-
thirteenth, “Rumis” regularly appear as the Christian enemies of “Muslims.”The absorption of the Ottomans’ rival in Rum was sealed by the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453. Therefore, it was no surprise that Mehmed II, in addition
to his titles SultanüɆl-Berreyn and HakanüɆl-Bahreyn (the ruler of two conti-
nents and two seas, respectively), also took the title Kayser-i Rum, a symbolic
declaration of his takeover of the Roman legacy, while setting his imperial project
in motion.
Likewise, the Saltukname, compiled in the fifteenth century, tried to evoke
this legacy by recounting Sarı Saltuk’s victorious gazas over the infidel Rum
(stretched to cover countries as far as Central Europe), which gradually trans-
formed into a Muslim territory and of which Sarı Saltuk was proudly declared to
be a part. He presented himself as Sarı Saltuk-i Rumi, as he traveled toward the
Arab lands, Africa, and India. It was also a way of describing where he was com-
ing from. However, the borrowing of the term also had political implications. It
cannot be merely coincidental that the appropriation of the term “Rumi” by the
Turco-Muslims came with the subsequent adjustment of the lands of Rum into
the Muslim world, a process that had already started with the earlier gazas of
Seyyid Battal, Melik Danişmend, and Sarı Saltuk and was to be completed under
the Ottomans.
***The Arabo-Byzantine frontiers stretching from the Taurus to the upper Euphrates
were in operation for almost five centuries. This frontier zone with the Byzantine
Empire started moving northward and westward with the Turcoman advance
into Anatolia. The frontier region with Rum that was located around Malatya in
the Battalname moved to northwest Anatolia with the Danişmendname and far-
ther into the Balkans with the Saltukname. Although I have underlined the con-
tinuity with the earlier layers of the frontier traditions in these narratives, I have
also tried to bring to the fore different definitions of key geographical terms in
each of these narratives, because as with the frontiers were changing, the frontier
culture—the way the frontiersmen perceived and defined it—was also changing.
The late medieval Anatolian Turkish warrior epics are products of a period
of transition in which the setting for mobility and fluidity required new terms for
defining identity. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the search for a new
identity, and therefore new terms to define it, was an ongoing process in which
place names and terms belonging to the rival language and culture were adopted,
distorted, and used by the Muslim newcomers. Such transition (or confusion) is
well reflected in the different usages of Rumi. The word initially referred to the