A Subterranean History: Paul Wittek (1894-1978) and the Early Ottoman State

Author(s): Colin Heywood

Source: Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 38, Issue 3, The Early Twentieth Century and
Its Impact on Oriental and Turkish Studies (Nov., 1998), pp. 386-405
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1570906
Accessed: 01-10-2016 16:06 UTC
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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY: PAUL Wll'fEK (1894-1978)

AND THE EARLY OTTOMAN STATE
BY

COLIN HEYWOOD
London

"... there is a subterranean history of scholarship awaiting exposure".

David Abulafia, Frederick I (2nd edn., London, 1992), 456.
"... my work covers only ... Ottoman studies and ... I am rather a historian than a linguist".
Paul Wittekl

1.

In the extensive literature which has appeared in recent years on

the work of refugee or self-exiled German-speaking historians dur-

ing the Emigration2, little attention appears to have been paid to

those who concerned themselves with what may be termed, in the

broadest sense, oriental history. This is equally the case for German-speaking historians born within the boundaries of the Dual
Monarchy, as for that greater number who were by origin subjects
of the German Empire and its post-war successors. Thus, for exam-

ple, Catherine Epstein's recently published and otherwise admirable prosopographic study of German-speaking refugee historians in
the United States3 makes no mention of the Vienna-born Islamicist
and medieval historian Gustave E. von Grunebaum, who had a
1 Wittek to Professor Ralph Turner, Brussels, 6 March 1948. Autograph Let-

ter. SOAS.

2 Hartmut Lehmann and James Sheehan (ed.), An interrupted past: Ge

man-speaking historians in the United States after 1933 (Washington, D.

German Historical Institute, and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199

Catherine Epstein, A past renewed: a catalog of German-speaking refuge

historians in the United States after 1933 (Washington, D.C. and Cambridg
1993); Ritchie Robinson and Edward Timms, Austrian exodus: the creative

achievements of refugees from National Socialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1995 [= Austrian Studies, vi]).

3 Epstein, op. cit.

? Koninklijke Brill BV, Leiden, 1998

Die Welt des Islams 38, 3

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

387

long and distinguished career at the University of Chica

terly, at the University of California, Los Angeles until

1972.4 Equally overlooked has been the noted Sinologi

Eberhard (1909-1989), who has some claim at least to
nised as a historian as much as a social anthropologist

like many Austrian and German refugees from Nazism,

refuge in Turkey, teaching at the University of Ankara
grating to the United States in the postwar years.5 A nu
most important publications on the history of early me
were thus written in Turkish, which has perhaps contri
undeserved oblivion to which his work has been largely
tirely consigned.

Eberhard apart, the Turkish connection in Germa

refugee historical scholarship has been little explored
the specialist literature. The present paper represents

to open up for discussion by an audience wider than tha

sional Ottoman historians the career and writings of Pau
one of the most significant but overlooked Austrian h
the Diaspora, who ended his professional career, from
retirement in 1961, as the first holder of the Chair of T

the University of London. Wittek was born in the ou

suburb of Baden bei Wien in 1894; he died in the outer London

suburb of Eastcote in 1978. His life spanned and in its external

course was moulded by the tragedies of his time, for he belonged
to that lost Austrian generation concerning which his friend the
writer Herbert Cysarz remarked that "it was not [political] systems,
states and armies that lost wars, but particularly age-groups, those
of the 1890s who went straight from the school bench or the university to the battlefield and who, if they returned, were anaesthe-

4 On G.E. von Grunebaum see, in particular, notices by A. Abel (Correspondence d'Orient: Etudes xvii-xviii (1970 [sic]), 3-5; C. Cahen (JESHO xv (1972), 1-2;
F. Gabrieli (J. Oriental Inst. Baroda xxi (1972), 87-88; F. Rosenthal, IJMES iv
(1973), 355-8, together with longer studies by G.C. Anawati, "Dialogue with
Gustave E. von Grunebaum", IJMES vii (1976), 123-8; Amin Banani, ,G.E. von
Grunebaum: towards relating Islamic studies to universal history", IJMES vi
(1975), 140-7), and Abdallah Laroui, 'For a methodology of Islamic studies. Islam as seen by G.E. von Grunebaum', Diogenes lxxxiii (1973), 12-39.
5 H. Widmann, Exil und Bildungshilfe. Die deutschsprachige akademische Emigration in die Turkei nach 1933, (Bern 1973), 259-260.

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388

COLIN HEYWOOD

tised in their achievements through endlessly ren

Wittek's was a life for which we recognise the parall

ple, the novels-and the life in exile-of his exact

Joseph Roth: an upbringing in the evening glow
monarchy; university study in Vienna interrupte

summer of 1914; service in the KLu.K. Armee; a pos

ruined and inflation-ridden Vienna and the postof ,,Deutsch-Osterreich"; a career as a journalist

the, from the mid-twenties, difficult years of reite

followed neither (as in the case of Roth) by despair
death, nor (as with Cyszarz) by readjustment to the
cal realities of the time; finally, half a lifetime of r
gaining of high academic office in England.7
Wittek's case, therefore, was somewhat different; i

man himself, it was unique. Wounded on the Ru

Galicia in the early months of the war, and subsequ

ized in Vienna, Wittek later served on the Isonzo

1917, he spent the remainder of the war on secondm

serving in Istanbul and later in Syria. In Turkey he
tery of Ottoman Turkish and was taken under the p
German consul in Istanbul, the scholar-diplomat J

Mordtmann (1852-1932). Wittek was also taken up

tanbul-based members of the George-Kreis, a connec

votion to which was to play a leading role in his d

historian.8 Having taken his doctorate (in classica

University of Vienna in 1921, Wittek rapidly establi

6 Herbert Cysarz, Zehn Jahre Prag, p. 77 (repr. in Prag,

1989).
7 For a vivid evocation of Wittek's years as Professor of Turkish in London
see the unsigned notice in The Times, 16June 1978 [by V.L. Menage] and the sup-

plementary notice, ibid., 24 June 1978 (by C.J.F. D[owsett]), and the apprecia-

tion by V.L. Menage, InternationalJournal of Middle Eastern Studies, xii (1980), 373.

Cf. further, Colin Heywood, 'Wittek and the Austrian tradition', Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society, 1988, i, 7-25; ibid., "'Boundless dreams of the Levant": Paul
Wittek, the George-Kreis, and the writing of Ottoman history', ibid., 1989, i, 3250; ibid., 'Between historical myth and "mythohistory": the limits of Ottoman history", Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, xii (1988), 339-40.

8 Further details in Heywood, '"Boundless dreams'", 35-9; 40, ff. Cf. also, on

Wittek's links with the George-Kreis, the unsigned notice (by C.V. Bock) in
Castrum Peregrini, 28. Jg., 138. Heft (Amsterdam, 1979), 112-3, and the appreciation byJ. Wansbrough, BSOAS xlii (1979), 137-9.

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

389

a leading figure in the newly-founded academic discipli

man historical studies both as joint editor (with his tea
rich von Kraelitz-Greifenhorst) and as a leading contrib

first scholarly journal of Ottoman history publishe

Turkey, the Vienna-based Mitteilungen zur osmanischen

(1921-26). Financially, he supported himself by jour

of which was published in the conservative, Grossdeu

Osterreichische Rundschau, which he edited from 1922 until it

ceased publication in 1924. Thereafter followed some years of

uncertainty, until (in 1929) Wittek took up a post at the German
Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. On the Nazi seizure of power
in 1933 he quickly renounced a position which rendered him a
civil servant in the employ of the German state, and found refuge
(1934) in Belgium. He settled in Brussels, establishing a connection with the Universit6 Libre at Brussels and with its eminent

Byzantinist, Henri Gregoire. In 1940, with Belgium invaded, Wit

escaped via Dunkirk to Britain, where he was to spend most of t

remainder of his life. In 1948 he was appointed to the newl

created Chair of Turkish in the University of London, a post wh

he held until his retirement, at the age of 67, in 1961.9

Wittek's scholarly output was small, but in terms of the fi

highly significant. A single monograph and a short series of
tures, products both of the 1930s, were the only works to ap

between their own covers in his lifetime. He also wrote few review

the greatest part of his oeuvre, written in German, French or E

lish according to its period, appeared for the main part in schol
journals devoted to oriental, Middle Eastern or Islamic studies
work is best remembered for two rather disparate qualities, whi
were displayed (often to their mutual exclusion) in his various ac

demic publications. On the one side stands a compact oeuvre

closely argued and strictly text-based studies in the field of early

toman history. In this work Wittek displayed both an astonishin

precocity and a remarkable sense of continuity. Both his earl

9 On Wittek's pre-war career in Turkey Belgium and his post-war activitie

London see Heywood, "Wittek and the Austrian tradition", 8-11, together
the notices by Klaus Kreiser (in Istanbuler Mitteilungen xxix (1979), 5-6);
Menage] (in The Times [London], 16 June 1978), and CJ.F. Dowsett (ibid.,
June 1978). Cf. also K. Bittel, F.W. Deichmann, W. Grfinhagen et al., Beitrig

Geschichte des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts 1929 bis 1979, i (Mainz, 1979
ff.

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390

COLIN HEYWOOD

published work-critical studies on the textual r

fifteenth-century Ottoman chronicler 'Ashlkpash
when he was still in his twenties-and his last, m
exegetic studies of early Ottoman documents, pu
retirement and left uncompleted, display meticul

and forensic skills of the highest order.10 On the o

exists an even smaller group of articles, publishin

texts of public lectures or conference papers del
few years in the mid to late 1930s in various ac

Paris, London, Leiden-in western Europe. The

sions of these lectures offer a remarkably prescript

matic, intuitive and assertive view of the early (and
and inference, the entire) history of the Ottoman s
temological whole."1

The question may thus be asked: does Wittek's w

the province of Ottoman studies, or that of history
orientalist who dabbled in history, or a historian eq
oriental languages necessary to his subject? These ar
tant questions, and Wittek himself was not in doub
swer. As he wrote in March 1948, when the establis

don of a Chair in Turkish, and Wittek's candidac

were under active consideration by the authoritie

sity, "I hope that the Advisory Council will be satisfi

covers only the Ottoman studies and that I am ra

10 P. Wittek, "Zum Quellenproblem der altesten osmanis

(mit Auszfigen aus Nesri)", Mitteilungen zur Osmanischen Ges

,,Zu einigen frihosmanischen Urkunden" I, WZKM, liii (195

liv (1957), 240-55; III, ibid., lv (1959), 122-41; IV, ibid., lvi (
ibid., lvii (1961), 102-17; VI, ibid., lviii (1962), 165-97; VII, i
published 1965), 21-23. The series was reprinted (with margin
additional continuous pagination [1-141] and Index [142-5]
Paul Wittek, La formation de l'empire ottoman (ed. V.L. Mena

rum Reprints, 1982, ?VII.

11 Wittek's principal works in this genre are the following

kampfer im Osmanenstaat", Oostersch Genootschap in Nede

het achtste Congres (Leiden, 1936), 2-7; (ii) "Deux chapitres de

de Roum. (I. Les traits essentiels de la periode seldjoucide e

Les Ghazis dans l'histoire ottomane.), Byzantion, xi (1936),
defaite d'Ankara a la prise de Constantinople". Revue des Etud
1-34; (iv) "Le Sultan de Rfim", Annuaire de l'Institut de Phi

Orientales et Slaves, v (Melanges Emile Boisacq, ii), 1938, 361-90

Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938).

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

391

than a linguist".12 It is to Wittek as a historian, ther

present paper relates.
II.

How was Wittek trained as a historian? A certain weight may be

placed on his later recorded observation that the period of Ottoman history the events of which he knew best was that which he

had learned as a schoolboy in the last years of the Habsburg empire.13 Later, during his time as a student at the University of Vienna, just before and again immediately following the Great War,
he encountered such influential figures from the previous genera-

tion as the medieval economic historian Alfons Dopsch (18681953) and the German pioneer of sociology Max Weber (18641920).14 It is therefore not surprising to discover that by the time of
his return to Istanbul in 1924, Wittek's historical formulations con-

cerning the genesis and nature of the early Ottoman state were already fully developed.
I have already analysed in detail the intellectual origins of these
formulations, and their projection on to the earliest period of Ot-

12 Cf. n. 1, supra.

13 Presumably Wittek meant by this the long years of the Ottoman-Habsburg

Tirkenkriege in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in particular the
period of glorious victories for the Habsburgs which followed the unsuccessful
Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. Paradoxically, this period, so much emphasised in Austrian school history textbooks, was one which lay quite outside
Wittek's own sphere of scholarly activity. For this concealed example of
Wittekian irony see J. Wansbrough, "Paul Wittek", BSOAS xlii (1979), 137.
14 It is perhaps worth recalling that Dopsch, like Wittek, was brought to England by the University of London in 1937. In February of that year, three months
before Wittek delivered the lectures which were published in the following year
as The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, Dopsch had also given three lectures in the Uni-

versity, in his case on "Economic Problems of the Middle Ages" (Heywood, "W.
and the Austrian tradition", 7). Weber's influence on Wittek can best be seen in
the latter's two early articles, "Konstantinopel, Islam und Kalifat", and "Tfirkentum und Islam, I [all published]", both of which appeared (in vols. liii (1925),
370-426, and lix (1928) 489-525, respectively), in the Archivfuir Sozialwissenschaft
und Sozialpolitik, the most prestigious sociological journal in Germany, to which
Weber had contributed some of his most significant works, and which he had coedited. Cf. also Wittek's article, "Der Katholizismus und der deutsche Geist", 6st.
Rund. XVI. Jg. (1922), 663-74, a portentous piece of journalism equally influenced by Max Weber, and also by Alfred Weber, Herman Hefele (also a contributor
to this issue of Ost. Rund.) and Stefan George.

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392

COLIN HEYWOOD

toman history from, firstly, his romantic vision of

Holy Roman Empire, and, secondly, the stimulus affor

tek by the poetry of Stefan George and his own lin

George-Kreis during and after the Great War.15 From

vision there developed by transfer Wittek's romantic

idealised imperium ottomanicum sacrum, and his re

world more distant and even more recoverable only

imagination than his own lost pre-1914 Vienna. From t

fluence, precipitated by Wittek's youthful devotion to
viewpoint of the George-Kreis, with its commitment t
heroic leader figure, derive many elements of Wittek'
of early Ottoman history.16
Most of Wittek's leading ideas concerning early Otto
in which these particular influences are manifested, ap

developed fully in Vienna during the period from

when, both as editor and contributor, he was close

with the Osterreichische Rundschau, a conservative, Gr

litical and literary fortnightly journal. They remain

unaltered and undeveloped, never the subject of rec
or revision, for the remainder of his career as an Ottoman histo-

rian. Wittek appears never to have engaged in self-questioning, let

alone retraction, of his earlier views. It is both harsh and valid to
observe that there is no development in his historical thought, only

the endless reworking of elegant variations on a basically simple

theme. In this we may contrast him with other historians writing in

the German intellectual tradition who lived through the times of

catastrophe. One thinks here, for example, of Meinecke.17
Significant here for purposes of illustration is an early and nowadays quite overlooked piece of writing by the young Wittek. In 1922
he reviewed in the Osterreichische Rundschau a dissertation

entitled "Die Kulturbewegung im modernen Tiirkentum", w

by Ahmed Muhyieddin, lecturer for Turkish at the Univer
Leipzig.18 In this review we find an already almost fully dev
expose of Wittek's historical thought concerning the Ot

15 Heywood, "'Boundless Dreams of the Levant"', passim Paul Witt

George-Kreis, and the Writing of Ottoman History (1989).

16 Heywood, "'Boundless dreams of the Levant'", 35-9 and 40, ff.
17 Cf., on this point, Heywood, "Wittek and the Austrian tradition", 23
18 Osterreichische Rundschau, XVIII. Jg. (1922), 836-9: review by W

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

393

Empire and its place in Islamic and world history:

,,Seit dem zehnten Jahrhundert unserer Zeitrechn

die innerlich erlahmte, politisch sich atomisierende

Hochkultur durch das widerholte Einstr6men tuirkischer Volker-

schaften frische ethnische Krifte und die M6glichkeit zu neuen, vor

nehmlich auf das Schwert gestitzten staatlichen Ordnungen. Di

erfolgreichste dieser Grfindungen, das osmanische Reich, erho

sich im vierzehnten Jahrhundert am dussersten Rande der islamische

Okumene, indem seine Begrfinder von einer staunenswert kleinen Bas

im Nordwest-Winkel Kleinasiens aus sich in die Fuigen des ve

morschten byzantinischen Reichsbaues eindringten, alsbald (sei

1350 etwa) auf christlich-slawischen Boden ein groBes Reich schufen

das nach kurzen Rickschlage (um 1400) sich in den Besitz de

weltberihmten Kaiserstadt Konstantinopel setzen konnte (1453
und bald hernach (seit 1512) den gr6Bten Teil der islamischen
Welt unter seinen, die Kalifatswiirde bekleidenen Herrschern vereinigte".19

Here, within a single paragraph of no more than one hundred

and fifty words, are brought together most of the key elements in
Wittek's fully-developed historical construct concerning the origin
and development of the Ottoman state down to the sixteenth century:

- the ethnic emphasis on the rejuvenation of the Islamic world by

the "fresh ethnic strength" brought by the repeated inflow of Turkish groups (Volkerschaften);

- the further emphasis on the peripheral position of the Ottoman

state vis-a-vis the Islamic "oikoumene" and on the almost miracu-

lous nature of the Ottoman successes "from an amazingly sma

base" in north-western Anatolia;

- the underscoring of the "rottenness" of the Byzantine empi

contrasted with the almost uninterrupted rise of the Ottomans to

the creation of an empire "on Christian-Slavic soil (Boden)" and to
a position of primacy in the Islamic world via the conquest of Con
stantinople.
Only two elements from Wittek's later historical constructs are
Ahmed Muhiddin, Die Kulturbewegung im moderen Turkentum (Leipzig, 1921).

Heidi Stein, "Ahmed Muhiddin <1892-1923>. Leipzig'de bir Tfirk Bilimadam

Tarih ve Toplum, Haziran 1993, pp. 356-358.
19 Ibid., 836. Italics added.

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394

COLIN HEYWOOD

missing from his 1922 review of Ahmed Muhiddin: th

the Ottomans' own historical traditions; and the leadin
ghazis in Ottoman history.

To deal with the latter element first. For an unde

Wittek's view as to the primacy of the ghazis, the proo

exposes of the subject delivered at the 1936 meeting

Oriental Society and in March of the same year at the

But these essays date from 1936, a decade and a half

then lay the roots of Wittek's obsession with the ghaz

already noted elsewhere, they lie in a "transference

ritterlich ideals of the George-Kreis, and the whole

thenschau" which Wittek constructed out of his uncri

ance of the ethos-world of 'Ashlkpashazade and of t

suspect and much criticized indicators: the mosque i

Orkhan in Bursa, and the famous passage in praise of t

Ahmedis versified epitome of Ottoman history.21 Thes

the problem have already been dealt with elsewhere

seek a deeper level of personal involvement in Wittek's

of the anti-Byzantine Turkish fighters of the fourtee

north-west Anatolian borderland. The impetus came

those fateful years 1921-2 and from the then still und
gle between the Turkish Nationalists and the Greeks
trol of western Anatolia. In an article entitled "Die Tfirkei nach

dem Weltkrieg", yet another of the pieces which he contributed

these years to the Osterreichische Rundschau, Wittek wrote, with r

erence to the recent Turkish Nationalists' first victory at Inn

over a Greek army (10 January 1921), the following remarka
piece of historicist-presentist fusion:

Nun kampft die tiirkische Krieger um durch die Geschichte geheilig

Heimatboden-[der] Schlachtort ist wohl bekannt aus den alten Chroniken, die von Osman und Orchan, die beiden osmanischen Herrschern erzahlen. Man kann [sich nur] vorstellen, welche moralische Kraft den
Truppen Mustafa Kemals daraus erwichst.22

20 p. Wittek, "Die Glaubenskampfer im Osmanenstaat", Oostersch Genootschap in Nederland, Verslag van het achtste Congres (Leiden, 1936), 2-7; ,Les
Ghazis dans l'histoire ottomane", "Deux chapitres", 302-19.
21 P. Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1938, 14-15.

22 P. Wittek, ,Die Tfirkei nach dem Weltkrieg", Ost. Rund. XVII, Jg. (1921),
599-603, at p. 603.

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

395

Leaving aside the preposterous inference of the la

Turkish troops of that era finding solace in the lingu

ties of the then almost entirely unpublished fifteenth
man chronicles we find here again Wittek's emphas
only be termed Blut und Boden history and on a rom
cal affiliation of land and people over a period of s
One may only say, without attempting further paralle
here presents an entirely bogus construct in his attem
lish a historical connection between the Kemalist, n
sent and the distinctly non-ethnic, dynastic Ottoman
Imber has already made this point in another context
tion of one of Wittek's later, and most influential, ar

is important to note the appearance of the theme at

and formative period in Wittek's intellectual developm
III.

There are also other elements in Wittek's writings w

evidence for the infiltration of his mental processes
the George-Kreis. Much was made by Ottomanists in

period of the significance, in the social and econom

Anatolia in the pre-Ottoman period, of the urban gui

so-called akh' corporations, the Muslim urban bro

sufistic inclination. This is not the place in which to

tory of this particular historiographic obsession back

and Taeschner to the work of Louis Massignon, or

present-day proponents or detractors, but merel

point that in Wittek's case the akhi-idea was also fitt

his ghazi world and his George-Kreis cosmology. In hi

23 Cf., in this context, the concluding paragraph of Wittek's

article: ,So ist durch das bewundernswerte Geschick beherzter Manner das alte

osmanische Reich im Begriffe, verjiingt und gefestigt aus dem Chaos von 1918
hervorzugehen. Die groBen europaischen Machte, gestern daran, es aufzuteilen,
schatzen es heute als einen wertvollen Genossen bei der Verwaltung der Welt.
Die mohammedanische Welt, deren Vormacht es gestern als ein wohlgehaBter
Gebieter war, blickt heute in Liebe und Hoffnung nach ihm als ihrem Ffihrer

und Hort".

24 Colin Imber, "Paul Wittek's 'De la defaite d'Ankara a la prise de Consta

nople', Osmanli Arasttrmalarz v (1986), 65-81, reissued in ibid., Studies in Ott

Histo7y and Law (Istanbul, 1996), 291-304.

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396

COLIN HEYWOOD

paper, which even more than his London lectures

year on "the Rise of the Ottoman Empire", provi

synthesis of all Wittek's idees fixes, Wittek attempte

the establishment of a futuwwa organisation by t

century 'Abbasid caliph Al-Nasir. Principally, Wittek

appeared to have had the ghazi movement in mind:

Denn es kam ihm ja darauf an, fur seine Politik, die auf E
Kalifenmacht zielte, ergebene Krieger zu finden. Dazu bot

ihrem Treueverhiiltnis zwischen Meister undjftnger ein vorzfi

Here, in the stress (justified or not) placed by Witt

ment of a "relationship of loyalty" (Treueverhaltnis)

ter and his young male followers, is clear evidenc

into Ottoman history of Stefan George's own view o

tionship as Meister with his disciples, which was a lea
fundamental) tenet of the George-Kreis. The Anat
deed, in Wittek's elevated view, had become by this

mere adventurers, but the title of ghazi was n

throughout the Islamic world as signifying no less t

und Adel-"Chivalry and Nobility".
An epitome and summation of Wittek's intellectu

be found in his 1937 London lectures, already me

These lectures, in their published form, have alr
cussed elsewhere;26 here it is merely necessary to

they contain in compressed form all of Wittek's hist

tions concerning the origins, character and destiny o

state. One such sweeping historical generalisation,

to have gained wide acceptance, and which ties up th

toman history in a couple of sentences, bears requoti
"naive curiosity", Wittek wrote, that impelled him t
study, "but rather the conviction that the history o
state ... becomes comprehensible only after one ha
its origin. The well-known sentence, that every state
ence to the same causes that created it, holds good

tent for the Ottoman state ...".

"Today", he continued and assured his audience

gained a clearer comprehension of its origins, we
25 Italics added.
26 See n. 8.

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

397

derstand better the latter and even the most recent per
toman history".
But what was the source of Wittek's "well-known sent

which he fails to provide a reference? To the Anglothe idea is at best a paradox, at worst a substitute f

thought on the processes of cause and effect. What, on

vestigation, proves to be surprising is that Wittek's for

the context of English writing on Ottoman history

means a new one in 1937. Sixty years earlier, at the heig

Eastern Crisis of 1875-8, Cardinal Newman, in the cours
essay on "The Turks in their relation to Europe",27 ob
"the catastrophe of a state is according to its antecede
destiny according to its nature; and therefore ... we can
on any anticipation of the instruments or condition o
until we know something about the principle and the ch
its life".28 The Wittekian parallelisms in this passage
able: yet clearly it is unlikely (if not impossible) that
read and was regesting Newman.29 It is worth recalling,
that the intellectual roots of enlightened English Rom
thought in the mid-nineteenth century-Newman's ro
as those of a more mainstream and significant historian

Acton-lay deep within the traditions of German hist

romantic medievalism. Acton's own intellectual debt to his mentor

Ignaz von D6llinger (1799-1890), theologian of Munich and p

dent of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, is well document
27 John Henry Newman, Historical Sketches, i (London, 1876), 1-238.

28 Newman, Historical Sketches, i, 161.

29 Equally noteworthy is the correlation between Newman's historicist p

uring of the conditions for the disappearance of the Ottoman empire"indestructable ... in the simplicity of its national [sic] existence ... while it remains faithful to its religion and its imperial line. Should its fidelity to either fail,

it would not merely degenerate or decay; it would simply cease to be" (Historical
Sketches, i, 220)-with Wittek's post-imperial rationalisation of the reasons for its
final disappearance (Rise of the Ottoman Empire).
30 Cf. David Mathew, Acton: the formative years (London, 1946), 67, ff.; idem,
Lord Acton and his times (London, 1968), 38, ff. Acton had a long, intellectually
unsatisfactory relationship with Newman; and in 1858 was instrumental in bring-

ing Newman and Dollinger together-in Birmingham (Mathew, Acton and his

times, 60). D6llinger's work as a historian was known in late-Victorian England.

His Studies in European History, "translated at the request of the author", were
published posthumously by John Murray in 1890: cf. his essay on "The significance of dynasties in the history of the world", originally delivered to the Royal

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398

COLIN HEYWOOD

Newman, drawing in his essay on the Turks a signif

between what he termed "barbarous" and "civilise

capable of drawing on Schlegel's Philosophy of Histor

son's translation) for a reference to this history of C
IV.

To pass judgment on Wittek's historical formulations, sixty years

after their final crystallization, ought not to be a difficult matter.
Ideally, it should not be necessary; in any case, in historiographical

terms the field has moved on, although perhaps not as far as it
should. The problem, as already observed, seems to be largely an
Anglo-Saxon (or at least an Anglo-American) one: in Germany
(and in Austria) both radically new and traditional philology-based
Ottoman historical studies flourish without reference to the problem, although it is not irrelevant to note how for several decades

the critical period of Ottoman history prior to 1453 has been almost completely ignored in both countries.

It is, however, perhaps worth recalling the year 1935. This was
the year in which H.A.R. Gibb and Sir Denison Ross appear first to

Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1880 (op. cit., I 25), which contains (pp. 6-8)

some deterministic, quasi-Wittekian, observations on the course of Ottoman history: "the fate of the empire was predestined by the Korean and the religious traditions of the Sunnis. Where polygamy, slavery, murder, religious oppression and
persecution are unassailable principles, sanctified by the example of the Prophet
himself, no reform and no recovery is possible for a body politic thus sick to

death". Four years later, in 1894, John Murray also published Dollinger's Ad-

dresses on historical and literary subjects, which contains, in an essay (pp. 50-72) on

"The founders of religions", an ecological justification for the emergence of Islam which finds distant echos in Wittek's apotheosis of the Anatolian frontier
zone as an area of special significance for the emergence of the Ottomans (cf.

Addresses, 57).

31 Newman, Historical Sketches, i, 162. According to Newman, "civilised

states" "live in some common object of sense [sic] (defined as "secular interests,
country, home, protection of person and property"), and "are destroyed from
within" (by "civil contention, ... revolution, decay of public spirit); whereas "barbarous states" "live in a common imagination" ("religion, true or false ..., divine
mission of a sovereign or dynasty, and historical fame") and are "destroyed from
without" by "foreign wars, foreign influence, insurrection of slaves or subject
races, famine, accidental enormities of individual power ...."
32 Newman, Historical sketches, i, 177: "the whole history of China, from begin-

ning to end ..., displays one continued series of seditions, usurpations, anarchy,
changes of dynasty, and other violent revolutions and catastrophes".

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

399

have set in train the academic processes which would

to London-as a distinguished visiting scholar in 1

emy alien and refugee in 1940; as Professor of Turkis

versity of London in 1948. For already in 1935 th

shortcomings of the neoromantic school of history, t

the baleful influence of Stefan George on a generatio
sionable younger historians, had been attacked in a
presented to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in tha
German medievalist Walther Goetz, a paper which pr
gone unread in Anglo-Saxon orientalist circles of th

possible only to speculate as to the extent to whic

nison Ross and Gibb were aware of Wittek's ideolo

and in particular of his devotion to the ideals of the

and to history as a genre of literature based on intuit
sensschau". Possibly, to both English scholars, such id
genial. Both Denison Ross and Gibb were romantics, a
entalists than historians. It comes as no surprise to d

the late Elie Kedourie's revelations that Gibb, at le

have regarded academic history in much the same lig

German neoromatics of the period, "als bloBe Mat

und Beschreibung".34
V.

What finally can be said in conclusion concerning Wittek's

legacy as a historian? The positive side has been well set down by
those best qualified to do so. Was there also a negative aspect? Pos-

sibly there was, in that Wittek's historical concepts, which were

formed no later than the mid-1920s, were transplanted into the al-

ien soil of British (and American) academia after the end of the
second world war. There, as exotic imports will, they took firm
root. This influence, when coupled with Wittek's methodological
conservatism, and with the inevitable reaction to it, determined
the trend of English (and much of American) work in early Otto-

33 Walter Goetz, "Intuition in der Geschichtswissenschaft", Sitzungsberichte

der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Abteilung,Jg. 1935, Hft. 5 (Minchen, 1935).
34 Goetz, 'Intuition in der Geschichtswissenschaft', 5.

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400

COLIN HEYWOOD

man history for half a century. Furthermore, the

spirit in Wittek's work, in the sense of the existence

in his treatment of the aetiology of causation and

long-term change in Ottoman history and (to put it

both his trusting acceptance and his failure to qu

proclaimed rationale at the heart of the "official" vie

man state as a ghazi state par excellence, must be not

phasized. Equally significant are the origins of th

naive (because romantic) affection for the subject of

tory, lying as they do in well-documented feelings o
sonal deprivation for the vanished Dual Monarchy of
of which tended to render childlike, almost, his historical responses to the broad characteristics of Ottoman history.35

35 How naive was Wittek in his historical judgements? In this context it may
be useful to reexamine the published text of the two lectures which he gave at
the Sorbonne in 1938 ("De la defaite d'Ankara a la prise de Constantinople", Revue des Etudes Islamiques, xii (1938), 1-34, reprinted in Paul Wittek, La formation
de l'empire ottoman (ed. V.L. Menage), London: Variorum Reprints, 1983, ? II),
and in particular the lengthy section (pp. 15-26) which Wittek devotes to the
events of the fifnet devri, the near quarter-century-long Ottoman "time of Troubles", which followed on the defeat, captivity and death of Bayezid I at hands of
Timur in 1402-3. Colin Imber ("Paul Wittek's "De de defaite d'Ankara a la prise
de Constantinople", Osmanli Arastzrmalarz, v (1986), 65-82) has harshly criticised
Wittek's handling of this episode, and has taken particular issue (pp. 76, ff.) with
Wittek's treatment of the personalities and motivations ascribed Bayezid's sons,
Sfileyman, Muisa and Mehemmed, the major contenders for power during this pe-

riod. Imber's demolition of the bases for Wittek's characterisations-of the wine-

sodden, debauched, Latinising Sfileyman; the austere, fanatical, revolution

Mfisa, and the essentially aristocratic but at the same time "heroic" national
deemer figure of Mehemmed, is more than adequate to expose the shaky f
dations in historical reality of Wittek's imposing edifice, but Imber's argum
sound as it is, can be taken a stage further, beyond the fundamental Quellenk
which informs it. Wittek's interpretation of the fitnet devri, the events of w
he tailored to fit his own purposes, is seriously flawed, most evident in his re
to admit evidence, or attested historical figures, whose existence and activ

during that time in themselves refute Wittek's hypotheses. Particularly signific

is the figure, neglected by Wittek, of the so-called 'Duizme' (or False) Mus
the undoubted son of Bayezid so strangely neglected by Wittek. Why should

be so? The answer would seem to lie in the fact that the course of 'Dfizme'

Mustafa's career cuts across the splendid 'tableau vivant' of Wit

defaite": Mustafa in fact had a far harder time of it than did Mius. Carried off to

captivity in Samarkand, he returned more than a decade later, attempting twi

(1415-6; 1421-2) to establish a counter-sultanate in Rumeli. And yet, in his s
month reign at Edirne (late summer-midwinter, 1421-2) he behaved even mo
irresponsible than did Sfileyman, whereas, on Wittek's reasoning of suffering a

hardener of character, Mustafa should have been a second Musa, which he

patently was not.

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

401

In this uncritical approach to Ottoman history W

stand alone. One of the peculiarities of Ottoman hist

it has developed since the demise of the Ottoman

been the almost entire lack of any spirit of revisionis

period of the Great War and its aftermath. Thus

nothing to equal-for example-the Fritz Fischer c
postwar German historiography over the role of G
outbreak of the Great War. The reasons for this state of affairs are

obvious and need no elaboration in the present context.

It was not only in this context that Wittek's intellectual legacy
a historian was, in the end, a tragic one. A refugee from dictatorship for half his life, he was, in his historical thought, both a vict

and a proponent of essentially autocratic views, albeit ones of

intellectual and spiritual, rather than a crudely political, orde
The point had already been made with exemplary clarity by W

tek's countrymen and near-contemporary Robert Musil, in his dia

entries for 1934-7, the years in which Wittek, by then himself
refugee from political and spiritual tyranny, was working out the
full development of his essentially authoritarian formulations
Ottoman history. ,,Lange vor den Diktatoren", wrote Musil, ,,h

unsere Zeit die geistige Diktatorenverehrung hervorgebracht

Siehe George. Dann auch Krauss und Freud, Adler undJung ... D
Gemeinsame ist wohl ein Bediirfnis nach Herrschaft und Ffihrer-

schaft, nach dem Wesen des Heilands".36

We are thus obliged to confront a cast of mind which is largely

alien to Anglo-Saxon modes of historical thought, and also, for the
most part, to those of Germany and Austria since 1945. The question may be asked: was this case of mind one which was unique to

Wittek, or can it be discerned in other refugee or expatriate historians of Central European origin in this period? An example which
springs to mind in the English academic context is that of Sir Lewi

Namier, another muhdjir historian of Dual Monarchy origins, al

beit of rather more provincial ones than Wittek's. Namier was

longer resident in England than Wittek, and was infinitely closer t

the heart of the English academic establishment than he, but both

predominated equally, with a high and often intolerable ascend-

36 Robert Musil, Tagebuch ?34 [1934-7], Tagebicher, Aphorismen, Essays und

Reden (ed. A. Frise), Hamburg, 1955, 398.

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402

COLIN HEYWOOD

ancy, in their chosen fields. Relevant here would

harsh judgement on Namier by the English histor
who described him as a man of far-reaching intellige
he added, "his major preoccupations were confin
deeply obsessional. Indeed, he was a curious mixture
specialist, excited by the minutiae of historical inves
a creative artist, alive to the nuances of human p
mier was also, Plumb concluded, "imaginative, percep
daring, capable of using techniques that bordere
and gullible".37 Much the same was said, in his tim
George-Kreis Doppelganger, Ernst Kantorwicz, co

it is useful to recall David Abulafia's observation that he lived in

that atmosphere, characteristic of the George-Kreis, "where broa

sweeps of imagination and impudent generalisations were, if

the norm, at least the ideal".38

Much the same might be (and has been) said concernin

Wittek. Evidence may be gathered from his 1953 essay on the

of Constantinople, with its neo-Georgesque hero-worship of
hemmed II and its plethora of (to borrow from Plumb) "tec
niques that bordered on the bogus and the gullible". Exampl
may be chosen almost at random:
- In speaking of those who fell in the general assault on 19 M
1453: "All those who in that merciless fight bravely gave their li
for the glory of their faith, Muslim and Christian alike, went-I
sure-straightway to their respective paradise;39
- On Constantine XI: "His heroice decision to fight and die spr

no doubt from his sense of the holiness of the imperial office ...";

37 J.H. Plumb, "The atomic historian" [on Sir Lewis Namier], The New Sta

man (London), 1 August 1969, pp. 141-3. Cf. also John Brooke, "Namier

Namierism", in George II. Nadel (ed.), Studies in the philosophy of history (N

York, 1975), 97-113 (originally published in History and Theory, iii/3 (1964),
47).
38 Frederick II: A mediaval emperor, London 2 ed. 1988. D. Abulafia, "Kantorowicz and Frederick II", History, lxii (1977), 193-210, at p. 197. The article is reprinted in D. Abulafia, Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean, 1050-1400 (London,
1987).
39 P. Wittek, "Fath mubin-'An eloquent victory"', in: Steven Runciman, B.
Lewis, R.R. Betts, N. Rubinstein and P. Wittek, The Fall of Constantinople (London:
SOAS, 1955), 33-44, at p. 35.
40 Wittek, "Fath mubin", 42.

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY

403

- On the Jewish population of Constantinople:

doubt considerable number of enslaved Jews, it c
that their numerous coreligionists among the sla
good care of them".41
Are these three examples merely flights of fancy,

suggested by a sympathetic participant at the time,42

ples of Wittekian irony-or are they "history" cast in

the George-Kreis, Gundolfian even in their fine w

their question-begging impudence, hardly to be ac
ous history?
VI.

The present essay has been cast in terms of Otto

graphy rather than of Wittekian biography. The
Wittek's life and scholarly career which have been

taken in the main from his own writings and from t

servations of his critics and commentators. There has been an irre-

ducible minimum of reference to biography as such. Should

then be content to look at history rather than at the historian,

the work rather than the individual who produced it? There is a
spectable school of thought which holds that we should. The gre
historian of Rome, Theodor Mommsen, who died in 1904, requested his family after his death "to prevent as far as possible the

publication of detailed biographies" and added, "let my books be

read as long as they may last: what I have been or ought to have
been, is no concern of the public".43 These are brave and proud
words-but are they proper to be uttered by a historian? Are we
ourselves, the foragers in so many private and public lives, so sacro-

sanct in our own persons? Probably, almost certainly, not. How

much poorer intellectually should we be without Gibbon's Letters
or Autobiography, or without Werner Kaegi's monumental biogra41 Wittek, "Fath mubin", 36-7.

42 The suggestion was made by Professor Jacob Landau, in the course of a

conversation in Cambridge, July 1984. I should perhaps add that Professor
Menage was kind enough to observe to me in this context: 'I was there ... The
printed version [scil. of "Fath Mubin"] is vastly different from the rambling discourse W[ittek] gave-but I have destroyed my notes of what he actually said" (undated MS. note).
43 "Theodor Mommsen's Last Wishes", Past and Present, 1 (1953), 71.

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404

COLIN HEYWOOD

phy and collection of the letters ofJacob Burckhard

per has not gone so far in its discussion of Wittek as

ple, recent studies on his contemporary fellow-histo

ber of the George-Kreis, Ernst Kantorowicz, is only
sult of our possessing at present a relatively smaller
mentation on which to draw.

And indeed, there are so many questions relating to our under

standing of Wittek as a historian which remain perforce unan
swered. What were the causes of his youthful obsession with an
lifelong devotion to the poetry and ethos of Stefan George. Wh
do we know of those early years about which Wittek apparent
spoke with affection late in life? Why the obsession with George,

and the apparently desperate need for an authority-figure in

time of crisis? It may be worth recalling to mind a parallel instanc

from the life of a greater mind than Wittek: Max Weber's interest

in the George-Kreis came much later in his life, following on a par

tial recovery from a paralysingly severe breakdown of several years
duration.44 At that time this most rational of minds exhibited a
flight from the rational as evidenced by his increased interest in,
firstly, Marx's explanation of the nature and origin of capitalism;
secondly, in a surge of interest in Russian culture, as particularly
represented by the mystical and irrational side of Tolstoy's work;

and thirdly in the George-Kreis, and in what one perceptive observer (Y. Malkiel) has defined as "its glorification of instinct and
impulse".45
There is a need to know more. In a savage but perceptive review
of Wittek's sole monograph, Das Firstentum Mentesche (1932),
his former collaborator and contributor to the Mitteilungen zur
osmanischen Geschichte, Fr. Giese, spoke of Wittek having produced a bogus historical totality out of a series of "individual phenomena" (Einzelerkenntnisse) concerning the emirate of Menteshe
44 On the intellectual and personal background to Max Weber's relationship
with the George-Kreis see Arthur Mitzmann, The Iron Cage: an Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York, 1970), 261-71 and passim: further: cf. G. Roth, "Po-

litical Critiques of Max Weber: Some Implications for Political Sociology", in:

Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth (ed.), Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on
Max Weber (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1971), 55-71.

45 Yakov Malkiel, "Ernst H. Kantorowicz", in R.A. Evans, jr. (ed.), On Four

Modern Humanists, Hoffmansthal Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz (Princeton, 1970),

146-219, at pp. 171-2, 173.

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A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY 405

which did not in any way themselves add

whole.46 Whether or not the Einzelerkenntnis

up to a meaningful whole, or where and ho

may be continued, is equally still open to ques

46 Fr. Giese, [review of P. Wittek, Das Firstentu

1935)], Historische Zeitschrift, cliii (1935-6), 370-1.
47 It is now more than ten years since my two earli
peared. Apart from some ill-tempered but non specific
tain quarters concerning the iniquities of 'younger'
(amongst whom I presume I have the honour to be i
work on the emergence of the Ottoman state has still
lenge of exploring further the subject's intellectual fo

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