Fleet K. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 1, Byzantium to Turkey, 1071-1453

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

rudi paul lindner

in ferreting out the remaining medieval monuments.

The remaining archi-

tectural works differ from one another in the eyes of connoisseurs, but they

are for the most part not very large or ornate. Smaller work in tapestry, wood

and ceramic is not rare, but it does not reveal the availability of a large surplus

of wealth. The coinages of the beyliks do not compare, in volume, weight

standards or design, to the issues from the Seljuk mints; but perhaps a large

volume of new coinage was not needed.

There are many difﬁculties associated with the chronology, lists of rulers

and internal histories of the beyliks, and it seems best for the moment to discuss

them in rather different terms. The beylik immediately to the south-west of

the Ottomans was Karası, in Mysia, whose history begins in earnest after the

Catalan expedition of the early fourteenth century. Bordering on the Marmara,

the Dardanelles and the Aegean, this beylik had some naval pretensions and

may have beneﬁted from the immigration of Turks from the Dobrudja. The

power, however, of the beylik was insufﬁcient to wrest Mytilene (Lesbos) from

Christian hands. Soldiers from this beylik played a role, along with Ottoman

volunteers,in the Thracianadventures beforethe deﬁnitive Turkish installation

across the Dardanelles. There is very sparse coinage remaining from Karası,

and it appears reasonable to suggest that the beylik, which fell deﬁnitively to

the Ottomans after various earlier partitions at the end of Orhan’s reign, was

hampered by its inability to control the sea routes and by its more powerful

neighbour to the east, Germiyan.

The beylik of Saruhan was centred on Lydia and lasted from the early

fourteenth century to 1410, when it ﬁnally fell to the Ottomans. The cap-

ital of the enterprise was at Manisa, but members of the family of the

Saruhano

gulları had subsidiary and perhaps partly autonomous residences

elsewhere. From an early date the rulers of Saruhan involved themselves

in campaigns at sea, where they were associated with the forces of Aydın.

They were also enmeshed in politics and warfare involving the Genoese

at Chios and Phocaea. On the one hand, Manisa prospered: there was a

slave market and some signiﬁcant building in the 1360s and 1370s. On the

other, the forces of the emirate seem to have been unable to establish com-

plete independence from the currents of war and diplomacy fostered by the

16 For an overview see G

Oney, Beylikler Devri Sanatı XIV.–XV. Y

uzyıl (1300–1453)

(Ankara, 1989). To the works mentioned within should be added the large number of

local histories, such as the works of

I. H. Konyalı on central and south coastal Anatolia.

17 E. A. Zachariadou, ‘The Emirate of Karasi and that of the Ottomans: Two Rival States’,

in The Ottoman Emirate (1300–1389), ed. E. A. Zachariadou (Rethymnon,1993), pp. 225–36,

who sees the beylik as more powerful, at least initially.

110

Anatolia, 1300–1451

Ottomans after 1360, Byzantium after the 1340s and the more powerful rulers of

Aydın.

Aydın appears to have been the most inﬂuential of the coastal beyliks, and it

is, with the exception of the Ottomans, the sole western beylik from which we

have a narrative source of some scope, the Destan of Umur Pas¸a. The dynasty,

formerly allied with the beys of the Phrygian emirate of Germiyan, established

itself around 1308 and shortly thereafter ruled from Birgi, although much of

the Smyrna (

Izmir) district, and the city itself, became part of the principality.

Once again, although the head of the family claimed supreme authority, other

members had their own separate residences with more or less autonomous

power.

Smyrna/

Izmir was then, as now, an economic centre of the Aegean basin,

and the dynasty became involved in warfare with the Genoese, trade arrange-

ments and diplomacy with the Byzantines: it even issued imitations of Italian

coins. Umur Bey (1334–48), hero of the Destan, allied himself with the Byzan-

tine claimant John Kantakouzenos, and forces from Aydın became involved in

the Byzantine civil wars of the early 1340s. It proved impossible, however, to

deal both with possibilities in the Balkans and with threats from the sea caused

by crusaders called forth by the pope and including a number of European

naval powers. Ultimately, Umur Bey died in battle at

Izmir. After his death,

his successors reached an agreement with the European powers in 1348, one

that crippled the naval power of the beylik and threatened to lower its trade

revenues substantially. The beylik continued to be inﬂuential but without offer-

ing the same naval threats as before: it is probable that its wealth for the next

few generations depended more on trade and internal growth than on the

opportunistic raids of Umur Bey’s career.

Thereare signiﬁcant architectural monuments of the era: mosques, medreses

and tombs. Perhaps the most signiﬁcant of the monuments is the

Isa Bey

mosque in Ephesus (1374). There are also important works translated from

Persian into Turkish from the Aydıno

gulları period, an indication of the devel-

opment of Turkish as a written language of high culture.

South and south-east of Aydın was the beylik of Mentes¸e, based in Caria.

The founders of this beylik had at one time been tributary, at least in principle,

to the Seljuks, since there are extant coins struck at Milas in 1291 in the name

of the Sultan Mesud II. Both Ilkhanid and Byzantine campaigns entered the

region in the last decades of the thirteenth century, but there was no long-term

opposition to the inﬁltration of nomads from the hinterland and Turks from

the sea (from Antalya). After 1308, the major naval opponent of the beylik was

Rhodes, which remained stubbornly independent throughout the fourteenth

111

rudi paul lindner

century. Once again, family rule prevailed in the beylik, and once again, much

of the wealth came through trade, some of which involved products exported

from the interior of the peninsula to the Aegean through the beylik’s ports.

The dynasty fostered the translation of works from Persian into Turkish, and

there are important Mentes¸eo

gulları buildings at the centres of family rule,

in particular the Hacı

Ilyas mosque at Milas (1330). This was yet another of

the beyliks that fell to Bayezid I, was reconstituted by Timur, but failed to

withstand the Ottomans after their resurgence.

Thebeylik of Tekewascentred on the southern portofAntalya, andincluded

parts of Lycia and Pamphylia. Antalya had been in Seljuk hands since 1207,and

the hinterland was connected with the important port through a network of

caravansarys by the middle of the thirteenth century. After Seljuk rule in the

south-west part of the peninsula faded away around 1307, a part of the family of

Hamid, in Pisidia, established itself as the beylik of Teke; again, members of the

family ruled in different towns. Antalya had been a prosperous trade centre,

facing Cyprus, and there was, in the middle years of the fourteenth century,

both warfare and trade between the two. Whereas there is a fair amount of

Seljuk material remaining in the area, from the Tekeo

gulları little survives

(there is a t

urbe dated 1377 in Antalya, reminiscent of Seljuk architecture).

Reviewing the status of the coastal beyliks curving west of the Ottomans

around the Marmara basin and the Aegean, as far as the lands opposite Cyprus,

there are a few interesting points that rise above the minutiae of their separate

and in many ways still confusing year-to-year history. First, their attentions

seem ﬁxed more on the sea than on the hinterland. Second, as sea powers their

emphasis was on trading and raiding rather than conquest; or, at least, their

power was insufﬁcient to wrest control of signiﬁcant islands from the more

distant European naval powers. Third, a few of them were able to provide

troops for service in the Balkans, but they were unable to establish and retain

a constant presence for their enterprises across the sea. They could assist in

Balkan actions, but they were unable to direct them or to set up a permanent

base. In the end, during the reign of Murad I, the Ottomans encapsulated

the Balkan adventurers from the coastal beyliks. Fourth, they appear to have

beneﬁted substantially from a transit trade linking merchants from the inte-

rior with European middlemen. This trade appears to have consisted of both

primary goods, including slaves, and partially ﬁnished goods. Finally, although

most of them issued coins, the output appears to have been far less, and of far

18 For the t

urbe, see Gary Leiser, ‘Teke-oghulları,’ EI2, x,pp.412–13; and Barbara Flemming,

Landschaftsgeschichte von Pamphylien, Pisidien und Lykien im Sp

atmitteralter (Wiesbaden,

1964), p. 90, for Hamid.

112

Anatolia, 1300–1451

lower quality, than that of the Seljuks or Ilkhanids, and on the basis of scanty

evidence it seems that the output of copper was greater than the output of

silver, which might, if true, imply that the beylik coinage was destined for small

transactions, while the extant currencies from the hinterland (and, presumably,

from Venice and Genoa) served the long-distance trade. Much more will be

secure once scholars have fully evaluated al-‘Umari’s materials on price levels

and measures, which must be considered in terms of the Mamluk models he

had in mind.

Next we may turn to the larger beyliks in the hinterland: Germiyan, Hamid

and Karaman. The name of the ﬁrst of these is the ﬁrst to appear in the

sources. By our period, Germiyan was centred on Phrygia, although the ruling

family had been associated with the Seljuks initially in south-east Anatolia

and then later in the west.

In the last quarter of the thirteenth century

they were sometimes nominally loyal to the Seljuks and sometimes acted

independently; at one time they were subservient to the Ilkhanids, although

just what that meant in practice is unclear. At the end of the thirteenth century,

from their centre at K

utahya, their inﬂuence appears to have reached as far as

Ankara, at least brieﬂy. Yakub b. Alis¸ir, about whom al-‘Umari wrote, was an

impressive ruler, some of whose lieutenants founded beyliks along the coast.

The Ottoman chronicle of As¸ıkpas¸azade claims that the forces of Germiyan

threatened the Ottomans’ southern ﬂanks during the ﬁrst few decades of the

fourteenth century. The economic resources of the beylik appear to have been

welldeveloped: sources discuss the manufacture and marketing of high-quality

weaving, a trade in horses (the beylik contained both land suitable for intensive

agriculture and areas ideal for steppe animal husbandry) and trade in such raw

materials as alum. In the second half of the fourteenth century the beylik no

longer had free access to seaports, and became dependent upon the Ottomans

for support against the beylik of Karaman. Bayezid I annexed the beylik in

1390, and although Timur re-established the family, and in the early ﬁfteenth

century the Ottomans made no attempt to extinguish it by force, it became

part of the neighbouring enterprise in 1429. The Germiyano

gulları erected

a number of mosques and imarets, and established a number of vakıfs, and

they were also patrons of literature and of translations of works from Persian

into Turkish. In the ﬁfteenth century, at the end of the dynasty, a number

of poets writing in Turkish worked at the court. The quality of fourteenth-

century Germiyanid coinage is notably superior to that of many of the other

beyliks.

19 See Mustafa C¸ etin Varlık, Germiyan-O

gulları Tarihi (1300–1429) (Ankara, 1974).

113

rudi paul lindner

The base of the beylik of Hamid was Pisidia, and from the highlands and

lakes the power of this dynasty spread south to the area discussed under Teke.

Rule was divided between two branches of the family, but the area included

a major trade route from the Mediterranean up country to the pastures and

lakes. There is little information about this beylik, although it is clear that at a

time when the other beyliks were ﬂourishing, that is, when the central Mongol

powerin Iranwas waning and beforethespreadofOttomanclaims,theMongol

governor Timurtas¸ ravaged the territories and crippled the government of

Hamid, as wellas bringing to an end the lesser beylikoftheEs¸refo

gulları (whose

temporary wealth and inﬂuence appears reﬂected in the building programme

at Beys¸ehir at the turn of the fourteenth century). Hamid is an example of a

beylik attempting to balance itself between the Mongols on the one hand and

the expansion of trade from the Antalya coast on the other.

The beylik of Karaman is the great exception, or perhaps better, it is the

beylik which in some ways seemed best able to pick up the pieces after the

Mongols disestablished the Seljuks. Already in 1277, when the family ﬁrst took

aim at rule in Konya, their declared policy was to replace Persian with Turkish

as the court language. However, in many ways the dynasty looked to the past

and relied on technologies that did not succeed in the long run, foremost of

which was reliance upon a nomad military arm.

The Karamanids ﬁrst came to notice in the area around Ermenek, which

harbours routes to the south-east and Cilicia as well as over the Taurus and the

great central plains east and north of Konya. Many of the family’s supporters

were pastoralists, although they do not seem to have been the military equal

of Mongol mounted archers in contests from 1277 on: the Karamanids were

able to raid and occupy towns but not to defeat the Mongols. It was not until

the departure of Timurtas¸in1327 that the Karamanids were able to effect a

decisive occupation of Konya, and even then, for the next generation they had

to counter the threats of the Eretnids, who had originally acted as lieutenants

of the Mongols. By the end of the third quarter of the fourteenth century, the

dynasty controlled most of the Lycaonian plain as well as the lands running

south beyond Ermenek to the coast.

The early contacts between the rulers of Karaman and the Ottomans were

diplomatic, ending in a marriage alliance, which did not prevent warfare from

breaking out over the legacy of the beylik of Hamid. Bayezid I annexed the

beylik, and the Ottomans found themselves facing future confrontations with

the Karamanids’ sometime allies, the Mamluks. The ﬁnal conquest of the

beylik of Karaman after its reconstitution by Timur goes beyond the bounds

of this chapter, but it is useful to note that supporters of members of the

114

Anatolia, 1300–1451

dynasty were always able to seek refuge in the rough hill country from which

the pastoralists had ﬁrst set forth in the thirteenth century. The last eruption

from Karaman enthusiasts occurred in 1500–1.

To some extent, the beys of Karaman, once they ruled in conﬁdence from

Konya, inherited some of the advantages that the Seljuks had enjoyed in the

1220s and 1230s. They did not control the north coast of the peninsula, but

they did have access to the Mediterranean, and a network of trade routes

converged on and diverged from Konya. They shared control over the Taurus

passes with Armenian lords, and they were able to extract duty from Italian

merchants at a number of south coast ports. The Lycaonian plain was rich in

horses and sheep, which allowed the export of animals, raised by tribes known

as horse drovers (At C¸eken), and quality woven goods (textiles from Aksaray).

The wealth so obtained went in part to continue the traditions of Seljuk art

and architecture.

The sizeable interior beyliks differed from their coastal neighbours in a

number of ways. Each had much less of a Byzantine legacy and rather more of

a Seljuk and Mongol imprint. Although Karaman had a long coastline, it did

not build a ﬂeet of raiding vessels as did the beyliks facing the Aegean. They had

a larger pastoral element to their economies and populations. One institution

that they all shared, however, was urban adherents to the ahi brotherhoods, and

if we understand Ibn Battuta correctly, it was these brotherhoods that provided

certain social and also economic links that crossed the frontiers between the

beyliks. Further, the opportunities for a sudden enhancement of their position,

such as a successful raid or alliance with a European power might bring, really

did not exist: aside from attacking a neighbour, the opportunity to increase

one’s power grew only as the post-Mongol enterprise of the Eretnids lessened

in importance. Karaman was the big winner here. However, none of the

interior beyliks had the power to withstand the growth of the Ottomans, and

it is worthwhile considering why this was the case. It may rest in part on the

conservative nature of the military forces of the beyliks, or on the lack of a

pragmatic administrative structure (it is typical in the scholarly literature to

see the beyliks as carrying on the Seljuk traditions), or perhaps on contingent

events about which we are presently ignorant.

The Candaro

gulları or

Isfendiyaro

gulları, east and north of the Ottomans,

form one of two interesting beyliks on the north coast of the peninsula. The

dynasty established itself in the last decade of the thirteenth century under

20 The classic survey, representing two traditional approaches, is Ernst Diez, Oktay

Aslanapa and Mahmud Mesut Koman, Karaman Devri Sanatı (Istanbul, 1950); there

are numerous later publications of particular monuments and genre examples.

115

rudi paul lindner

murky circumstances involving the Seljuks and Ilkhanids. The dynasty minted

coins under Ilkhanid suzerainty in the early fourteenth century, and its two

centres were Kastamonu and the port of Sinop. There are reports of a large

nomad population in the area at the end of the thirteenth century, and some

evidence that certain of the groups responsible for revolts against the Seljuks in

1238 had relocated there, but the sources tell us relatively little about nomadic

activity. Rule was usually divided between the members of the family ruling in

Kastamonu and Sinop, and the bases of power were probably different in kind,

since Sinop was a great entrep

ot. Once again, Bayezid I subdued the beylik and

Timur saw to its reconstitution; the beylik lasted until 1461. Trade, exports of

raw materials (copper, iron) from the Pontic mountains and a competent navy

preserved the beylik for some time. In some ways this beylik is similar to its

neighbour to the east, the Byzantine ‘beylik’ of Trebizond (Trabzon), which

enjoyed prosperous agriculture in the valleys of the Pontic alps, had control

of the coastal end of a major route to Iran and also held out until the reign of

Mehmed the Conqueror. These two northern polities were inﬂuenced by the

Mongols on the one hand and by the European trading cities on the other;

the coinage of Kastamonu betrays Mongol inﬂuence, while the Trebizondine

issues bear a relation to the Venetian issues.

How different were the beyliks from the Seljuk sultanate of Rum? Most

obviously, they were smaller and more compact. They had fewer resources

but at the same time fewer obligations. A number of the beyliks existed on land

which had not known Muslim rule before, and these faced both a Byzantine

past and a maritime legacy. While some were founded by former ofﬁcials famil-

iar with the scribal traditions of the Seljuks, others grew from Turkish nomad

tribes. All of them reﬂected greater or lesser Mongol inﬂuence, sometimes

only in linguistic usage, occasionally in institutional practice, often in military

orientation, and certainly to some extent in the source of their population, for

of the Mongol tumans that entered Anatolia in the 1250s, not all returned to

the east. When the new immigrants settled the coastal cities in the fourteenth

century, they built up new areas: the new mosques are often outside the older

Byzantine settlement. In the cities and the courts, Turkish became more and

more the language of choice, and there was a considerable amount of trans-

lation, along with new literary production in poetry and prose. Some of the

beyliks were modest centres of patronage for this literature, and most exper-

imented with the construction of a Friday mosque, occasionally departing

21 For the coinage see Celil Ender,

Ust

un Erek and G

ultekin Teoman, Candaro

gulları Beyli

(

Isfendiyaro

gulları Beyli

gi) Paraları Katalo

gu (Istanbul, 2003), pp. 33–52.

116

Anatolia, 1300–1451

from Seljuk models.

There was probably less trans-peninsular trade, but

there was more trade from the plateau to the Aegean coast, as well as the

development of pastoral production (animals, textiles) in the lowlands newly

settled by Turks.

The Ottomans

Of the beyliks, it was the Ottomans who succeeded, unifying Anatolia over the

course of the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, and advancing to the Danube.

Unfortunately, their origins are obscured by the present state of the evidence

and the relative care taken by their early chroniclers to homogenise the story

of their rise to power. As scholars have examined the sources in greater depth

and sought out neglected or new sources, it seems that in some ways they

are less sure today than was the case a generation ago. What follows is surely

partly true but not very likely the whole truth.

One of the problems facing historians of the earliest Ottoman years is the

reconciliation of the Byzantine sources and the Ottoman chronicles. Although

some of the material in the chronicles may go back earlier than 1422,itisvery

hard to test accounts of events dating back to the early fourteenth century.

As¸ıkpas¸azade claims to rely in part on a source whose author lived in Orhan’s

time, but no other exemplar of this source has surfaced, and the material it

retails looks to contain a certain amount of romance. The Byzantine sources

are more contemporary, and it is convenient to attempt a reconciliation on

the grounds that what seemed signiﬁcant to one author would have found

agreement from another. But this need not be true, and some of the attempts

at ﬁtting Byzantine and Ottoman accounts together have failed under closer

scrutiny. So we face the interesting challenge of balancing two accounts that

are occasionally rather distant from each other.

A second problem arises from the nature of the early Ottoman chronicles,

which, it is now clear, contain a fair amount of folk tradition. If this is so, then at

what point may we begin to take these chronicles seriously?

A conservative

viewwould place this time in the middle of Orhan’sreign. In the reconstruction

22 See HowardCrane, ‘Noteson Architecture and Patronage inBeylikAnatolia (1300–1450)’,

in The Turks, vol. II, ed. Hasan Celal G

uzel, Kemal C¸ic¸ek and Salim Koca (Ankara, 2002),

pp. 737–45.

23 I am deeply indebted, in what follows, to the excellent chronological account of Imber,

Ottoman Empire.

24 See Colin Imber, ‘The Legend of Osman Gazi’, in Zachariadou, The Ottoman Emirate,

pp. 67–75.

117

rudi paul lindner

below, however, a more liberal attitude will reign, tempered by a certain

humility.

How should this history be organised? This chapter will follow a tradition

honoured by time and discuss the events and processes reign by reign. We

have no means at present of retrieving the personalities of the early Ottoman

rulers, but at the same time it does not appear that the events were more in

the hands of administrators or persons whose judgement ran independently

of the wish of the chief (and, later, sultan). There is some evidence that there

are some changes in policy due to the character of a new sultan, but it would

be imprudent to make a wholesale claim in this regard. For the moment, until

one sees the development of a solid institutional base or countervailing forces

away from the centre of the enterprise, it seems safe to organise the history

by the reigns of the heads of the enterprise.

The forefathers of the Ottomans appear to have entered Anatolia either just

before, with or immediately after the Mongol incursions of the 1240s and 1250s.

Ottoman tradition had Osman’s father, Ertu

grul, like so many founders of later

beyliks, arrive in the frontier zone between the weakened Seljuk polity and the

weakening Byzantine Empire. In particular, the nomads and other followers

in what may well have been a tribally organised group enjoyed pastures and

cultivable lands between Eskis¸ehir (Dorylaion) and what is now Bilecik, at

a place now called S

ut (probably an ancient settlement, given that spolia

have been found in the area, but its ancient name is not conﬁrmed). We know

nothing about the life of Ertu

grul, and his existence is independently attested

only by a coin of his son Osman.

Ottoman historybeginswith this Osman, about whomthe chronicles weave

a tantalising web of tales. It should be noted right at the start that because the

contemporary Byzantine chronicler Pachymeres refers to him as Atman, Colin

Heywood has reasonably suggested that he had some relation to the Mongols

north and north-west of the Byzantines, and that Pachymeres had ‘hetman’ in

mind. Osman’s career is one of conquest, moving to secure his rear against the

beys of Germiyan, defending himself against Mongols to the south-east, and

advancing slowly to the west and north-west down the Sakarya (Sangarios)

river, towards the ‘Bithynian Riviera’.

The early Ottoman chronicles indicate that Osman began to act indepen-

dently of the Seljuks around 1299. It is far from clear that Seljuk authority ran

north-west as far as the frontier of Phrygia and Bithynia, but it does seem clear

that the Ilkhanid authority came pretty close, at least sporadically. There is

a silver dirhem at T

ubingen minted in the name of the Ilkhan Ghazan, dated

699, with the mint S

ud (modern S

ut). During that year some forty-six

118

Anatolia, 1300–1451

mints struck silver dirhems in Anatolia, a record, as mentioned previously. It is

possible that there is a relationship between this annus mirabilis and the revolt

of the Ilkhanid governor S

ulemis¸, but in any case the implication is that in

699 whoever held authority at S

ut was beholden to the Ilkhan. And there is

later evidence from an accounting treatise that in Orhan’s time the Mongols

expected his tribute. So it would not be outlandish to expect to ﬁnd Osman

within the Ilkhanid orbit at the beginning of his public career.

Our ﬁrst indisputable evidence comes from the Byzantine chronicler

Pachymeres, who tells the story of a battle at Bapheus, quite near Nico-

media (

Izmit), in July 1302, in which Osman and a force of nomad archers

defeated a Byzantine force accompanied by Alan auxiliaries. It is possible that

bad weather upstream and a rare ﬂood of the Sakarya (Sangarios) downstream

made it attractive to Osman and other Turkish beys to seek to recoup damage

to their herds in the lowlands. At this time Osman was no more powerful than

a number of other minor beys south and east of the Sakarya basin.

However, over the course of the succeeding decade Osman took control of

lands west of the Sakarya and well into the Bursa plain. He was unable to seize

any of the cities, but he extended his inﬂuence over the small communities

without much opposition from Constantinople. At the time of his death,

probably in 1324, he had yet to obtain control of a city, although he was master

of much of the lowland areas outside of

Iznik (Nicaea) and Bursa (Prusa). It

should be noted that in the 1290s there was little reason for the Byzantines to

take much notice of him, and membership in the bands of the nomad chiefs

was still ﬂuid, depending on their successes. A good deal of Osman’s success in

the Bithynian lowlands derives from the fact that the Byzantines had relaxed

their defences and had a very small army available for service in Anatolia. As

for Osman’s own success, there is some evidence from vakıf documents and

registers. These make it clear that many of his foundations were located in

the southern, less economically productive area of his domains: in fact, the

resources available to him, if the foundations are any measure, were limited

and by no means the equal of his neighbouring beys.

What was the economic adaptation of the Ottomans in Osman’s time? It

looks as if the military force available to Osman was nomadic, that is, it was

a body of mounted archers. There is no evidence of the availability of siege

engines for

Iznik or Bursa. Nor is there much evidence of the need for an

independent coinage, although the same could be said of the beyliks to the

25 See the very suggestive study by Ir

ene Beldiceanu-Steinherr, ‘La conqu

ete de la Bithynie

maritime,

etape d

ecisive dans la fondation de l’

etat ottoman,’ in Byzanz als Raum, ed.

Klaus Belke, Fridrich Bild, Johannes Koder and Peter Soustal (Vienna, 2000), pp. 21–35.

119