Paul Wittek

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Paul Wittek
Born(1894-01-11)11 January 1894
School of Oriental and African Studies
Doctoral studentsVictor Louis Ménage
Notable studentsPeter Charanis, Stanford J. Shaw, Elizabeth Zachariadou
Main interestsearly Ottoman history
Notable worksThe Rise of the Ottoman Empire (1938)
Notable ideasGhaza thesis

Paul Wittek (11 January 1894,

expansion of Islam. Until the 1980s, his theory was the most influential and dominant explanation of the formation of the Ottoman Empire
.

Biography

Wittek was conscripted at the

Ottoman Turkish and acquired the patronage of Johannes Heinrich Mordtmann [de
], the former German consul in Istanbul. Once the war ended, Wittek returned to Vienna and resumed his studies in ancient history, which he had already begun before the war. In 1920 he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on early Roman social and constitutional history, after which he dedicated himself to the study of Ottoman history.

Wittek was in Vienna during the emergence of the fledgling discipline of

Paul Kahle and Hans Lietzmann.[4] Wittek's activities included study tours to collect material on early Ottoman epigraphy.[5] He also examined beylik-period architecture and collaborated with Friedrich Sarre and Karl Wulzinger [de] on a monograph of late medieval Miletus under Islamic rule. In Istanbul, he met and befriended the Russian Orientalist Vasilij Bartolʹd.[6] He claimed a part in the collective effort of Turkish historians to put a halt to the sale of Ottoman treasury archives to Bulgaria as scrap paper by İsmet İnönü's government in 1931.[7]

After

School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS), which he held until his retirement in 1961.

Wittek, who was a devoted member of the

George Circle (along with the fellow medievalist and academic refugee Ernst Kantorowicz[9]), published relatively little and mostly in short form, but became very influential within his discipline. His only book-length studies, on the principality of Menteşe and on the rise of the Ottoman Empire, appeared in the 1930s. In the latter Wittek formulated his ghazi thesis, according to which the ideology of sectarian struggle was the major cohesive factor in the formative phase of the Ottoman Empire. The ghazi thesis was, until Rudi Paul Lindner
's nomad thesis in the 1980s, the prevailing view of the emergence of the Ottoman Empire.

Books

Notes

  1. ^ Heywood 1988, p. 10.
  2. ^ Bittel 1979, p. 74.
  3. ^ Maas 2018.
  4. ^ Bittel 1979, p. 77–78.
  5. ^ Heywood 1988, p. 9–10.
  6. ^ Binbaş 2012, p. xiv–xv.
  7. ^ Shaw 1979, p. 139. On the archive sale affair, see Altay 2017, p. 35–36, Uluışık 2015.
  8. ^ Bittel 1979, p. 83.
  9. ^ Heywood 2008, p. 299.

References

External links

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