Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey,

beginning with pg. 143. THE BIRTH OF TURKEY As was said earlier, the 'turkization' of Asia Minor, even though incomplete, has often appeared to be a source of astonishment, a fact that is itself astonishing. In the course of their history many other countries have changed their ethnic character, and we merely have to try to understand in each case how this took place and, if possible, in what degree and proportion. It is obviously impossible to give any figures for the Turkish immigration into Asia Minor. Generally speaking, it is difficult to believe that movements of peoples at that period can have involved more than a few tens of thousands of individuals in any one operation, at the most two or three hundred thousand, even though the texts give the impression of enormous masses (it should be remembered that regular armies in battle contained at the most a few thousand men). However, various factors come into play which, either in general or in Asia Minor in particular, increase, if not the actual scale of the numbers involved, at least its relative effect. On the one hand, as has been noted, Asia Minor, taken as a whole and with some regional exceptions, was thinly populated at the time of the Turkish penetration; and the flights, massacres and enslavements during the phase of conquest reduced the population still further. In the second place, its component elements were so disparate that, even though their total numbers were obviously far greater than those of the new immigrants, the distinction between both was already less clear, and in any case the disproportion is slighter, if the immigrants as a whole, are compared with each of those component elements, if the powers of penetration of the one side are set against the other side's powers of resistance. In any case it was the Turks alone, or certain of them, who were present in all parts, while there were Greek regions, Armenian regions, and so on. Thirdly, it is certain that the great majority of the Turks who set out from Central Asia settled in Azerbaijan and Asia Minor, most of them finally reaching the latter country. There they found living conditions sufficiently close to their own traditions to reduce the need for any adaptation, such as they had not found in the Arab countries or in central and southern Iran. Lastly, and perhaps this is the essential point, as has been explained, the ethnic effects of an invasion cannot be thought of in an instantaneous, static form. What counts is not merely the number of immigrants, but the economic and social position that they held, and also the way in which relations between the two peoples became organized, particularly marriages and births. Enslavement, or even discouragement, may have reduced the fecundity of the subject people, whereas the opening of wider possibilities in the existence of groups which tended to envisage riches and power in terms of the number of children, might on the contrary increase their birth-rate. Moreover, it is certain that, either by abduction or, more commonly, because the heads of native families hoped in return to be left in peace by the conquerors, many of the young native women must by right or by force have been taken into the victors' beds, and consequently, their children being brought up as Turks, it was the Turks who benefited by their progeny, at the expense of native society. We are of course unable to give figures or define these matters exactly, and perhaps they should if possible be modified or even called into question in certain cases. But the basic ideas, the general orientation of their evolution, in themselves appear to be distinctly probable. Naturally, a mingling of races of this kind resulted in a partial alteration of the Turkish type, but that did not prevent the children from regarding themselves or being regarded as Turks at heart. In certain cases the conquerors' racial superiority may quickly have been endangered by their monopoly of warfare, in which they suffered losses. To a slight extent, this is possibly what happened later, with the Mongols, just as it had with the Vandals in North Africa. But war

never seems to have been sufficiently permanent or costly in lives to bring about any such consequences for the Turks of Asia Minor, either temporarily or locally, and other factors would have restored the balance. However that may be, it is certain that, if Muslim authors continued to apply the name Rum/Rome (which no longer bore its precise political significance) to Asia Minor, and then to the state created there by the Seljukids, on the other hand western writers, from the time of Barbarossa's Crusade at the latest, when they had to give a name to the country, spoke of it as Turchia, Turkey, a word they did not apply to any of the other countries under Turkish domination. It is thus clear that, in whatever way the Turkish character of Asia Minar is assessed, and however ill-defined the frontiers of Turchia, its Turkish aspect was felt by contemporaries to impart a specific identity to the whole. It is true, as will be shown in another context, that this Turkish aspect did not really make itself felt among the whole Turco-Muslim popuIation of Asia Minor itself before the Mongol period; but that is no justification for dismissing the general impression held by foreigners, merely on the grounds that, from within, those concerned were more alive to the differences between their own component elements than to their unity as against others. This being said, it is now necessary to enter into somewhat greater detail, and to try to identify certain more precise features of this phenomenon of 'turkization'. Firstly, from the geographical point of view, it is plobable that the turkization was not everywhere of equal intensity. As seen through the chronicles, which mostly relate the incidents on the frontiers, the turkization appears to have been considerable all along the borders of the politically Turkish domain, facing the Greeks in the west and north and the Armenians in the south (the Georgians, for their part, were more worried by their somewhat exposed frontier with Azerbaijan than by the difficult mountains separating them from Asia Minor). There is no doubt, and there are various episodes to remind those who are uncertain, that there were also some Turkish settlements in inland regions. The fact remains nevertheless that the truly Turcoman elements had been massed mainly on the frontiers, either spontaneously or by organized movement of population, according to the individual case. It sometimes happens that place-names are given by Byzantine authors in their Turkish form, suggesting that no one was left who remembered the native form. The distinction made here shows at once that the problem is at least as much social as ethnic. When western writers speak of Turchia, it is certain that they have in mind, above all, the open country held by the Turcomans, who would have to be encountered in battle and whom, generalizing a term properly applied to nomadic Arabs, they sometimes also call Bedouins. For the towns, the problem is a different one, which will be considered shortly. The turkization of the open country is thus essentially the work of the Turcomans. Varying naturally with the region, an indigenous rural population still remained, usually forming a large majority. Not all its members had fled or been killed and, whether free or subdued, many remained in Cappadocia, Armenia, on the borders of the Anatolian plateau and elsewhere. In the western frontier zones the Byzantines often brought them back after their victories, creating a sort of no man's land (and thereby increasing the Turcomans' importance), but sometimes the Seljukids also took them back and installed them, under conditions that guaranteed their stability. The principal question, and a difficult one to answer, is to know how to picture these Turcomans of the Seljukid period. Were they exclusively nomads, or were they no longer so? It has already been remarked that, for contemporary Turkish scholars, this question is a crucial one, perhaps excessively so, and that even in

Central Asia there were modifications of nomadism (but perhaps fewer of the sedentarized elements emigrated than of the others). Moreover, a distinction has to be made between longrange nomads with camels, who were not to be in the majority in Asia Minor, and seasonal migrants with flocks of sheep, sometimes attached to villages according to the season, who surely were more numerous. Were there also sedentarized elements who became cultivators of land? Travellers describe the Turks exclusively as nomadic shepherds, but no doubt they only gave that name specifically to those who were nomadic, without including those who had ceased to be so. And from all the accounts of battles, which give the impression of a populace always ready to move, any conclusions must be subject to the same reserve. In any case, we know that there were Turcoman foresters and wood-cutters, occupations which, if not agriculture, are also not stock-breeding: this applied to many Turcomans in the Taurus, which was still covered with vast forests, and perhaps to certain ones, called the Agach-eris, whom we shall see again shortly. Pure nomadism was a rarity: there was almost always a symbiosis of nomadic herdsmen and sedentary cultivators. That the latter were in eneral indienous is certain, but it cannot be ruled out that there were already many Turks among them in certain regions. Waqf-deeds and other documents which we possess for the thirteenth century, and the more numerous ones dating from the fourteenth century (too few of which have as yet been published), can shed some light on the ethnic mingling of the peoples, and perhaps in certain favourable cases it would be possible, thanks to them, to follow the chronological rhythm of islamization or turkization. It is necessary only to be careful to differentiate between the regions and, more particularly, to note that in most cases the villages and plots of land whose owners or occupiers are named are in the neighbourhood of a town, where the process of islamization or occupation by Muslims was likely to be more rapid than in the remote countryside. This being said, it should be noted that, in the waqf which he founded with property situated on the outskirts of Konya in 598/120I, Altun-Aba explicitly refers to the abundance of 'infidels'. However, the villages and domains to which he refers have mixed names, and the conclusions to be drawn from them remain uncertain, since a village with a native name may have Turkish inhabitants, either still remaining there or brought back, the name being merely that of a proprietor or of one of the racial groups. Taken together, however, the combina- tion is significant. Similar impressions are to be gained from reading the waqfs made by Karatay, to the south of Kayseri, from the middle of the century. More definite indications are provided in those instances where it is not a village or whole domain that is named, but an individual plot of land: on the whole, what emerges, always of course in an urban district, is that there are Muslims alongside Christians. But, on the whole, there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the travellers' impressions that, in the open country, the great majority of real countrymen were Christians. These will be considered shortly. In an earlier reference to mixed unions, it was remarked that in their usual form they did not really involve any loss of Turkish character by the Turkish element. It would be interesting to know how far there were any instances of a true mingling of populations. It is possible that this happened with certain Kurds, and perhaps the Germiyan, of whom more will be said, are an example. Possibly too there were others in the Taurus mountains, with the Bulgar, or even Mardaite (?) colonies found by the Turks, which can hardly have disappeared completely. Here, too, we can only state the problem. It should merely be noted that, in the literature written to the glory of the Turcoman dynasties, far from any hostility being shown towards other rural Muslim elements, and especially towards Kurds, it seems to have been customary to serve beside them as fellow-soldiers, under Turcoman leadership. On the whole, in the possible examples of racial intermixture, turkization gained a definite advantage. There is nothing to show, and the fact of Turkish domination explains this sufficiently, that the Turks

were absorbed by native groups; but there may have been a progressive turkization of some groups in which the ascendancy, even among males, was held by natives. And, in the towns, there were the ikdsh, of whom more will be said. It would be possible to go more closely into the history of the Turcomans of Rum if we were certain, on the one hand, of the interpretation to be given to certain names of Turcoman groups, and on the other of the system of land tenure in Seljukid Asia Minor. The second question must be deferred until later. The first raises the subject of tribal organization and the identification of groups, and this is a point on which it is essential, as a principle of method, to regard Yaziji-oghlu with suspicion. This writer, when making his adaptation of the Seljukname of Ibn Bibi in the fifteenth century, introduced into it the names of the tribes which, in the climate of opinion of the Turcoman states of the time, were considered to be the most important and which were evidently anxious to discover ancestors during the origins of Turkish Asia Minor. But none of these names appears in Ibn Bibi, and consequently it is impossible to believe that they possessed, in his time, the importance they had acquired by that of Yaziji-oghlu. In these circumstances it is quite indispensable to confine ourselves to contemporary sources, or in any case to relatively ancient ones. On the question of the Turkish migration that accompanied the formation of the Empire of the Great Seljukids, reference has already been made to the difficulty of following the traces of the different tribes, whose existence is, however, largely authenticated for that period. For Asia Minor, the question is complicated by the fact that, if the names of tribes there are exceptional (and they occur solely as epithets of individuals in the thirteenth century), there were on the other hand fairly frequent references, from the beginnings of the penetration in the middle of the twelfth century, to a group of men, of uncertainorthography, (y)a(r)uki, (y)a(v)uki or other variants, a word for which no convincing interpretation has as yet been suggested. The Muslim authors, from the eleventh century, often give the frontier Turks the name "uch" which means precisely 'frontier-men', and is thus merely an equivalent of the Byzantine akritai or, with a different etymological meaning, of the Arabic gha-zi. But it is difficult to discover through what linguistic modification uch could be changed to (y)a(r)uk. Attempts have been made to link these people either with followers of Yabgu (see p. 20), something rather anachronistic, or with the iva-i, a tribe known in Azerbaijan in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or with the na-vaki, throwers of darts (in Persian na-vak), a body whose existence is attested, though not among the Seljukids, or, finally, with the yuruks, the name for Turkish nomads in Asia Minor which has survived until our own time, though not attested before the Ottomans. The last hypothesis, which is attractive historically but weak linguistically, ultimately proves as inadequate as the rest. The problem remains unsolved. The only thing that is almost certain is that it is not a matter of a tribal name. This means that, like the entire Seljukid invasion, the penetration into Asia Minor was undertaken, not in large tribal groupings but in parties made up of mixed elements. Moreover, there is no proof that the tribal spirit was as strong among the Turks as it had been among the Arabs. The only other name occurring in the ancient texts as an unquestionably collective name is that of the Agach-eris (literally 'men of the trees'), which is not much clearer than the previous one. It is not the name of a traditional Oghuz tribe, nor, as at one time was thought on the strength of a fortuitous phonetic resemblance, is it an ancient people from Russia transplanted into Asia Minor (although it cannot be proved that these Agach-eris were exclusively Turkish). They are only recorded in the thirteenth century, and for the most part in the central and eastern Taurus region, as far as the gates of Malatya, essentially as unruly elements with whom the established authorities contended. It was probably the same people who, crossing the frontier in the wake of the Mongol invasion, were then recorded to the north of Antioch

and Aleppo as 'Turcomans from Syria', not to speak of the partial dissemination that can be found in later periods. In Syria, a contemporary described them as 'a primitive people without towns or castles, and who always dwell in tents of felt and have livestock in great abundance, such as sheep and some goats and even oxen and cattle, and live like shepherds, and undertake no gainful employment . . .' (Continuation to William of Tyre). It is true that the place-names of modern Asia Minor include many names of localities and villages which are connected with those of most of the traditional Oghuz tribes. The important thing, for historical purposes, is to distinguish between the various periods, and to accept as pre-Mongol only the rare place-names which were recorded before the middle of the thirteenth century. The Mongols, either by driving back the Turcomans or by sweeping some of them aside, brought about a new influx of them, and also to some extent a redistribution of those already there; and the new arrivals cannot have been, tribally and socially, entirely identical with the earlier ones. Without maintaining that the groups whose existence is attested by later nomenclature cannot have existed previously, it is prudent to refrain from asserting that they did exist. The determination of the date of appearance of a place-name, where possible, may suggest the date of sedentarization of the group whose name is thus preserved. Perhaps, conversely also, the fact that the name given is that of a tribal group known in a.certain period may, when supported by confirmation from some other source, justify a conjecture as to the period of establishment of the village and so of the sedentarization of the group of people who settled there. The period of sedentarization may be quite different, varying with the regions and the different categories of Turcomans. Among the names which can be noted are some which are the names of tribes recorded during the Seljukid migration generally, either directly as groups or indirectly as descriptions of individuals. But that is not enough to prove that either their establishment or their sedentarization in Asia Minor was prior to the Mongol conquest. The Turks of Asia Minor officially were Muslim, while the native inhabitants were not. However, turkization and islamization must not be absolutely identified. At the time of the conquest or later, in order to save their lands or to establish a career, to contract a profitable marriage or for some other reason, some Armenian or Georgian notables in the first place, and then later some Greek ones, became converted to Islam, in a manner that ultimately must have led to the cultural and semi-ethnic turkization of their descendants, but which does not necessarily imply that they were really turkicized themselves, or even that they had any knowledge of Turkish, any more than they had of Arabic or Persian. The slaves, who for the most part were soon enfranchized, had been brought back from frontier raids (or, at first, from the actual invasion of the whole country). They represent a further islamized element (individuals of this category can often be recognized from the fact that their father's name is given simply as ''Abd Allah'). And there were Iranian immigrants, who will be discussed later and under whose increasing influence in particular the new Muslims were to be won over to Islam under its least Turkish aspects. For the present, these allusions, which are matters for ethnological study, must suffice. These questions will recur again later when the cultural and social aspects are considered. All that has just been said applies essentially to the open countryside, when it existed. Asia Minor, however, had previously been, and after a certain time once again became, under the Turks, a land of towns, or at least a land where there were towns, which played an essential part. Naturally, at the start, the devastation of the countryside, which jeopardised the towns' supplies and ruined the land-owners, and later the occupation of those towns led to emigrations, particularly by those with the means to undertake them; and the Turcoman chiefs did not settle in the towns, which they regarded as nests of infidels, and hence did not favour

the townsmen. This situation continued to be perpetuated or repeated for a long period in particular regions on the frontiers, where the surrender of the fortified urban settlements had generally been achieved after the countryside had been laid waste. But it was not perpetuated in regions of true stabilized occupation. It is a known fact that, in the East in general, nomadic chiefs settled down more readily as townsmen than as peasants (even if their followers were inclined rather to become peasants), apart from leaving the towns for occasional expeditions into the desert or steppes. Whether nomads or not, the Turkish chiefs soon established themselves in the towns. From their own past the Seljukids were familiar with town life, and it will be remembered that Sulayman was careful to provide one of the first towns to be conquered with its own regular cadi; moreover, at times when they would have delayed settling in a town, the Byzantines themselves installed them in it, as has been seen. Although more directly Turcoman, the Danishmendids' behaviour does not seem to have been very different. Within a reduced perimeter they restored the fortifications of towns, and readily settled in them themselves, or established the governors of provinces or holders of apanages and their garrjsons in them. In proportion as states were constituted, whatever may have been the proportion of Byzantine and Islamo-Iranian influences, the town was (apart from regional or native exceptions), as in all Muslim countries, at once the political, economic and cultural centre. It is true that in Asia Minor there was no town remotely comparable with Constantinople or Cairo as they were at that time, or even with Damascus or Baghdad; and indeed there was probably not a single town that could be put on the same footing as the four or five huge metropolitan towns of Iran. But there was a considerable number of fairly large townships and some cities which, nevertheless, were large and genuinely urban centres. The point of concern for the moment is the population of these towns. It is certain that, at the start, the ordinary inhabitants, alongside the Turkish garrison with its slaves and freedmen, consisted of natives who had remained there or been brought back, the proportions varying, and with a more or less clearly defined hiatus between the earlier occupation and the new one. Gradually, however, certain people of mixed race were also added, the ikdish, whose part will later be examined. Later, Iranian elements, mainly from the north-west but also Khorasanians, as has been said, were also introduced and in the thirteenth century became of importance, perhaps numerically and certainly from the social point of view. It is true that there were elements of the Iranian civil or religious aristocracy, driven out by the Khwarizmians or Mongols, before being sent by the latter to represent them; but there were also more humble men of religion, officials, merchants or artisans. It is therefore certain that the population of the towns was not identical with that of the open countryside. Without question, the Turkish element was important, but it was not exclusive, and in the organization of the new regime in all its aspects, the other immigrants had a con- siderable influence which acted upon the Turks themselves. This subject will be referred to again, in connection with cultural life, but in the present context also it should be noted that these Iranians exercised an iranizing, and so in a sense anti-Turkish, influence on the Turks. At the end of the thirteenth century the citizen of Konya who was to write the Seljukname, and who although he wrote in Persian was certainly Turkish, to judge from some of his pronunciations, restricts the name 'Turks' to the Turcomans, with a hint of disdain, the townspeople being simply 'Muslims'. If this language is perhaps not that of all his contemporaries, it is nonetheless symptomatic. While in Egypt in the same period the Mamluks, confronted with the native population, considered and described themselves as 'Turkish', in Asia Minor, confronted with the Turcomans, even the citizens of Turkish stock were no longer really conscious of the fact, they thought of themselves as 'Muslims' and stated this in Persian as often as in Turkish. The conclusive, though still incomplete, turkization was to take place under the Mongols and after them.

It is no less certain that Asia Minor, even in its Turkish elements, gave foreigners, and particularly foreign Muslims, the impression of being a truly foreign country, of 'Turkey', in fact, as distinct from the Arab world in particular. In the twelfth century hardly any travellers went there, and an envoy of Nur al-Dm, al-Balkhl, on his return spoke of the country he had seen somewhat as a modern traveller might speak of an expedition into the heart of the most isolated parts of Asia or Africa. Even in the thirteenth century the impressions formed during his travels by the Caliph's ambassador Ibn al-Jawzl should be noted. Costume naturally differed from that of the Arabs and, in the country, the Iranians. But it was above all the women who impressed the Europeans as much as the Muslims, by reason of their life of freedom (the Turcomans at least were not veiled) and their robustness (Ricoldo di Monte Croce claims that they gave birth without halting the caravan). When all this has been said of the Turkish and Muslim element, it is quite certain that, in Asia Minor, there remained some 'natives', whose total number probably greatly exceeded that of the Turks - by ten to one, William of Rubruck said in the thirteenth century. To determine the continuity of a population, it is not altogether enough to establish that some of it has remained even to the present century, since different circumstances may have encouraged people to return and recolonize zones which had been in part abandoned. It is possible that such may have been the case under the Mongol Protectorate, and it was certainly so during the last two centuries of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, until the contrary is proved, the existence of a certain native group in modern times is presumptive evidence of its existence throughout its history. This of course does not release us from the need to search in the ancient sources for direct proof of, and more especially for details concerning, this existence. Further reference will be made later to these 'natives' in connection with the organization of inter-confessional relations and the system of taxation and land tenure. One or two words will sufflce here. Western Armenia remained a largely Armenian country. This is broadly true of Erzurum, although detailed information is lacking. The position is still more certain in respect of Erzinjan, which perhaps even at that time, and in any case under the Mongols and at the end of the Middle Ages, was to have greater importance than Erzurum and, despite its TurcoMuslim colony, remained predominantly a great Armenian city. The south of Armenia had however even then been more widely infiltrated by Kurdish populations. Further to the west, it will be remembered, Byzantine policy had partly armenized Cappadocia: the Turkish conquest caused some, but not all, of the Armenians in Cappadocia to move down into Cilicia, where an Armenian principality gradually took shape, and many of them remained there, particularly in the central Taurus and its southern slopes, straddling the frontier between Asia Minor and Syria or Mesopotamia. It would be difficult to explain the fact that the Monophysites had maintained the principal residence of their Patriarch in the monastery of Mar Bar-Sauma, in the mountains to the south of Malatya, if the large communities of them which existed in Upper Mesopotamia had not extended further in this direction. As for the Greeks or the Hellenized populations, they continued to be represented along the whole coastal and mountainous periphery of Anatolia proper, from Trebizond and its hinterlands as far as Isauria, passing through the Danishmendid country, the provinces of Kastamonu and even Ankara, the upper valleys of the rivers flowing into the Sea of Marmora or the Aegean, and the region of Antalya. They still remained in considerable numbers, it must be repeated, in the very heart of Cappadocia and in the agricultural and urban parts of the Anatolian plateau itself. The conclusion then will be a double one, and apparently contradictory. On the one hand, it is certain that the majority of the population was not Turkish, it was not even Muslim, and it was not unified. And yet it is equally certain that a country, Turkey, was in the process of creation

because, as in the Russo-Asiatic steppe, and unlike the other countries politically subjugated by the Turks, there was here a Turkish people who were settling down in their own home, and whose dominating presence everywhere, when compared with the divisions of the natives, imparted a particular character to the whole of Anatolia. The 'Turkish' quality, as has been seen, was not characteristic of all the Muslims, nor even of all the Turks; but the orientation in this direction characterized Asia Minor, in contrast to the other Muslim countries.