The Ottomans

Toûrkoi (Τοῦρκοι) is the Byzantine name for the Ottomans, the plain usage of the last Greek historians, Doukas and Chalkokondyles among them, who wrote the empire’s end within a decade of living it; their histories, composed just past 1453 about the decades before it, are this atlas’s continuity clause at its most literal. The word itself was old in Greek: Constantine VII had used Toûrkoi in the tenth century for the Magyars, and the name wandered among steppe peoples in Byzantine usage before settling permanently, from the eleventh century onward, on the Turks of Anatolia, first Seljuk and then Ottoman.

The refusal inside the name is the entry’s point. The Ottomans styled themselves the House of Osman and, increasingly, heirs of Rome; the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, could concede neither, and Toûrkoi names the enemy strictly by ethnicity, an ethnonym where the dynasty offered a dynasty and the Persians offered Rūm. It is the mirror of the Franks’ imperator Graecorum aimed at Byzantium itself on this atlas’s western pages: what a rival calls you is calibrated exactly to what it will not call you. After 1453 the Greek east lived inside the word’s shadow, tourkokratía, the rule of the Turks; the last name the dying empire coined for its conqueror became the first name of the era that followed it.

Banū ʿUthmān (بنو عثمان), “the sons of ʿUthmān,” is the Arabic name for the Ottoman house, the usage of the Mamluk chancery and the Arabic historians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; al-Qalqashandī’s great secretarial manual, compiled in Cairo around 1412, prescribes the correct forms of address for correspondence with the Ottoman ruler, styled the lord from the line of ʿUthmān, one princely house among the many the chancery ranked. The construction is the ordinary Arabic tribal genitive, banū, the same frame that holds Banū Umayya and Banū ʿAbbās, and the founder’s Turkish name Osman is restored to its Arabic original ʿUthmān, the caliph’s name it descends from.

The entry preserves a hierarchy at the moment before it inverted. To the Cairo chancery of 1412 the sons of ʿUthmān were a frontier dynasty to be addressed with measured courtesy, junior to the sultan of Egypt who sheltered the Abbasid caliph himself; the grammar of banū quietly filed them among the Arab world’s familiar family-states. Within a century the sons of ʿUthmān had taken Constantinople, and within two they had taken Cairo, the caliphal title migrating to the house the manual had ranked below its own master. Chanceries fix names at the moment of writing; this one caught the Ottomans in the last decades when the Arabic world could still address them as one family among many.

Âl-i ʿOsmân (آل عثمان), “the House of Osman,” is the dynasty’s own name for itself, and it stands in the title of the first Ottoman history ever written: Ahmedî’s verse chronicle, the Dâstân-ı Tevârîh-i Mülûk-i Âl-i Osmân, “the tale of the histories of the kings of the House of Osman,” appended to his İskendernâme and presented to the sultan Mehmed I around 1412. The construction is Persian, āl “house, family” with the connecting -i, wrapped around the Arabic name ʿUthmān that the founder bore in its Turkish shape, Osman: three languages in three words, which is the early Ottoman court in miniature. From the same name Europe made “Ottoman,” and Turkish itself Osmanlı, “of the House of Osman.”

The endonym is the atlas’s last, and its logic closes a long series. The atlas’s states have named themselves for lands, peoples, cities, and, in the caliphate’s case, an argument; the Ottomans named themselves for one man, a frontier bey dead around 1324 whose personal name became an empire, an ethnicity in foreign eyes, and eventually the English word for a footstool. No other polity in these pages is so completely a family name worn by a state. The chronicle that first wrote the name down was finished in the dynasty’s darkest decade, between Timur’s hammer and the civil war; the house survived, and the name Ahmedî fixed on paper in 1412 had, within his readers’ lifetimes, taken Constantinople.