The early Ottomans as a syncretic Islamo-Christian state

Just a very lengthy rant about how "Christian Ottomans" isn't quite implausible. Sure, it's not very probable, but it certainly is not impossible.

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Older historiography attributed the meteoric rise of the Ottomans, culminating in their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, to the presence of ghazis - that is, zealous Muslim holy warriors and raiders who battered the infidels under the banner of Islam. This remains a popular viewpoint among laypeople, including in AH.com. Here's an example of what I mean, with the very first (and significantly upvoted) comment saying:
There would be no Ottoman Empire.The early Ottomans relied heavily upon ghazis,they ain't gonna fight for some Christian warlord.

But this is an increasingly challenged - some would even say anachronistic - theory. More recent works on the early Ottomans draw a quite different picture. From Heath W. Lowry's The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (which the most important recent synthesis of Ottoman studies, Osman's Dream, cites extensively):
There is an ironic twist to this interpretation; it would suggest that the real secret of Ottoman success may have stemmed from the failure of its early rulers to adhere to the traditional Islamic concept of the gaza [holy war]. Osman and Orhan, rather than attempting to pressure the local Christians of Bithynia into accepting Islam or subjugating them to the yoke of a tolerated cizye (poll tax) paying community, simply left the issue of religion open. One joined their banner as either a Christian or a Muslim and made their mark on the basis of ability. When in 1973, Halil Inalcık described the fourteenth-century Ottomans as “a true ‘Frontier Empire,’ a cosmopolitan state, treating all creeds and races as one,” he highlighted what appears to be the real secret of Ottoman success in its formative period.
Viewed through the lens of surviving fourteenth- and early-fifteenth century sources, the emerging Ottoman polity was one in which culture and ideology were (from the outset) the vehicle through which the administrative apparatus of earlier Islamic dynasties was passed on to the new entity. Islam was the religion of the rulers from the time of Osman forward. What was different about Osman and his immediate successors was the fact that they in no way sought to impose their own faith upon those who, attracted by the prospect of booty and slaves, flocked to their banner. On the contrary, in the first one-hundred-plus years of the state, one’s religion in no way determined whether or not one could join their endeavor and/or serve as a member of its ruling elite. Muslims (many of whom were converts) and Christians rose to positions of prominence on the basis of performance not belief.​

Some arguments made by Lowry:

Gaza meant raid, not holy war: Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources, from Ottoman poets themselves to Italian merchants, state that the Turks considered gaza (Arabic for "holy war") virtually the same thing as akin (Turkish for "raid"). This suggests that the Ottomans referred to their looting activities, whose primary motivation was plunder and not zeal, as gaza.
Indeed, as late as 1484, the Sublime Porte's edict calling for a so-called "holy war" (gaza) in Moldavia makes an appeal not to any sort of religious warriors, but to those "desiring booty and plunder." This is despite the sultan at the time being so devoutly Muslim that he was literally nicknamed "Bayezid the Saint." Nor were those participating in gaza/akin mostly or even majority Muslims; the 1484 edict uses the term yoldash ("comrade," a religiously neutral term) when calling for volunteers, and in one campaign against the White Sheep Turkomans in the 1470s, 85% of the "raiders" (akinci) mobilized in one Balkan Province were Christians.

The early Ottoman government included many Greeks and Christians
: In 1326, the Ottomans captured their first major city, Prusa (Bursa). Interestingly, the earliest Ottoman chronicles credit the Ottoman conquest of Bursa to a certain "Michael the Beardless," who was not only Greek -- as is obvious from the name -- but had been an Orthodox Christian until just a few years before. Michael would go on to found one of the three most powerful families in the early Ottoman empire, the Mihaloglus.
Another of the three powerful dynasties was the Evrenosoglus, founded by the esteemed ghazi Evrenos. Here's the catch; Evrenos appears to be a Greek name. One historian even suggests that Evrenos was the Byzantine governor of Prusa/Bursa who defected when the Ottomans conquered his city, although Lowry rejects this. Evrenos's father, Isa (Turkish for Jesus), was nicknamed "the Frank," suggesting that he might have been a Spanish mercenary (Byzantine chronicles state that hundreds of Catalan mercenaries joined Osman I in 1305).
Besides the domain of soldiers, a 1385 endowment deed features 39 Ottoman bureaucrats. Six of those have names identifiable as those of converts, while one is said to be the son of Koskos, a Christian police superintendent. Or when a Byzantine historian visited Pegae, a Roman city rcently captured by the Ottomans, he found that the Ottomans had appointed a Greek Christian named Mavrozoumis as the military governor there. The Ecumenical Patriarch's archives suggest that there were Christian judges in Ottoman land in 1340.
Even more striking is the fact that from the years 1453 to 1516, for 31 years the Grand Viziers in the Porte were Muslim converts from Byzantine, Serbian, and Bosnian nobility, who often retained ties to their Christian hometowns and families. On a lower level, many of the pronoia of Byzantium underwent a relatively smooth transition to becoming Ottoman timariots. In Albania in 1431, a full sixth of the timariots were Christians and another third were first-generation converts.
So Lowry concludes that there was an "established process where bona fide Christians were performing administrative functions in the emerging Ottoman state apparatus."

The early Ottomans did not follow traditional Islamic ways of dealing with Peoples of the Book: Among our first Ottoman chroniclers opens his discussion of Osman I with this sentence:
Upon taking his father’s place, [Osman] began to get along well with those unbelievers who were his close neighbors.​
This chronicler tells us that when Osman I conquered Harmankaya (the hometown of Michael the Beardless, incidentally) the Ottomans "took no slaves. This they did in order to bind the local people to them." Osman I explained these actions by saying that "they [the Greeks] are our neighbors. When we first came to this area they treated us well. Now it is fitting that we show them respect." This does not quite match the common image of the Muslim holy warrior.
This could be explained by realpolitik, but more striking is a German janissary's report in 1397 about Bursa, where Ottoman hospices were open to all, Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. A French visitor to Bursa in 1432 even claims that wine was distributed in these charitable kitchens. In more orthodox Islamic societies - including the mature Ottoman state - each religious group had largely separate charitable institutions.
From an administrative viewpoint, a 1490 document states that the island of Limnos - a former Venetian possession that commands the entrance to the Dardanelles and has a valuable type of clay - should be defended primarily by the local Greek Christians in the exact same way they had under Byzantine and Venetian rule. There was no Islamic bureaucracy to be found on the island at all, only a tiny janissary garrison composed of two dozen Greek Muslims most of who were married to local Christian girls. Again, not really a sign of ghazis overtaking local Christian society.
Finally, one might discuss the example of a preacher in Bursa in the late 14th century who, from the pulpit of the mosque, proclaimed that Jesus was just as great a prophet as Muhamamad. When an Arab cleric pointed out that this seemed heretical, the local congregants rejected his position in favor of the Jesus-centered viewpoint of the Turk.

Overall, it seems that the early Ottomans -- that is, before c. 1500 when the influx of Arab ideas and the Safavid empire forced the empire into taking a position as the bastion of Sunni Islam -- were a fairly mixed bunch with only limited ties to war for the sake of religion.
 
You make a few interesting points but as your text acknowledges a great many non-Muslims converted.

You could only get so far in these Muslim empires without doing so.
 
You could only get so far in these Muslim empires without doing so.
Actually, I see the complete opposite; (relatively speaking, both to other Muslim empires and the mature Ottoman state) enormous numbers of high-ranking Ottomans who did not convert or did so after already reaching high positions, as well as drastically limited Islamic penetration of the countryside. That's my point - the early Ottomans were basically a frontier society, and thus much more open to foreign influence than Egypt or Syria or what have you.

In a word, I'm saying the Ottomans were different from what you refer to "these Muslim empires" until the 16th century. And certainly not a fanatical kingdom of zealots as is still commonly portrayed.
 

dcharleos

Donor
Just a very lengthy rant about how "Christian Ottomans" isn't quite implausible. Sure, it's not very probable, but it certainly is not impossible.

---

Older historiography attributed the meteoric rise of the Ottomans, culminating in their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, to the presence of ghazis - that is, zealous Muslim holy warriors and raiders who battered the infidels under the banner of Islam. This remains a popular viewpoint among laypeople, including in AH.com. Here's an example of what I mean, with the very first (and significantly upvoted) comment saying:


But this is an increasingly challenged - some would even say anachronistic - theory. More recent works on the early Ottomans draw a quite different picture. From Heath W. Lowry's The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (which the most important recent synthesis of Ottoman studies, Osman's Dream, cites extensively):
There is an ironic twist to this interpretation; it would suggest that the real secret of Ottoman success may have stemmed from the failure of its early rulers to adhere to the traditional Islamic concept of the gaza [holy war]. Osman and Orhan, rather than attempting to pressure the local Christians of Bithynia into accepting Islam or subjugating them to the yoke of a tolerated cizye (poll tax) paying community, simply left the issue of religion open. One joined their banner as either a Christian or a Muslim and made their mark on the basis of ability. When in 1973, Halil Inalcık described the fourteenth-century Ottomans as “a true ‘Frontier Empire,’ a cosmopolitan state, treating all creeds and races as one,” he highlighted what appears to be the real secret of Ottoman success in its formative period.
Viewed through the lens of surviving fourteenth- and early-fifteenth century sources, the emerging Ottoman polity was one in which culture and ideology were (from the outset) the vehicle through which the administrative apparatus of earlier Islamic dynasties was passed on to the new entity. Islam was the religion of the rulers from the time of Osman forward. What was different about Osman and his immediate successors was the fact that they in no way sought to impose their own faith upon those who, attracted by the prospect of booty and slaves, flocked to their banner. On the contrary, in the first one-hundred-plus years of the state, one’s religion in no way determined whether or not one could join their endeavor and/or serve as a member of its ruling elite. Muslims (many of whom were converts) and Christians rose to positions of prominence on the basis of performance not belief.​

I started a thread a few weeks ago about an Alevi Ottoman Empire which was getting at something very similar to a "syncretic" Ottoman empire. I think for all practical purposes, the Empire will have to be nominally Muslim no matter what. But, Alevism is along the lines of a syncretic faith, and with 500 years of official sponsorship added to a large influx of Christian converts, I can see it becoming even moreso.
 
I really like this idea.

Maybe a much later conquest of the Mameluke's. At the same time, earlier and constant expansion into Europe.
 
I think the Ottoman success forced them to adopt some kind of traditional Islam, when they conquered Syria, Mesopotania and Egypt, they simply got so many traditional Muslims under them, that they needed to embrace traditional Islam. So what if the Timurid Empire ended up longer lasting and also ended up control Syria, Mesopotania and Hejaz took the title Caliph. While the Ottomans only keep control over Anatolia. This mean that most of their Muslim subjects are Alevi. This allow the Ottomans to be less Orthodox.
 
I am currently not at leisure to address this thread and ideas here that I have engaged before as skewed and mislead. However, Ghazw/Gaza/etc is a raid, but separating that from jihad is europeanisms through and through. Unlike Europe, Islamic society did not differentiate between the two. If persuaded, by a counter, I have much resources to pull for this both from contemporaries and Islamic fiqh.
 
Interesting thread. But there's a wide gulf between mid-level pragmatism and religious indifference (let alone syncretism, or a full-blown change of religion).

A few observations:

Looking back to that Christian 16% of timariots in Albania...this seems to be a reasonably representative number; in some provinces, the percentage of Christian timariots was even higher, and in some it dropped to 2% or less.
But what does this actually mean? In an almost exclusively Christian region, Ottoman conquest reshaped the local elites so radically that only 16% of the new elite remained Christian. How and why did this happen, if the Ottomans were so indifferent to religion and so slick at integrating local structures?

Many of those examples deal with converts; not actual Christians. This isn't exactly the same thing...and the extremely high incidence of conversion among people moving up - or preserving their positions on - the Ottoman ladder, does not paint a picture of religious equality or indifference.

Is Lowry saying that Christians in Bithynia did not, in fact, pay the cizye under Osman/Orhan?

I believe Gaza does not preclude or forbid plunder; pointing out that there were aspects of a raid does not necessarily devalue the gaza's religious character. I'm in no way an expert on Islamic theology, but I see this was also mentioned by John7755 يوحنا.

Also, if we look at the writings of Ottoman warriors from the 1300s and 1400s, such as Ahmed Ashiki or Tursun Bey - we can see that the ghazi ideals, the ideals of holy war, are strong and quite pervasive. And that there's generally a strong religious component.
 
Interesting thread. But there's a wide gulf between mid-level pragmatism and religious indifference (let alone syncretism, or a full-blown change of religion).

A few observations:

Looking back to that Christian 16% of timariots in Albania...this seems to be a reasonably representative number; in some provinces, the percentage of Christian timariots was even higher, and in some it dropped to 2% or less.
But what does this actually mean? In an almost exclusively Christian region, Ottoman conquest reshaped the local elites so radically that only 16% of the new elite remained Christian. How and why did this happen, if the Ottomans were so indifferent to religion and so slick at integrating local structures?

Many of those examples deal with converts; not actual Christians. This isn't exactly the same thing...and the extremely high incidence of conversion among people moving up - or preserving their positions on - the Ottoman ladder, does not paint a picture of religious equality or indifference.

Is Lowry saying that Christians in Bithynia did not, in fact, pay the cizye under Osman/Orhan?

I believe Gaza does not preclude or forbid plunder; pointing out that there were aspects of a raid does not necessarily devalue the gaza's religious character. I'm in no way an expert on Islamic theology, but I see this was also mentioned by John7755 يوحنا.

Also, if we look at the writings of Ottoman warriors from the 1300s and 1400s, such as Ahmed Ashiki or Tursun Bey: we can see that the ghazi ideals, the ideals of holy war, are strong and quite pervasive. And that there's generally a strong religious component.

Very good post.
 

dcharleos

Donor
I think the Ottoman success forced them to adopt some kind of traditional Islam, when they conquered Syria, Mesopotania and Egypt, they simply got so many traditional Muslims under them, that they needed to embrace traditional Islam. So what if the Timurid Empire ended up longer lasting and also ended up control Syria, Mesopotania and Hejaz took the title Caliph. While the Ottomans only keep control over Anatolia. This mean that most of their Muslim subjects are Alevi. This allow the Ottomans to be less Orthodox.

This is what i was thinking. Adopting a hetrodox form of Islam would have the Ottomans expand less in Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and more into Europe and around the Black Sea, at least in the first stage of empire.

From a geopolitical perspective, expanding to control the whole of the Black Sea territories would put the Ottomans in a stronger position compared to OTL.
 
This is what i was thinking. Adopting a hetrodox form of Islam would have the Ottomans expand less in Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and more into Europe and around the Black Sea, at least in the first stage of empire.

From a geopolitical perspective, expanding to control the whole of the Black Sea territories would put the Ottomans in a stronger position compared to OTL.

I think the biggest weakness of the Ottoman Empire was that it couldn't take the step and become a European power before it was to late. If the Ottoman belong to a heterodox Christianised version of Islam, they may be able to take the step.
 
However, Ghazw/Gaza/etc is a raid, but separating that from jihad is europeanisms through and through.
Of course ghazat (gaza) and jihad (cihad) are similar in concept. From Bayezid the Saint's edict calling for raiders and "gazis" for his Moldavian campaign of 1484:
All those wishing to join in the sacred conquest, engage in the pleasure of gaza and cihad, [all those] desiring booty and plunder, [all those] brave comrades who gain their bread by the sword, and all those wishing to receive a timar by comradeship, are requested to join me with their weapons and accessories in this blessed gaza and for a share in the rewards of this gaza and cihad. And all those who gain booty and comradeship will enjoy my kindness and assistance. And those seeking timars will have my help in obtaining timars and dirliks, and as this year there will be no pençik [the fifth, i.e., the 20 percent normally accruing to the Sultan], taken from anyone’s booty, they should perform accordingly. Issued in the beginning of May 1484 in Kabaagaç.​
If religiously motivated cihad was such an important part of early Ottoman expansion, why would these very secular reasons, and not the blessed paradise of the martyrs, be used to attract volunteers for the campaign? Do note that "comrade" (yoldash) is religiously neutral.
Anyhow, per Cemal Kafadar, early Ottoman sources rarely make any reference of any sort to cihad (which of course has a more explicitly religious meaning). This actually supports my wider point about gaza being conceived as similar to the secular akin.

But what does this actually mean? In an almost exclusively Christian region, Ottoman conquest reshaped the local elites so radically that only 16% of the new elite remained Christian. How and why did this happen, if the Ottomans were so indifferent to religion and so slick at integrating local structures?
Certainly conversion to Islam provided greater opportunities within the bureaucracy -- there were no Christian provincial governors, but there were a number of Slavic nobles who became governors once converting. That explains why the nobility was among the first to become Muslim. But if the Ottomans were such fierce gazis, why did the old Christian aristocracy survive to such a degree? In some parts of Serbia 50% of the timariots were Christian Serbs. As seen above, even post-1453 a doen Grand Viziers were scions of Balkan nobility, including a close relative of Constantine XI. Why such a heavy reliance not on Anatolians, nor even the devshirme recruits, but literal pre-conquest aristocrats to staff the pinnacle of the state? And far from converting all their new Balkan possessions into neat parcels of timars, the early Ottomans (not unlike the Mughals) essentially retained local forms of governance. In Bosnia, where there were no pronoia, there were no timars either; as seen above, the privileges and duties of the Limnos islanders survived conquest entirely intact. A great number of the famed 'askeri class were also Christians until the 16th century, when the orthodoxization of the Ottoman state relegated the Christian military into the peasant class. All this stands uneasily with the Gazi Thesis, which supposes an influx of zealous Turkomen warriors from the rest of Anatolia to the Ottoman frontier; where are all these gazis in the early Ottoman Balkans? To quote Halil Inalcik, one of the most important scholars of the Ottomans:
Within this policy of istimâlet [moderation], the Ottomans, especially during the first transition period, maintained intact the laws and customs, the status and privileges, that had existed in the preconquest times, and what is more unusual, they incorporated the existing military and clerical groups into their own administrative system without discrimination.​

This isn't exactly the same thing
Conversion to Islam provided greater opportunities, especially the more recent you go. But do note that Michael, founder of the Mihaloglu, was the second most powerful person in the Ottoman state under Osman I's reign -- and he was a Christian until the 1320s. In any case, if the Ghazi Thesis is correct, why such a heavy reliance on Christians and converts for basic military functions?

Is Lowry saying that Christians in Bithynia did not, in fact, pay the cizye under Osman/Orhan?
We have almost no reliable information about Bithynian peasants in the 14th century, but documents from Limnos cited above do not feature the cizye in practice. Instead, they have a gradated tax system where taxation depends on wealth. This was replaced in the 16th century by the standard cizye poll-tax.

we can see that the ghazi ideals, the ideals of holy war, are strong and quite pervasive.
The Ottoman chronicler I cited above about Orhan's treatment of the Christian Bithynians is, as a matter of fact, Ahmed Ashiki. But generally, you should distinguish between the Ottoman literati, infused with the ideal of holy war, and actual Ottoman statecraft and practice. For instance, Ahmedi's work of history which you reference -- which does strongly emphasize the gazi-ness of the Ottomans -- is more properly a polemical text like the mirrors for princes in the Persianate world. One Hungarian historian says:
For Ahmedi history was not something to explore, but much rather a thesaurus of examples from which one must draw the events and facts that most snugly fit the portrayal of the ideal types embodied by his characters. As the historical events are in this way reduced to mere illustration, their choice is random and arbitrary, devoid of their real significance. What Ahmedi describes is at most a sketchy outline of Ottoman history studded with an array of legends. This, in turn, provides the important conclusion that no matter [that] the facts selected by Ahmedi may well be true, his reticence on certain subjects can by no means be regarded as authoritative.​
 
I'm afraid I don't see the point of a syncretic state here. You cite a lot of sources that illustrate tolerance - which meshes with the early Ottoman state's formation in an area where many Christians and Muslims did coexist. However, I don't see the logical leap towards syncretism. Even in places where syncretism did occur on the fringes of the Islamic world, it tended either to fail at the elite level or ultimately be replaced with a more "authentic" form of the religion - India and Central Asia come to mind, as examples of both the former and the latter.

Christians could and did assume positions of importance in the early Ottoman Empire. Jihad was often combined with secular motivations of plunder and conquest. This is nothing new. I don't see where this justifies a syncretic religion's emergence. Tolerance doesn't imply blending of religious thought - not inherently.

Besides, wouldn't such a thing conflict with the Ottoman attempts to establish dynastic legitimacy in a very much post-Mongol cultural world?
 
However, I don't see the logical leap towards syncretism.
Ah, sorry for the confusion. By syncretism I meant less the technical religious definition of the term and more the idea that the Ottomans were, far from being a gazi state, a polity "between two worlds" that was culturally integrative, as you note. The title is just to draw views, the actual post is really a response to the rather surprising fact that the Gazi Thesis is apparently widely accepted in AH.com when even Wikipedia rejects it.
 
I am currently not at leisure to address this thread and ideas here that I have engaged before as skewed and mislead. However, Ghazw/Gaza/etc is a raid, but separating that from jihad is europeanisms through and through. Unlike Europe, Islamic society did not differentiate between the two. If persuaded, by a counter, I have much resources to pull for this both from contemporaries and Islamic fiqh.
A lot of European scholarship misunderstands the Islamic world and a lot of that is motivated by ideology.
 
@Intransigent Southerner

First of all, it is a common phrase to in both Arabic and likely too with Turkish, for you to place two terms meaning similar or the same topics together. This was not to differentiate but to make it clear the intention of Ghazw, which is not for personal al gains but to deprive the munafiqeen of wealth and thus bring the power into the believers (Dar al-Islam). Further, the Gift of everlasting is due unto all Muslim and for the shaheed and fidayeen who are those who will die in the cause of Allah. However, the reward for the muhjahid is that of the world (dunya) and the after (jinnah). Thus, he offers to them the beauty of conquest and to take what the kafr has, for the whole world is owned in whole by the Muslim for it is given by right of Allah. So all he is saying, is that Allah has allowed you to enjoy the spoils of jihad and ghazw, both of which are religious, because there is no difference.


"So they routed them by Allah's leave and Dawud killed Goliath, and gave unto him the kingdom and taught of him that which He willed. And if Allah did not check one people by another, surely the earth would be in fitnah. But Allah is bountiful in loot to the Muslim."
-Quran 2:251


Right here, Allah one says that he will always check people with another measure. This is al-Istaraaj, no matter what occurs, Allah will counter eventually the disbelief and the Muslim need only wait. Thus, the ultimate counter is islam itself and the wars upon which we are enjoined to conquer the fitnah (all non Muslim states).

Then, Allah gives a reason for war and conquest that alludes to loot, land, money, slaves, etc instead of a heaven.

"So enjoy what you have captured of loot/booty in war, as lawful and good."
-Quran 8:69

Enjoy what you have captured as loot, thus, it is lawful within jihad and is a reward for you, to acquire secular goods.

With this in mind, this is called Fiqh al-Ghaneemah and Fiqh al-Fay. Ghaneemah is loot gathered by way of fighting. So, ghaneemah (word from which we get Ghazw, this is also similar to baghy which is a bandit) is when you defeated an army and raid his house, land, leftovers of the army, his armor/weapons, etc... Fay is the loot you inherit as a result of victory or by default. Thus, when you conquer a land, it is permissible to take what the enemy left or owned (this includes slaves, wives, money, farms, etc...). This differs in that ghaneemah is won and the other inherited by default. In relation to this is fiqh al-Jizya, which is essentially the money given by Dhimmi to keep their blood haram; or is counted the same for it is the loot Muslim gain by conquering those within kufr and fitnah and is to be distributed in fifths just as Allah commanded of ghaneemah and fay.

"Allah has made loot/booty lawful and good*. He used it to incite the Muslim to unity of purpose. Thus, enjoy what you have captured." -Ibn Ishaq :372

*It is good, thus it is part of jihad and holy. This would otherwise be called permissible, but is instead referenced positively and thus actively sought. It is infact, fardh and obligatory to take loot.

As you see, dunya items such as spoils or ghaneemah and Fay, is a unity of purpose for Allah. He United Muslim in the common goals therein, that is destroying fitnah, even if it is for ghazw. Secondly, enjoy your loot, this is the same enjoyment one gains for any good deed for ones taqwa or for the enjoyment of heaven gained by the fidayeen and shaheed. Ghazw is one and the same with jihad, fidayee and shahid....


"When their wrists were bound with chains, the Apostle (and Allah) was a sea of generosity for us."
Ibn Ishaq :465

It is a sea of generosity, the distribution of spoil. Just as taqwa (piety) is given unto those who wage war, so too is the booty.

"Indeed Allah has guided you with His wisdom. If you wish to capture booty/loot, obey Allah and His Apostle...." Al-Tabari 9:74

Gaining the loot is by following the guidance of Allah, thus religious.


"And much booty they will capture. Allah is ever mighty, wise. Allah promises you much booty you will capture and has given you this in advance, and has withheld men's hands from you, that it may be a token for the believers and that He may guide you on the right path." Quran 48:19-20


Allah promises you booty and this is a token, a sign, for you. So to, it was for the Ottomans.

"I heard Allah's Apostle saying; 'The example of a Muhjahid in Allah's cause... and Allah knows best who is in his Cause.... is like a person who fasts and prays perpetually. Allah guarantees that he will admit muhjahid in His Cause into paradise if he is killed, otherwise he will return home with rewards and booty." Bukhari 4:52

Self evident and commentary becomes redundant.

There are many more examples of this without getting into historical examples and quotes spanning the length of history. However, I feel I have sufficiently given an argument for why it is false to differentiate Ghazw or raiding for booty with jihad except within the realm that the Ghazw is a sub category of jihad and Harb (war) and thus not secular in terms of a Muslim or the time period.
 
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Ah, sorry for the confusion. By syncretism I meant less the technical religious definition of the term and more the idea that the Ottomans were, far from being a gazi state, a polity "between two worlds" that was culturally integrative, as you note. The title is just to draw views, the actual post is really a response to the rather surprising fact that the Gazi Thesis is apparently widely accepted in AH.com when even Wikipedia rejects it.

That wiki is rife with misconceptions of Islamic fiqh. Firstly it assumes an Islamic army must austerely reject non Muslim warriors. Not even groups like al-Qayda forbid this and all Muslim states in the past levied non Muslim troops and raiders. This is not an unislamic action at all and is infact agreed upon by all scholars as permissible. The only issue, is the standard and army must be ruled by Muslim at the top. Allah can use kuffar for His Cause as he used Cyrus for the freedom of the nation of Israel, so too can a Muslim army use those not of Islam or heterodox Islam for the causes of destroying fitnah/jihad.

The orthodox opinion on gazi Ottoman state is fully maintained and justified and further, is correct.

EDIT: Mind you, Ottomans are not the only Muslim state. Before all of this, these terms and traditions were settled long ago. The Ottomans simply fed off the precedence before them.
 

dcharleos

Donor
You're a really knowledgeable guy, and this is an interesting post. However, you use a lot of really specialized, jargonish vocabulary. It makes it a little hard to follow. I'm not telling you what to write, but if you defined some more of the non-English terms as you went, it might make it more accessible, letting everyone get more out of it.
 
Certainly conversion to Islam provided greater opportunities within the bureaucracy -- there were no Christian provincial governors, but there were a number of Slavic nobles who became governors once converting. That explains why the nobility was among the first to become Muslim. But if the Ottomans were such fierce gazis, why did the old Christian aristocracy survive to such a degree? In some parts of Serbia 50% of the timariots were Christian Serbs.
That's the thing - can we really say that the Christian aristocracy survived "to such a degree"?

You can point at the fact that the early Ottoman Empire allowed Christians to be sipahis at all, and interpret this as a sign of pragmatism. It is - but only to a certain extent.

In some parts of Serbia, 50% of the timariots were Christians; in other parts of Serbia, only 5% were. In Albania it was 16%, in Bosnia 27%, in Herzegovina 6%...and so on.
The Christian aristocracy did survive to some degree, but this degree was not a very large one at all. Those numbers don't portray the Ottoman conquest as a smooth integration by a more or less secular state; they portray a radical upheaval. A radical upheaval in which religion played a not insignificant role.

It's also worth noting that the timars granted to Christians were much smaller and less valuable than timars granted to Muslims. And that, the further one moves away from the key borderlands, the less Christian timariots there are. Which suggests that the relatively (only relatively) high presence of Christian timariots there was not a spontaneous reflex of Ottoman "secularism", but a more or less conscious policy - a policy that the Ottomans disregarded or greatly toned down when they no longer perceived it as absolutely necessary.
As seen above, even post-1453 a doen Grand Viziers were scions of Balkan nobility, including a close relative of Constantine XI. Why such a heavy reliance not on Anatolians, nor even the devshirme recruits, but literal pre-conquest aristocrats to staff the pinnacle of the state? And far from converting all their new Balkan possessions into neat parcels of timars, the early Ottomans (not unlike the Mughals) essentially retained local forms of governance. In Bosnia, where there were no pronoia, there were no timars either; as seen above, the privileges and duties of the Limnos islanders survived conquest entirely intact.

There were timars in Ottoman Bosnia.

As you mentioned, at least half of the 1453-1516 period the Vizier was a devshirme, or ocassionally a Turk. Converted Balkan aristocrats were indeed overrepresented, but they didn't hold a monopoly on power.
As for why these converts were overrepresented, that's an interesting question. To use their family ties as a potential advantage? To give the Sultan an extra edge against the more powerful and independent old elites? Something else entirely? Haven't got a clue. But those are still converts we're talking about, so their presence isn't exactly a mark of syncretism or religious indifference.

Conversion to Islam provided greater opportunities, especially the more recent you go. But do note that Michael, founder of the Mihaloglu, was the second most powerful person in the Ottoman state under Osman I's reign -- and he was a Christian until the 1320s. In any case, if the Ghazi Thesis is correct, why such a heavy reliance on Christians and converts for basic military functions?

Fair enough. But as above, I don't see the presence of converts as an obstacle to the ghazi thesis, let alone as a sign of religious indifference. If anything, the rate of conversion could be taken as an indication of the exact opposite. And while converts were a dime a dozen, the participation of actual Christians in Ottoman power structures was much smaller and less prominent.
The Ottoman chronicler I cited above about Orhan's treatment of the Christian Bithynians is, as a matter of fact, Ahmed Ashiki. But generally, you should distinguish between the Ottoman literati, infused with the ideal of holy war, and actual Ottoman statecraft and practice. For instance, Ahmedi's work of history which you reference -- which does strongly emphasize the gazi-ness of the Ottomans -- is more properly a polemical text like the mirrors for princes in the Persianate world. One Hungarian historian says:
For Ahmedi history was not something to explore, but much rather a thesaurus of examples from which one must draw the events and facts that most snugly fit the portrayal of the ideal types embodied by his characters. As the historical events are in this way reduced to mere illustration, their choice is random and arbitrary, devoid of their real significance. What Ahmedi describes is at most a sketchy outline of Ottoman history studded with an array of legends. This, in turn, provides the important conclusion that no matter [that] the facts selected by Ahmedi may well be true, his reticence on certain subjects can by no means be regarded as authoritative.​

The works of Ashiki and the others are useful not just as a source of accurate or inaccurate historical facts; but as an insight into the mindset of early Ottoman warriors and a reflection of Ottoman ideals and state ideology.
 
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