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.
- would seriously dent his prestige and that of the office.