Gaza Thesis

The Gaza or Gazi Thesis (from Ottoman Turkish: غزا‎, ġazā, "holy war," or simply "raid") is a historical paradigm first formulated by Paul Wittek which has been used to interpret the nature of the Ottoman Empire during the earliest period of its history, the fourteenth century. The thesis addresses the question of how the Ottomans were able to expand from a small principality on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire into a centralized, intercontinental empire. According to the Gaza Thesis, the Ottomans accomplished this by attracting recruits to fight for them in the name of Islamic holy war against the non-believers. Such a warrior was known in Turkish as a gazi, and thus this thesis sees the early Ottoman state as a "Gazi State," defined by an ideology of holy war. The Gaza Thesis dominated early Ottoman historiography throughout much of the twentieth century before coming under increasing criticism beginning in the 1980s. Historians now generally reject the Gaza Thesis, and consequently the idea that Ottoman expansion was primarily fueled by holy war, but are conflicted with regard to what to replace it with.

The Gaza Thesis was first formulated in the 1930s by Turkish historian Fuat Köprülü and Austrian historian Paul Wittek. Partly in response to contemporary Orientalist historians, who tried to marginalize the role of the Turks in Ottoman state formation, Köprülü formulated what was to become the Turkish nationalist view of early Ottoman history. According to Köprülü, the Ottoman polity was formed by Turkish tribes fleeing the advance of the Mongol Empire, built upon Turkish tribal manpower, and administered by men from the Anatolian hinterland experienced in the Turco-Muslim political tradition of the Seljuks. Paul Wittek, responding to Köprülü's claims, accepted the Turco-Muslim basis of the early Ottoman state, agreeing that it grew out of the already highly developed civilization of Seljuk Anatolia and was fundamentally shaped by the unique conditions of the Byzantine frontier. Yet rather than Turkish ethnicity and tribal connections, he placed his primary emphasis upon the role of Islam. For Wittek, the Ottomans were first and foremost Islamic holy warriors. His primary evidence for this included the titles adopted by early Ottoman rulers, including an inscription erected in Bursa in 1337 describing Orhan, the second Ottoman ruler, as "gazi, son of gazi." Wittek also relied upon the work of the early fifteenth-century Ottoman poet Ahmedi, who likewise described the early Ottoman rulers as gazis. Thus in this formulation, the early Ottoman polity was built upon an "ideology of Holy War," and was able to grow powerful by attracting warriors to join in conquering the Christians of Anatolia and the Balkans. The early Ottomans harnessed the religious and martial energies of the frontier (uc) between the crumbling Byzantine and Seljuk states in order to conquer an empire. It was Wittek's formulation which became generally (though not unanimously) accepted among Western historians of the Ottoman Empire for much of the twentieth century.

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Wikipedia