In 1938 the Royal Asiatic Society published The Rise of the Ottoman Empire by Paul Wittek, based upon lectures he had delivered in London a year before. In this little book he offered for the first time in English the Strong Wittek Thesis, in which zeal for the holy war became the engine fuelling Ottoman success (and its disappearance leading to doom: “It is not surprising that [the Ottomans] failed the test of the Great War and disappeared forever”).Footnote ¹

Wittek began with a brief review of the scholarly literature on the formation of Ottoman history, of which there was little. In particular, he discussed “the eminent Turkish scholar Mehmed Fuad Köprülü”, whose recent book he found wanting: “Unfortunately in this book the investigations are limited to the earliest epoch and do not go beyond the beginning of the fourteenth century. All the questions which are especially important for explaining the development towards an empire are therefore completely missing in this work”.Footnote ² Wittek soon went further. Building on his earlier detection of interpolations and his demolition of the early Ottoman dynastic genealogies, he commented: “The fact that such an interpolation, which splits the whole genealogical connection, was possible and could establish itself proves that any tribal feeling, if such ever existed, had already disappeared”.Footnote ³ He added: “Yet even Fuad Köprülü has not been able to renounce this tradition, and he still maintains that the Ottomans are Qayı-Oghuzes and that their state was originally based on tribal links”.Footnote ⁴

Neither of these criticisms is quite accurate or just. Köprülü did devote most of his book to the Seljuk, Ilkhanid, and early Ottoman background, but he also offered on numerous occasions and in the last portion comments on the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (but not the era of Murad II and Mehmed II, who were very important to Wittek).Footnote ⁵ Even more significant is his treatment of the tribal aspect of the early Ottomans: “. . .the fact that the Ottomans were not of the Mongol race but belonged to the Qayı clan [sous-tribu in the French original] of the Oghuz was of no consequence at all to the historical march of events”.Footnote ⁶ Further: “Although they [the members of the Qayı tribe accompanying the first Ottomans] formed the nucleus of a new political entity, they had no effect whatsoever on the nature of the state that was created. A handful of people whose role was completely political, and determined somewhat by chance, they produced a state founder from among their ranks and initially served as his base of support, but it is impossible to attribute to them any other influence. . . .”Footnote ⁷ Some years ago I stated that Wittek's error was an innocent slip; today I am no longer so sure.Footnote ⁸

Köprülü certainly did not consider the matter an innocent slip. In an eighty-four page article on the ‘ethnic’ origins of the Ottoman Empire published in 1943, he dedicated the last nineteen to criticising Wittek's position. Right from the start he repeated that he had attributed little significance to a Qayı tribal membership.Footnote ⁹ He remarked upon Wittek's emphasis on the role of ghazi ideology and reminded the reader that he had himself written about the ghazis in his Origines, and he stated his own hope to publish a full study of the significant issues in a forthcoming work.Footnote ¹⁰ He did add that he considered Wittek's sole reliance on the role of zeal for the ghaza as a simplification of a complex reality.Footnote ¹¹ At the end of a long and detailed demonstration he offered a summary: the Ottoman dynasty belonged without a doubt to the Qayı; the Qayı had entered Anatolia in the eleventh century with the Seljuks and definitely not later with the Mongols; and that, against Wittek's assertions, he had not considered the Ottoman state “tribal”.Footnote ¹² Wittek never responded in print to this article.

A possible cause of Wittek's accusation lies in the frayed tapestry of the history of Turcology. The personal relationship between Wittek and Köprülü is now probably beyond recovery. The professional relationship, however, was complex. Today's scholars know Wittek best for the Strong Wittek Thesis; certainly I have heard few remark on their study of his work on Anatolian toponymy, his early demolition of the Ottoman genealogies, the articles on early Ottoman documents, or even some of his later English-language publications. It is the role of the ghazis for which his memory remains secure. It is therefore worth mentioning that Professor Tibor Halasi-Kun suggested to me in 1972 that Wittek had learned of the significance of the ghazis from an early publication of Köprülü. If there is a proof text for this suggestion, it is the short annex to Theodor Menzel's famous article on early Turkish mystics.Footnote ¹³ Here Wittek remarked, “The fact that Osman appears first and foremost as a ghazi places his foundation of the state in an entirely new light”. He refers at the end to Köprülü's valuable commentary on the ghazis in a recent book.Footnote ¹⁴ In that book, referring to the spread of Turkish institutions from Inner Asia to Anatolia, Köprülü explicitly mentions the important role of the ghazis.Footnote ¹⁵ It is also good to recall that these were also the great days of the arch-ghazi, Mustafa Kemal, and that heroic notions were very much in the air. It was certainly Wittek, going far beyond what Köprülü had suggested, who took what was in the air and made a theory of Ottoman history from it — and it alone.

In the early years Wittek could not write enough about Köprülü's positive qualities. In 1927 Wittek published a feuilleton, “Köprülüsade Mehmed Fuad”, in the Istanbul German business journal Türkische Post. The occasion of the half-page essay was an honorary degree to be awarded the Turkish savant by Heidelberg. Among Wittek's compliments were these: “And now in conclusion a word about the celebrity. This is a man who, thoroughly and on his own, a shining example to his people, has taken up the immense task now facing his nation, to shatter the bonds of oriental thought and win through to the modern European attitude — without abandoning the fertile roots of his own nation and its many valuable traditions. . . . For years this man and his elevated intellectual goals have lived in quiet retirement. To that fortunate person who visits him in that turreted kiosk in which he has established his study, one glance reveals what spiritual strength and the treasures of learning surround Köprülüsade. I imagine that nobody has departed from that study, packed to the ceiling with books and yet furnished in exquisite taste, without taking along stimulation and instruction in great abundance”.Footnote ¹⁶

Five years later Wittek entered the lists in Köprülü's defence. In 1932 he published an excoriating review of Franz Babinger's Die Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen und ihre Werke in Der Islam.Footnote ¹⁷ Most of the review contained criticisms and corrections of Babinger's treatment of the early Ottoman chroniclers, ending in the fifteenth century. But the last paragraph of the review was dedicated to Köprülü. Wittek pointed out that Babinger had twice provided the wrong publication date for the Turkish scholar's Türk edebiyatında ilk mütasavvıflar. He then added, “B[abinger] really ought to say what he has in mind by this re-dating”.

This minor matter was not the end of it. Wittek ended his review, “One may conclude that [Babinger] is ill disposed to the highly honored Turkish scholar from the fact that [Babinger] does not shrink from reproducing on his p. 302 the laughable Constantinople squabble over Köprülüzade's family”.Footnote ¹⁸

What is all this about? A number of possibilities come to mind. One of them is that Babinger and Köprülü had been entwined in the warp and woof of controversy before. In 1921 Babinger published a lengthy article on the history of Islam in Anatolia; based upon his inaugural lecture in Berlin, it was published again in Turkish translation in 1922. Immediately after, Köprülü published a lengthy review and refutation of Babinger's work.Footnote ¹⁹ Perhaps Wittek thought that vengeance was what Babinger had in mind.

We bear in mind as well that there was a considerable amount of ill will between some of the scholars of the time. There was no love lost between Wittek and Friedrich Giese, the editor of the Anonymous Chronicles and Aşıkpaşazade.Footnote ²⁰ Wittek's feelings about Babinger were even worse. Babinger ignored Wittek: his article on jihad for the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences left out Wittek's contributions.Footnote ²¹ After Babinger died in Albania in 1967, Wittek wrote:

The correct date of publication is not a major matter. Correcting proofs for Babinger's Geschichtsschreiber must have been a time-consuming and unpleasant task. The printed book has well over 400 pages, and many pages have dozens of citations to manuscript numbers, titles in foreign languages, and dates. But what was the ‘Constantinople squabble’, and why would anybody care?

The passage that exercised Wittek comes late in Geschichtsschreiber, almost the very end. It is part of Babinger's entry on Ali Emiri Efendi (1857–1924). Scholars of today know Ali Emiri Efendi as the founder of a great library in Istanbul, a collector and connoisseur of manuscripts, and the saviour of one of the earliest and most profound works of Turcology, Mahmud al-Kashgari's Diwan lugat al-turk, whose sole manuscript Ali Emiri possessed. Ali Emiri Efendi was an Ottoman of the old school, a gentleman who had little interest in European oriental studies, a lover of Ottoman traditions, and an opponent of the new ways of scholarship and literary style. After the rise to power of the Young Turks, he retired physically and intellectually to his study, and his eternal legacy remains the preservation of his vast and valuable collection in the library he founded.Footnote ²³

The dispute between Ali Emiri Efendi and Köprülü was in part between an older and a much younger scholar (the one born in 1857, the other in 1890, a generation later), in part between an aficionado of a traditional literary style and a harsh modernist critic, in part a matter of differing tastes and styles, in part a clash over the cultural and political future of Ottoman society, in part a dispute over who would end up buying a rarity in the book bazaar, and, perhaps at heart, personal distaste and a mutual lack of respect. While Ali Emiri Efendi was the past master of an imitative style (and had been called “the Fuzuli of today”), Fuad Köprülü wished to wed the future of his society both to European approaches and a more Turkish culture (as his generation strove to define and understand such a phrase). Their dispute played out over the yellowing pages of newspapers and magazines during the last decade of Ali Emiri Efendi's life.Footnote ²⁴ And it was bitter: Köprülü had won a reputation as an intellectual fighting cock, and this offended Ali Emiri Efendi; Ali Emiri Efendi, for his part, had crossed the line. Martin Hartmann opined that “In the better Istanbul circles engaging in personal matters is just not done”.

It went further than that, for in his entry on Ali Emiri Efendi Babinger wrote, “[Ali Emiri Efendi] especially hated the leader [der Führer] of the younger Turkish scholars, the historian of literature Köprülüzade Mehmed Fu’ad Bey (born 1306/began 7 September 1888), whom he considered with his strongest distaste. Thus he spent much time in the attempt to establish that Mehmed Fu’ad Bey was not descended from the Köprülüs, but his family tree descended instead from a brother-in-law of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, a certain Kibleli Mehmed Pasha, and thus Mehmed Fu’ad Bey should rightly be called Kiblelizade”.Footnote ²⁵ This was the ‘Constantinople squabble’. Family descent was still highly valued in certain circles, and this accusation partly explained Köprülü's tone of outrage.Footnote ²⁶ Honour, truth, justice, all seemed to be at stake and to Wittek Babinger's dredging up a quarrel that had died with Ali Emiri Efendi was wrong.

Was there really anything to it at all? The answer, as so often in historical research, is both yes and no. Köprülü Mehmed Pasha's sister, Fülane Hatun, married Kibleli Mustafa Pasha. Of their great-great-great-grandsons, one was named Kiblelizade Mehmed Vassaf Bey, the other took the name Köprülüzade Ismail Afif Bey. Ismail's son was Ahmed Ziya Bey, his son Faiz Bey, and his son Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad.Footnote ²⁷ In 1924 Ali Emiri Efendi died, to the last calling his nemesis Kiblelizade Fuad; in 1934, when the law about family names went into effect, Mehmed Fuad took the last name Köprülü and that brought the matter to an official end. In one sense, he was not a member of the celebrated family of viziers; on the other, he was, as a collateral. When the hagiography of the family came to be written in the eighteenth century, only those in the direct line entered into the picture; but those closely connected were not excluded from the household.Footnote ²⁸ From Ali Emiri Efendi's perspective, however, lineage was a sharp tool not to be toyed with. The lack of respect for the traditional ‘law’ of family line was the great sin.Footnote ²⁹ It was his task to give the Kiblelizade their proper place, and if it brought Mehmed Fuad down a peg, well, that was a not entirely unwelcome bonus.

We may now return to Wittek, Köprülü's admirer and defender. In the mid-1920s he had come to Istanbul from Vienna and soon became the resident orientalist for the German Archaeological Institute, then located in a crowded building just off Taksim Square, in a former ward next to the German Hospital.Footnote ³⁰ There he rapidly gained a formidable reputation for his philological and historical studies. In 1933, however, the Nazis came to power in Germany and towards the end of July the German foreign ministry ordered that Institute employees now had to greet each other with the ‘German Greeting’, known to speakers of English as the Hitler salute. The order contained specific instructions for correct performance. Martin Schede, director of the Institute, was away, and Wittek was briefly in charge. He let it be known that he would raise his right leg in preference to his right arm.Footnote ³¹ The ambitious Hittite scholar Helmuth Bossert and an associate spread the word to the German authorities. Wittek soon received a request to provide proof that he was of Aryan descent; he responded that he had been hired for his scholarship and not for his stock. In short order he broke with the Institute's director, Martin Schede, partly for personal reasons, partly because Schede, a loyal bureaucrat, did not attempt to ameliorate the conditions imposed from Berlin. Their personalities and political views were very different, and Wittek's scholarly reputation had risen above that of his boss.Footnote ³² He continued to prepare his monograph on the history of the beylik of Menteşe, whose publication the Institute was to fund, but the formal connection was at an end. Discord, jealousy, opinions expressed perhaps too openly, the bad blood spilled by Bossert, had broken the peaceful, scholarly atmosphere of the Institute.

What was now to happen to Wittek? In 1933 he might still have had hopes, for the Turkish government found academic positions for a hundred or so German-speaking scholars whose faith or politics or both had placed their careers in jeopardy. It was not to be. There are two intertwined stories here, both recounted by Kurt Bittel. Having wrapped up the season's work in Boğazköy, in October Bittel went to the historic Ankara station to catch the Istanbul train. Waiting to bid him farewell was the director of the Ethnographic Museum, Hamit Zübeyr Koşay. His colleague took him aside and expressed regrets that it would not be possible for the authorities to hire Wittek. Bittel was shocked, not least because he had been in the field for months and had nothing to do with events unfolding in Germany, Istanbul, or Ankara. Koşay went on to explain that since it was known that Wittek not only had no friendship for Turkey but had criticised both modern Turkey and Turkish scholarship, employment in the state schools was out of the question. Bittel spoke strongly in favour of his friend and said that he knew of no such opinions as were now attributed to Wittek. The grounds for Koşay's report surfaced later. The German Archaeological Institute had no journal of record but published an informal mimeographed quarterly report of the activities of its members. In the October 1932 issue Wittek wrote a circumstantial report of recent meetings of Turkish commissions and congresses, including the recent Turkish historical and linguistic theories.Footnote ³³ A copy of the issue found its way to the Berlin scholar Willy Bang, who left it lying around his seminar room, where Turkish students found it, read it, and reported its critical contents to the Turkish ministry of public instruction, which forbade Wittek's public appointment.

Bittel thought that there was another, decisive reason. Wittek had hoped for a professorial appointment at Istanbul University, and he thought that Köprülü was his champion. He had supported his Turkish colleague unstintingly, had lobbied intensively for his honorary degree from Heidelberg, and given him as much assistance as he could.Footnote ³⁴ However, despite Köprülü's public expressions of friendship, the professor and head of program had no intention of allowing a potential rival to join him in the same institution. It was some time before Wittek realised that Köprülü had led him on and done absolutely nothing to further his hopes. He had proven himself no friend to the German scholar, now bereft of hope of a position in Germany or Turkey.Footnote ³⁵ And Bittel ended his discussion of Köprülü's betrayal by mentioning the suspicion that Mehmed Fuad was in actuality not Köprülü but, as Babinger had suggested, Kibrisli [sic!].Footnote ³⁶ Since Bittel did not read much in the way of Ottoman studies, how did he learn of this accusation? From Wittek?

Perhaps Wittek did not intend to misunderstand his false friend as he lectured from the security of London; perhaps he did make a rare slip. And perhaps not.

We have rehearsed four sad stories. Had Ali Emiri Efendi's sole accomplishment been the preservation of Kashgari's great work, it would have been enough to raise him among the immortals. Had Köprülü been known only from the reputations earned by his students, it would have been enough to establish him as the beacon light of humanistic scholarship in the early Kemalist entity. Had Babinger only published his series of articles on the history of scholarship, it would have been enough to mark him out as the saviour of so many obscure heroes of the field. Had Wittek lived in obscurity after his departure from the German Archaeological Institute, his work would have been enough to have singled him out as that person whose views, right or wrong, changed the direction of Ottoman history.

It was not to be. Ali Emiri Efendi was protective of the only scholarly path he knew; Fuad Köprülü, a bright and eager young man without a strong academic pedigree, allowed his sharp elbows free play; Franz Babinger, injured thereby, afforded Ali Emiri Efendi's diatribe a European audience; and Paul Wittek, his expectations of rescue dashed, allowed himself to misconstrue the scholarship of a former ally.

Clio's mansion has many chambers. It is now time for us to depart from the romper room. As a New York socialite from the 1930s, Lamont Cranston, put it, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” If we are to learn a lesson from this visit, perhaps it lies in the response that Rabbi Hillel offered to an inquirer: “What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbour. That is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now go and study”.Footnote ³⁷