TURKEY

The Original Historian

He said to the master,“Sir, I’ve come to get inspired by your experience. I’ve been exerting myself trying to write history, to no avail.”
The Original Historian

By Dr. Elif Uluğ


The historian shrugged:

“What a frivolous concern, my dear sir! Why are you trying to write history? Just revise the most famous histories, and that should suffice. Isn’t that how it’s done? Do you happen to have a novel idea? Do you want to relate events and people from unexpected perspectives? Don’t! You’ll only end up making the readers uneasy. The readers don’t like to feel uneasy. Don’t be original. An original historian incurs worldwide mistrust, contempt and loathing.”

Halil İnalcık achieved the unadvisable feat depicted in the Preface of Anatole France’s Penguin Island. He rewrote the history of Devlet-i Aliye-yi Osmaniye, and thus left his mark in the annals of history. We bade farewell to the centenarian pillar, the world-renowned historian İnalcık yesterday. In order to acquire an epithet like ‘the beacon of historians’, that is, to be the epitome of knowledge, one has to be able to say that they have written “72 books, most of which after the age of 80”; still taught at the age of 100; and advised many Ph.D. students including people like Donald Quataert, Cemal Kafadar, Colin Imber, and Rudi Paul Lindner. İnalcık, who inspired us, had been a student of such great teachers as Fuad Köprülü, Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, and Şemseddin Günaltay. In his own words, he took classes from first rate scholars and worked like a monk for his ideals. However, the student eventually surpasses the teacher. Therefore, Bernard Lewis says, “Köprülü and Barkan were the great scholars of their time, but Halil İnalcık is the greatest of all time.”

As a student of history, I was introduced to İnalcık through his masterpiece “the Establishment” where he claimed “the Ottoman State started with the Battle of Bapheus in 1302, and not in 1299.”  Also, especially the chapter called “Religion and Culture” in his book “the Classical Age in the Ottoman Empire” broadened my horizons while writing my own dissertation. Since I cannot possibly mention all his works here, I’ll only focus on “the Establishment of the Ottoman State and its Becoming an Empire” (Kuruluş ve İmparatorluk Sürecinde Osmanlı). What does it mean to claim that the Ottoman State was established in Yalova in 1302 instead of Söğüt in 1299?  It means sifting through many archival documents, living a large portion of his life quietly in the archives, compiling and combining documents meticulously, working his way through dusty shelves like a detective in order to show the three year difference between what was taught to us and what he found out to be true. İnalcık did not confine his work to only documents, but traveled around Anatolia, whose history he wrote, extensively. He was a topographer. He did not repeat the dozens of clerical errors made before him. Local narratives and rumors that allowed history to be reconstructed today with a new outlook and perception found their place into his materials. These are the tools of a new historiography today.  He evaluated the materials that came down through epic historiography under the light of waqf records. He did not digress from the archives. He described the objective of a historian’s curiosity for knowledge as follows: “to find out about how people lived in the past, and what their daily life and economy looked like rather than writing the history of states.”

We learn from Halil İnalcık that Osman Bey was much more than a shepherd, and was indeed a respectable warrior who could summon other seasoned warriors. We also get to place what Osman Bey experienced, into a historical perspective. What really strengthened him was the victory and the charisma he gained in the Battle of Bapheus in1302 against Byzantium. This would pave the way to a great empire. İnalcık did not stop there, and went on to show with documents that the Ottomans came to the West not by fighting, but by compromises.

Inalcik once said “What makes nations is their history. A nation without a history is like an individual without a personality.”  He made one of the greatest contributions to our common past with his unique perspective. The loss of Halil İnalcık is like the loss of an elderly family member for the historian community. The death of a great scholar is like the death of the whole world, indeed. However, thankfully, we have his masterpieces to keep him with us. He gave just the recipe for these dire times:“Pessimism is cowardly. We are a great nation. Turkey is great. We have a 1500 year old history.  We need to sustain that greatness with all that we have. Abandoning it is akin to treason. If there are shortcomings, we need to work on them. We have to live in a way becoming to our state history and work very hard.” 

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