Some Observations on the Influence of Byzantine Institutions on Ottoman Institutions.

• Author: Morrison, Robert S.
• Position: Book Review

By MEHMED FUAD KOPRULU. Translated by Gary Leiser. Ankara: TURK TARIH KURUMU, 1999. Pp. vii + 195.

Gary Leiser has given scholars the first English translation of Koprulu's 1931 monograph-length article on the historiography of the Ottoman Empire ["Bizans muesseselerinin osmanli muesseselerine tesiri hakkinda bazi mulahazalar," in Turk Hukuk ve Iktisat Tarihi Mecmuasi I (1931)]. In 1981, Koprulu's son Orhan republished this monograph in book form (Bizans muesseselerinin osmanli muesseselerine tesiri [Istanbul: Otuken Nesriyat, 1981]), but Leiser, aware of transcription errors in the reprint, has relied on the 1931 original for his translation. He has corrected Koprulu's footnotes and has updated them with references to more recent literature. Leiser has also provided a six-page postscript (pp. 161-66) that chronicles the reaction of European and Middle Eastern scholars to Koprulu's book from the time of its publication through the end of the twentieth century. The explicit goal of Koprulu's monograph was to refute the historical paradigm that held that the Ottoman Empire was an Islamized version of the Byzantine Empire. He implied that once one stops believing "that the Turks were basically a warrior race, uncultured and dependent upon other peoples and civilizations" (p. 12), Ottoman history could move beyond a sequence of battles, conquests, and defeats to a broad examination of Ottoman culture.

In Koprulu's era, historians in Europe had argued that the entire institutional culture of the Ottoman Empire, from military offices to palace banquets to methods of public humiliation, was carried over directly from the Byzantine Empire. In individual sub-chapters devoted to Ottoman institutions such as the Grand Vizirate, the Dual Beylerbeylik, the Kadiaskerlik, the Defterdarlik, etc., Koprulu showed that whatever his adversaries attributed to a direct borrowing from the Byzantine Empire, had also existed in pre-Ottoman Turkic civilizations, such as the Seljuks or Danishmendids, or in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. On the basis of these Islamic predecessors, Koprulu argued that there was no considerable, direct Byzantine influence on Ottoman institutions.

The existence of similar institutions in earlier Islamdom does rebut the view that the Ottoman Empire could not have been anything but an Islamized Byzantium. Koprulu generally overstated his case, however, when he concluded that there could not have been Byzantine influence on Ottoman...