The Origins of Ottoman History

I'm a great believer in the idea that when we look at the history of an era, we're looking at first of all what we can reconstruct of what happened, how it happened, and if we can, why it happened the way it did. Given that in the early stages of any enterprise that has a long history in front of it, people were not really aware of what was going to happen. And as a result, often they didn't take a great deal of care. They didn't understand that some particular decision that they made would in fact have reverberations and not only reverberations, but that there would be something that would grow out of it later on. At the time, they're not really aware of it. And therefore, if you have an account of the beginnings of an enterprise and that account is full, is rich, is well put together, I would be highly suspicious of it. That's Rudy Paul Linder, Professor of History and Astronomy and Maritus at the University of Michigan, and the author of the books, No Mads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, published by Indiana University Press in 1983, and Explorations in Ottoman prehistory, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2007. As color with a broad array of interests, Rudy has written on pastoral nomadic societies, coinage, printing, sheep, the history of astronomy, historiography, and above all, on the origins of Ottoman history. Over the years, the Ottoman history podcast has featured interviews with hundreds of scholars on an incredible variety of topics, spanning the Ottoman Empire's six plus centuries and vast territories. But remarkably, until now, the podcast has never covered the formative period of Ottoman history, that is, the Ottomans' emergence and expansion in Anatolia in the 14th century under the dynasty's eponymous founder Osman and his successors. This is simply a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of scholars work on the early modern and especially the later periods of Ottoman history, which are far better documented. In contrast, the murky origins of Ottoman history have been the subject of only a handful of studies over the last half century, but plenty of controversy, given the limitations of the available sources. The importance, according to the motivations, and organizational strategies of Osman's followers and successors, and the abiding influence of the arguments and ideas of two scholars active in the 1930s. The debate on Ottoman origins has been contentious. So much so that the Ottoman scholar Colin Ember argued in 1993 that "the best thing that a modern historian can do is to admit, frankly, that the earliest history of the Ottomans is a black hole. None of the theories of Ottoman origins, ancient or modern, is tenable. Any attempt to fill this hole will simply result in the creation of more fables." But our guest Rudy Lindner has spent his career exploring the event horizon of Ottoman history. On this episode of the Ottoman history podcast, Mariam Patton and I talk with Rudy, who is my graduate school advisor, about the history and historiography of Ottoman origins, about the sources and scholars that shaped the field. And about the experiences, teachers, and ideas that shaped his own approach to writing, Ottoman history. I'm Joshua Michael White. Stay with us. Colin Haywood used to say that the virtue of studying early Ottoman history is that it enables us to get to understand the sources better. That is to say, he looked at things not for the sake of whether Ottoman was a shepherd or not, but what the accounts of Ottoman's pastoral activities, what that might imply about the nature of the chronicles and the other sources we have. To understand the early Ottoman period, there is a need to think of it as an era that is not necessarily an extension back of later Ottoman history. You can do the history of the Ottomans in the 17th or 18th of the 19th century. Fundamentally, you can do a reasonably good job with sources in Ottoman. You cannot study early Ottoman history without having reference to the Byzantine Greek sources. Period. There is nothing you can do about that. I'll give you an example. One of the things that interested me was what was the nature of the social organization of early Ottoman society, given that after all they found themselves in an area where there was a background of Byzantine and earlier civilizations. Well, I couldn't find much that would satisfy me from the Ottoman side. I found hints here and there. The early Ottoman sources, the chronicles, tell us the family of Osman was a family of pastoralists. But to get to know, for instance, whether they were a nomadic power, this is something that must be inferred from the Byzantine sources. And many of these Byzantine sources have not been translated. So, for example, there is a panagiric in honor of a Byzantine emperor that was written and delivered in the early 1290s. And in this panagiric, the author is suggesting ways in which the Byzantine emperor, poor Nebuchadnezzar, can attempt to deal with the Turks on the eastern and south eastern frontier. And he says, you know, it's very hard to do this. The best thing to do would be to get in touch with the Seljuk Sultan. Because if you try to deal with these people themselves, they're always changing from one leader to another leader. You can't locate them because, you know, they're moving their animals from one place to the other. And things change. And he goes on to describe this. And what he is talking about is, first of all, a pastoral society and secondly, a society in which you have changing tribal leadership, whatever one means by the term tribal. It is the Byzantine sources that often give us little tidbits of information, especially because this particular panagiric was written in 1293, 1294. And we have no Ottoman source that goes back that far that is contemporaneous with those events. So I think there's that issue. There's the issue that you really have to look at at this from the perspective, not only of Turkish materials and Persian Arabic, but also the Greek materials. You were taking us in this direction before. And it's a very simple one, but I think it's not an easy one to answer, which is where for you does Ottoman history begin? Ah, Ottoman history begins in the door to Paul Vitech's old office in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Or if it's after six o'clock at night, across the street from the school in Schmitt's German restaurant, where he would start his seminar three in the afternoon and it would finish at one in the morning when the waiters got sick and tired and said, "Get the heck out of here." Where Ottoman history begins? Now, first of all, the earliest Ottoman written source, leaving aside coins and inscriptions, is the source that was used by Ahmedi in his Versified Chronicle of the World. It turns out that that same source was used 30 years later by Shakrullah for his history of the world in Persian, which has a chapter on the Ottomans. And that same source was used in the Ottoman Anonymous Chronicle that was translated by Dmitri Kostratis. The great work on how these things fit together was done by Viktor Manage, his doctoral dissertation, 700 Rockam Sakam pages. That work of Manage is, I think, the finest thing I've ever read in Ottoman history. It is inspirational. Manage demonstrated, just in passing, that this earliest source that was used by Ahmedi, Shakrullah and the Oxford Anonymous, was in Persian, slightly less than expected. I think Ottoman history probably begins sometime in the 1250s or 1260s, when the Mongols seriously began installing some of their forces in Asia Minor and some of them were installed pretty far to the west. And I think that the Ottomans probably were related in some way, shape form, not that they were Mongols in a sense of speaking Mongolian, but that they arrived in the wake of the Mongols. And the Chronicles have something to say about this, and I'm not certain whether what the Chronicles say is accurate, but the general tenor is that the Ottomans came in as pastoralists in the middle or the third quarter of the 13th century. I don't think that's too much in dispute. Now the question is that once they find themselves in Northwest Asia Minor, what then happens to them? We are told in the Chronicles that the Ottomans' winter pastures were northwest of Eskisha here, between Eskisha here and Bilegic. And their summer pastures were to the southwest in the mountains of an area called Dumanic, and the stories tell us that on the way to and from their winter pastures, summer pastures, they would stop and deposit some of their goods that were not movable with the Byzantine Lord of Bilegic. Nice story, except it makes no geographical sense. And so the question then arises because it's way out of the way for them to go to Bilegic. We know that the Ottomans had no mades with them because they, in the accounts of their earliest military exploits in the Byzantine sources, they are clearly mounted archers. But maybe many of the people with them were in fact not pastoralists, that is to say they may have been in the process of settling down, and the story of their pastoralism is something of a conceit. In any case, by the second, third decade of the 14th century, they find themselves in this area which is suitable perhaps for pastoralism, but is much more suitable for settled agriculture. And I think that one can see them them settling, and once can see them adopting some of the institutions of settled society. Here is something where I would like to make a point about method. The future of early Ottoman history does not lie so much in the chronicles, although there's a good still to be gleaned from them and from the Byzantine sources. But if I were young and were doing it all over again, I would go to Turkey, and I would go to the walkf records in Ankara, and look at all of the Pious Foundation records that they have from the area between Eskisha here and Borsa. And then I would go to the tax registers, and look at the tax registers for the area between Eskisha here and Borsa to see what there is. Had Anne Belderciano began to do this, and she wrote a couple of articles in which she talks about this. People don't take as much attention to what she did, but she is very careful worker. And she has a lot to say about, for example, that in the time of Asman and even early period of Orhan, the Ottomans were pretty small beer. That there were other bailiks that were doing far better than they did. And that the man who really creates the enterprise and gets it going is Orhan. Let's look at something that nobody looks at. Let's look at coins. The coin edge of Orhan is fascinating. There's a lot of it, and there are many different types. And it's good silver. You mint that much money and have different kinds because you have a need of it. You have a need of it to pay people and you have a need of it for trade. And I think that's very interesting. You know, one of the reasons why the 13th century is so interesting is in 13th century Asia Minor, if you look at works on the Seljuks. The most interesting thing about the 13th century for the Seljuks is, I think, in part the architecture, but especially the coin edge, is an enormous amount of silver that's flowing here and there in 13th century Anatolia. I didn't article not too many years ago about the silver mines of Asia Minor. There are more silver mines in operation in 13th century Asia Minor than any time before or since. There are more mince striking good silver that is to say 95% fine or better in 13th century Anatolia than any other time before or since. And that includes the Greg period and the Roman period. It's no wonder that these coinages called Ackches, little white things because of the purity. So I think Ottoman history begins out of this Incoate period when the Seljuks are losing power. What is the expression I use? The Seljuks become guilty of the crime of loitering with intent to govern and the Ottomans begin in Northwest Asia Minor and you then have to ask the question, well why did they succeed and the others didn't? And the answer is to put it bluntly, nobody knows. [music] Cuperlu was probably right that it's a variety of circumstances. One of the things is that if you look at the Baelics, the competing Baelics, Germion, Caramon, Iden, one of the things that they tended to do was to use a very old practice that goes back to the 7th and 8th and 9th centuries and was elucidated by Peter Golden of Rutgers, which is dividing rule between brothers. That led to difficulties and succession problems. But I think it's also true that the Ottomans had this good thing going for them that they controlled or they were in the position to control have influence over a number of significant trade routes. They also had the advantage that the weaknesses of the Byzantines who were terribly involved in defending themselves in the Balkans. The Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor was probably the strongest in the later Middle Ages. After the 4th Crusade, when they had to simply make themselves profitable, make themselves strong with an Asia Minor. When they recover Constantinople in 1261, immediately their efforts turned to Europe. There's also something else, of course, which we have to bear in mind, which is something that historians on the whole don't like, which is the role of chants, the role of contingent events. And I think some of that is involved. But I do think that the way of the Ottomans to study that involves taking a very close look at Orhan's time. Because by the time that Orhan dies, they have a foothold, not a strong one, but they have a foothold in the Balkans. And they also have some economic relations with the Byzantines. They don't have to worry about the Mongols to the east of them. And they're in pretty good shape. To go back to this idea of the challenge of doing early Ottoman history or Ottoman prehistory, there's almost no point in trying to find a source that announces we are the beginning. This is the origin of the Ottoman Empire. You're not aware, one can't be aware of the fact that they're at the beginning of something like the Ottoman history. But you mentioned that one solution or one of the many solutions would be to look at non-Autumn sources, the coins as another source. You also mentioned briefly geography and how you can use geography as another sort of adjacent way of reading the sources. I was hoping you could go into that a little bit more about methodologically speaking, how to use geography as an early autumn historian. After I graduated from college, I spent a year and a half at Wisconsin where I studied Byzantine history. And in those days, history was a thriving academic field. In my entering class at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1965, there were 150 graduate students in the history department alone. Wow. So we were in this big room and the chairman came in and was talking to us about the way of the world. And he said, "You're not here to get a liberal education anymore. If you didn't have one, you can forget about it now." We're talking about professional training. And then he began talking about American history because approximately 100 of those graduate students were interested in American history. Wisconsin was very strong at American history at that time. They had one one historian for every 10 years of American history. I mean, it was phenomenal. And so he said, "One of the things that you should pay attention to is the geography of the United States and the geography of American history." And I understood that because I'm from Stockton, California, the Asparagus capital of the free world. In order to get to Harvard as an undergraduate, I had to cross the United States. And he said, "It would be good for you at some point to drive across the United States. And if you're from Harvard, you should walk." And what he meant by that, of course, is that we often don't perceive things until we can actually see them or taste them or have a sense of what place ourselves in the shoes of other people. And in Ottoman history, geography plays a very interesting and in some senses a limiting role. When the Ottomans worked their way down from the plateau and worked their way into the area of really the Riviera of Bethinia, the area between the lake of Isnac and the peninsula west of Nicomedia of Ismit, they found themselves in an area in which the best use of the land was for intensive agriculture. That agricultural richness was an invitation to thinking in different terms about taxation, different terms about how, for instance, you might have an army. Because now, if you have intensive agriculture, you have a surplus and you can use that surplus to feed and to pay for an infantry army. Whereas if you're a pastoralist, you only have military power if you have horses. You need lots of pasture, which means you can't concentrate lots of people together. Whereas in the area around Borso or Yeni Shahir or Isnac or Ismit, you can have intensive agriculture and you can do really very well. And this is something that shows up in these early Ottoman tax registers. Oh, I want to make one other comment, which I would like you to pay some attention to later on. I believe that history is a branch of literature. I believe furthermore that this literature should be written so that people can read it, that the way in which we write reflects the way in which we think. And I think we have to be very careful. And if there's anything, I mean, the nature of early Ottoman history is for reasons that I will explain in a while, everything that I've done will be forgotten within a few years. And that's not so bad. I don't need royalties after I die. But I think if there's anything I have done is that I think what I write is readable. And the rhetoric that I use is one that is accessible. And in explorations in Ottoman prehistory, I refer very early and I give the sheet music for something by Schubert. The beginning of that last pianos and not about Schubert. And I believe writing so that people can understand is very, very, very important. And I do think often in musical terms. And I think in terms of does this melody fit? Or is it just music to bruise apples by? I'm in Turkey in October of 1969. And October of November, and it's Ramadan. And I was in Taksim. I've been working at the German Archaeological Institute. And I had to go back to Besiktashe. So I was waiting in Taksim to take the dolmush name, desire back down to Besiktashe. And there was a line of us. And there was a man up at the front. Akhia, his job was to be the dolmush dispatcher. And he was there and he was there. I don't know how much money he made very little. He was very, you know, not a man with a great lucrative profession. And then the gun went off indicating that the sun had set. And he opened the bag and took out a loaf of bread. And he walked down the line, touring off a piece of bread and giving it to each one of us in line. So that we could break our fast. Now that is why I loved Turkey. Rudy spoke with great affection for Turkey in nostalgia for his time in Istanbul. It may come as a surprise then that he has not returned to Turkey since before the publication of his first book. On May 19, 1985, the New York Times and the Washington Post published an advertisement orchestrated by the Turkish government funded Institute of Turkish Studies to push back against the proposed resolution in the US House of Representatives recognizing the Armenian genocide. Before the advertisements publication, dozens of US-based academics working in Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Turkish Studies were enjoined by the ITS to sign on. In all, 69 academics ascended to the inclusion of their names. Rudy declined. With a research plan for his second book ready and funding secured, Rudy soon discovered that his principal stand would have consequences. When I refused to sign the advertisement that appeared in the Washington Post in the New York Times, you know, later I never got back into Turkey. And I remember talking with one of the people at the consulate in Washington. I asked him, "What's the problem?" "Excuse me." He comes back and says, "Well, Professor Linda, perhaps you should have signed the advertisement. Look." So that's why if you look at the blog that my daughter has set up for me office hours with Rudy, WordPress, Com, you'll find I have lots of stories in there about my time in Istanbul, but the last ones are from 1978. I was once on a boat going from Besik Tosh to a minute now. I was talking with some guy and he said, "So tell me, you're here, you're working with our historical records, you're doing this, you're doing that." And it will obviously help you in your goal to be a scholar. What are you doing for Turkey? And I was taken aback. Of course, it was a perfectly reasonable question for him to ask. And I don't remember one answer I gave him. I think I said something that Americans will get to know more about Turkey. Well, the number of Americans who learn more about Turkey from me is probably vanishingly small. So, yeah, there are these interesting, there are these interesting difficulties. But as I said, if I were if I were going into the field now, I would certainly go to Ankara and work with the walk registers and things like that and work with and look at the registers. And I would do so with a view of trying to understand the stories of small places. So, for instance, when I was working with registers of pastoralists in Karaman, I was able to actually follow a herd of sheep for 70 years. Now, why would you follow a herd of sheep for 70 years? It's one of the great things about the registers as you can follow small groups of people over a fair period of time. Of course, the registers are they telling you the whole truth? No. Sometimes they're giving you normative things. But even in index of things, compared with others is pretty good. Even when you come across, you look even at the names. Nijat Beyd, Nijat Beyd, Nijat Beyd was wonderful because he would talk about, "Look at these names." He said, "Let me read you these names." And he would say, "These are Turkish names that nobody uses anymore." But they're interesting. In some cases, you'll find lots of Greek names. You know, one of the things I came across was a group of Greek Christian pastoralists in Karaman. You wouldn't expect that, but there they were. It was clear that Rudy's experiences, his teachers and the places where he lived and the institutions in which he'd studied have profoundly shaped his historical interests and the methods he employed in his research. In his first book, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, Rudy paired contemporary anthropological theorists with close readings of the earliest chronicles to make the first series challenge to the orthodoxy of Vitech in half a century. In Explorations in Ottoman prehistory, his second book, "The Challenge of Exile from the Archives and Libraries of Turkey led Rudy to draw on a unique combination of sources and methods, harnessing his respect for an understanding of numismatics, topography, hydrology, and the life cycle of the herds to fashion a series of evocative essays on the first fateful events that sparked the Ottoman Enterprise." With all this in mind, I asked Rudy to take us back to Paul Vitech Seminar at Schmitt's German restaurant and reflect on the 20th century historiography of Ottoman origins. When I went into Ottoman history, we knew a lot about early Ottoman history and if there's anything that my work has done, it's been to demonstrate that we know today much less than we did in the mid-1960s. Vitech is a fascinating man in a number of ways when he fled Europe and came to England and when the British went to war with the Germans in September of 1939, Vitech and a very large number of people who held German passports were arrested and interned in a camp near Liverpool at a place called Heiten. And the number of those who were interned included all kinds of people of all types and it included Nazis and Jews and non-Jewish refugees and it took the British a while to figure out what was going on. In the meantime, the refugees began running classes for the children or for the adults and it became known as Heiten University and it was the best school in Liverpool, so people said because there were a number of people there who had the Nobel Prize. The person who taught geography was my father and another person who taught was Paul Vitech. So my father at some point and I found this only fairly recently must have known Paul Vitech and they both came from Vienna. Vitech belongs to that generation of scholars in Central Europe who believed in the power of ideas as a ruling force in history. Now Vitech's great student Menage, Victor Menage and I should say something about the impact, the personal impact of Vitech. Menage, I spent a day with Menage in 1982 and we were seated across from each other one day and he leaned across the table to me. Vitech had been dead for five years. He leaned across the table to me and he said, he whispered, you know Rudy, I don't think Vitech knows Persian. He was present tense, obviously a very impressive man. So Vitech spent his years 10 years in Turkey during the years of what Menage termed the Atatürk dictatorship. And it looks as though Vitech who for many reasons had a great interest in the role of ideas indeed even of poetry in history because of the intellectual circles he belonged to in Vienna. Vitech hit upon this notion that what had really distinguished the Ottomans was their dedication to the Holy War. And he had two pieces of evidence for this. One is the section on the Ottomans in Ahmedi which talks about why have the Gazi has come at the end of time because the last is always the best, what I call the dessert theory of history. And there was also the inscription, the infamous Borsa inscription about Orhan as a Gazi, son of Gazi, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now at one point David Morgan, the great Persian and Mongol historian, turns into Colin Haywood's office at London and he says, "Is it really true that Vitech's theory that everybody believes about the rise of the Ottomans is based on these two measly texts?" And Haywood said, "Of course." And Morgan walked away shaking his head according both to Morgan and to Haywood. So this notion, there was a very great time in the 30s of this notion of ideals and religious zeal playing an important role in history. Remember the famous essay by Max Weber on religion and the Reformation and R.H. Tonney's book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and these notions of the very significant role played by religious zeal. Vitech took this in part from a casual remark that was made by Cuperloon, one of Cuperloon's books, which he didn't really build very much on. But Vitech bought that in the late 20s and it became the hallmark of his theory of Ottoman origins. And he said that it is the guiding light of Ottoman history until in 1914 they allied themselves with the Christians, they allied themselves with the Habsburgs and with the Germans and that was the end of it. And when that happened, it was only a matter of time. Well, it's very interesting. It has a certain amount of appeal. You know, my parents came from Vienna. I considered myself the last of the Habsburg Jews and I have a good deal of sympathy for this view of Vitech. But in fact, the evidence just ain't there. Now there are two versions of the Vitech theory. There is the strong Vitech thesis, which is the one that's presented in his lectures The Rise of the Ottoman Empire. Then there's the weak. And I think that that was destroyed by Haywood and by Imber and by me. And then there's the weak Vitech thesis, which says, well, yes, there's that plus a bunch of other factors. And the weak Vitech thesis was explicated by Halealynogic and by a few others since that time. And that was pretty much, I think, destroyed by an article by Colin Imber called What Does the Word Gazi Really Mean? And he shows various interesting things about it. So the significant thing about the so-called Vitech thesis, both the strong and the weak version, is number one, this notion that you can take history and you can grasp history that you can have just one or two causes. In response to that, I will remind you of the work of another great Viennese scholar, Dr. S. Freud, who remarks in one of his works, you know, human behavior is overdetermined. There are many causes. And really what Vitech was doing was reflecting very much the intellectual history of the 1920s. If you want to read, you know, something that really influenced Vitech, the great medievalist Aaron Hartwig-Kanderovitz, who spent his last years at Princeton, wrote in the 1920s a marvelous biography of the great German emperor, Frederick II, 12.5 to 12.50. And that is, it's a piece of romance, and it's heavily dependent upon Kanderovitz's love of the ideologies of the German poet, Stefan Georg. And Vitech was a member of the Georg Circle. So really, when you read Vitech, you are reading, you're reading about the Ottomans, yes, but you're also reading about the intellectual history of Central Europe in the 20s and the 30s. What's fascinating is that later when Kuperl wrote his book, it's very interesting. Kuperl argued that the Ottomans came in to Anatolia in the 11th century, which for which there's no evidence. But he wanted to show that the Ottomans had no connection with the Mongols because the Mongols were terrible people. And look, I spent a day in Chicago with the Professor Analogic. And he walked me up and down the, you know, he rode me out of town on a rail and said, look, the trouble with you is that you think that Osman was a tribal leader, you think he was a primitive. And I said, look to be a tribal leader is not to be a primitive. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was clear that that Professor Analogic was not interested in what the anthropologist in the 40s and 50s had to say. And he thought, I remember, he asked me, are you Greek Orthodox? And I said, no, I'm a Jew. Well, he said, that's funny because you take the Greek Orthodox line. And I said, well, no, I don't, but, you know, that was that. At the same time, Spurus, Rionus, was calling me a Turkish nationalist. So I went home and I said to my wife, Molly, if the Greeks think, if the Greeks think I'm a Turk and the Turks think I'm a Greek, I must be doing something okay. So I think that I think that one of the things, which is very true of the study of Ottoman history, has been that you read about Ottoman history and you read the scholars and you find sure you'll find out about Ottoman history, but you'll also find out about the scholars. So we've spoken about the history scholarship and sort of, you know, the role that a scholar is sort of background plays into the way they view the sources and they view Ottoman history. And we spoke about how students don't necessarily always understand that and they don't see the sort of the depth of the background behind, you know, a narrative that's presented to them about Ottoman history. My question concerns one of your essays and explorations on Ottoman history and this issue surrounding the way Ottoman chronicles present the capture of Khair Jahisar, which they present as being owned by Byzantines, but your research very convincingly shows, no, it must have, you know, that doesn't make any sense. They must have changed it from the garramianids to the Byzantines because they didn't want to see them as if they were Muslims attacking other Muslims. And you frame this research and this analysis in the context of, you know, respecting the sources, yes, the sources say something contrary to what we think of as being historical truth or historical fact. But the reason that you did that has some merit to it and as historians, our task is to understand why and you, you call this respecting the sources. How would you explain this idea, this notion of respecting the sources to young students, to undergraduates, sort of just now just embarking on this field trying to understand how to do historical analysis. In the context of these kinds of early Ottoman sources that for lack of a better word, you know, contradict one another or don't necessarily tell the true story in the way we in 2021 think of historical truth. The important thing is to read what you read, whether it's scholarship or a textbook or a source, fresh, don't accept anything. And then ask yourself, does it make geographic sense? Does it make historical sense? You know, what am I going to do with it? To ask questions and don't worry so much about answers, open windows, don't close them. I was looking at a coin this summer, which I first looked at in the late '60s. And I was looking at a coin catalog with casually remarked about this coin. It's a Seljuk coin. See Vos 1249, that it's underweight. And then it began bothering me. And finally I did some more work. And I discovered that all of the known examples of this coin, of which there are 75 or 76, are at a certain weight standard. But it's not the Rooms Seljuk weight standard. And I looked around and I discovered that it was the Mongol standard. And then I looked a little bit more and I discovered that this is in fact Mongol money being minted in Seljuk See Vos. And it made some things more sensible, which was that in the coin there's an overs of the coin has a picture of a horseman. If you go on Google and look up see Vos 646, dear him, you'll find it. And the man is shooting an arrow. And the point of the arrow, the head of the arrow, looks like this. It's La Vie. It's not a point. That's a Mongol arrow. It's a propaganda piece. It's a very interesting thing. It's, you know, you look and you use four eyes. Or as a therapist would say, a very great student of Freud once said, "I listen to what my client says with two ears, but what I'm really doing is I am listening with the third ear." And it's that third ear. It's where you hear that little thing of Schubert. You know, if you read it slowly and you were careful about what you read, partly you're asking yourself, you know, the questions, what does this tell me about what happened in, you know, what was done by Ahmed Ibn Yifnif in 1365. But also you get to know the mind of the author. You know, I can, I can now sort of tell things in Ashik Pasha Zada that I couldn't before, because I'm now able to tell, ah, this is where he's using the anonymous chronicles, or this is where he's changing this, or that. You know, none of us can get back to the year 1299, but what we can do is we can get back into the minds of these people who wrote. Even sometimes you can get back, you know, if you're looking at a deaf dare, you can sort of, if you have a map, you can say, this guy is moving, the guy who's the deaf dare, meaning what's he doing? Where's he going? Where's he going this day? Where's he going the next day? And you can get back there. The surface of history is not smooth, it is not plain, it is very rough. This is why if I can read a manuscript, I prefer any manuscript to an edited text, because the manuscript tells me some facts, maybe, it tells me something about the author, maybe, and it tells me about the copiest. And there are the four of us, the text, the author, the copiest, and Rudy. And it's a bridge game. And as usual, the case, Rudy is the dummy. That concludes our conversation with Rudy Paul Lindner. To learn more, visit our website for a short bibliography and other episodes related to our discussion. I'm Josh White. Thanks for listening. Take care. [MUSIC]