Picturing History at the Ottoman Court

By Emine Fetvaci

“A comprehensive study of Ottoman illuminated histories and their readers, makers, intended meanings and political uses.” —Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

The Ottoman court of the late sixteenth century produced an unprecedented number of sumptuously illustrated chronicles. While usually dismissed as imperial eulogies, Emine Fetvaci demonstrates that these books commented on contemporary events, promoted the political agendas of courtiers as well as the sultan, and presented their patrons and creators in ways that helped shape the perspectives of their elite audience. Picturing History at the Ottoman Court traces the simultaneous crafting of political power, the codification of a historical record, and the unfolding of cultural change.

“An absolutely original work, full of good ideas and important points. Fascinating.” —Pamela Brummett, University of Tennessee

“One of the most profound examples of new directions in scholarship dealing with “the book” and “the text” of the past few decades. It shows an exceptional breadth of vision.” —Walter G. Andrews, University of Washington

“[Fetvaci’s] book, an exhaustive and richly illustrated study based on secondary literature and primary sources, among them some documents in the Topkapi Palace archive, will no doubt remain the standard study on the topic for many years to come.” —Bibliotheca Orientalis

“A welcome addition to the work of scholars who are studying these manuscripts in relation to the context of their production. This is a handsome book.” —International Journal of Islamic Architecture

“This is a book for the specialist as well as the intelligent undergraduate, as its exceptional clarity of organization and exposition makes complex and overlapping dynamics readily meaningful. The lavish illustration (102 colour plates) and the author’s interest in comparative imperial practices add to its depth.” —*Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253051011

Book preview

Picturing History at the Ottoman Court

Picturing History at the Ottoman Court

EMİNE FETVACI

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

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© 2013 by Emine Fetvacı

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.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in China

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fetvacı, Emine.

Picturing history at the Ottoman court / Emine Fetvacı.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-00678-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. History in art. 2. Illumination of books and manuscripts, Ottoman. I. Title.

ND3343.8.F48 2013

745.6'709561—dc23

2012025512

1 2 3 4 5    18 17 16 15 14 13

FOR CANDAN, ORHAN, AND ZEYNEP FETVACı

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

INTRODUCTION

1 CIRCULATION, AUDIENCE, AND THE CREATION OF A SHARED COURT CULTURE

2 MAKING BOOKS AT THE OTTOMAN COURT

3 SOKOLLU MEHMED PASHA AND ILLUSTRATED OTTOMAN HISTORIES

4 CHIEF BLACK EUNUCH MEHMED AGHA: NEGOTIATING THE SULTANIC IMAGE

5 IN THE IMAGE OF A MILITARY RULER

6 A VENETIAN OTTOMANIZED: CHIEF WHITE EUNUCH GAZANFER AGHA AND HIS ARTISTIC PATRONAGE

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am delighted to have this opportunity to thank the colleagues and friends who provided much help as I worked on this project. Gülru Necipoğlu and David Roxburgh have been firm supporters and generous mentors, and their exemplary scholarship continues to inspire my work. This book simply would not have been possible without their encouragement, advice, and friendship. They also provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of the book. I am grateful to Cemal Kafadar, Irene Winter, Wheeler Thacktson, and the late Şinasi Tekin for their support. Filiz Çağman, Zeren Tanındı, and Cornell Fleischer have been extremely generous with their ideas and time. Two particular conversations with Cornell Fleischer in February 2004 and March 2009 were integral to the development of some of the ideas in this book.

I am greatly indebted to the following institutions, curators, and library and museum directors who granted me access to the materials in their care: Mary McWilliams, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge; Dr. Elaine Wright, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; the Directorate of the Beyazıt Library, Istanbul; Dr. Meral Alpay, Yasemen Akçay, and Zekiye Eraslan, Istanbul University Library, Istanbul; the Directorate of the Köprülü Library, Istanbul; Durmuş Kandıra, Prime Ministry Archives, Istanbul; the Directorate of the Süleymaniye Mosque Library, Istanbul; Ülkü Altındağ and Sevgi Ağca, Topkapı Palace Museum Archives, Istanbul; Muhammad Isa Waley, British Library, London; Sheila Canby (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Ladan Akbarnia, British Museum, London; Linda Komaroff, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Sylvie Merian, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Annie Berthier, Monique Cohen and Francis Richard, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; M. Nicolas Sainte-Fare Garnot, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris; and Dr. Ernst Gamillscheg, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Two museums deserve special mention: at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul, I was warmly welcomed by the former director Dr. Nazan Ölçer, Dr. Şule Aksoy, and Sevgi Kutluay, who also kindly assisted me with the photographs. At the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul, I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Filiz Çağman, former Director, and would like to thank Prof. İlber Ortaylı, Director, Gülendam Nakipoğlu, Deputy Director, and Esra Müyesseroğlu. I owe special thanks to Zeynep Çelik Atbaş of the Topkapı Palace Library, for her friendship and help through the years. Zeynep and the rest of the Topkapı staff went out of their way to help with permissions, images, and of course with viewing the manuscripts under their care. My dear friend and photographer extraordinaire Hadiye Cangökçe produced the photographs that enrich this volume and bring life and color to its pages.

I am grateful to Shahab Ahmed, Diliana Angelova, Gina Cogan, Sinem Eryılmaz, Zeynep Yürekli Görkay, Eugenio Menegon, Aslı Niyazioğlu, Ceylan Orhun, Sunil Sharma, Daniel Star, Baki Tezcan, Alicia Walker, and Gregory Williams, who kindly read significant parts of the text at different stages and provided invaluable advice. András Riedlmayer has been a constant source of wisdom over the years, and, along with Himmet Taşkömür and Yücel Demirel, has also helped with the difficult Ottoman passages. I presented earlier versions of some chapters at the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University; CAA Annual Conference; the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture Lecture Series at Harvard University; and the University of Washington Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, all in 2006; the Networks of Exchange in the Mediterranean symposium at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and the Boston University Graduate Student Art History Association Lecture Series, both in 2007; and at the HIAA Symposium in 2008. My heartfelt thanks go to the participants and audiences at these events and especially to Robert Gregg, Aaron Rodrigue, Shreve Simpson, Gülru Necipoğlu, Selim Kuru, Nathalie Rothman, and Barry Flood, chairpersons and organizers, for their helpful comments and criticisms. My participation in the Folger Library Faculty Seminar Constantinople/Istanbul in 2007, organized by Palmira Brummett, enhanced my thinking on some of the issues covered in this book. I also benefited greatly from conversations with the following friends and colleagues: Walter Andrews, Serpil Bağcı, Persis Berlekamp, Palmira Brummett, Giancarlo Casale, Zeynep Çelik Atbaş, Erdem Çıpa, Tülün Değirmenci, Holly Edwards, Stine Grodal, Christiane Gruber, Robert Harrison, Mehmet Kalpaklı, Hakan Karateke, Elizabeth Kessler, Tijana Krstič, Selim Kuru, Ersu Pekin, Bissera Pentcheva, Florian Schwarz, Matthew Smith, Ebru Turan, the late Stefan Yerasimos, Ayşin Yoltar Yıldırım, and Michael Zell. Yasmine Al-Saleh, Sahar Bazzaz, Jennifer Pruitt, Dana Sajdi, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Aslı Niyazioğlu, and Sibel Zandi-Sayek were my companions as I wrote and revised the book at Widener Library over the past four years, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart for their warm friendship. Kristina Van Dyke’s friendship, emotional support, and intellectual complicity have been integral to the research and writing of this book. Eser and Memduh Hacıoğlu, Berin Hikmet and my sister Zeynep Fetvacı have graciously hosted me in their homes in Paris and London during research trips.

Research for this project was conducted with the assistance of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University; the C. E. Norton Fellowship for Dissertation Research; the Whiting Dissertation Completion Grant; the Joukowsky Family Foundation Grant of the American Research Institute in Turkey; and the Stanford University Humanities Fellows Program. I wrote the book during two semesters of leave from Boston University, made possible by the Peter T. Paul Career Development Professorship. I am grateful to Peter Paul for his generous support which has also funded many research trips, and to my colleagues in the History of Art and Architecture Department for their encouragement during the writing process. Funds from the Peter T. Paul Professorship, supplemented by a Publication Production Grant from the Boston University Humanities Foundation, made it possible for this volume to be published with more than one hundred color images. I thank the anonymous readers from Indiana University Press for their very helpful criticisms. At Indiana University Press, I would like to thank Robert Sloan, Sarah Wyatt Swanson, June Silay, and Hila Ratzabi for supporting the book and overseeing its production with care.

My husband Daniel has been a most loving and supportive intellectual companion. He has helped me sharpen my arguments, stimulated my thinking with his questions, and made crucial suggestions about the writing. I am thankful beyond words for the music he has brought into my life. My parents and my sister have been sharing me with Ottoman manuscripts, sultans, viziers, and eunuchs for more than a decade. They have searched for books, traced research permissions, acquired images, and visited museums on my behalf. Without their encouragement, support, and love, this book, which I gratefully dedicate to them, would never have been completed.

Note on Transliteration

Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian words have been transliterated according to the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies system, except that in Ottoman words ḫ has been used for خ and h for ہ. Some books made for the Ottoman court were written in Persian or Arabic. In these cases, I have transliterated the titles and quotations according to the IJMES system for those languages, and not Ottomanized them (hence not Süleymānnāme but Sulaymānnāma). Terms and titles with direct English equivalents have been translated; those found in a standard English dictionary have been anglicized (e.g. sultan, madrasa). Diacritical marks have been omitted from names, but titles, terms, and direct quotations have been given in transliteration.

The AH (anno Hegirae) dates of the Muslim calendar, with corresponding AD dates in parentheses have been provided in quotations from original sources. Otherwise AD dates are used. Since the Islamic calendar is based on a lunar year, AH years do not correspond exactly to AD years; therefore inclusive dates are provided, except when the exact day is known.

ABBREVIATIONS

Topkapı Palace Museum Library: TPML

Topkapı Palace Museum Archives: TPMA

Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul: MTIA

Istanbul University Library: IUL

Prime Ministry Archives, Istanbul: PMA

Picturing History at the Ottoman Court

I.01. Selim II in the Tower of Justice watching the Imperial Council. Beneath, the author, artists, and scribes of the manuscript Shāhnāma-i Salīm Khān of Lokman. Istanbul, ca. 1571. British Library Board. All rights reserved. Or. 7043, fol. 7b.

Photo courtesy of the British Library.

Introduction

The illustration program of a contemporary account of sultan Selim II’s reign (1566–74) begins with what is arguably the most complex composition of any Ottoman painting (fig. I.01). The page contains two discreet but superimposed frames. The upper image reproduces a painting submitted to the sultan during the planning phases of the book, depicting the Imperial Council Chamber in the palace. It shows Selim II as he sits just underneath the Tower of Justice, framed in a window. He oversees the meeting of the Imperial Council below, where his viziers and administrators are assembled. The sultan is at the apex of a triangular composition, with the members of the council spreading out on either side below him. Selim’s gaze falls directly on his grand vizier, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (in office 1565–79), seated at the head of the viziers and facing the two army judges of the central territories of the empire. At the bottom are various functionaries, such as scribes or treasurers. The triangular composition with the sultan at the top mimics the social and administrative hierarchy at the Ottoman court.¹ The accompanying text refers to the sultan’s location in the tower as the pavilion of justice and the seat of the caliphate. The window he is looking out of is the window of intellect … the grid-lined cage of the palace of fortune. And sultan Selim is said to follow the events of the Imperial Council with the gaze of compassion and the ear of understanding.² The composition and accompanying text come together to signal that this is an allegorical representation, rather than the depiction of any particular moment.

The second frame on the page, the lower, horizontally oriented one, depicts those responsible for the production of the book in which the two paintings appear. Down here, an eminent scholar sits at the apex of another mini-pyramid. To the left are the painter, illuminator, and scribe who produced the manuscript, and to the right of the scholar is the court historian who wrote the text and supervised the entire project. While this is an image of the planning stages of the book, it is also a group portrait of those responsible for documenting Ottoman history in word and image throughout the late sixteenth century—the men who produced the definitive accounts of the court during its heyday.

If I am right to interpret the upper image as allegorical, its juxtaposition with the collective author portrait below also calls for a non-literal reading, opening up questions about representation and power. On a literal level, the painting above is part of the planning process, it was the sample painting presented to the sultan at the inception of the project. The group portrayed below is discussing the book project, including, no doubt, the sample painting. Yet on an allegorical level, the joint composition thematizes two kinds of representation—political and artistic. The Ottoman sultan, framed as if he were an image inside an image, is represented below by his lieutenants, who in turn will be represented for us in the rest of the manuscript by the scholars and artists portrayed at the bottom of the page. This team of producers will describe in word and image, and thereby define, the administrators just above them, paralleling the way the administrators’ actions on behalf of the sultan give form to his authority. While the text emphasizes a top-down flow of power and authority from the sultan down, the image implies a flow of shaping influence in the opposite direction. The multi-layered painting is a visualization not only of the Ottoman court but also of its representation by the artworks—the illustrated histories—that are the focus of the present study. As such, it embodies some of the key concerns of Picturing History at the Ottoman Court: how members of the Ottoman court (bureaucrats, soldiers, and household servants) constructed a relatively stable narrative about the nature of the Ottoman state as they wrote their own histories. By harnessing the power of word and image, they sought appropriate ways to represent the dynasty and the social hierarchy of the court.³

My aim in this book is to illuminate the nature of Ottoman illustrated histories with regard to their production, uses, purposes, and messages. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court produced an unprecedented number of such books. When considered with attention to their audiences and contexts of use, it becomes evident that these manuscripts were neither passive ornaments nor formulaic laudations of the sultan. Instead they were instrumental in forming the perspectives of their elite audience—the current and future members of the Ottoman court. They comment on contemporary events, promote the political agendas of courtiers as well as of the sultan, and characterize their patrons and creators in very particular ways.⁴ While the illustrated manuscripts were informed by existent social hierarchies, I demonstrate in the following pages that they also helped to shape those hierarchies and contributed significantly to the formation of Ottoman courtly identity at the end of the sixteenth century.

A particularly striking attempt at influencing courtly hierarchies is embodied in the painting with which I began (fig. I.01). The relative spatial positions of the sultan, the grand vizier, the Imperial Council, and the bureaucrats in the upper image echo a specific social order. It is an idealized composition that points to a seamless relationship between the sultan and his representatives, all seated in their proper places. In tandem with the text around it, the painting suggests that the Ottoman sultan, though removed from the daily business of running the state, nevertheless guarantees just rule by his presence behind the scenes. This idea is strengthened by the gilded, openwork globe hanging from the vault of the council chamber with an arrow protruding from it, shot by the sultan. The text likens this to the sphere of the earth, at the center of which is the seal of the deputy of the sultan, the grand vizier. The sultan’s arrow represents his justice-delivering decrees.⁵ His grand vizier, at the head of the council, ensures that the sultan’s justice is enacted. There is no room here for the other power brokers that were actually present at the Ottoman court and become visible in other books or paintings. This particular account of the Ottoman power hierarchy, then, is the one preferred by the specific individuals involved in the making of this book, pictured below and lauded in the text. The painting is one of many prescriptive visualizations of the court put forth by illustrated histories, presenting different visions of order among the Ottoman ruling elite.

Whether they served self-promoting agendas for courtiers (such as the grand vizier in his privileged place in figure I.01) or sought to glorify the ruler (like Selim II guaranteeing justice with his mere presence), official histories codified the visual and verbal telling of Ottoman history. As I demonstrate in the present study, through their circulation at court, these books disseminated a particular vision of empire and a shared understanding of the past to the inhabitants of the Topkapı and other imperial palaces and grandee households, both in the capital and beyond. The books can be viewed as instruments of acculturation, to borrow a term from Maria Subtelny’s study on the social transitions of the late fifteenth-century Timurid court.⁶ As Ottoman courtiers and palace trainees read and viewed these books, they were faced with idealized images of their society. The books reinforced courtiers’ knowledge of their own places within social hierarchies and taught those who were still undergoing their training at the palace about the community they had recently joined.

Various members of the bureaucratic-military class and imperial household servants participated in the patronage and production of these books. As a result of this group involvement, it becomes clear that we can no longer consider the Ottoman sultan as the sole patron or subject matter of these books. In the Ottoman court of the late sixteenth century, manuscript patronage was an act of image making shared among a diverse group of individuals and served as a means to present the self through a demonstration of wealth, culture, and worthiness as a servant to the sultan.⁷ Ottoman courtiers aspired to the prestige of being manuscript patrons, and harnessed the expressive potential of the manuscripts to propagate specific messages about themselves and their society.

The accounts of the Ottoman dynasty illustrated at this time each present diverse visions of the ideal sultan and his relationship to the court and state. These visions are based on ideas current in political discourse during the second half of the sixteenth century, and appear to be attempts to discern the most appropriate relationship between the sultan and his subjects. It is possible to trace the changing interpretations of state structure and court hierarchy through the illustrated histories, and to correlate the changing image of the sultan with the aims of manuscript patrons, contemporary political discourse, and historical events. Notions of Ottoman sovereignty can also be found in the development of imperial norms and practices, the patronage of charitable institutions, and titulature used on coins and chancery documents.⁸ Yet an examination of illustrated histories with attention to word and image not only charts evolving notions of sovereignty but also provides a very nuanced account of how the Ottoman court wanted to be perceived, and how these histories shaped the image of the dynasty and the court.

OTTOMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITY AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

Let us briefly turn to the historical and cultural context that gave rise to these extraordinary works of art and the complex community that created them. Any brief treatment of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire will necessarily be unable to capture the full complexity of the economic, social, and cultural forces at play, and there is no single narrative that can do justice to the multiple strands of history one could examine. However, when the artistic, literary, historical, and archival products of the sixteenth century are considered together, the themes of imperial identity formation and cultural production come to the fore in an intertwined fashion. An inspiring wave of revisionist scholarship in Ottoman cultural studies has begun to evaluate the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the period when a distinctive Ottoman identity developed in tandem with cultural production.⁹

Historical writing, the genre to which the manuscripts examined in the present study belong, was employed to shape and publicize a specific imperial image since the founding of the empire.¹⁰ The early works of the fifteenth century have been masterfully studied by Cemal Kafadar, who demonstrates that the history of the empire and its historiography developed in a dialectical relationship.¹¹ Writing on the same period, Heath Lowry argues that early Ottoman identity

stemmed from a conscious or unconscious awareness on the part of the early Ottoman rulers that some form of common identity was needed in what otherwise was a multireligious, polyglot, multiethnic society. With the passage of time and successive generations of converts the indigenous population was religiously Islamicized, linguistically Turkified, and culturally Ottomanized.¹²

The complexities of cultural geography and identity in the Ottoman lands have been elegantly outlined by Kafadar, who reminds us that many Ottomans referred to themselves as Rumi, of the lands of Rum, the loosely defined geographic region in which the core of the Ottoman Empire was located.¹³ Quoting a well-known passage by the sixteenth-century Ottoman historian Mustafa Âli (d. 1600), Kafadar explains that this was not an ethnic term per se, and that Rumi was distinguished from both Turkish and Ottoman. In Âli’s words:

Those varied peoples and different types of Rumis living in the glorious days of the Ottoman dynasty, who are not [generically] separate from those tribes of Turks and Tatars … are a select community and pure, pleasing people who, just as they are distinguished in the origins of their state, are singled out for their piety, cleanliness and faith. Apart from this, most of the inhabitants of Rum are of confused ethnic origins. Among its notables there are few whose lineage does not go back to a convert to Islam …¹⁴

The term Rumi was adopted by many inhabitants of the central lands of the empire but was not forged by or for the Ottoman state. Kafadar distinguishes Rumi identity from the Osmanlı, or Ottoman identity. The latter, he says, implied those who belong to [the ruling apparatus shaped around the House of] Osman.¹⁵ The main protagonists of the present study are precisely those individuals who would be known as Osmanlı, in addition to their Rumi identity. They were a smaller subset within the empire, and encompassed the ruling elite. As Âli also points out, they came from ethnically and religiously diverse backgrounds. A lengthy period of education in the imperial palaces of the empire acculturated these young men to Ottoman ways.

The Ottomanization of the empire, beyond the cultural elite, continued well into the sixteenth century and beyond: the conquest of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century, and the early-sixteenth-century territorial expansions exacerbated the need to define the nature of the new, enlarged Ottoman Empire.¹⁶ A frenzy of legal writing geared toward integrating the peoples and the lands conquered under sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66) and his father Selim I (r. 1512–20), as brought to our attention by Snjezana Buzov, helped to give order to the newly expanded empire.¹⁷ Additionally, Süleyman’s reign witnessed the growth of the bureaucracy as a response to territorial expansion. The ensuing increase in state-issued documents is well known and studied among scholars of Ottoman history.¹⁸ What is less often remarked upon is the creation of networks of archives that would record and preserve the stories (or alternative histories) of guilds, Sufi organizations, madrasas, and even private individuals at this time.¹⁹ Political treatises on the nature of the sultanate and the role of the ruler also abounded.²⁰ A parallel development was the elaboration of a distinct canon of Ottoman poetry around the middle of the sixteenth century, in tandem with the appearance of the earliest Ottoman biographical dictionaries of poets: another venue for recording and organizing.²¹

Eventually, during the last decades of the reign of Süleyman, as Cornell Fleischer demonstrates, the ideals, identity, and practice of the dynastic state, particularly in matters of ideological representation, elite reproduction, and distribution of resources were redefined and slowly institutionalized.²² Concepts and practices related to the state that were previously in flux or allowed to exist in multiples were remolded into a new synthesis at this time, and continued to be further refined under Selim II and Murad III (r. 1574–95). While on the one hand this redefinition was achieved by the articulation of laws, the writing of treatises and histories, the reorganization of the education system previously structured by Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81), or the expansion of an imperial archive, it also found expression in the visual arts and the architecture of the period, which came to reflect an increasingly defined corporate identity. The interaction of artistic and architectural production and identity formation have been fruitfully examined by Gülru Necipoğlu, who has demonstrated that a canon for the visual arts, incorporating architecture, textiles, and ceramics, can be identified by the end of Süleyman’s reign.²³ Necipoğlu also shows that the emergence of an Ottoman style in the visual arts corresponds to similar developments in the Safavid Empire of Iran (1501–1722), as the two rivals tried to distinguish their imperial traditions from each other in their competition for legitimacy on political and religious fronts.²⁴

Illustrated histories extended the preoccupation with self-definition into a figural and perhaps more explicit register. As the present study demonstrates, the Ottoman elite experimented with different ways to define social and political order, and their place within it. These experiments also resulted in the development of identifiable visual and verbal styles, which seem to give form to an awareness of the singularity of the Ottoman experience. When viewed by the multiethnic members of the Ottoman court, during their education or aterward, these books would be easily distinguished by their aesthetic properties as products of the Ottoman court. The flattering terms in which the court and the dynasty are portrayed would doubtless instill a sense of pride in those courtiers who leafed through them.

The codification of the Ottoman image in illustrated manuscripts, portable objects, and architecture parallels the increasingly prescribed nature of court ceremonial at this time.²⁵ The closeness with which these compositions echo the rule-bound nature of Ottoman court society (as in figure I.01) renders them particularly legible, especially to contemporary viewers, who were acutely aware of the rules governing decorum.²⁶ The hierarchical order of the Ottoman court in state ceremonies was strictly followed in manuscript representations through location and details of costume, so much so that one can identify individuals in the paintings. The paintings in these historical works do not represent the private lives of Ottomans, but instead display the public, ceremonial sphere. This also explains the near complete absence of contemporary women from the illustrations, despite their prominence as patrons of art and architecture and as political actors at court. Their activities were most often behind the scenes, or took place through agents such as those examined in this book.

The nature of Ottoman social hierarchy was very much at the center of critical discourse among intellectuals of the late sixteenth century. Numerous treatises and books of advice for the ruling monarch were composed at this time, and at the heart of many of these books was the notion that the Ottoman order, referred to alternately as ancient law/canon/codes (ḳānūn-u ḳadīm) or the order of the world (niẓām-ı ῾ālem), was changing.²⁷ Perhaps the most visible change was to life at the Topkapı Palace. As the contemporary historian Mustafa Âli mourned time and again in his writing, Sultan Murad III had withdrawn further and further into the palace, and no longer led the army in campaign. He did not leave the capital after his accession. As a result of the sultan’s new lifestyle—which he spent among the inhabitants of the inner part of the palace—the political clout of the imperial council was transferred to the people with whom the sultan had daily contact. Unofficial companions and servants of the inner household, such as the chief eunuchs, the sultan’s tutor, boon companions, and spiritual advisors, became visibly involved in the decision-making process. Mustafa Âli’s description of the reign of Murad III begins with the significant individuals around the sultan—a recounting he did not deem necessary when discussing the reigns of previous sultans.²⁸ While such figures had played important roles in the Ottoman palace before, their participation in political life became more overt and systematized, attracting more pronounced negative attention. This exacerbated existing conflicts between the household (including the sultan, female family members, and servants of the inner household) and the bureaucracy (including viziers of the imperial council and other court officials).²⁹ Although these conflicts began to appear as early as the reign of Süleyman, they became more acute during the reign of Murad III.

The discourse of complaints, as well as the historical developments that gave way to it, were a part of the Ottoman court’s process of self definition—as different factions in the court acted in new ways, other members grew critical and couched their criticisms by referring to a mythical unchanging order. The emerging picture of unease at the face of social change also affected manuscript patronage. The higher numbers of people involved in court politics coincided with a boom in the production of illustrated manuscripts and a growing number of patrons for them. As the importance of the sultan’s companions grew in court politics at this time, the need to address these people and influence their opinions became a necessary part of the political process.³⁰ The increase in the number of illustrated manuscripts during the last quarter of the sixteenth century also demonstrates the desire to address the circle of courtiers around the sultan. These social changes might also have inspired authors to write about and make sense of the times, or perhaps to use the history of the empire as positive propaganda.³¹ Consequently, the illustrated histories may be understood to serve the same purpose as the numerous reform treatises written by Ottoman intellectuals during the same period: deploring what they perceived as a movement away from an ideal, almost mythical, order, and giving advice to the ruling elite in an effort to shape the future of the court and state.³²

I.02. The Ottoman army, led by Ulama Pasha, leaving Lipva. Sulaymānnāma of Arifi. Istanbul, 1558. Topkapı Palace Museum, H. 1517, fols. 526b–527a.

Photo courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum.

Yet it is not change but stasis that is emphasized in the paintings of the Ottoman court from the time. As the paintings negotiate a new public image for the sultan and his court, they allay the viewer’s concerns and portray the gravitas of the empire and the weight of its traditions. As the historian Philippe Buc observes of the medieval French court, Legitimacy hinges on regularity in performance as well as on the regularity in the language through which political actors communicate.³³ The legitimacy of the Ottoman ruler appears to have been supported by the regularized visual and verbal language used to record his reign and the stories of his ancestors. All this was despite the fact that this was a period of acute transition in terms of artistic production, patronage, and court structure. The intriguing question of how a period of change was recorded, and remembered, as an ideal moment of stasis, is at the basis of my inquiry. This point has also been analyzed by several scholars on the literature of decline and the construction of an idealized image of the reign of Süleyman in the late sixteenth century.³⁴

Replication of court ceremonial, of standardized compositions, of backgrounds, and even of contents in words and pictures is a characteristic feature of Ottoman court histories. By re-presenting events as well as their visual depiction, Ottoman artists and courtiers engaged in a renewal and redetermination of legacy.³⁵ This is not simply a reproduction of what came before, but rather a deliberate construction through the selection or omission of past visual forms and events, which creates a link with the past and also allows for minute social and ceremonial changes to be introduced. Slowly, these changes would be incorporated into the portrait of the court, and appear as if they had always been there. In the end, the cultural products of the Ottoman court, in particular the illustrated histories, determined the representation of imperial identity in very strong terms.

I.03. The Conquest of Timisoara. Sulaymānnāma of Arifi. Istanbul, 1558. Topkapı Palace Museum, H. 1517, fols. 532b–533a.

Photo courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum.

THE OTTOMAN COURTLY STYLE

Since my characterizations of the roles played by manuscripts often stem from their materiality and physical qualities, it is appropriate here to discuss their appearance in broad terms. They are written on burnished paper, generally with the clearly legible calligraphic script naskh for the work in Ottoman Turkish and ta῾līq for the Persian ones. The borders are often plain, except on introductory pages where an illuminated heading will be accompanied by gold illumination in the interlineal spaces as well as the border. The bindings are of dark leather, embossed with gold decoration. The binding design usually consists of a central elliptical and lobed medallion and corner brackets decorated with floral and cloud motifs on a gold ground. These manuscripts tend to be around 25 cm in width and 35 cm in height, though smaller and larger ones exist. Together the calligraphy, illumination, illustration, and binding render the manuscripts precious, embellishing their status as luxury objects, pointing to a certain level of orchestration and a high level of quality.

Paralleling developments in architecture and the decorative arts, albeit with a lag of a few decades, manuscript illustrations of the second half of the sixteenth century reveal an increasingly identifiable Ottoman visual idiom that moves away from the Persianate aesthetic that characterized earlier examples.³⁶ In comparison to the 1558 Sulaymānnāma (Book of Süleyman, figs. I.02, I.03), the paintings in the Shāhanshāhnāma (Book of the King of Kings, figs. I.04, I.05) of 1592–97, demonstrate a decrease in surface ornamentation and more legible mono-scenic compositions.³⁷ In these paintings, the primacy of the protagonist is generally indicated by his privileged location, relatively larger size, and the higher degree of attention paid to the embellishment of his costume. Positionality, for example, is a signifier of importance, both in the Ottoman court, and in Ottoman painting of the late sixteenth century.³⁸

The move away from Persianate prototypes, which had multiple focal points and came to increasingly include figures or vignettes not contributing to the central narrative, accords well with the general Ottomanization of the visual arts at this time. The development of Safavid painting of the late-sixteenth century has been characterized as moving in the opposite direction, with increasingly busier compositions embellished with superfluous details, functioning less as illustrations and more as artistic creations independent of a text.³⁹ I believe that the divergence of the two neighboring painting traditions was connected as much to the nature of the texts being illustrated as to a desire to create independent and distinct aesthetic systems. The most popular texts illustrated for the Safavids were literary works including heroic tales and romances, whereas the Ottoman manuscripts that display the differing Ottoman aesthetic are primarily works of contemporary history. The gradually developing Ottoman style of the manuscripts, in other words, was intended to embellish their meaning by contributing to the effect of comprehensibility.⁴⁰° The multiple functions and audiences of the Ottoman illustrated histories dictated that an appropriate style be developed. Literary manuscripts appear less uniform in their aesthetic characteristics.

Additionally, the changing circumstances in which Ottoman manuscripts were produced had a bearing on their appearance. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, Ottoman court historians were increasingly being selected from the ranks of career bureaucrats instead of poets loosely attached to court. This meant a regularization of practice, as the writing of history implicitly became a part of the job description of certain bureaucrats, as opposed to ad-hoc production by freelance poets.⁴¹ The bureaucratization of history was accompanied by the increasing primacy of scribes specializing in the chancery scripts of naskh and dīvānī instead of the more poetic ta῾līq. Naskh was used most often in the copying of books for maximum legibility such as the Qur’an, and dīvānī was the script used for imperial decrees because its complex and precise aesthetics meant that documents would not be easily forged. Contemporary accounts of renowned calligraphers predominantly feature the practitioners of these two scripts, suggesting that scripts formerly appreciated for their functionality had become popular among arts enthusiasts, pointing to a shift in taste undoubtedly connected to availability of samples.⁴² Illustrated histories eventually began to be copied in naskh rather than ta῾līq,, which further differentiated them from Safavid counterparts. While there is no one concrete cut-off date for this change in script, as the histories began to be written in Ottoman Turkish rather than Persian, the naskh came to be preferred. With their increasingly legible images and text, Ottoman manuscripts emphasized order and structure in their aesthetic properties, and privileged stability over playfulness. The aesthetic of these manuscripts clearly conveys a sense of the momentousness of the times, a sense of having arrived, and of the grandeur of the empire. These trends suggest a different—perhaps more utilitarian—role envisioned for the illustrated history in the Ottoman court from the illustrated products of the Safavids.

I.04. Sinan Pasha’s appointment as commander. Shāhanshāhnāma of Lokman, vol. 2. Istanbul, 1592–97. Topkapı Palace Museum, B. 200, fol. 9b.

Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe.

I.05. Sinan Pasha receives the seal of the grand vizierate. Shāhanshāhnāma of Lokman, vol. 2. Istanbul, 1592–97. Topkapı Palace Museum, B. 200, fol. 19a.

Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe.

OFFICIAL HISTORY

Such developments in historical manuscripts are most perceptible in those examples created under the supervision of court historians, hence the authoritative nature of the works. Generically called the Şehnāme (Book of Kings) a number of these books record the reigns and deeds of Ottoman sultans in Persian, and employ the meter and style of Firdawsi’s eleventh-century epic poem about the ancient kings of Persia, the Shāhnāma (Book of Kings). The widespread appeal of this work in the medieval and early modern Turco-Persian world must be related to the fact that its heroes are drawn from Iran and Turan, hence are possible role models for Turkic dynasties as well. In the 1550s, a salaried position, called the şehnāmeci (şehnāme- or shāhnāma-writter), was created to have such accounts of Ottoman history composed; the position disappeared early in the seventeenth century.⁴³

While the artistic creations of the şehnāmeci do embody a codified aesthetic, the reader should not jump to the conclusion that this is an embodiment of a monolithic vision of empire. The individual characteristics of the holders of this office and the patrons to whom they catered deeply affected the character of the works. In the products of the office of the court historian, as in many Ottoman books, image was subservient to text. The role of the image as illustration is attested by the captions provided in numerous historical manuscripts summarizing the visual narrative, or identifying the figures by name. This relation between image and text was at times subverted to provide alternate readings to the text.

The illustrated şehnāme manuscripts date to a relatively brief period—from 1557 until 1623—but were not the only manuscripts being illustrated. A particular group of historical manuscripts—examined in chapter five—which reflect an increasing plurality of authorial voices in the 1580s and 1590s are accompanied by differing visual styles. Past scholarship generally defines Ottoman manuscript painting as a realistic depiction of contemporary and historical events with an emphasis on dynastic history. This framework had previously directed art historians to study only the kinds of manuscripts that fit the conceptualization of the archetypal Ottoman illustrated manuscript. These manuscripts used to be understood as nothing more than dynastic eulogies or demonstrations of imperial grandeur—notions often evoked by the manuscripts.⁴⁴ Consequently, the varying styles of the unofficial histories have not been examined as a group.

More recently however, revisionist scholars such as Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, and Zeren Tanındı have focused on issues of production, royal and non-royal patronage, and image formation.⁴⁵ Manuscripts with different contents have been receiving more attention as well. A refreshing survey of Ottoman illustrated manuscripts has also recently been published in Turkey.⁴⁶ The present study builds on these recent works as it moves away from older paradigms, and considers the relationship between the products of the şehnāmeci’s office and other contemporary examples.

The official histories were part of an historiographical explosion that appears to have taken place during the second half of the sixteenth century, and especially during the reign of Murad III.⁴⁷ Indeed more