Ottoman History Podcast - The Origins of Ottoman History

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

with Rudi Lindner hosted by Joshua White & Maryam Patton | Among the most murky periods of the Ottoman dynasty's six-century history is the period of its very emergence in medieval Anatolia. In this episode, we talk to Rudi Lindner about his attempts to understand this early period of Ottoman history and the development of hypotheses and methods concerning the investigation of Ottoman origins over the past century of scholarship. We also reflect on what decades of research and teaching have taught Lindner about sources for history and the questions they require us to ask. « Click for More »

I am a great believer in the idea that when we look at the history of an era, we're looking at first of all what we can reconstruct of what happened, how it happened, and if we can, why it happened the way it did. Given that in the early stages of any enterprise that has a long history in front of it, people were not really aware of what was going to happen. And as a result, often they didn't take a great deal of care. They didn't understand that some particular decision that they made would in fact have reverberations, and not only reverberations, but that there would be something that would grow out of it later on. At the time, they're not really aware of it. And therefore, if you have an account of the beginnings of an enterprise,

and that account is full, is rich, is well put together, I would be highly suspicious of it. I would be highly suspicious of it. That's Rudy Paul Lindner, professor of history and astronomy emeritus at the University of Michigan and the author of the books Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, published by Indiana University Press in 1983,

and Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2007. A scholar with a broad array of interests, Rudy has written on pastoral nomadic societies, coinage, printing, sheep, the history of astronomy, historiography, and above all, on the origins of Ottoman history. Over the years, the Ottoman History Podcast has featured interviews with hundreds of scholars on an incredible variety of topics spanning the Ottoman Empire's six-plus centuries and vast territories. But remarkably, until now, the podcast has never covered the formative period of Ottoman history, that is, the Ottomans' emergence and expansion in Anatolia in the 14th century

under the dynasty's eponymous founder Osman and his successors. This is simply a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of scholars work on the early modern and especially the later periods of Ottoman history, which are far better documented. In contrast, the murky origins of Ottoman history have been the subject of only a handful of studies over the last half century, but plenty of controversy, given the limitations of the available sources, the importance accorded to the motivations and organizational strategies of Osman's followers and successors, and the abiding influence of the arguments and ideas of two scholars active in the 1930s. The debate on Ottoman origins has been contentious,

so much so that the Ottomanist scholar Colin Imber argued in 1993 that, quote, the best thing that a modern historian can do is to admit frankly that the earliest history of the Ottomans is a black hole. None of the theories of Ottoman origins, ancient or modern, is tenable. Any attempt to fill this hole will simply result in the creation of more fables. But our guest, Rudi Lindner, has spent his career exploring the event horizon of Ottoman history. On this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Mariam Patton and I talk with Rudy, who is my graduate school advisor, about the history and historiography of Ottoman origins, about the sources and scholars that shaped the field,

and about the experiences, teachers, and ideas that shaped his own approach to writing Ottoman history. I'm Joshua Michael White. Stay with us. Colin Haywood used to say that the virtue of studying early Ottoman history is that it enabled us to get to understand the sources better. That is to say, he looked at things not for the sake of whether Osman was a shepherd or not, but what the accounts of Osman's pastoral activities, what that might imply about the nature of the chronicles and the other sources we have. To understand the early Ottoman period, there is a need to think of it as an era

that is not necessarily an extension back of later Ottoman history. You can do the history of the Ottomans in the 17th or 18th of the 19th century. Fundamentally, you can do a reasonably good job with sources in Ottoman. You cannot do, you cannot study early Ottoman history without having reference to the Byzantine Greek sources, period. There's nothing you can do about that. I'll give you an example. One of the things that interested me was what was the nature of the social organization of early Ottoman society, given that, after all, they found themselves in an area where there was a background of Byzantine and earlier civilizations.

Well, I couldn't find much that would satisfy me from the Ottoman side. I found hints here and there. The early Ottoman sources, the chronicles, tell us the family of Osman was a family of pastoralists. But to get to know, for instance, whether they were a nomadic power, this is something that must be inferred from the Byzantine sources. And many of these Byzantine sources have not been translated. So, for example, there is a panegyric in honor of a Byzantine emperor that was written and delivered in the early 1290s. And in this panegyric, the author is suggesting ways in which the Byzantine emperor,

poor Nebuchadnezzar that he is, can attempt to deal with the Turks on the eastern and southeastern frontier. And he says, you know, it's very hard to do this. The best thing to do would be to get in touch with the Seljuk Sultan. Because if you try to deal with these people themselves, they're always changing from one leader to another leader. You can't locate them because, you know, they're moving their animals from one place to the other, and things change. And he goes on to describe this, and what he is talking about is, first of all, a pastoral society, and secondly, a society in which you have changing tribal leadership, whatever one means by the term tribal. It is the Byzantine sources that often give us little tidbits of information, especially because this particular Panegyric was written in 1293-1294,

and we have no Ottoman source that goes back that far that is contemporaneous with those events. So I think there's that issue. There's the issue that you really have to look at this from the perspective not only of Turkish materials and Persian Arabic, but also the Greek materials. You were taking us in this direction before, and it's a very simple one, but I think it's not an easy one to answer, which is where, for you, does Ottoman history begin?

Ah. which is where for you does Ottoman history begin? Ah, Ottoman history begins in the door to Paul Wittek's old office in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Or if it's after six o'clock at night, across the street from the school in Schmidt's German restaurant, where he would start his seminar at three in the afternoon, and it would finish at one in the morning when the waiters got sick and tired and said, get the heck out of here.

Where Ottoman history begins. Now, first of all, the earliest Ottoman written source, leaving aside coins and and inscriptions is the source that was used by ahmadi in his versified chronicle of the world world. It turns out that that same source was used 30 years later by Shukrullah for his history of the world in Persian, which has a chapter on the Ottomans. And that same source was used in the Ottoman anonymous chronicle that was translated by Dimitri Kostratis. The great work on how these things fit together was done by Victor Menage, his doctoral dissertation, 700 rock'em sock'em pages. That work of Menage's is, I think, the

finest thing I've ever read in Ottoman history. It is inspirational. Minaj demonstrated, just in passing, that this earliest source that was used by Ahmadi Shukrullah and the Oxford Anonymous was in Persian. Slightly less than expected. I think Ottoman history probably begins sometime in the 1250s or 1260s when the Mongols seriously began installing some of their forces in Asia Minor, and some of them were installed pretty far to the west. And I think that the Ottomans probably were related in some way, shape, form. Not that they

were Mongols in a sense of speaking Mongolian, but that they arrived in the wake of the Mongols. And the chronicles have something to say about this. And I'm not certain whether what the chronicles say is accurate, but the general tenor is that the Ottomans came in as pastorless in the middle or the third quarter of the 13th century. I don't think that's too much in dispute. Now the question is that once they find themselves in Northwest Asia Minor, what then happens to them? We are told in the chronicles that the Ottomans' winter pastures were northwest of Eskişehir, between Eskişehir and Bilecik. And their summer pastures were to the southwest in the mountains of an area called Domanić. And the stories tell us that on the way

to and from their winter pasture, summer pasture, they would stop and deposit some of their goods that were not movable with the Byzantine lord of Bilicic. Nice story, except it makes no geographical sense. And so the question then arises, because it's way out of the way for them to go to Bilicic, we know that the Ottomans had nomads with them because they, in the accounts of their earliest military exploits in the Byzantine sources, they are clearly mounted archers. But maybe many of the people with them were in fact not pastoralists. That is to say they may have been in the process of settling down, and the story of their pastoralism is something of a conceit. In any case, by the second, third decade of the 14th century, they find themselves in this area which is suitable perhaps for pastoralism, but is much more suitable for settled agriculture.

for pastoralism, but is much more suitable for settled agriculture. And I think that one can see them settling, and one can see them adopting some of the institutions of settled society. Here is something where I would like to make a point about method. The future of early Ottoman history does not lie so much in the chronicles, although there's a good deal still to be gleaned from them and from the Byzantine sources. But if I were young and were doing it all over again, I would go to Turkey and I would go to the WAKF records in Ankara and look at all of the Pius Foundation records that they have from the area between Eskişehir and Bursa. And then I would go to the tax registers

and look at the tax registers for the area between Eskişehir and Bursa to see what there is. Madame Beldeciano began to do this and she wrote a couple of articles in which she talks about this. People don't take as much attention to what she did, but she's a very careful worker and she has a lot to say about, for example, that in the time of Osman and even early period of Orhan, the Ottomans were pretty small beer, that there were other Beyliks that were doing far better than they did, and that the man who really creates the enterprise and gets it going is Orhan. You know, let's look at something that nobody looks at. Let's look at coins.

The coinage of Orhan is fascinating. There's a lot of it, and there are many different types, and it's good silver. You know, you mint that much money and of different kinds because you have a need of it. You have a need of it to pay people, and you have a need of it for trade, and I think that's very interesting. You know, one of the reasons why the 13th century is so interesting is in 13th century Asia Minor, if you look at works on the Seljuks, the most interesting thing about the 13th century for the Seljuks is, I think, in part the architecture, but especially the coinage, is an enormous amount of silver that's flowing here and there in 13th century Anatolia. I did an article not too many years ago about the silver mines of Asia Minor.

There are more silver mines in operation in 13th century Asia Minor than any time before or since. There are more mints striking good silver, that is to say 95% fine or better, in 13th century Anatolia than any other time before or since, and that includes the Greek period and the Roman period. It's no wonder that these coinages called akces, little white things, because of the purity. So I think Ottoman history begins out of this inchoate period when the Seljuks are losing power. What is the expression I use? The Seljuks become guilty of the crime of loitering with intent to govern. And the Ottomans begin in Northwest Asia Minor. And you then have to ask the question,

well, why did they succeed and the others didn't? And the answer is, to that it's a variety of circumstances. One of the things is that if you look at the Baliks, the competing Baliks, One of the things is that if you look at the Balics, the competing Balics, Germion, Karaman, Aydin, one of the things that they tended to do was to use a very old practice that goes back to the 7th and 8th and 9th centuries and was elucidated by Peter Golden of Rutgers, which is dividing rule between brothers. That led to difficulties and succession problems. But I think it's also true that the Ottomans had this good thing going for them that they controlled, or they were in the position to control, have influence over a number of significant trade routes. They also had the advantage that

the weaknesses of the Byzantines, who were terribly, terribly involved in defending themselves in the Balkans. The Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor was probably at its strongest in the later Middle Ages, after the Fourth Crusade, when they had to simply make themselves profitable, make themselves strong with an Asia Minor. When they recover Constantinople in 1261, immediately their efforts turn to Europe. There's also something else, of course, which we have to bear in mind, which is something that historians on the whole don't like, which is the role of chance, the role of contingent events. And I think some of that is involved. But I do think that the way of the Ottomans to success, to study that involves

taking a very close look at Orhan's time time because by the time that orhan the time that orhan uh dies they have a foothold not a strong one but they have a foothold in the balkans and they also have they have some economic relations with the byzantines They don't have to worry about the Mongols to the east of them. And they're in pretty good shape. To go back to this idea of the challenge of doing early Ottoman history or Ottoman prehistory, there's almost no point in trying to find a source that announces we are the beginning, right? This is the origin of the Ottoman Empire. You're not aware, one can't be aware of the fact that they're at the sort of beginning of something like Ottoman history. But you mentioned that one solution, or one of the many solutions, would be

to look at non-Ottoman sources, the coins as another source. You also mentioned briefly geography and how you can use geography as another sort of adjacent way of reading the sources. I was hoping you could go into that a little bit more about, methodologically speaking, how to use geography as an early autumn historian. After I graduated from college, I spent a year and a half at Wisconsin where I studied Byzantine history. And in those days, history was a thriving academic field. In my entering class at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1965, there were 150 graduate students in the history department alone. Wow. So we were in this big room and the chairman came in and was talking to us about the way of the world. And he said, you're not here to get a liberal education

anymore. If you didn't have one, you can forget about it now. We're talking about professional training. And then he began talking about American history because approximately 100 of those graduate students were interested in American history. Wisconsin was very strong in American history at that time. They had one historian for every 10 years of American history. I mean, it was phenomenal. And so he said, one of the things that you should pay attention to

is the geography of the United States and the geography of American history. And I understood that because I'm from Stockton, California, the asparagus capital of the free world. In order to get to Harvard as an undergraduate, I had to cross the United States. And he said, it would be good for you at some point to drive across the United States. And if you're from Harvard, you should walk. And what he meant by that, of course, is that we often don't perceive things until we can actually see them or taste them or have a sense of what, place ourselves in the shoes of other people. And in Ottoman history, geography plays

a very interesting and in some senses, a limiting role. When the Ottomans worked their way down from the plateau and worked their way into the area of really the Riviera of Bithynia, the area between the lake of Iznik and the peninsula west of Nicomedia of Izmit, they found themselves in an area in which the best use of the land was for intensive agriculture. That agricultural richness was an invitation toward thinking in different terms about taxation, different terms about how, for instance, you might have an army. Because now, if you have intensive agriculture, you have a surplus

and you can use that surplus to feed and to pay for an infantry army. Whereas if you're a pastoralist, you only have military power if you have horses. You need lots of pasture, which means you can't concentrate lots of people together. Whereas in the area around Bursa or Yenishahir or Iznik or Izmit, you can have intensive agriculture and you can do really very well.

And this is something that shows up in these early Ottoman tax registers. Oh, I want to make one other comment, which I would like you to pay some attention to later on. I believe that history is a branch of literature. should do later on. I believe that history is a branch of literature. I believe furthermore that this literature should be written so that people can read it. That the way in which we write reflects the way in which we think. And I think we have to be very careful. And if there's anything, I mean, the nature of early Ottoman history is, for reasons that I will explain in a while, everything that I've done will be forgotten within a few years. And that's, you know, that's not so bad. I don't need royalties after I die.

But I think if there's anything I have done is that I think what I write is readable. And the rhetoric that I use is one that is accessible. And in explorations in Ottoman prehistory, I refer very early and I give the sheet music for something by Schubert, the beginning of that last piano sonata by Schubert. And I believe writing so that people can understand is very, very, very important. And I do think often in musical terms, and I think in terms of in in in musical terms and I think in terms of does this melody fit or is it just music to bruise apples by I'm in Turkey in October of 1969. And October, November, and it's Ramadan. And I was in Taksim.

I'd been working at the German Archaeological Institute and I had to go back to Besiktas. So I was waiting in Taksim to take the dolmush named Desire back down to Besiktas. And there was a line of us. And there was a man up at the front, a kya-kya, whose job was to be the Dolmush dispatcher.

And he was there, and he was, that is not, he was, I don't know how much money he made, very little. He was a very, you know, not a man with a great lucrative profession. And then the gun went off, indicating that the sun had set. And he opened a bag and took out a loaf of bread, and he walked down the line, tearing off a piece of bread and giving it to each one of us in line so that we could break our fast.

Now that, that is why I loved Turkey. Rudy spoke with great affection for Turkey and nostalgia for his time in Istanbul. It may come as a surprise, then, that he has not returned to Turkey since before the publication of his first book. On May 19, 1985, the New York Times and the Washington Post published an advertisement orchestrated by the Turkish government-funded Institute of Turkish Studies to push back against a proposed resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Before the advertisement's publication, dozens of U.S.-based academics working in Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Turkish studies were enjoined by the ITS to sign on. In all, 69 academics assented to the inclusion of

their names. Rudy declined. With a research plan for his second book ready and funding secured, Rudy soon discovered that his principled stand would have consequences. When I refused to sign the advertisement that appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times, you know, later I never got back into Turkey. And I remember talking with one of the people at the consulate in Washington. I asked him, what's the problem? He says, excuse me. Comes back and says, well, Professor Linder, perhaps you should have signed the advertisement. Click. So that's why if you look at the blog that my daughter has set up for me, Office Hours with Rudy, WordPress.com, you'll find I have lots of stories in there about my

time in Istanbul, but the last ones are from 1978. I was once on a boat going from Beşiktaş to Eminönü. I was talking with some guy and he said, so tell me, you're here, you're working with our historical records, you're doing this, you're doing that, and it will obviously help you in your goal to be a scholar. What are you doing for Turkey? And I was taken aback, of course. It was a perfectly reasonable question for him to ask. You know, I don't remember what answer I gave him. I think I said something that, you know,

Americans will get to know more about Turkey. Well, the number of Americans who've learned more about Turkey from me is probably vanishingly small. So yeah, there are these interesting difficulties. But as I said, if I were going into the field now, I would certainly go to Ankara and work with the walk of registers and things like that and work with and and and and and look at the look at the registers and I would do so with a view of trying to understand the stories of of small places. So, for instance, when I was working with registers of pastoralists in Karaman, I was able to actually follow a herd of sheep for 70 years. Now, why would you follow a herd of sheep for 70 years? It's one of the great things about the registers is that you can follow small groups of people over a fair period of time. Now,

of course, the registers, are they telling you the whole truth? No. Sometimes they're giving you normative things, but even an index of things, you know, compared with others is pretty good. Even when you come across, you know, you look even at the names. Nejat Bey, Nejat Goyen was wonderful because he would talk about, look at these names. He said, let me read you these names. And he would say, these are Turkish names that nobody uses anymore, but they're interesting. In some cases, you'll find, you know, lots of Greek names. You know, one of the things I came across was a group of Greek Christian pastoralists in Karaman. You wouldn't expect that, but there they were.

It was clear that Rudy's experiences, his teachers, and the places where he'd lived and the institutions in which he'd studied had profoundly shaped his historical interests and the methods he employed in his research. In his first book, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, Rudi paired contemporary anthropological theory on nomads with close readings of the earliest chronicles to make the first serious challenge to the orthodoxy of Wittek in half a century. In Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory, his second book, The Challenge of Exile from the Archives and Libraries of Turkey,

led Rudi to draw on a unique combination of sources and methods, harnessing his respect for and understanding of numismatics, topography, hydrology, and the life cycle of the herds to fashion a series of evocative essays on the first, fateful events that sparked the Ottoman enterprise. With all this in mind, I asked Rudy to take us back to Paul Wittek's seminar at Schmidt's German Restaurant and reflect on the 20th century historiography of Ottoman origins. When I went into Ottoman history, we knew a lot about early Ottoman history.

And if there's anything that my work has done, it's been to demonstrate that we know today much less than we did in the mid-1960s. Wittek is a fascinating man in a number of ways. When he fled Europe and came to England, and when the British went to war with the Germans in September of 1939, Wittek and a very large number of people who held German passports German passports, were arrested and interned in a camp near Liverpool at a place called Hyten. And the number of those who were interned included all kinds of people of all types. kinds of people of all types. And it included Nazis and Jews and non-Jewish refugees. And it took the British a while to figure out what was going on. And in the meantime, the refugees began running classes for the children or for the adults. And became known as heightened University and it was the best

school in Liverpool so people said because there were a number of people there who had the Nobel Prize the person who taught geography was my father and another person who taught was Paul Wittek so my father at point, and I found this only fairly recently, must have known Paul Wittek. And they both came from Vienna. Wittek belongs to that generation scholars in Central Europe who believed in the power of ideas as a ruling force in history. Now, Wittek's great student, Menage, Victor Menage, and I should say something about the personal impact of Wittek. I spent a day with Minaj in 1982, and we were seated across from each other one day, and he leaned across the table to me. Vitek had been dead for five years. He leaned across the table to me, and he said, he whispered, you know, Rudy, I don't think Vitek knows Persian.

I don't think Vitek knows Persian. Present tense. Obviously a very impressive man. So Vitek spent his years, 10 years in Turkey during the years of what Minaj termed the Ataturk dictatorship. And it looks as though Vitek, who for many reasons

had a great interest in the role of ideas, indeed even of poetry in history, because of the intellectual circles he belonged to in Vienna, Wittek hit upon this notion that what had really distinguished the Ottomans was their dedication to the Holy War. And he had two pieces of evidence for this. One is the section on the Ottomans in Ahmadi, which talks about why have the Ghazis come at the end of time? Because the last is always the best, Ghazi has come at the end of time because the last is always the best, what I call the dessert theory of history. And there was also the inscription, the infamous Bursa inscription, about Orhan as a Ghazi,

son of Ghazis, etc., etc., etc. son of Ghazi's, etc., etc., etc. Now, at one point, David Morgan, the great Persian and Mongol historian, turns into Colin Haywood's office in London, and he says, is it really true that Wittek's theory that everybody believes about the rise of the Ottomans is based on these two measly texts? And Heywood said, you know, of course. And Morgan walked away shaking his head, according both to Morgan and Heywood. So this notion, it was a very great time in the 30s of this notion of ideals and religious zeal playing an important role in history. Remember the famous book, the famous essay by Max Weber on religion and the Reformation and R.H. Taney's book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. and R.H. Taney's book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,

and these notions of the very significant role played by religious zeal. Wittek took this in part from a casual remark that was made by Kupferlu in one of Kuprulu's books, which he didn't really build very much on. But Fittek bought that in the late 20s, and it became the hallmark of his theory of Ottoman origins. And he said that, you know, it is the guiding light of Ottoman history until in 1914, they allied themselves with the Christians. They allied themselves with the Habsburgs and with the Germans, and that was the end of it. And when that happened, it was only a matter of time. Well, it's very interesting. It has a certain amount of appeal. You know, my parents came from Vienna. I consider myself the last of the Habsburg Jews, Vienna. I consider myself the last of the Habsburg Jews, and I have a good deal of sympathy for this view of Wittek, but in fact the evidence just ain't there. Now there are two versions of the

Wittek theory. There is the strong Wittek thesis, which is the one that's presented in his lectures, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire. Then there's the weak, and I think that that was destroyed by Heywood and by Imber and by me. And then there's the weak Wittek thesis, which says, well, yes, there's that plus a bunch of other factors. And the weak Wittek thesis was explicated by Halil Inalcic and by a few others since that time. And that was pretty much, I think, destroyed by an article by Colin Ember called What Does the Word Ghazi Really Mean? And he shows various interesting things about it. So the significant thing about the so-called Wittek thesis,

both the strong and the weak version, is, number one, this notion that you can take history and you can grasp history, but you can have just one or two causes. you of the work of another great Viennese scholar, Dr. S. Freud, who remarks in one of his works, you know, human behavior is overdetermined. There are many causes. And really what Wittek was doing was reflecting very much the intellectual history of the 1920s. If you want to read, you know, something that really influenced Wittek, the great medievalist Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, who spent his last years at Princeton, wrote in the 1920s a marvelous biography of the great German emperor Frederick II, 1205 to 1250. And that is, it's a piece of romance, and it's heavily dependent upon Kandorovich's love

of the ideologies of the German poet Stefan Georg. And Wittek was a member of the Georg circle. So really, when you read Wittek, you are reading, you're reading about the Ottomans, yes, but you're also reading about the intellectual history of Central Europe in the 20s and the 30s. What's fascinating is that later when Kupferlu wrote his book, it's very interesting, Kupferlu argued that the Ottomans came in to Anatolia in the 11th century, for which there's no evidence. But he wanted to show that the Ottomans had no connection with the Mongols because the Mongols were terrible people. And look, I spent a day in Chicago with Professor Analjik, and he walked me up and down the,

you know, he rode me out of town on a rail and said, look, the trouble with you is that you think that Osman was a tribal leader. You think he was a primitive. And I said, look, to be a tribal leader is not to be a primitive. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was clear that Professor Rinaldschik was not interested in what the anthropologists of the 40s and 50s had to say. And he thought, I remember he asked me, are you Greek Orthodox? And I said, no, I'm a Jew. Well, he said, that's funny because you take the Greek Orthodox line. I said, well, no, I don't. But, you know, that was that.

At the same time, Spiros Vrionis was calling me a Turkish nationalist. So I went home and I said to my wife, Molly, if the Greeks think I'm a Turk and the Turks think I'm a Greek, I must be doing something okay. I'm a Greek, I must be doing something okay. So I think that one of the things which is very true of the study of Ottoman history has been that you read about Ottoman history and you read the scholars and you find, sure you'll find out about Ottoman history, but you'll also find out about the scholars. So we've spoken about the history scholarship and sort of, you know, the role that a scholar's sort of background plays into the way they view the sources and they view Ottoman history. And we spoke about how students don't necessarily always understand that and they don't see these sort of the depth of the background behind, you know, a narrative that's presented to them about Ottoman history. My question concerns one of your essays and explorations on Ottoman history and this issue surrounding the way Ottoman chronicles present the capture of Qarajahizar, which they present as being owned by Byzantines, but your research very convincingly shows, no, it must have, you know, that doesn't make any sense. They must have changed it from the Garmianids to

the Byzantines because they didn't want to seem as if they were Muslims attacking other Muslims. And you frame this research and this analysis in the context of, you know, respecting the sources. Yes, the sources say something contrary to what we think of as being historical truth or historical fact. But the reason they did that has some merit to it. And as historians, our task is to understand why. And you call this respecting the sources. How would you explain this idea, this notion of respecting sources to young students, to undergraduates, sort of just now just embarking in this field, trying to understand how to do historical analysis in the context of these kinds of

early Ottoman sources that, for lack of a better word, you know, contradict one another or don't necessarily tell the true story in the way we in 2021 think of historical truth. The important thing is to read what you read, whether it's scholarship or a textbook or a source, fresh. Don't accept anything. And then ask yourself, does it make geographic sense? Does it make historical sense? You know, what am I going to do with it? To ask questions and don't worry so much about answers.

Open windows, don't close them. I was looking at a coin this summer, which I first looked at in the late 60s. And I was looking at a coin catalog with casually remarked about this coin. It's a Seljuk coin, Sivas 1249, that it's underweight. Okay. And then it began bothering me.

And finally, I did some more work, and I discovered that all of the known examples of this coin, of which there are 75 or 76, are at a certain weight standard, but it's not the Roman Seljuk weight standard. And I looked around and I discovered that it was the Mongol standard. And then I looked a little bit more and I discovered that this is in fact Mongol money being minted in Seljuk Sivas, and it made some things more sensible, which was that in the coin, there's a, obviously the coin has a picture of a horseman. If you go on Google and look up Sivas 646 Dirham, you'll find it. And the man is shooting an arrow. And the point of the arrow, the head of the arrow, looks like this.

It's a V. It's not a point. That's a Mongol arrow. It's a propaganda piece. It's a very interesting thing. It's, you know, you look and you use four eyes. Or as a therapist would say, a very great student of Freud once said, I listen to what my client says with two ears.

But what I'm really doing is I am listening with the third ear. And it's that third ear, it's where you hear that little thing of Schubert. You know, if you read it slowly, and you are careful about what you read, partly you're asking yourself, you know, the questions, what does this tell me about what happened in, you know, what was done by Ahmed ibn Yifnif in 1365? But also, you get to know the mind of the author. You know, I can now sort of tell things in Ashik Pasha Zayda that I couldn't before, because I'm now able to tell, ah, this is where he's using the anonymous chronicles,

or this is where he's changing this or that. You know, none of us can get back to the year 1299, but what we can do is we can get back into the minds of these people who wrote. Even sometimes you can get back, you know, if you're looking at a deft air, you can sort of, if you have a map, you can say, what, this guy is moving, the guy who's the deft air, I mean, what's he doing? Where's he going? Where's he going this day? Where's he going the next day?

And you can get back there. The surface of history is not smooth. It is not plain. It is very rough. It is not plain. It is very rough. This is why if I can read a manuscript, I prefer any manuscript to an edited text.

Because the manuscript tells me some facts, maybe. It tells me something about the author, maybe. And it tells me about the copyist. And there are the four of us. The text, the author, the copyist, and Rudy. And it's a bridge game. And as is usually the case, Rudy Paul Lindner. To learn more, visit our website for a short bibliography and other episodes related to our discussion.

I'm Josh White. Thanks for listening. Take care.