Download PDF | Christopher Markiewicz - The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam_ Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty-Cambridge University Press (2019).
366 Pages
The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam
In the early sixteenth century, the political landscape of West Asia was completely transformed: of the previous four major powers, only one – the Ottoman Empire – continued to exist. Ottoman survival was, in part, predicated on transition to a new mode of kingship, enabling its transformation from regional dynastic sultanate to empire of global stature. In this book, Christopher Markiewicz uses as a departure point the life and thought of Idris Bidlisi (1457–1520), one of the most dynamic scholars and statesmen of the period.
Through this examination, he highlights the series of ideological and administrative crises in the fifteenth-century sultanates of Islamic lands that gave rise to this new conception of kingship and became the basis for sovereign authority not only within the Ottoman Empire but also across other Muslim empires in the early modern period.
Christopher Markiewicz is Lecturer in Ottoman and Islamic History at the University of Birmingham. He was the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Extra-European History at Exeter College, Oxford between 2015 and 2017. In recognition of his research, he was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award by the Middle East Studies Association in 2016.
Note on Usage
Arabic and Persian terms, texts, and book titles that appear in the body of the text are fully transliterated following a slightly modified version of the IJMES transliteration system. No macrons or diacritics are included except for ʿayn and medial and final hamza, which are indicated by ʾ and ʿ respectively. Ottoman Turkish terms are rendered according to the principles of modern Turkish orthography, except that in these instances ʿayn and hamza are indicated in the same manner as Arabic and Persian names and words. Arabic renderings are given in the text for terms that also appear in Persian and Ottoman Turkish (mawlana, vali ʿahd), except for kanun and kanunname, which are rendered from Ottoman Turkish. Names and titles cited in footnotes and in the bibliography are fully transliterated with all macrons and diacritics according to the transliteration principles governing the language of that work. Terms that have entered regular English usage are translated (pasha, vizier, etc.), but more technical terms are maintained in transliterated and italicized forms (waqf, shariʿa). Major toponyms are rendered in their established anglicized form whenever possible (Cairo, Konya, Isfahan, Herat, Euphrates, Oxus, and so forth). Minor place names are transliterated according to the principles of the language that predominated in the area (e.g., Suliqan, Marj Dabiq, Akşehir) and historical names are maintained, especially for places within the Republic of Turkey – so Amid, not Diyarbekir; Harput, not Elazığ; Ayntab, not Gaziantep. Similarly, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Syria indicate these historical regions and not the boundaries of modern nation-states.
With respect to names of individuals rendered in the Roman alphabet, this book draws similarly fine distinctions. Names of individuals generally follow the transliteration conventions of the language that predominated in their principal location of activity. Hence, although Turkic, names of Mamluks are transliterated using Arabic conventions (Qayitbay, Tumanbay). Names of individuals whose lives predominantly unfolded in an Ottoman context are rendered using the Ottoman Turkish principles applied to Turkish words (Mehmed, Müʾeyyedzade ʿAbdurrahman Efendi). More problematic are individuals or groups who operated across vast terrains.
In these cases, I have attempted to assess the formative sphere or primary area of activity of the individual or group and transliterate these names accordingly. Hence, Idris Bidlisi is rendered from Persian, but his son, who was largely raised within Ottoman domains is rendered from Ottoman Turkish (Ebu’l-Fazl Mehmed). All names and titles of works are fully translated with macrons and diacritics in the footnotes and bibliography according to the transliteration principles of the language in which they were written. Dates are given in the Common Era unless the Hijri date is essential for the particular discussion.
Introduction
In the sixteenth century, Muslim rulers of the largest empires of West and South Asia all embraced a new vocabulary of sovereignty that supplemented traditional Perso-Islamic titles and concepts of rule. To be sure, the traditional nomenclature remained. The Ottoman sultan, the Safavid shah, and the Mughal padishah still frequently referred to themselves by titles with long histories in Islamic lands. In all cases, these titles were mutually intelligible across these empires and to a large extent interchangeable in Ottoman Istanbul, Safavid Qazvin or Isfahan, and Mughal Delhi or Fatehpur Sikri. That is to say, on the basis of a long-established and shared cultural heritage, sultan, shah, and padishah were all recognized and accepted markers of sovereignty across a wide expanse between the Balkans and Bengal.1 Yet, in addition to these traditional titles of sovereign authority, alternative claims emerged prominently in the sixteenth century within these three Muslim polities. Such claims powerfully enhanced the older designations. They also often suggested a rationale for rule on a sacral or cosmic universal scale. These emperors were not just preeminent in their own domains, but became sahib-qiran (lord of the auspicious astral conjunction), mujaddid (centennial renewer of the faith), khalifa-yi ilahi (Vicegerent of God), and occasionally mahdi-yi akhir-i zaman (Harbinger of the End Time).
To explain the preponderance of this vocabulary, modern historians have pointed to the significant cosmic, sacral, or millenarian overtones of these titles and set them in relation to broader processes of heightened apocalyptic foreboding in the sixteenth century.2 In most cases the new titles grounded their claims to authority in cosmological doctrines that anticipated the ordination of one individual to usher in a new era of universal justice, order, and peace. The claims were potent because they effectively articulated the aspirations of the three universal empires and they were plausible because, in the approach of the Hijri year 1000 (1591–2 CE), Muslim societies were primed and charged for great changes in the near future. At different moments and in response to varying, more immediate political concerns, rulers of all of these empires necessarily addressed apocalyptic anxieties, engaged millenarian discourses, and embraced radical expansive conceptions of their rule in the grandest of historical and cosmological terms.3 Beyond these specific anxieties of the tenth Hijri century, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and, to a lesser extent, Uzbek pretensions to universal empire reflected the confidence of these Muslim polities in the sixteenth century. For much of this period, these empires, although frequently immersed in intense political competition and military confrontation with one another, offered a degree of stability in governance and relative peace within their own domains afforded through a continuity of administration over large territories throughout the century. In this regard, the justice and peace provided through their rule indicated plausibly the initiation of a new millennial political and spiritual dispensation in the approach of the year 1000.
THE CRISIS OF KINGSHIP IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY This new dispensation for these four polities was, no doubt, enhanced by the stark contrast they presented with the turbulent political realities of the preceding century. The fifteenth century was the last of several centuries dominated by Turco-Mongol pastoralist politics and its uneasy tension with sedentary Islamic identities and modes of social organization. Such domination and tension in the central lands of Islam was initially precipitated by the invasions of the Seljuks from Central Asia in the eleventh century and exacerbated by the irruption of the Mongols in the thirteenth and the vast conquests of Timur (r. 1370–1405). Indeed, the life and career of Timur remained the primary point of ideological reference for all subsequent rulers of the fifteenth century, perhaps especially because the extent and impact of his conquests remained unparalleled over the course of the century. The fragile and ultimately fractured territory he bequeathed to his descendants was subjected to conquests, counterconquests, and the rapid succession of rulers that seemed to perpetuate a state of instability in Iran and adjacent lands. Even in the last decades of the century, stability within and among the four principal sultanates of West Asia remained fleeting. Of these four powers – the Ottomans of the Balkans and Anatolia, the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt, the Aqquyunlu of western and central Iran, and Timur’s descendants in eastern Iran and Transoxiana – only the Ottomans would survive and thrive beyond the second decade of the sixteenth century. How, then, did this confident and expansive vision of kingship emerge in the sixteenth century? What were the conditions prevailing in this politically tumultuous, fractured world of the fifteenth century that made possible the emergence of territorially defined and ideologically assertive Muslim empires in the sixteenth century? In order to address these questions, we must immerse ourselves in the political, social, religious, and cultural contexts of the fifteenth century. Such contexts are challenging, not least, because they do not fit neatly into the historiographical categories in which historians most frequently work. These categories are informed by the legacies of the early modern Muslim empires and therefore focus upon modern notions of linguistic, religious, cultural, and national boundaries. Yet the fifteenth century was more than a period of messy transition to the more orderly and coherent geopolitical landscape of the sixteenth century. Several of its features bear directly upon a new model of kingship articulated in the fifteenth century and more expansively realized in the sixteenth. Many of these related to the social, intellectual, and religious developments attendant with the continuing growth of Islamic religious movements, especially those with a militant messianic cast, that prospered equally among urban, rural, and tribal elements of society across Islamic lands. Such movements included the far-flung Sufi networks that coalesced around nascent confraternities, such as the Mawlawiya, Naqshbandiya, and Khalwatiya.4 They also encompassed much more radical millenarian movements and included most prominently the insurrection of Shaykh Bedreddin in the Balkans and Anatolia, the Safavis in Azerbaijan and Anatolia, the Mushaʿshaʿ in Iraq and southern Iran, the Nurbakhshiya in northern and western Iran, and the Hurufis across much of West Asia.5 To varying degrees, both the emerging Sufi orders and the more radical millenarian movements drew upon the thought of the theosophical Sufi Ibn al-ʿArabi (d. 1240). With few exceptions, they espoused a reverence for ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and his first successor within Shiʿi tradition, that promoted extreme concepts within some circles and, more generally, produced a confessional fluidity or ambiguity that blurred distinctions between Sunnis and Shiʿis.6 Insofar as these movements embraced an overt political agenda, they constituted a threat to prevailing authorities. Equally, their intellectual production offered fertile material for new discourses on sovereignty, especially since they so frequently concerned how theosophical cosmologies came to bear upon the ordering of humankind and the world. In the central lands of Islam – roughly the lands between the Nile and Oxus rivers – such intellectual production was frequently expressed in Persian. To be sure, Arabic still predominated as the universal language of scholarship – especially pertaining to religious learning – but Persian was used extensively or even preferred in other learned and literary forms, including Sufism, poetry, and history writing. Indeed, the prestige of Persian is evident within court culture, even among rulers whose native tongue was Turkish or whose subjects spoke Arabic. Throughout the fifteenth century, this court culture, including outside Iran, bore the imprint of the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of Timurid courts, which, notwithstanding their political volatility, patronized art, architecture, poetry, and prose in brilliant fashion. These cultural products, in turn, circulated and shaped the aspirations and expectations of courts across a wide expanse. In this sense, the prestige of Persianate cultural products acted as an important binding agent for the broader, fractured political terrain of the period and facilitated the movement of religious and political ideas. In these respects, the socioreligious and cultural features of Islamic lands in the fifteenth century constituted a challenge to the existing political order, yet offered it the appropriate conditions for a wide-ranging response or synthesis. This challenge and response renders the fifteenth century, in the estimation of John Woods, “an era of great experimentation and innovation in political thought and practice.”7 Such experimentation and innovation was undertaken in administrative and ideological spheres and ultimately informed the political context and intellectual basis for the innovative, yet widely deployed vocabulary of the sixteenth century. The practice of politics in the fifteenth century was particularly fragile because sultanic courts with centralizing ambitions contended with entrenched societal elements that frequently opposed them. These elements, whether of the Turkic military or urban notable classes, were key to sultanic governance since they constituted the traditional backbone of sultanic authority in its military or fiscal-administrative forms. Generally, sultanic reliance on these classes was acknowledged and expressed through the complex arrangements by which sultans offered extensive financial privileges to these leading elements in exchange for military, administrative, and ideological support. The accumulation and consolidation of these privileges, which frequently assumed the form of significant tax exemptions on land, precipitated a reduction in the sources of revenue and in this manner undermined the ability of these polities to govern. In the latter half of the fifteenth century, all four of the major sultanates operated under the fiscal constraints imposed by these arrangements even as they sought ways to centralize their authority and administration. The tension, therefore, between these centralizing courts and the broader societal elements upon which they relied produced a number of political crises between the late 1460s and early 1490s within each of these sultanates, precipitated most immediately by their concerted efforts to undertake land tenure reforms and reappropriate the usufruct grants and religious endowments belonging to the military and urban notable classes. In all cases, the protests of the effected privileged parties prevailed – often with violent repercussions – and the central administrative reforms of the four sultanates stalled. Equally, all polities in the fifteenth century strove to formulate a basis for political authority in the absence of any widely agreed-upon parameters for articulating legitimacy. This crisis of kingship, in fact, harkened back to the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 and intensified after the dissolution of the Chinggisid Ilkhanate in the fourteenth century. Before these monumental events, universal political authority was derived largely from juridical and genealogical discourses that effectively buttressed the claims of Abbasid or Chinggisied royal claimants to universal rule. Since at least the eleventh century, Muslim jurists widely agreed that the office of caliph should remain the prerogative of a member of the Quraysh tribe of the prophet Muhammad.8 For as long as an Abbasid caliph lived, such a view posed no problems, and indeed, effectively buttressed the Abbasid caliph’s claim to represent the Sunni community. The obliteration of the Abbasid Caliphate with the advent of the Mongols in the thirteenth century prompted a crisis among Muslim jurists, yet posed little concern for the Turko-Mongol military elites who dominated the central Islamic lands.9 For these elites, descent from the world-conqueror Chinggis Khan constituted the principal attribute of an effective claim to universal rule. Yet, by the middle of the fourteenth century, such prestige began to erode and with the dissolution of the Ilkhanid dynasty, no descendant of Chinggis Khan offered a viable bid for de facto rule. To be sure, in the postAbbasid, post-Chinggisid world of the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Muslim jurists attempted to modify the legal arguments of their predecessors, yet no single argument was advanced to establish any broad consensus on the matter.10 Similarly, an alternative genealogical tradition emerged, especially among Ottoman and Aqquyunlu Turkmen rulers, rooted in Oğuz Turkic genealogical traditions, yet, here too, such discourses failed to resurrect the universal prestige that had accrued to members of the Quraysh in the era of the Abbasids or the offspring of Chinggis Khan during the heyday of the Ilkhanate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.11 Crucially, none of the principal rulers of the central Islamic lands, including the Ottomans, could claim credibly descent from the Quraysh or Chinggis Khan. For these reasons, the fifteenth century, perhaps especially with respect to political thought, constituted an extremely fluid period, one, in which, as Evrim Binbaş suggests, “established discursive forms and taxonomies lost their powers of persuasion” and rulers and ruled alike actively sought out and developed alternatives.
OTTOMAN SOVEREIGNTY BEFORE EMPIRE
Despite its isolated position at the margins of Islamic lands, the Ottoman Sultanate of this period was equally susceptible to these broader currents. Indeed, it is a central contention of this book that the Ottoman Sultanate, rather than being insulated from the principal anxieties of other fifteenthcentury Muslim polities, necessarily operated within these same socioreligious and political constraints. For this reason then, the Ottoman adaptation and development of this vocabulary constitutes an illuminating expression of the broader phenomenon. Throughout the fifteenth century, and especially in its latter decades, by which point Ottoman sultans were increasingly drawn into political and military entanglements in Anatolia, the ramifications of the crisis of kingship played out increasingly within the Ottoman court and helped establish a new ideological trajectory for the sultanate into the sixteenth century. To be sure, such a trajectory contrasted markedly with the salient and animating features of Ottoman sovereignty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During this period, the sultan and his sultanate’s legitimacy was frequently construed in response to the geopolitical concerns of the more narrowly bounded territory of the sultanate in the Balkans and Anatolia. Over the first two hundred years of its existence, Ottoman sultans had personally led raids, campaigns, and conquests of non-Muslim territory in these lands that contributed to the greatest expansion of Islamic lands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such activities, referred to alternatively as ghaza or jihad, accrued significant esteem for the sultans, who frequently proclaimed their status as preeminent warriors of the faith (sultan-i ghaziyan, sultan-i mujahidin).13 In this regard, in 1453, when the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481) conquered Constantinople – capital of the eastern Roman Empire and subject of apocalyptic prophecy since the early days of Islam14 – contemporary sultanates across the Muslim world took note and in congratulatory missives affirmed the Ottoman sultan’s status as a great warrior of the faith.15 This distinguishing attribute, therefore, can be said without exaggeration to constitute both the raison d’être of the sultanate, as well as a compelling component of its legitimating ideology.16 In addition to a ghaza ideology, the Ottoman Sultanate in the fifteenth century also bolstered its claims to rule, especially through chronicles, with reference to two other discourses. These discourses, which elaborated Ottoman connections to prominent Turkic lineages or historically verifiable legal arguments, sought to defend Ottoman expansion into Anatolia. In contrast to southeastern Europe, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Anatolia was governed by a number of Turkmen principalities that had emerged as successors to the Seljuk Sultanate during and after its gradual dissolution in the latter half of the thirteenth century. In reference principally to this political geography, one of these discourses focused on an Ottoman dynastic lineage that emphasized its superior status among the Turkmen principalities of the region, all of which claimed common descent from Oğuz Han, a mythic Turkic ruler.17 From the 1420s onwards, Ottoman chroniclers presented genealogies of the Ottoman dynasty and suggested its superiority in relation to all other Turkmen royal families.18 The other legitimating discourse had much the same effect. Specifically, in parallel with Ottoman claims of esteemed lineage, Ottoman chroniclers in the fifteenth century also argued for its legitimacy to rule in Anatolia in consequence of its historically demonstrable status as the rightful heirs of the Seljuk Sultanate.19 Yet ultimately, these discourses proved insufficient and unsatisfactory on their own to explain and represent Ottoman sovereignty in the sixteenth century. For, in addition to expansion into Europe and Anatolia, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the Ottomans also expanded further eastward into traditionally Muslim territories. Between 1473 and 1516, the Ottomans went to war with the major powers in Arab and Persian lands four times. The last of these conflicts led to the incorporation of western Iran, Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz into the Ottoman polity and greatly transformed the demographic and cultural profile of the sultanate. Over the course of these conflicts and in their immediate wake, a legitimating ideology of conquest based primarily upon ghaza or defended with reference to Oğuz heritage and Seljuk inheritance, was frequently irrelevant when articulated in reference to Muslim opponents and conquered subjects.20 For instance, in 1472 in the midst of rising tensions with the Aqquyunlu Sultanate – admittedly a polity concerned with its Oğuz identity – one unnamed Aqquyunlu commander sent a letter to the Ottoman governor-general of Rumiya that acknowledged the Ottoman reputation for ghaza and suggested such efforts would be exercised best against unbelievers and not, as he anticipated, against fellow Muslims.21 Moreover, for this letter writer, the relevant historical touchstone in the Ottoman-Aqquyunlu conflict was neither Oğuz lineage nor Seljuk inheritance, but the more proximate legacy of Timur.22 Indeed, the bulk of the letter is devoted to detailing the Ottoman folly of any war with the Aqquyunlu sultan Uzun Hasan (r. 1457–1478), recipient of divine favor, who, through fourteen points enumerated in the letter is compared agreeably to Timur, world conqueror and vanquisher of the Ottomans. Certainly, Ottoman conflicts with other Muslims caused consternation within Ottoman ruling circles. The Ottoman war with the Mamluk Sultanate between 1485 and 1491 disquieted several of the leading Ottoman scholars of the day and prompted the ruler of Tunis to send an envoy to the Ottoman court in an effort to broker peace between the two leading Islamic polities.23 Clearly, in these circumstances, a legitimating ideology and vision of rule based solely or even primarily on the Ottoman sultan’s status as warrior of the faith, Oğuz descendant, or Seljuk heir failed to accommodate the increasingly complex terrain in which the Ottomans operated and exercised power. In this sense, Ottoman expansion into traditionally Muslim territory and the broadening horizons and burgeoning self-confidence of the sultanate in the early sixteenth century helps explain the increased appeal and plausibility of the broadly resonating, yet relatively novel vocabulary of universal rule, construed as it was in sacred and cosmic terms. With the conquests in 1516–1517 of Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Ottoman sultans came to rule the holiest and most prestigious lands of Islam. When coupled with their reputation as conquerors of vast non-Muslim domains in Europe, Ottoman sultans in the early sixteenth century were well positioned to ground their rule, not in genealogy or jurisprudence, but something altogether grander and more universalizing. But how precisely did this novel discourse on rule emerge in the fifteenth century and by what means did it come to be asserted not just by the Ottomans, but by all the major Muslim empires of the sixteenth century?
POLITICAL CULTURE AND INDIVIDUAL AGENCY
To answer these questions historians have focused on two interrelated phenomena. First, they have noted the intertwining of kingship and sainthood as a major and fundamental aspect of political culture in Islamic lands between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In response to the challenges to universal authority posed by the dissolution of the Abbasid and Chinggisid dispensations, monarchs across the central lands of Islam sought to substantiate their right to rule by association with holy men, through whose miracles, prophecies, and divine grace a ruler’s credentials might be burnished. Association with such holy men and their pious performances was appealing and powerful because it cut across all strata of society and was sensible and intelligible both in highly literate discourses, as well as in the performative – and therefore more accessible – representations of sovereign authority to wider publics. Yet more powerfully, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, lines distinguishing sovereign and saint were frequently blurred. On the basis of their pious charisma, a number of Sufis, sages, and sayyids (descendants of the prophet Muhammad) claimed the mantle of temporal authority through the instigation of activist messianic movements that sought to overturn the existing political order and usher in a new age of justice and peace.24 Conversely, over this same period, rulers experimented with and frequently drew directly upon the concepts of pious charisma, prophecy, and divine beneficence – all of which had been the purview of holy men – in the articulation of their own sovereign image and mode of kingship. In this manner, in the words of Azfar Moin, “in the post-Mongol centuries, the institution of kingship became locked in a mimetic embrace with the institution of sainthood.”25 Moreover, insofar as the phenomenon was widespread and discernible throughout the central lands of Islam, it constituted a common pattern of kingship based clearly upon Sufi and millennial motifs.26 Second, historians have explained this common pattern of kingship as part of a larger reflection of the connectedness that seems to characterize the expanding horizons and various integrations of Eurasia after Mongol hemispheric conquest and the world more broadly after European global exploration and expansion. From this perspective, Azfar Moin notes that the Safavid and Mughal imperial projects of the sixteenth century drew upon “a shared cultural context and learned from the other’s modes and methods.” Similarly, Erdem Çıpa argues persuasively that the imprint of such a shared cultural context should properly extend to the Ottomans.27 In this regard, the role of the Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520) was axial, not only in setting the “political, religious, and cultural agenda of the Ottoman enterprise in the sixteenth century,” but in propelling “the complete integration of the Ottoman Empire into the early modern Eurasian political-cultural zone.”28 Çıpa interprets the common “articulation of ideas on universal sovereignty and expressions of millenarian and messianic expectations” among the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals as a clear manifestation of the “connected histories” outlined and explored by Sanjay Subrahmanyam.29 No doubt, these two interrelated phenomena contribute a great deal to the emergence and spread of this new vocabulary of sovereignty, yet they leave at least three sets of unanswered questions. The focus on kingship emphasizes the role of the king as a driver and shaper of political culture. The performative aspect of kingship insofar as it requires the active participation of a monarch in court ceremonial, public procession, or any other royal act suggests rather sensibly that the person of the monarch has a major role as an agent of political culture. In this manner, Selim’s reference to his military advisers and officers as “his Sufi disciples” clarifies his active role in the intertwining of kingship and sainthood.30 Or, the Mughal ruler Humayun’s insistence on scheduling the official rhythms of his court according to the astral auspiciousness of each day of the week suggests a concerted effort to present his rule as a conscious and conscientious reflection of a universal cosmic reality.31 Yet, such performances reflect a wider cultural climate. They exist within a range of possibilities that are not molded, defined, and bounded solely by the king. In fact, in many instances, the monarch may be entirely incidental to the expression of kingship, and therefore quite limited as an agent of political culture. So, what are the limits of a king’s agency? Who are the other actors that helped suggest to Selim or Humayun the efficacy and desirability of their peculiar displays of sovereign authority? Focus on the monarch as the primary driver of a kingly image, instead of developing an understanding of political culture as “an activity shot through by willful action, power relations, struggle, contradiction, and change,” tends toward a totalizing view of politics and power that obscures as much as it illuminates.32 To be sure, the recent work of historians on sixteenth-century Muslim kingship emphasizes the malleability of cultural meanings in a political context, but an emphasis on the activity and performances of the monarch overshadows the more complex processes by which a particular act suggests itself as potent or persuasive at any given time. Separately, recent explanations of the new sixteenth-century vocabulary of sovereignty rest upon a reasonable and long-established understanding of Islamic lands as constituting a shared cultural space that facilitated the emergence of a common conception of rule among the three Muslim empires.33 In this sense, widespread modes of association – such as Sufi networks – shared cultural priorities – such as the cultivation of Persian letters, and historical legacies – observable most clearly in the post-Mongol universalism embraced across eastern Islamic lands – lends assertions of a shared cultural space a certain concrete coherence in considerations of Muslim sovereignty. But the precise mechanisms that sustained these associations and legacies are often left unexamined in the context of political culture. Can a connected history lead to something more precise than an amorphous and pervasive climate of ideas observable through broad phenomena and shared across a wide space? What processes sustained such a shared culture? What were its limits and internal tensions? More generally, travel and focus upon intermediaries, gobetweens, and other unlikely individuals is a hallmark of much of the literature concerned with exploring and elucidating the connected histories of the early modern world.34 Surprisingly, a similar emphasis on the movement of individuals and their capacity as conveyors and transformers of political ideas is largely absent. In short, because the empires shared a common cultural space, connections are assumed rather than demonstrated and explored. Such a state of affairs is perhaps especially surprising since with respect to other aspects of late medieval and early modern Islamic history, travel, and the movement of people and ideas figures so prominently. For this period, the expanding yet still flexible affiliations created and sustained by Sufi networks facilitated the transmission of important spiritual practices, including the cultivation of spiritual lineages (silsila), the development of formal master-disciple (pir – murid) relationships, the veneration of saints’ tombs, and the adoption of rituals particular to specific Sufi communities.35 In parallel with these Sufi networks, especially with respect to the fifteenth century, recent work has begun to note the existence of important informal networks of intellectual affiliation distinct from traditional scholarly and Sufi circles across wide expanses of Islamic lands. This work, especially in the form proposed by Evrim Binbaş, draws inspiration from the seventeenth-century European Republic of Letters with its focus on informal ties and long-distance intellectual exchange cultivated through correspondence among intellectuals with similar philosophical, political, cultural, and aesthetic sensibilities.36 With respect to fifteenthcentury Islamic lands, a similar dynamic underpinned the writings and thought of scholars united through their interest in the occult science of letters as the epistemological underpinning of all bodies of knowledge.37 Such esoteric ideas represented the cutting edge of scholarship in the fifteenth century, yet frequently their practitioners and promulgators worked at the margins of political life, or even completely removed from it. The existence and circulation of their ideas among intellectual circles of far-flung informal scholarly networks suggests an important process by which they spread across the central lands of Islam, but cannot explain how ideas on messianic, astral, or sacred kingship were reformulated, domesticated, and internalized as the basic building blocks upon which courts and their barebones bureaucracies defined and articulated a conception of rule. How, then, might we connect more concretely esoteric ideas and concepts that might have political potential with their subsequent widespread expression in courtly discourse – whether in the elaborately choreographed ceremonies and expertly crafted descriptions and depictions of sovereignty or in the more mundane, quotidian technologies of governance? One of the problems with considering these questions concerns the varying and multiple scales of analysis required to address them effectively. On one level, the questions raised thus far suggest a near global scale: How did a specific vocabulary of sovereignty come to be shared over a relatively short period of time across a wide expanse between southeastern Europe and South and Central Asia? Focus therefore on the connective social and cultural phenomena that may have facilitated this movement seems entirely apposite, as is examination of specific rulers and courts. But this shift to narrower, analytically comprehensible scales entails still further problems, including in this case the limits of cultural connectedness and integration and the appropriate construing of individual agency. One way historians have dealt with this basic problem in other historiographical contexts is to acknowledge and embrace the utility of the individual as historical subject in the consideration of much broader questions. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam observed in his study of global cultural encounters, “the individual with his forensic characteristics is at one level the obvious and irreducible minimal unit for the historian of society.”38 Yet in coming to embrace the utility of the individual, historians in recent decades have necessarily been forced to address the historiographical baggage of a nineteenth-century obsession with great men as drivers of change. Instead, they have tended to focus on the lived experience of “unknown” individuals, who for one reason or another have left a discernible (and illuminating) trace in the archival record. The approach shares much in common with microhistory and indeed, the gradual accumulation of global individual stories has been posited as a method to write the history of “our interconnected world, one story at a time.”39 Sebouh Aslanian, drawing inspiration from Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel’s thinking on the problem of scale in transnational history, advocates such a micro-historical approach to global history for three methodological considerations that it is suited to address.40 First, such an approach places actors and agency front and center and in this manner restores the human dimension to what otherwise are largely impersonal narratives – whether of global networks of material exchange and circulation or of an amorphous climate of ideas. Second, through examination of “unusually cosmopolitan individuals who led ‘global lives’ and on whom archival information happens to be abundant,” historians have a concrete method by which microanalysis of an individual in a global context illuminates unexamined aspects of broad imperial, commercial, and biological expansion, circulation, and integration. Related to this second point is a third. The concrete and close engagement with a life as reflected in an archival record permits historians “to fulfill the craft and ethic of their discipline” by adhering closely to their primary sources, even as they seek to address the grandest of historical questions.
Yet the sustained engagement with the fleeting images of a life afforded by patchy archival remnants raises another question of craft and ethic. A micro-historical approach, in its incomplete and instrumental examination of snippets of lived experience risks, in the words of John-Paul Ghobrial, “producing a set of caricatures, a chain of global lives whose individual contexts and idiosyncrasies dissolve easily into the ether of connectedness,” or are subsumed too fully into a neat (micro-/global-) historical narrative.42 To deal with this challenge, Ghobrial has proposed an approach that necessarily drags the historian back into the local contexts – and by extension we may add longer term historical developments – that informed, motivated, or restricted an individual’s activities and thought in the past. It is an approach that rests somewhere between micro-history and biography and it is one particularly well suited to the examination of political ideas in a broad historical context.43 Ideas, perhaps especially political ideas, are as messy as the lives that give birth to them. As Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geoulamos, and Nicole Jerr observe, sovereignty, and therefore kingship, are concepts “embedded within particular constellations of ideas, aesthetics, and practices”; rather than seek to disentangle these constellations, “the historian’s purpose is to display at a minute level these entanglements and their consequences.”44 A self-consciously biographical approach allows us to explore kingship and the intellectual and cultural constellations in which it is formulated while still preserving the messiness of individual lived experience and the broader intellectual entanglements they produce.
HISTORY AND SOVEREIGNTY THROUGH THE LIFE OF IDRIS BIDLISI
In these senses, the life and thought of Idris Bidlisi offers just the sort of varied and rich view of a life immersed in scholarly and literary pursuits, susceptible to the demands of political activity, and filled with all the messiness and mystery of lived experience that add depth and nuance to consideration of the broader political, intellectual, and religious processes that shaped Islamic lands in the early sixteenth century. Examination of this life in these broader contexts constitutes the subject of Part I of this book. Indeed, the barest outline of Bidlisi’s experiences addresses directly many of the themes outlined thus far; his birth, in 1457, within the reclusive messianic community of Muhammad Nurbakhsh in northern Iran, inaugurated a lifelong commitment to exploring the mystical realities that Bidlisi believed undergirded the order of the cosmos and ultimately informed his vision of man’s role in the world. His education, principally under the guidance of his father, Husam al-Din ʿAli Bidlisi (d. 1504), formally initiated him in such explorations, but also brought him into direct contact with the leading Sufi and philosophical authorities of the day. As a young adult, he spurned his father’s example of a godly life detached from worldly concerns and entered the court of the Aqquyunlu ruler Yaʿqub in Tabriz. For the next twenty years, Bidlisi rose within the ranks of the Aqquyunlu chancery, in which capacity he crafted and composed sultanic missives and other documents that articulated and projected a commanding and divinely sanctioned image of the sultan. In middle age, he witnessed firsthand the political turmoil in his homeland in Iran that culminated in 1501 with the dissolution of the Aqquyunlu Sultanate and the political rise of a messianic figure, Shah Ismaʿil, whose radical program shook Bidlisi and prompted his migration to the Ottoman court of Bayezid II. There, he found an initially welcoming environment where he could flourish as a man of erudition and Persian belles lettres through the composition of a massive history of the Ottoman house entitled Hasht bihisht (The Eight Paradises) and a number of other scholarly works, political treatises, and panegyric poems dedicated to members of the dynasty and its leading statesmen. Slighted by the mixed reception of his history at court and frustrated by his subsequent marginalization, he flirted with the idea of reconciliation with Shah Ismaʿil and departed from Ottoman lands only to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. In his last years, he returned to the Ottoman court at the invitation of a new sultan, Selim, whose energetic reign included a major military confrontation with Shah Ismaʿil and the Ottoman conquests of western Iran, Syria, and Egypt between 1514 and 1517, during which time, Bidlisi acted as Selim’s ideologue, trusted adviser, and special envoy to the rulers of Kurdistan. Even in this cursory form, Bidlisi’s life appears to have run in tandem with many of the political, social, and intellectual currents that underlay the spread of the new vocabulary of sovereignty. Although not a monarch, Bidlisi was attached to courts for long stretches of his career and worked within them as secretary, historian, adviser, and envoy. In these capacities, he acted as both recipient and shaper of a political culture in flux in both the Aqquyunlu Sultanate of his youth and early adulthood and the Ottoman Sultanate from middle age onwards. Even so, focus on Bidlisi is not to suggest that his experiences were sui generis or even that his intellectual contribution was uniquely transformative. Rather, for reasons that I hope will become apparent in the following chapters, he was simply a more successful example of a more general type of scholar-secretary who helped shape and promote what became a broadly accepted vision of rule. The Aqquyunlu and Ottoman Sultanates did not arrive at similar conceptions of sovereignty because they shared broadly in some cultural climate. Rather, it was through the migration and activities of men like Bidlisi that the specific formulations of kingship circulated and were adapted to widening political contexts throughout the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. It is through this migration – along with its resulting triumphs and frustrations – that Bidlisi’s life offers a window to the precise mechanisms that sustained and bounded the expansive shared cultural complex within Islamic lands. By virtue of his talents and luck, he had a specific impact on the ideological discourse of the Ottoman Sultanate during a critical juncture in its history. His life, like any other, was marked both by triumphs and frustrations and the underlying social and cultural tendencies beneath them permit us to expose and examine the religious, linguistic, literary, and ideological contours of this complex, as well as the internal tensions that placed certain restraints on their expression. Part II focuses upon these contours and Bidlisi’s reflections on rule and governance principally through an examination of two interrelated aspects of his thought: his historiographical outlook and theory of kingship. Bidlisi’s historical writing and thinking on sovereignty was conditioned by important new responses to the ideological crisis facing Islamic polities well before his birth. Most substantially, these responses were spurred by the career of the Turkic conqueror Timur and the competing legitimating claims of his descendants. By focusing on sovereignty, not as a function of jurisprudential reasoning or genealogical prestige, but as a consequence of cosmic and divine favor, scholars and secretaries working for Timur and his heirs began to develop an effective new vocabulary of sovereignty that directly addressed the ideological challenges Islamic polities faced in the fifteenth century. These scholars and secretaries undergirded their new vocabulary and the claims of cosmic or divine favor that such vocabulary entailed with reference to mystical, astrological, and philosophical doctrines and theories. In this manner, they transformed discourses of sovereignty from the rather restrictive confines of legal discourse and genealogical elaboration to a dynamic discourse conversant with a wide range of epistemological traditions. Timurid courts embraced these discourses and their underlying epistemologies through expertly produced and delicately decorated works, including most lavishly the horoscope of Iskandar b. ʿUmar-Shaykh (d. 1415), a detail of which adorns the cover of this book. As a consequence of the frequent dissolution and consolidation of powerful competing political courts across the central lands of Islam, these same scholars and secretaries regularly traveled from Herat to Constantinople and Cairo, where they found employment in chanceries or produced literary works, which in both cases afforded ample opportunity to deploy the Timurid vocabulary of sovereignty in ever wider contexts. Clearly, Bidlisi’s activities and intellectual output are emblematic of this process; he began his career in the Aqquyunlu chancery and finished it as an adviser to the Ottoman sultan Selim. Significantly, he was also among a wider network of Persian émigré scholar-secretaries who arrived in Ottoman lands amidst the political turmoil in Iran in the waning of the fifteenth century and the onset of the sixteenth. When Bidlisi began writing his massive history of the Ottomans at the beginning of the sixteenth century, he joined a debate about the meaning and purpose of history as a branch of knowledge that had unfolded between Arabophone and Persephone historians over the preceding century. Bidlisi’s views on the central questions examined by these historians immediately informed how he wrote history and presented his ideas on rule. Significantly, Bidlisi understood history as the preeminent literary science, and as such, it should display the full range of rhetorical technique. In other words, it should draw upon the most varied sciences – whether religious, poetic, astrological, mystical, physiognomical, or philosophical – to embellish and substantiate historical narratives. For Bidlisi and many of his contemporaries, such narratives rightfully focus on lauding the good deeds of kings. More than empty praise, such encomia served a didactic purpose, since reading history encouraged good actions and habits while discouraging bad behavior. As a consequence of this view, history, for Bidlisi and his likeminded contemporaries, became the foremost mode for articulating and defining ideal kingship.
Not surprisingly, his discussions of sovereignty and ideal kingship substantively reference the Timurid vocabulary of sovereignty to which he was exposed as a young secretary working in the Aqquyunlu Sultanate. Like his immediate Timurid predecessors in the chancery, Bidlisi, through his several works on rule, referenced a wide range of epistemological traditions in his construction of a conception of kingship. Although he frequently deployed the Timurid vocabulary of sovereignty in his writings, he also advanced his own conception of kingship, which he called khilafat-i rahmani (the vicegerency of God). To be sure, like other Ottoman chroniclers of his day, he developed the themes of ghaza, Oğuz lineage, and Seljuk inheritance in his history, yet such themes cannot be said to constitute the principal thrust of his historical and ideological thought.46
Instead, informed by his didactic and wide-ranging historiographical outlook, in The Eight Paradises, Bidlisi brought together the various epistemological strands to which he was most committed – astrological, mystical, and philosophical – and arrayed their doctrines and conclusions under the umbrella of khilafat-i rahmani to define a coherent vision of kingship embodied in the Ottoman sultans. In some small measure, it is a credit to Bidlisi’s talents as historian and rhetorician that such a vision of rule was taken on board by the Ottomans in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. Yet the deployment of a new vocabulary of sovereignty for the Ottomans was likely also an outgrowth of the Ottoman conquests of 1514–17.
The adaptation of this innovate, yet broadly resonating vocabulary of sovereignty became an important part of the Ottoman ideological program to persuade predominantly large non-Turkic, Muslim populations in newly conquered regions of the suitability and righteousness of Ottoman rule. Articulated as the divine and cosmic favor shown the Ottoman sultans, yet manifested through their just and awesome actions as rulers, the new vocabulary of sovereignty became a discernible component of an Ottoman ideology of rule for much of the sixteenth century
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