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Braude, Benjamin. "Review of Lindner's 1983 Book: Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia." Speculum 62.3 (July 1987): 701-03.

Brodsky, Matthew RJ. "Ibrahim, Isma'il, Ishaq: The Sacrifice." The Importance of Jerusalem in Early Islam. Graduate Seminar Paper: Tel Aviv University, 2005. 25-36.

    "There were so many events in this war that the pen can't describe them all, the tongue can't list them all."

           It is clear from Wittek's thesis that the battle for Constantinople was a religious one, just as it is clear from Lindner's thesis that religious zeal had nothing to do with it. According to Princeton University Ataturk Professor, Heath Lowry, "the desire to see Islam spread among the conquered Christian peoples was a secondary factor."^[31] He argues that once the Empire extended beyond Egypt, and included, Syria, Palestine, and parts of Iraq, (early-mid sixteenth century) the Ottomans began to perceive themselves as the inheritors of the great past Islamic dynasties. "This meant conveniently rewriting early Ottoman history. No longer was the state portrayed as what it had had been: a state with only a nominal regard for the niceties of Orthodox Islam. It was now projected as having always been a gazi state driven by the ideal of spreading Islam by sword into the reaches of Christian Europe...[they] were repackaged as devout Muslims who were driven by zeal to spread Islam in the lands of the unbelievers."^[32] This revisionist interpretation is not supported by the surviving firsthand accounts.

          It was with the coming of the pagan, steppe dwellers (known now as the Turks) that the flame of jihad was rekindled. They came from the grasslands of Central Asia from where waves of nomadic raiders, later including the Mongols, issued forth periodically to ravage the settled, city dwellers to the west. Gradually, these raids continued to carry Turkish tribes westward and by the ninth century, many settled along the frontier zone along the Muslim border. The Caliph of Baghdad recognized their fighting qualities and recruited many of them into his armies as military slaves.

         

          The Turks had primarily three kinds of contacts with the Muslims:

            At the center of the ghazi debate are two diametrically opposed theses. The first is Paul Wittek's 1938 thesis that claims that ghazi tradition was the motivating factor in the formation of the Ottoman Empire. A relative consensus formed around his influential thesis and it remained largely unchallenged for half a century. In the 1980s, several scholars began to challenge Wittek's basic assumptions. Among them was Rudi Paul Lindner, whose elaborate, systematic, and anthropological approach to dismantling ghazi theory became the most recognized work in his 1982 article and subsequent book.^[8] He claimed that ghazi ethos had nothing to do with the Empire's formation.

            Both Wittek and Lindner rely on the issues of genealogy, migration, and the value of a fifteenth century chronicler's account - Ahmedi's chronicles. There are several other differences in approach leading to diametrically opposed conclusions. What follows is the essence of the two theories (they are to be kept in mind during the subsequent discussion - see "Conclusions" for this author's appraisal):

    "Constantinople is a city larger than its renown proclaims.  May Allah in his grace and generosity design to make it the capital of Islam."

                            - Hasan Ali Al-Harawi, twelfth-century Arab writer^[1]

 

          For the Ottoman Turks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Constantinople stood out as a psychological problem, taunting their ambitions and cramping their dreams of conquest. For Western Christendom, it was the bulwark against Islam, keeping them secure from further encroachment. In the millennium since the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and established the eponymously named city, various armies laid siege on Constantinople no less than twenty-four times. However, the capital of Byzantium fell only once before falling to the Ottomans - to Christian knights during the Fourth Crusade.

 

          Byzantium was the final heir to the Roman Empire and the first Christian nation. Its capital in Constantinople was conceived as a replica of heaven since its founding. Triumphs were seen as the work of God and failures were seen as the culmination of collective Christian sin and therefore, God's punishment.