Int. J. Middle East Stud.

10 (1979), 131-141 Printed in Great Britain

IN MEMORIAM

P R O F E S S O R PAUL W I T T E K , 1894-1978
The death of Professor Paul August Wittek, Emeritus Professor of Turkish at
the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 13 June
1978, at the age of eighty-four marks the end of a pioneering era in the study of
Ottoman and Turkish history.
A true scion of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Paul Wittek was born at Baden,
near Vienna, of a Czech family. He served as an artillery officer during World
War I on the Russian front, and after recovering from a serious head wound (in
later life he was fond of luring unsuspecting students into feeling the hole that
remained), he was dispatched as adviser to the Ottoman General Staff, serving on
the Palestinian front during the latter days of the war. He began his study of
Turkish, as he later related, while traveling on a military train which took him
through southeastern Europe to Istanbul. He met most of the great Ottoman
leaders of the time, and also Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk during and after the
Gallipoli campaign, describing the latter as brilliant but aloof in reaction to the
airs of superiority taken toward Turks and Muslims by many of the German and
Austrian officers then in Ottoman service.
Following the war, Wittek returned home to study Turkology formally,
securing his degree at the University of Vienna. He then spent a number of
years back in Turkey at the German Archaeological Institute, where he began
his studies of medieval Turkish and Islamic epigraphy as well as Ottoman origins,
also making an important contribution to the study of later Ottoman history by
bringing to public attention the proposed sale of the Ottoman archives to
Bulgaria as 'wastepaper.' Professor Wittek later said that he was lunching one
sunny day at a restaurant overlooking the Sirkeji railway station when he noticed
a number of papers being blown down the street. Running quickly to intercept
them, he found several early Ottoman governmental documents. With the help
of other leading Turkish historians, the scandal was uncovered and publicized,
and the archives were saved for future generations of scholars.
After his return to Vienna, Professor Wittek reacted to the rise of Nazism
by emigrating to Brussels, where he flourished under the stimulus of the
Institute of Byzantine Studies, then directed by Professor Henri Gregoire.
When the Nazis invaded the Low Countries Wittek fled in a small boat to
England, where, as an Austrian national, he was initially imprisoned as an enemy
alien. It did not take long, however, for a number of British orientalists, led by
Professor Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Sir Denison Ross, to secure his release
and employment at the University of London. He traveled back to his wife and
family in Brussels soon after the war, but returned to England permanently
when he was named to a new Chair of Turkish at the School of Oriental and
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 140 In Memoriam

African Studies in 1948, remaining there until his retirement in 1961. Unhappy
at the School's failure to provide him with a suitable office and to include him
in its academic activities, Wittek was overjoyed when he was appointed to the
Warburg Institute nearby, with which he was connected until his death. During
his last years, Wittek no longer actively taught or wrote, but remained keenly
interested in Ottoman scholarship and the work of his many students, receiving
visiting scholars on a regular basis both in his rooms in Ruislip, a suburb of
London, and at the Warburg Institute.
Paul Wittek was not a prolific scholar in the ordinary sense of the word. In his
entire career he published only two small books, Das Fiirstentum Mentesche
(1934) and The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (1938), the latter a collection of
public lectures given earlier. But in these, and in numerous articles, Wittek
established the basis for the emphasis on the Gazi tradition in the establishment
of the Ottoman Empire, an idea that has never been refuted despite the efforts of
some later scholars seeking to emphasize the contributions of one national group
or another. Wittek's mastery of Ottoman history and the nuances of Ottoman
Turkish, however, and his impatient willingness to impart his knowledge to
those able and willing to benefit from it, left a whole series of scholars who have
worked to develop the study of Ottoman history on a far more scientific basis
than that which preceded his work. Wittek emphasized, above all else, study of
the Ottoman sources, largely to the exclusion of the encrustations of myth and
fantasy about the Ottomans built up in Western sources, and repeated by
Western scholars over the centuries. It was his early interest in the Ottoman
archives which encouraged not only his own students but also others in and out of
Turkey to make use of them as soon as they became available for research
following World War II.
Wittek remained an autocratic and distant figure, but with warm human
feelings and interests which soon were exposed once his initial reserve was
overcome. He was a severe critic, of himself and his students as well as of
others, and some hesitated to visit too regularly with him in his later years
owing to the certainty of learning in full what was wrong with their latest
published works. Wittek himself retained substantial files of completed and
partly completed articles which he hesitated to publish until he was absolutely
certain that all possible sources had been found and examined. A few of these in
fact became the nuclei for studies carried on by students and friends to whom he
generously gave them.
Wittek's lectures inspired all who heard them. Many of the major 'discoveries'
of subsequent Ottoman historians were in fact germinated here - ideas such as
the absurdity of the Lybyer thesis that the reason for Ottoman success was the
division of its ruling class into ruling and Muslim institutions, with the former
limited entirely to born Christians converted to Islam in their own lifetimes; the
importance of the Turkic and Islamic traditions in the development of Ottoman
society and institutions, in contrast to those who preferred to emphasize the
Greek and Byzantine heritages; the freedom and autonomy left to the subject

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 In Memoriam 141

peoples through the millet system, in contrast to the claims, spread by the
emerging nationalities as they rose to independence during the nineteenth
century, that they were oppressed throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule;
and the like.
Paul Wittek was a scholar among scholars - a truly great man who will be
missed by all who knew him as well as by many who did not.
University of California, Los Angeles STANFORD J. SHAW

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