• 1 For Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, his historical writings and the political and ideological concerns he exp (...)

5In Ahmed Cevdet Pasha’s (1822-1895) History, the monumental study that reconciles the reforming Ottoman Empire of the 19^th century with its Ottoman and Islamic heritage,1 the link between the Ottoman principality and the Iconium sultans of Rum was established as follows: “Although the Iconium sultans of Rum had been one of the strongest polities in the abode of Islam, they were weakened by the Tartars. They even had to pay tribute to the Tartars. After years of disorder and difficulties, this polity waned and was subsequently demolished in the year 699 (A.H.) [1299 A.D.] At that time, thanks to God, the dark beginning’s happy conclusion and nightmarish dreams’ optimistic interpretation, the Ottomans rose and gave light to all the Islamic lands and the neighboring lands” (Ahmed Cevdet Paşa 1309: v. I, 29). Ahmed Cevdet Pasha reiterated the Ottoman narrative and maintained that the drum and the tail, the two Turkic symbols of sovereignty and authority, had been dispatched to the young Osman from the sultan in Konya after his victory against the Greeks, epitomizing the transfer of the mandate to govern the Muslims and Turks from the Konya sultanate to the young Osman.

• 2 Curiosity towards pre-Islamic Turkic history was prevalent as early as the 1860s (Çelik 1994: 621 (...)

7Although this tradition was not dismissive of the pre-Ottoman Turkic and Islamic heritage, it employed the Turkic heritage primarily in order to legitimize the rule of the Ottoman dynasty. As David Kushner has demonstrated, there was already a growing interest in both Islamic and pre-Islamic Turkic history during the Hamidian era, an interest apparent in the daily newspaper Ikdam, which endorsed the motto Türk Gazetesidir (A Turkish daily) (Kushner 1977)2 As an example of the swelling interest in the pre-Ottoman Turks and the positioning of the Ottoman Empire within this glorious past, the prolific writer Ahmed Midhat Efendi (1844-1912) pointed out in his 1887 world history that “the millions of Turks whom Seljuks brought and settled in these areas mixed with the Ottomans and increased their numbers. If they had not existed, and the Ottoman state had to be founded in the midst of Greeks, Kurds, Arabs and Georgians, these nomads [the Ottomans], only four hundred in number, would not have been able to assert themselves” (Ahmed Midhat Efendi, 1303: v. I, 135; quoted in Kushner 1977: 35).

• 3 Although the term “Turkish nationalists” could also be used, “Turkist” seems more appropriate to (...)

8The historical Turkish identity was explored in the late 19^th century, and its scope was so much expanded that as early as 1869 the Polish convert Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha declared that the Etruscans were Turkish (Copeaux 1997: 17). Diverse figures such as the eccentric Young Ottoman Ali Suavi (1838-1878), the polymath Ahmed Vefik Pasha (1823-1891), and the military commander Süleyman Pasha (1838-1892) showed a profound interest in pre-Islamic Turkic history. The modes of dynastic legitimacy and the functions and meanings of dynastic governance were also changing. Abdülhamid “invented” new modes of legitimization by popularizing and nationalizing the dynastic legitimacy (Deringil 1998). Nevertheless, it was the impact of 1908 Revolution that caused these undercurrents to proliferate in the public sphere and to be endorsed by a broader intellectual public. The earlier Turkists3 of the Hamidian imperial elite seemed outmoded in light of the visions of Ottoman imperialism among the radical Young Turks. For them, the dynastic legitimacy had to be established in accordance with national aspirations and had to be based on national modes of legitimacy. The dynasty should serve the nation, not the other way around. The changing parameters of imperial legitimacy prompted renewed interest in the Seljuks, who were no more perceived as merely a prelude to Ottoman history, but as a pivotal and indispensable chain in Turkic history culminating in the Ottoman Empire. In 1914, Necib Asım and Mehmed Arif, in the first volume of Osmanlı Tarihi [History of the Ottoman Empire] written for the collective project of the Ottoman Historical Association, epitomized the shift in the historical meaning of the Ottoman polity at its best (Necib Asım, Mehmed Arif 1340). Almost the entire volume was devoted to pre-Ottoman Turkic history, beginning with the numerous pre-Islamic and Islamic Turkic polities in Central Asia and ending with an extensive discussion of the Seljuks of Rum. By thus placing the Seljuks within the broader Turkic history, the Ottoman Empire began to be treated not as the natural and preordained end of this trajectory, but as the contemporary Turkic polity, merely another chain in a sequence.

• 4 For a comprehensive account of Köprülü’s intellectual biography, see Park 1975.

11This was the intellectual and political setting in which Fuad Köprülü (1890-1966) delved into the study of the Seljuks of Rum. By raising a variety of problematic issues regarding the Seljuks, Köprülü’s contribution to the emerging historiography of the Seljuks revolutionized historical scholarship. His disproportionate impact on the historiography recast the representations of the Seljuk polity within the national imagination, and hence has to be treated separately and extensively.4

• 5 For a review of the emergence and development of the scholarship on the Seljuks of Rum from the 1 (...)

12Despite the emerging new interest in pre-Ottoman Anatolia, at the time Köprülü entered the scene it was an almost “blank sheet,” not only in the Ottoman Empire but also in Europe, where the output of 19^th-century orientalism was immense in other areas.5 At the time, not much was known about the Seljuks of Rum, and the lack of critical studies caused prominent scholars to accept as true erroneous ideas such as the perception of the reign of Alaeddin Keykubad III as the age of Seljuk collapse or the supposed association of Bektashis with Mevlevis (Berktay 1983b: 17-19). The German Orientalist Martin Hartmann spoke of the rule of the Seljuks of Rum in Anatolia as “a period of disorder” without any substantial evidence. Wittek remarked that not much was known regarding the Seljuks of Rum and regarded this period as merely an “auxiliary area” to assist the “main areas of study” (Gordlevsky 1988: 35). Herbert Adams Gibbons in his 1916 Foundation of the Ottoman Empire ignored the pre-history of the Ottoman Empire and began his history with a chapter entitled “A New Race Appears in History” (Gibbons 1916: 11) in which he mentioned the Seljuks of Rum only in passing. His only commentary regarding the previous two centuries was that Byzantium was too weak to respond to the Turkish invasions and thus was confined to the environs of Constantinople in Western Anatolia (Gibbons 1916: 16-17). When the young Indologist Franz Babinger at the University of Munich decided to change fields and embark on Turkish studies after working as a liaison officer in the Ottoman army during World War I, the German orientalist G. H. Becker “cautioned him about his views saying that from the standpoint of academic advancement, they [Turkish studies] were a ‘sheer catastrophe’. There was no future in Turkish studies” (Leiser 1993: xiv).

• 6 For its reprint in the Latin alphabet, see Köprülü 1986: 3-47.

15Köprülü’s first article dealt with the poetry of Şinasi and was printed in Servet-i Fünun in 1912 (Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad 1328). This article was followed by a landmark article in Bilgi Mecmuası entitled Türk Edebiyatı Tarihinde Usül (Methodology in the Study of Turkish Literary History) in 1913 (Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad 1329b: 3-52).6 This article was arguably not only a milestone in the emergence of literary history in the Ottoman Empire, but was also in the emergence of a scientific methodology in historiography. In this article, Köprülü examined the course of 19^th-century European historiography and probed a wide range of historians from Vico to Seignobos. He stipulated that “Hippolyte Taine in his introduction to his reputable book on English literature wrote that the literature of a nation is her living history and nothing can be comparable to it in terms of allowing us to comprehend the history of the nation in question” (Köprülü 1986: 18-19). He shared Taine’s view, and his appraisal of literature as the mirror of nations determined the contours of his later scholarly studies and interests.

• 7 Baha Said studied and praised the Anatolian heretical sects, Bektashis and Alevis in the 1910s, d (...)

19Instead of extolling the pre-Islamic pagan and shamanistic heritage like some Turkists of his time, Köprülü depicted the Muslim Turks of pre-Ottoman Anatolia as devout Muslims who developed a unique, genuine, and whole-hearted way of living Islam. Contrasting the “Anatolian-Turkish Islam” with the “dogmatic and docile Arabic Islam,” he argued that it was the adoption of the simple language of Turkish that Islamized the Turkic masses. For him, this mode of proselytism was more genuine and pious than a formalistic interpretation of Islam. Köprülü argued that it was the corrupting Persian influence, not Arabic, that was the main foreign element in Turkish Islamic culture. His version of “Turkish Islam” was compatible with Sunni Islam as embodied in the poetry and culture of mystical folk poet Yunus Emre. Nevertheless, he mitigated his distanced attitude to the heretical mystical sects in his previous article Selçukiler Zamanında, where he had described them as influenced by Persian culture.7

• 8 For some vivid narratives of this interpretation of Islam, see Fuad Köprülü (1976:251-253; 349-35 (...)

20Köprülü reconstructed “Turkish Islam” in line with his own worldview and commitments. It was not authoritarian but individualistic; not legalistic but spiritual; not based on fears of divine punishment but stemming from the love of God and nature; not desolate but joyful.8 He connected the historical trajectory of the Turks from Central Asia to Anatolia via the wandering dervishes. It was as if these wandering dervishes and the mystical brotherhoods and networks had assumed the duty to transmit the spirit of Turkishness through their souls from Central Asia to Anatolia and from an earlier age to the Islamic medieval age.

• 9 For example see the novels of Halide Edib and Müfide Tek (Halide Edib 1329; Müfide Ferit 2002 [19 (...)

22There was a growing enthusiasm with an imagined Turkist utopia that had to be revived and redeemed in the 1910s.9 Köprülü seems to discover his utopia in the Seljukid Anatolia. Nevertheless, Köprülü was not a radical Turkist praising the pure and uncorrupted volkish spirit as opposed to the corrupted court cultures. On the contrary, in many regards he was conservative, dismissing radicals who sought renunciation of the past and endorsement of Central Asian pagan Turkishness. In his later works, he attempted to reconcile his allegiance to an Ottoman vision by revealing the extent to which Turkish culture survived the Ottoman centuries in Anatolia (Köprülü 1986).

• 10 (Babinger 1338: 188-221). For the Latin transcription of its Turkish translation, see Babinger an (...)
• 11 For the text, see Babinger and Köprülü 2003: 41-122. For the English translation of Köprülü’s art (...)

24The Turkish translation of his article was published in Darülfunun Edebiyat Fakültesi Mecmuası [Journal of the Faculty of Literature of the University of Istanbul]that same year.10 Köprülü immediately responded with an article published in Darülfunun Mecmuası entitled Anadolu’da Islamiyet: Türk İstilasından Sonra Anadolu Tarih-i Dinisine Bir Nazar ve Bu Tarihin Menbaları [Islam in Anatolia: A Glance at the Religious History of Anatolia after the Turkish Invasion and its Origins].11 In this article, he retained the perspective developed in his book Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar. He criticized Babinger’s and the Western orientalists’ superficiality and ignorance of the local sources and rearticulated his interpretation of Turkish religion in Anatolia. For Köprülü, the Western orientalists’ conclusions were erroneous due to their dearth of substantial knowledge and their superficiality. Köprülü’s article was a consummate portrayal of his notion of an “organic Islam” in its original and authentic form as it was detached from the scripturalist intepretation and developed by Turks in movement throughout centuries. He endeavored to crush the orientalist vision of a “monolithic Islam” determined by the “book”, Islamic learning, and a strict observance of the universally accepted principles and contrasted this legalistic Islam with the Turkish folk Islam with which he was enthralled.

• 12 Originally published in Belleten 1938 with the French title “Les Institutions Juridiques Turques (...)

26The Sonderweg of the Turks was a recurring agenda for Köprülü. He gradually began to be interested in legal history and attempted to situate legal history within a socio-political infrastructure which was, in turn, embedded within a wider and overarching civilizational background. In his 1938 article İslam Amme Hukukundan Ayrı bir Türk Amme Hukuku Yok Mudur?12(Is There a Turkish Public Law Separate from Islamic Public Law?) he described a Turkish legal culture separate and independent from Islamic law, observable from pre-Islamic Turkic times to the Ottoman Empire. In this article, he attempted to demolish the “myth of universal Islamic institutionalism” in favor of a Turkish Sonderweg. Although he acknowledged the significance of Islamic legalism in the Turkish political institutional culture, he argued that legal culture was merely a reflection (or superstructure in Marxian terms) of social formations, thus creating space for the existence of a unique and culturally determined Turkish legal culture. He again drew a trajectory from pre-Islamic Turkic polities to the Ottomans in terms of the character of the political institutions and denied the prominence of Islamic institutionalism and legal culture.

• 13 Also see Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad 1931: 20-25.
• 14 Turan is a term that refers to the mythical and ancestral Turkic land and simultaneously implies (...)

27In short, the main concern of Köprülü was to draw a trajectory of Turkic history from Central Asia to his own time.13 He “emancipated” Turkish history not only from Ottoman history, but also from Islamic history. He also set the contours of a future reconciliation with Islam by distinguishing a progressive “Turkish Islam” from the alleged obscurantist Islam. He did not subscribe to the romantic Turan14 myth but endeavored to discern the Turkish culture embedded in Anatolia, in the very geography of the emerging contemporary Turkish Republic. Thus, the Seljuks of Rum were pivotal in his national historical imagination.

• 15 For the full list of the articles that appeared in the journal, see Akbayrak 2009: 475-507.
• 16 For the articles and publication policies of the local People’s Houses journals, see Öztürkmen 19 (...)
• 17 The interest in the local history in early 20th-century France also did not challenge the nationa (...)

30The historiographic interest in the Seljuks of Rum that emerged in the 1910s was further advanced in the first two decades of the republic. The first articles on the post-Seljukid and pre-Ottoman Turcoman principalities, first and foremost the articles of Ahmed Tevfik in the Tarih-i Osmani Encümeni Mecmuası in the 1910s,15 were followed by new monographs and articles in the 1920s and 1930s as a corollary to the burgeoning interest in local history. Local expressions of ethnic identity appeared not only in national journals such as Belleten and Vakıflar Dergisi but also in the state-sponsored local journals, first and foremost the journals of the local sections of Halkevleri [People’s Houses].16 New local histories were published (Atalay 1339; Katip Ferdi 1331; Konyalı 1945; Konyalı 1946; Uluçay, Gökçen 1939). Apparently, these local histories were not regarded as subverting national identity and unity; on the contrary, they were viewed as reinforcing and maintaining the allegiance of localities to the grand national narrative under which they were subsumed. Local historical monuments were perceived as proving the constitutive place of these localities within the grand national narrative.17 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı published several monographs on the heritage of the Seljuks and the post-Seljukid Turcoman principalities in the provincial centers seeking to demonstrate their prominence within the Turkic history which had been trivialized by the excessive (and supposedly undeserved) emphasis on Istanbul (Uzunçarşılıoğlu İsmail Hakkı 1927; Uzunçarşılıoğlu 1929; Uzunçarşılıoğlu 1932; Uzunçarşılı 1937).

• 18 Most of the late Ottoman textbooks simply called the polity Selçuklular, abstaining from defining (...)
• 19 For the interesting geographical, ethnic and cultural meanings and attributes of the conceptRum, (...)

31The name of the polity was changed in the early republic from Rum Selçukluları18 [Seljuks of Rum] to Anadolu Selçukluları [Anatolian Seljuks] in order to further Anatolianize and Turkify the sovereign territory of Turkey by dismissing the term Rum, which connoted Greek ethnicity and might therefore support Greek claims to Anatolia.19 Before the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, Rum had meant Roman, and referred to followers of the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchy in the heartland of the Byzantine Empire; the Ottomans subsequently employed the term Rum to refer to the Anatolian peninsula as distinguished from a larger geography which also included the Balkans. During the Ottoman centuries, the Arabs had also called the Turks Rumi. This pre-national and porous nomenclature became a liability with the emergence of nationalist agendas, when Rum began to denote ethnic Greeks as descendants of the Roman Empire, making what was initially a religious term into an ethnonym.

• 20 Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad, “Anadolu’da İslamiyet: Türk İstilasından Sonra Anadolu Tarih-i Dinisine B (...)

32Fuad Köprülü employed the labels Rum Selçukluları and Anadolu Selçukluları interchangeably in his monumental Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar, sometimes referring to the polity as Rum, sometimes as Anadolu. In the 1966 edition, which he and Fevziye Abdullah Tansel edited, all references to the polity were rendered Anadolu Selçukluları along with other minor Turkifications in the text. In 1922, Ragıp Hulusi employed the phrase Rum Selçukluları in his translation of Babinger’s Der Islam in Kleinasien in the Journal of the Faculty of Literature of the University of Istanbul (Babinger 1338: 190). Interestingly, in his response to Babinger’s article published in the subsequent three issues of the journal, Fuad Köprülü referred to the polity only as Anadolu Selçukluları, omitting the phrase Rum Selçukluları completely (Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad 1338-1339).20 Nevertheless, this neologism was not employed by the scholarly community. Meskukatçı Ali referred to the polity as Selçukiye-i Rum in his 1924 article in the Türk Tarih Encümeni Mecmuası (Meskukatçı Ali 1340/1924:1). The 1928 yearbook of the Turkish Hearths apologetically noted that “because Anatolia was called the land of Romans (iklim-i Rum) at the time … [the polity] was called the Seljuks of Rum in Islamic history” (Akçuraoğlu Yusuf 2009: 42). The yearbook did suggest the label Anadolu Selçukluları as a neologism, but as late as in 1929, Ali Reşat referred to the polity as Rum Selçukluları in his history coursebook for high schools (Ali Reşat 1929: 317), which was to a large extent an adaptation of the French coursebooks and thus non-nationalist in its orientation and outlook.

• 21 Paul Wittek’s monograph on the principality of Menteşe (Wittek 1934) had appeared in 1934 and was (...)

35The Kemalist historiography perceived the Seljuks of Rum as the predecessors and historical role models of the Ottoman Empire. In İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı’s presentation to the second Turkish History Congress in 1937, he referred to Köprülü’s remarkable study on the origins of the Ottoman institutions in which Köprülü had repudiated the claims of Western Ottomanists regarding the alleged impact of the Byzantine institutions on their Ottoman counterparts (Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad 1931). Uzunçarşılı supported Köprülü’s conclusions and argued that after the collapse of the Seljuks of Rum, the Turcoman principalities had modeled their polity and governance on the model of the Seljuks and the Ilkhanids (Uzunçarşılı 1943: 500). He briefly discussed the administrative structures of the post-Seljukid Turcoman principalities of Germiyan, Karamanlı, and Karesi and posited them within the culture of Islamic legal institutionalism which they inherited from the Great Seljuks and the Seljuks of Rum. Uzunçarşılı thus concluded that the European argument regarding the Byzantine origins of the Ottoman institutions was refuted by the evidence he provided regarding the institutional culture of the Turcoman principalities (given that the Ottomans were also a Turcoman principality that emerged with the collapse of the Seljuks of Rum). This relatively short paper was largely theoretical and lacked substantial evidence. In Anadolu Beylikleri ve Akkoyunlu, Karakoyunlu Devletleri [Anatolian Principalities and the States of Akkoyunlu and Karakoyunlu] published the same year, Uzunçarşılı presented a more thorough study. In this study, he utilized vakfıyes, Arabic and Turkish language manuscripts and local histories written in the 14^th and 15^th centuries while the memories of these principalities were still alive (Uzunçarşılı 1937). In the first, chronological part of the book, he summarized political history, whereas in the second part he dealt analytically with the social and economic conditions of the principalities in Anatolia. In this latter part his main concern was clearly to prove and further Köprülü’s thesis (Uzunçarşılı 1941). Uzunçarşılı’s interest in socio-economic history was inspired by Köprülü, but lacking Köprülü’s erudition and comparative methodology, Uzunçarşılı was prone to essentialism and legalism and tended to assume that legal institutions on paper both revealed and determined political, social, and economic organization and development.Nevertheless, this study was a major contribution at a time when the Turcoman principalities were a black hole in academia.21

• 22 For a review of the academic output on the Akhis in the first decades of the 20^th century, see Ar (...)

36Certain themes pertaining to the age of Seljuks attained prominence in the Kemalist historiography. The translation of Ibn Battuta’s travelogue into Turkish by Mehmed Şerif Pasha in 1897-1901 (İbn Battuta 1328) (following a partial translation serialized in Takvim-i Vekayi and subsequently published as a separate book (Aykut 2004: v. I, xlvi-lii; İbn Battuta 1290)) engendered profound interest in the previously unnoticed akhis, the brotherhoods of craftsmen in Seljukid and post-Seljukid Anatolian cities. This travelogue, in which Ibn Battuta conveys his encounters with akhis during his travels in Anatolia, is the best source on this peculiar pre-Ottoman Anatolian institution. Akhis were first extensively studied by Fuad Köprülü in his 1918 Early Mystics in Turkish Literature as representative of the freedom-loving Turkic political culture imbued with the teachings of Turkish esoterism (as opposed to the literal interpretations of Islam in courts). The implications of the peculiar akhi institution were widely discussed in academic circles,22 and also inspired the emerging nationally-minded intelligentsia to endorse it enthusiastically. The akhi institution was praised immensely by the republican intelligentsia, who saw it as epitomizing a Turkic semi-republicanism which apparently enjoyed significant power in cities after the Mongol invasions and the breakdown of political structures. More importantly, Ankara, the capital of the new republic, was supposed to have been a medieval city-state self-governed by the akhis before the Ottoman takeover (Uzunçarşılı 1945: 40-41; Koşay 1932: 22; Gülekli 1948:49; Galanti 1951: 49-50; Ahmed Tevfik 1329 1200-1204; Halil Edhem 1332: 312-312). Akhis were examined in various books, articles and pamphlets in the 1940s, some academically robust and others meager propaganda work. Whereas the prolific scholar Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı produced an exhaustive and meticulous study of the akhis, (Gölpınarlı 1949-1950: 3-354) others, such as İlhan Tarus, perceived them as precursors of the republic who “lived within a democratic system” (Tarus 1947: 45). Neşet Çağatay tellingly named his book on these fraternities as “Akhis as a Turkish National Institution” (Çağatay 1974).

• 23 For a classical study on the Turkification and Islamization of Anatolia, see Vryonis 1971; Vryoni (...)

39At the end of the battle of Mazikert in August 1071, the Byzantine army was severely defeated by the Seljuk army and the Byzantine emperor was captured. Yet Manzikert was not a pre-planned strategic victory for the Seljuks. The Seljuk leader Alparslan did not aim to attack and destroy the ambitious Byzantine army; his attack was rather a defensive measure before moving to his main combat ground in the south to face the Fatimids for supremacy within the abode of Islam at a time when the Byzantine army was striving to impede the continuous Turcoman raids that had been ravaging the eastern frontiers of Byzantium since the 1050s. The conclusive victory also did not cause Alparslan to take advantage of this defeat and seek territorial expansion. As Claude Cahen, the eminent authority on Selkjuks of Rum wrote, “Alp Arslan’s object was not to destroy the Byzantine Empire; he contented himself with frontier adjustments, the promise of tribute and an alliance-settlement which the downfall of Romanos Diogenes rendered impermanent” (Cahen 1986: 420-421). Nevertheless, what followed the war was the rapid Turkification and Islamization of Anatolia. “This was due to the internal political disorders in the Byzantine polity. The domestic conflicts of the Byzantines not only encouraged Turcomans to raid the west of Cappadocia, but also allowed them to take hold and settle in these lands” (Cahen 1992: 26). The Turkification and Muslimization of Anatolia occurred within two centuries, mainly in two waves: the first in the second half of the 11^th century and the second in the mid-13^th century due to the flight from the Mongols. Thus, Manzikert paved the way for a dramatic process of Turkish colonization and transformed the demography of Anatolia, a process which has yet to be explained satisfactorily in the absence of substantial evidence.23

• 24 Even in 1928, in the yearbook of the Turkish Hearths, the Battle of Manzikert was only briefly me (...)

42Abrurrahman Şeref had mentioned the war as “the war near Manzikert” in which the “Roman emperor Roman Diogenes was defeated and taken captive” without any reference to the “opening of Anatolia” (Abdurrahman Şeref 1315: v. I, 47), although he did establish that “Alp Arslan took Georgia, South Syria, and Mesopotamia” (Abdurrahman Şeref 1315: v. I, 47). Ahmed Cevdet also did not charge the war with any substantial attributes in his History, mentioning only the defeat of the Byzantine army and the captivity of Roman Diogenes (Ahmed Cevdet Paşa 1309: v. I, 26). In his Kısas-ı Enbiya (The History of the Prophets), the picture he drew was slightly different. Since the book was an Islamic history and aimed to encourage patriotism among a larger audience, he devoted long passages to the Battle of Manzikert, re-articulating the Islamic hagiographic tradition as developed in the chronicles of the 12^th and 13^th centuries and praising Alp Arslan as a just, benevolent, and heroic Islamic ruler (as all the other revered Islamic political leaders and commanders were defined). Nevertheless, he did not make a single reference to the “opening to Anatolia” (Ahmed Cevdet Paşa 1969: v. II, 241-242). For Ahmed Cevdet, Alp Arslan was an Islamic, not Turkic hero. In Leon Cahun’s 1896 Introduction à l’histoire de l’Asie, (Cahun 1896) a breakthrough study which influenced the Turkists of the Hamidian era extensively and is thus constitutive of the historical imagination of the Turkists, Manzikert was not mentioned at all. Necib Asım, in his Türk Tarihi, which was overwhelmingly based on Leon Cahun’s book, completely secularized and ethnicized the battle and described it as “an immense and definite success” [büyük ve kati bir muvaffakiyete nail olan] (Necib Asım 1316: 271). He quoted the alleged dialogue between the captured Roman emperor and the Seljuk sultan to demonstrate the latter’s magnanimity (Necib Asım 1316: 272), but he attributed no dramatic meaning to the battle, nor did he mention its consequences.24 Ahmed Refik devoted significant space to the Seljuks of Rum in his magisterial Tarih-i Umumi [General History], a fact indicative of the growing interest in the pre-Ottoman Anatolian Turkish civilization in the early 1910s. His depiction of the Battle of Manzikert was also completely secularized and Turkified (Ahmed Refik 1328: v. VI, 279-280). Nevertheless, he did not credit Manzikert with any substantial repercussions. For him, the Turkification of Anatolia was associated with the conquests of Süleyman bin Kutalmış in the 1070s. He began his long chapter on the Seljuks with Süleyman bin Kutalmış’s ascent to the throne as the son and successor of Alparslan. The area bestowed upon Süleyman bin Kutalmış was defined as “between the Euphrates and the Black Sea Channel [Bosporus]”, not as Anatolia (Ahmed Refik 1328: v. VI, 286). The chapter also did not single out the Battle of Manzikert as the crucial turning point of the Turkish invasion. He wrote, “the control of the Byzantine Empire had already been weakened because of the assaults of the caliphs and the battles of Tuğrul Bey and Alparslan” (Ahmed Refik 1328: v. VI, 286).

• 25 Feridun Dirimtekin, Malazgirt Meydan Muharebesi, 1936, p. 48. A second edition of the study was p (...)

44In Mükrimin Halil Yinanç’s 1934 History of Turkey: Age of the Seljuks, Manzikert was consecrated not only as the turning point in Turkic history, but also “a turning point in world history” (Yinanç 1944: 78).Staff officer Feridun Dirimtekin wrote in his “military history” of the Battle of Manzikert published as the supplement of Military Journal in 1936 that “Seljuk commanders conquered Sivas, Kayseri, Bursa, Ankara and the Aegean coasts…Anatolia was Turkified. That meant the end of Byzantium” (Dirimtekin 1936: 48).25 He also compared Manzikert with the Battle of Cannae, the decisive defeat of the Roman army by the Carthegian army under Hannibal which was praised by Hans Delbrück, the most reputed German military historian in pre-1914 Germany, Alfred Von Schlieffen, the eminent strategist and chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, and the Prussian military historians in general as the ultimate battle of annihilation (and an inspiration for the Schlieffen Plan and Blitzkrieg) and spectacular tactical genius (Dirimtekin 1936: 1). His comparison and depiction of the war as the “Turkish Battle of Cannae” clearly epitomized the new cultic status of the war in the eyes of the nationalists and Kemalists deeply influenced from Prussian visions of total warfare, militarization of the nation and militarism. Dirimtekin also began his military study of Manzikert rendering it as a “turning point in world history” (Dirimtekin 1936: 1). The reiteration of this cliché will recur verbatim in all the later treatments of Manzikert (Turan 1971: 32; Sevim 1988: 75; Sevim, Merçil 1995: 72).

• 26 For an analysis of Turco-Islamic synthesis, see Taşkın 2007.

47This persuasion matured in the 1970s, fostered by conservative right-wing intellectuals who reconciled Turkish nationalism with Islam. Repudiating the strictly secular interpretations of Turkish nationalism, they argued that Islam and Turkish identity were indistinguishable and complemented each other.26 Inspired by the vision of Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924), the revered ideologue of Turkish nationalism and Kemalism, they imagined a “Turkish culture” uncorrupted through the ages and embodied in the Turkic states, and argued that the Turkish nation was grounded in this cultural uniqueness rather than on racial superiority. The culturalistic turn enabled the insertion of religion as one among many other components of Turkish culture. The proponents of the Turco-Islamic synthesis thus endorsed the nation-statist discourse of Kemalism and reconciled it with Islam, merging their Kemalist training in the “center” with their provincial backgrounds. The short biographies of the two architects of this idea are illustrative.

• 27 For the “Turco-Islamic synthesis” see Taşkın 2007 ; Güvenç, Şaylan, Tekeli, Turan 1994. Also see (...)

49TKAE (The Institute for Research on Turkish Culture), founded in 1961, became an important site for the development of the Turco-Islamic synthesis (Copeaux 1997: 95-100). The institute’s journal, Türk Kültürü (Turkish Culture) was particularly prominent in the articulation and advancement of the theory. İbrahim Kafesoğlu (1914-1984) one of the foremost historians of the Seljuks, emerged as the chief ideologue of the institute, and endeavored to construct a new historical imagination that would reconcile the Turkish nation and culture with Islam (Kafesoğlu 1955: 463-490; Kafesoğlu 1966: 467-480; Kafesoğlu 1972). He was not only a prolific writer but also an adroit organizer of symposia and congresses gathering “nationalist intellectuals” (Taşkın 2007: 135-143). He was also the founder and the first chairman of the “Hearth of the Intellectuals” (Aydınlar Ocağı), a highly influential right-wing think-tank in the 1970s and the chief bastion of the Turco-Islamic Synthesis.27

• 28 (Turan 1970 : 231-262 ; Turan 1969 ; Turan 1971 ; Turan 1988 ; Turan 1948a ; Turan 1948b ; Turan (...)

50Interestingly, many of the prominent proponents of the Turco-Islamic persuasion, including İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Osman Turan (1914-1978)28 and Mehmet Altan Köymen (1914-1993), (Köymen 1976; Köymen 1989) were scholars of the Seljuks and the Seljuks of Rum, and were at the same time also right-wing intellectuals and leading Seljuk historians. Although they began to produce their early work in the late 1940s and 1950s (Köymen 1947; Turan 1948a; Turan 1948b; Turan 1952; Kafesoğlu 1956; Erzi 1956; Köymen 1962), they rose to prominence in the second half of 1960s along with the rise of a new conservative intelligentsia. Kafesoğlu’s entry in İslam Ansiklopedisi [Encylopedia of Islam] as a separate 24-page pamphlet provided the outline of the nascent discourse. Kafesoğlu praised Alp Arslan as “exterminating the currents detrimental to Sunni Islam”, “maintaining political unity” and guiding the Turks to their promised land, Anatolia, on an Islamic and historical mission (Kafesoğlu 1956:1). With Kafesoğlu, Alp Arslan was promoted to a senior in the pantheon of great Turkic heroes along with Atatürk and Mehmed II. Historians with Turco-Islamic sensitivities founded the Selçuklu Tarihi ve Medeniyeti Araştırma Enstitüsü [Institute for the Research of Seljuk History and Civilization] in 1966 and published a scholarly journal devoted to studies in Seljuk history (Selçuklu Araştırmaları Dergisi) (Bilgiç 1971b: vi).

• 29 For the rise of the “myth of Manzikert” in the 1970s, also see Hillenbrand 2007: 203-219.

51As the 900^th anniversary of Manzikert approached, the battle came to the limelight and was further consecrated. In the words of two prominent proponents of the Turco-Islamic synthesis, with Manzikert, “Anatolia’s eternal destiny was sealed with its transformation into a Turkish homeland (yurd)” (Kafesoğlu, Deliorman 1977: 66; Sevim 1988: 58-76; Turan 1971: 32-37; Köymen 1992: v. III, 26-40). Furthermore, these historians gave their own twist to the Kemalist interpretation of Manzikert.29

• 30 For example, see Turan 1969: 142-144.
• 31 For an insightful comparative perspective for Manzikert, see George Duby’s monumental study of th (...)

53Whether this victory made such an impact in the consciousness of the Muslim public opinion cannot be known. However, one thing is sure: By documenting the contemporary eulogies of the Battle of Manzikert, the proponents of the Turko-Islamic synthesis re-constructed the myth of Manzikert as an Islamic epic.30 This epic narrative established itself as the only truthful narrative and obliterated any possible alternative narratives of the battle.31 Hence, in the modern Turco-Islamic narrative of Manzikert, we do not observe any significant historical misrepresentations or distortions. On the contrary, the salient point is the accordance between the discourses of the Islamic contemporary accounts and the modern Turco-Islamic narrative of Manzikert. Providing evidence to Anthony Smith and his ethnosymbolic approach to nationalism (Smith 1991; Smith 1999; Smith 1986; Smith 2003), the Turco-Islamists reinvigorated the contemporary accounts of the Battle of Manzikert, and out of these popular mythologies, they invented a modern Turco-Islamic imagination and narrative.

• 32 For some studies of Manzikert conducted by historians affiliated with the Turco-Islamist school, (...)

54The prominent role attributed to Manzikert arguably derived from its Janus-faced character. Manzikert contained allusions to a Turkish nationalism both Anatolia-centered and ecumenical. It had two faces, the first directed towards the pre-1071 world of Turks and the other looking at the post-1071 world of “Western Turks” in Anatolia. We may argue that Manzikert was a conspicuously Kemalist project although its heyday came long after Kemal Atatürk with the rise of the historians of the Turco-Islamic synthesis school.32 Manzikert connected two different Turkic cosmologies and drew a path from the legendary Oghuz Khan (the first Turk and the first Turkish khan in the Turkish mythology) to Atatürk by simultaneously alluding to the ecumenical vision of Turks and to the sacralization of Anatolia. It was the intersection and marriage of two different historical imaginations.

• 33 For the association between Atatürk and the other members of the medieval Turkic pantheon, see Cop (...)

55The contemporary accounts of the battle were reconstructed through a Kemalist lens which reinterpreted the medieval warfare and statecraft within the terminology of perfectly organized, Weberian, modern nation-states. Etienne Copeaux has demonstrated the extent of the Kemalist elements in this gaza epic narrative introduced in the 1970s as most apparent in the implicit or explicit allusions to Atatürk in the depictions of Alparslan throughout the epic gaza narrative introduced in the 1970s (Copeaux 1997: 191).33 The resemblance of the dialogues between the victorious Alparslan and the captive Roman emperor Roman Diogenes to the dialogue between the victorious Mustafa Kemal and the captive Greek commander Trikupis in 1922 are unmistakable. The refashioning of Manzikert in the 1970s marked a perfect moment for the reconciliation of Kemalism and Islamic discourse at a time when the chief enemy of the republic emerged as the communists.

• 34 For a critical study of the scholarship conducted by the proponents of the Turco-Islamic school, (...)

56The Kemalist narrative was the Ur-ideology and the “root paradigm” of modern Turkish political culture from which all the modern ideologies from socialism to Islamism derived their premises. This is also true for the Kemalist representations of Turkish history. Nevertheless, there are salient differences between the Kemalist and the Turco-Islamic depictions of post-Manzikert and Seljuk Anatolia. Due to lack of space, we will not comparatively scrutinize the scholarly output of these two schools34 but will instead attempt to reveal the differences as they appear in the history textbooks which, because they were written with pedagogical aims, best exemplify the ideological premises.

• 35 For the mechanisms of “forgetting” in the construction of Turkish national imagination, see Özyür (...)
• 36 For the consolidation of state power in Turkey by the early 1930s see Tunçay 1999.

57Tarih II, the authoritative Kemalist high school text book published in 1933,discussed the clashes with Georgians and Armenians during the Turcoman raids into Anatolia (T.T.T. Cemiyeti 1933: 226). All references to Armenians and Georgians disappeared in the history textbooks of the 1970s, which portrayed these raids as targeting the Byzantine Empire and imagined the Byzantine Empire as a perfectly centralized polity monitored strictly from Constantinople. In Tarih II, by contrast, the fragility and tributary nature of the Byzantine central state was captured well. As articulated in the Kemalist course book, during these raids, the Turcoman lords plundered nearby cities and fought not with the forces of the Byzantine central authority, but with local, autonomous commanders. After the Byzantine military and political presence had been weakened in these remote outposts, the Byzantine East was run by local warlords of predominantly Armenian and Georgian origins. It can be argued that later textbooks ceased to emphasize the Turcoman raids so as not to invoke the non-Turkish autochthonous ethnic groups living in Anatolia prior to Manzikert. In the 1930s, the memories of the ethnically mixed character of Anatolia before the 1920s were fresh, in particular of the Armenians and the Armenian massacres. Time was necessary for the “forgetting process” which formed one of the main components of the “construction of national memory”.35 Furthermore, the consolidation of state-centrism (as opposed to Turkism) had yet to be completed in the 1930s, a period which was marked with inconsistencies and ambiguities.36

• 37 For the replacement of the Kemalist course books with the pro-Western and “humanist” textbooks, s (...)

59The rupture in the representations of nation and state in Turkish history can be observed in the liberal-nationalist history textbooks written in the late 1940s and 1950s by authors such as Emin Oktay and Niyazi Akşit37as replacements for the Kemalist history textbooks. In these textbooks, the Seljuk raiders were depicted as modern military commanders taking and executing orders from the central political authority. “Kutulmuş oğlu Süleyman Bey was assigned [memur edildi] to conquer the lands to the west of Kızılırmak.” (Oktay 1951: 173). The book trivialized and marginalized the principalities established by the Turcoman raiders and implied that Kutalmışoğlu Süleyman, by establishing an effective and centralized state in such a short time, secured the “unity of Anatolia” [Anadolu birliği], that sacrosanct phrase and cult of Turkish nationalism and nation-statism (Oktay 1951: 173).

• 38 Also see Sevim 1990.
• 39 “[Alp Arslan] Türkmen beylerine bütün Anadolu’nun zabtını emretti.”

60This view was reinforced by the Turco-Islamic textbooks published in the 1970s. In these books, the post-Manzikert Turkish invasion was further centralized and depicted as a top-down venture. This process was narrated employing anachronistically modern military terminology. According to İbrahim Kafesoğlu and Altan Deliorman, Turcoman lords, who were dubbed “commanders” as if they were military officers of a modern military,38 carried out military operations in all parts of Anatolia on orders of Alp Arslan: “[Alp Arslan] ordered the Turcoman lords to capture all of Anatolia” (Kafesoğlu, Deliorman 1977: 66).39 The authors described these marches in detail and dubbed these raids “military operations” (harekat) coordinated by a joint chiefs of staff: Operation Southeastern Anatolia, Operation Western Anatolia, Operation Eastern Anatolia, Operation Middle and Northwestern Anatolia (Kafesoğlu, Deliorman 1977: 68-73; Sevim 1988: 42-45). According to the textbook, whereas the Seljuks of Rum had been established legitimately upon the orders of Alp Arslan as an extension and dependency of the Seljuks after Manzikert, “the Turcoman principalities were [temporarily] founded due to a power vacuum [iktidar boşluğu]”, (Kafesoğlu, Deliorman 1977: 109) as if their establishment was a diversion from the natural path and a temporary stage within the pre-ordained trajectory of (Turkic) history.

• 40 For the transformation of German nationalism in the 19^thcentury, see Williamson (2004); Green (20 (...)

61With the complete victory of the cult of the state over ethnic romanticism, ethnic references were also marginalized, and the narrative was reconstructed as a struggle between the Turkish political leadership and the Byzantine Empire. According to Osman Turan, once the Byzantines had been subdued militarily and politically, Anatolia was easily Turkified and Islamized (Turan 1973: 51). He saw the Turkish raids as part of a master plan for the Turkish conquest of Anatolia derived from a “Turkish ideal of world domination” [Türk cihan hakimiyeti mefkuresi], the foremost motivation of Turks in history (Turan 1969b). The Turkish raids and plunders were no longer seen as spontaneous, as had been implied in Tarih II. Now the Turkish race was imagined as an organism with one brain and single command unlike the Kemalist romanticism which had praised the free-standing “noble raiders” fighting for their own glory, fame, and honor although subservient to the Turkic ideal in the final analysis. For Kafesoğlu, Turcoman nomads “came from distant steppes never to return, and submitted to the Seljukid state. Coordinated and guided by the state, they flooded into Byzantium with Islamic zeal and heroism” (Kafesoğlu 1956: 1-2). Arguably, state-centrism had won over a racialized vision of history, much as it had in the 19^th-century Europe, where romantic nationalism had been absorbed by the rising nation-states, especially in Germany where the early-19^th-century pre-Christian pagan mythologies had been absorbed by Prussian authoritarianism.40 Hence, the struggles against the “Armenian and Georgian” were replaced by struggles with the Byzantine Empire.

• 41 For depiction and praising of Alp Arslan’s magnanimity towards Romanos Diogenes, see Turan (1971 (...)

64It is also remarkable that whereas Dirimtekin, a representative of the Kemalist paradigm, in 1936 accused Alp Aslan for making a devastating blunder in freeing the Roman emperor and criticized his narrow foresight in his analysis from the perspective of military science, (Dirimtekin 1936: 46) the proponents of Turco-Islamic synthesis praised his benevolence, magnanimity and for “showing mercy, moderation and humanitarianism” (Kafesoğlu 1956: 19) which they saw as Turkish and Islamic virtues.41 Differing attitudes toward Alp Arslan arguably stemmed from the fact that whereas for Dirimtekin it was the Seljukid military commanders and raiders that had epitomized Turkishness, for the proponents of Turco-Islamic synthesis Turkishness was embodied in the person of the sultan. Furthermore, whereas for Dirimtekin, who was enthralled with Prussian militaristic visions, it was the sheer might of the Turks that was to be esteemed, in the upcoming decades it was also the moral righteousness of Turks that had to be cherished and emphasized.

• 42 The interpretations of the Seljuks of Rum by Mustafa Akdağ and Doğan Avcıoğlu contrast with the i (...)

66Hence, since the idea of a politically divided Anatolia was subversive, its unity had to be secured. The nation was also imagined ahistorically and as an organic whole. Yet the nation was indefinable in the absence of a state. The Turkish nation was to be realized and defined via obedience to a political organization. This vision established the main contours and premises of the historical visions of the Seljuks of Rum posited within the larger Turkic history as a crucial stage in the continuum from Central Asia to the 20^th century Turkish republic.42