How a Russian Orientalist Debunked a Centuries-Old Legend About the Ottoman Caliphate

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Vasily Bartold was a titan of early 20th-century scholarship, bridging the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Beyond his monumental studies on Central Asian history, he famously dismantled the long-held myth that spiritual authority was formally transferred to the Ottoman sultan in the 16th century, revealing it as a later invention.

Born in Saint Petersburg in 1869 to a Russianized German family, Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold—who published in the West as Wilhelm Barthold—became a preeminent authority on Islamic and Turkic history. His academic ascent was rapid; after defending his seminal thesis on Turkestan during the Mongol invasion, he became an ordinary professor at Saint Petersburg University by 1906 and an academician at the Russian Academy of Sciences by 1913. His work was defined by rigorous archival research, often involving extensive field trips to Muslim countries to study obscure manuscripts.

Bartold’s intellectual independence was remarkable, particularly during the transition to Soviet rule. In his 1912 work, The Caliph and the Sultan, he utilized his deep historical knowledge to prove that the narrative of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil III transferring spiritual power to the Ottoman sultan Selim Yavuz was a legend that only emerged in the 18th century. This discovery challenged established historical orthodoxy. Even after the 1917 Revolution, his prestige remained so immense that when his collected works were reprinted in nine volumes between 1963 and 1977, Soviet editors felt compelled to add footnotes criticizing his 'bourgeois' views, yet they dared not censor the original text.

His contributions extended far beyond historical critique. Bartold was instrumental in the early Soviet project to create written languages for Central Asian peoples and advocated for the transition from the Arabic to the Cyrillic alphabet. He was a central figure in the First All-Union Turkological Congress in 1926 and dedicated his later years to preserving cultural heritage, including the mausoleums of figures like Nizami Ganjavi and Ferdowsi. By the time of his death in 1930, he had left an indelible mark on the study of the Muslim world, ensuring his research remained a cornerstone of orientalist scholarship for decades to come.

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