Writing History at the Ottoman Court

Description

The uses of history in the shaping of the Ottoman state

Ottoman historical writing of the 15th and 16th centuries played a significant role in fashioning Ottoman identity and institutionalizing the dynastic state structure during this period of rapid imperial expansion. This volume shows how the writing of history achieved these effects by examining the implicit messages conveyed by the texts and illustrations of key manuscripts. It answers such questions as how the Ottomans understood themselves within their court and in relation to non-Ottoman others; how they visualized the ideal ruler; how they defined their culture and place in the world; and what the significance of Islam was in their self-definition.

Preface
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments

1. The Historical Epic Ahvāl-i Sultān Mehemmed (The Tales of Sultan Mehmed) in the Context of Early Ottoman Historiography \ Dimitris Kastritsis
2. The Memory of the Mongols in Early Ottoman Historiography \ Baki Tezcan
3. Imperialism, Bureaucratic Consciousness, and the Historian's Craft: A Reading of Celālzāde Mustafā's Tabakātü'l-Memālik ve Derecātü'l-Mesālik \ Kaya Şahin
4. Conversion and Converts to Islam in Ottoman Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries \ Tijana Krstić
5. Seeing the Past: Maps and Ottoman Historical Consciousness \ Giancarlo Casale
6. From Adam to Süleyman: Visual Representations of Authority in 'Ārif's Shāhnāma-yi Āl-i 'Osmān \ Fatma Sinem Eryılmaz
7. The Challenge of Periodization: New Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Historiography \ Hakan T. Karateke

Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Middle Est
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• Theory
• Middle East
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253008749
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

WRITING HISTORY AT THE OTTOMAN COURT
WRITING HISTORY AT THE OTTOMAN COURT
Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future
Edited by H. Erdem ı pa and Emine Fetvac ı
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2013 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Writing history at the Ottoman court : editing the past, fashioning the future / edited by H. Erdem ı pa and Emine Fetvac ı .
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00857-2 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00864-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00874-9 (e-book) 1. Turkey - Historiography. I. ı pa, H. Erdem, [date] II. Fetvac ı , Emine.
DR438.8.W75 2013
956 .015072 - dc23
2012049578
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
Contents
Preface
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments
1 The Historical Epic A ḥ v ā l-i Sul ṭ ā n Me ḥ emmed (The Tales of Sultan Mehmed) in the Context of Early Ottoman Historiography \ Dimitris Kastritsis
2 The Memory of the Mongols in Early Ottoman Historiography \ Baki Tezcan
3 Imperialism, Bureaucratic Consciousness, and the Historian s Craft: A Reading of Cel ā lz ā de Mu ṣ ṭ af ā s Ṭ aba ḳ ā t l-Mem ā lik ve Derec ā t l-Mes ā lik \ Kaya Ş ahin
4 Conversion and Converts to Islam in Ottoman Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries \ Tijana Krsti
5 Seeing the Past: Maps and Ottoman Historical Consciousness \ Giancarlo Casale
6 From Adam to S leyman: Visual Representations of Authority in Ā rif s Sh ā hn ā ma-yi Ā l-i O s m ā n \ Fatma Sinem Ery ı lmaz
7 The Challenge of Periodization: New Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Historiography \ Hakan T. Karateke

Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Preface
Ottoman Scholars of the early modern era produced an unprecedented number of works with historical subject matter. Beginning in the fifteenth century, authors of various backgrounds composed chronicles; biographical dictionaries; hagiographies; local, dynastic, or universal histories; campaign accounts; compilations of letters; and other literary texts with historical content. The Ottoman historical record consisted of verse and prose accounts; Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and some Arabic texts; and a plethora of archival sources and supporting documents. The writers of these historical texts came from several milieus; indeed, very few were career historians: many were scribes, bureaucrats, soldiers, poets, religious scholars, grand viziers, tax collectors, and men of other professions. The roster included supporters of the state, dissenters, and eulogizers, as well as complainers and critics.
Members of the Ottoman dynasty and administration, too, were attuned to the value of historical writing and experimented with appointing official historians. One such experiment began in the sixteenth century and led to the creation of numerous dynastic accounts that were illustrated in luxurious manuscripts. 1 At the end of the seventeenth century another kind of office was created, that of the court chronicler. The holder of this post was given access to archival records and kept a record of important events in Ottoman history. 2 Thus, Ottoman rulers and those around them - in a manner similar to that of other European monarchs, such as the Habsburgs in Spain - sought to create a historical record that favored their interests and concerns. 3 Yet, historical writing was far from being constrained to court-sponsored projects.
Indeed, the historical imagination had such a hold on the Ottomans that authors and readers alike often viewed the present in terms of literary or historical models. Thus we read about Ottoman rulers who are the Alexanders or Solomons of their age and grand viziers called Asaf, linking them to Solomon s vizier. The first occupants of the office of court historian were charged with writing Sh ā hn ā ma -like accounts of the Ottoman dynasty, in the same meter and rhyme scheme of the eleventh-century poem by Firdaws ī , and in Persian; in its first incarnation the position was called the ş ehn ā meci , or Sh ā hn ā ma -writer. That the image of the Ottoman sultan was modeled in some instances after Sh ā hn ā ma figures is as evident in the textual content of the manuscripts as in the visual representations that sometimes accompany them. 4 The history of the Ottoman state and Ottoman historiography developed, not surprisingly, in tandem. 5
Given the Ottomans predilection for historical writing and record keeping, modern historians of the Ottoman Empire have had a dazzling array of materials through which to examine the history and historiography of the empire. A certain interest in Ottoman historiography was already evident in the work of such early scholars as Fuat K pr l (d. 1966) and Paul Wittek (d. 1978), who compared chronicles to establish textual authenticity and reliability. 6 In influential essays on Ottoman historiography, Halil İ nalc ı k, Victor M nage, and John R. Walsh began to explore the literary dimensions of Ottoman historical writing and took account of audiences and contexts of use. 7 These scholars, however, were not interested in Ottoman historians and their writing as historical phenomena in their own right but rather as sources for the reconstruction of a reliable account of events from Ottoman history. 8 Only in recent years, with the work of Cornell Fleischer and Cemal Kafadar leading the way, have historians been moving away from mining Ottoman historical works for facts and focusing on contexts of writing and on literary and stylistic dimensions. The work of historians like Gabriel Piterberg, Giancarlo Casale, and Baki Tezcan, some of whom are contributors to the present volume, has been charting exciting new territory in this regard. In a different fashion, Dimitris Kastritsis combines numerous texts with the study of context and reminds us that there is room for historiographical investigation through the close study of a select few texts, while Tijana Krsti , to great effect, makes ample use of texts not traditionally considered in the historical genre. 9 All of these scholars are also careful to consider contexts of production and use and to examine a body of material in a comparative, or supplementary, way. They interpret the sources at hand in an informed fashion, with attention to authorial intentions and anchored in the historical context.
Recent scholarship on Ottoman historiography has also been moving away from an understanding of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century histories as embodying a single, monolithic ideal of the Ottoman state or dynasty. Texts that have heretofore been assigned an Ottoman understanding of world events, or Ottoman cultural or political motives and interests, are being reassigned to the motivations of individuals, social groups, or political factions reacting to very specific combinations of events. Building on this new understanding of early modern Ottoman history writing, the essays that constitute the current volume present innovative and nuanced readings of a wide range of historical narratives, revealing the implicit - and at times multiple, or even contradictory - messages conveyed by the texts and illustrations of historical manuscripts. These essays demonstrate that even the histories that appear to operate primarily as imperial propaganda reveal different agendas and represent varied attitudes toward the Ottoman dynasty and the members of its ruling elite. Informed by such disparate fields of inquiry as history, art history, and philology, collectively they offer fresh interdisciplinary insights into the heterogeneous nature of history writing within the context of an early modern Islamic empire.
The essays in the present volume focus on a core group of Ottoman histories and historians from the fift eenth and sixteenth centuries. The only exception is the contribution by Hakan Karateke, which analyzes the nineteenth-century responses to these earlier histories. Through innovative approaches to these well-known sources, the scholars contributing to the present volume advance our understanding of a seminal period in Ottoman history. They turn to the sources to answer such questions as how the Ottomans understood themselves in relation to non-Ottoman others as well as within their own court; how they visualized the ideal ruler; how they defined their culture and place in the world; and what the significance of Islam was in their self-definition. Together, the essays examine the role of historiography in fashioning Ottoman identity and institutionalizing the dynastic state structure. As such, they also shed light on the crucial question of why there was a historiographical explosion in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire.
We have chosen to explore three themes within Ottoman historiography: the question of audience, the significance and implications of genre in historical writing, and the definition of what or who is Ottoman through the writing of history. By questioning for whom these histories were written, to what expectations they cater, and in wh