Download PDF | Kate Fleet, Suraiya N. Faroqhi, Reşat Kasaba - The Cambridge History of Turkey_ The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603. Vol. 2-Cambridge University Press (2013).
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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY O F TURKEY
With the conquest of Constantinople and the extinguishing of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Ottoman Empire moved into a new phase of expansion during which it emerged in the sixteenth century as a dominant political player on the world scene. With territory stretching around the Mediterranean from the Adriatic Sea to Morocco, and from the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea, the Ottomans reached the apogee of their military might in a period seen by many later Ottomans, and much later historians, as a golden age in which the state was strong, the sultan’s might unquestionable, and intellectual life and the arts l ourishing. Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Turkey examines this period from the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the accession of Ahmed I in 1603. The essays, written by leading scholars in the i eld, assess the considerable expansion of Ottoman power and the ef ervescence of the Ottoman intellectual and cultural world through literature, art and architecture. They also investigate the challenges that faced the Ottoman state, particularly in the later period, as the empire experienced economic crises, revolts and long, drawn-out wars.
Suraiya N. Faroqhi is Professor of History at Istanbul Bilgi University. Her publications include The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (2004); The Ottoman Empire: A Short History (2008); Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans ( 2009 ); and, as editor, The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (2006).
Kate Fleet is Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (2006); A Social History of Istanbul , co-authored with Ebru Boyar (2010); and, as editor, The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 1: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453 ( 2009 ).
Introduction
Of the Ottoman Empire we can say what Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) once wrote about the seventeenth-century military commander and entrepreneur Albrecht von Wallenstein (in Czech, Albrecht V á clav Eusebius z Vald š tejna, 1583–1634). According to Schiller’s verse, the favour and hate of [conl icting] parties had caused confusion, producing a highly variable image of Wallenstein’s character in history. Put dif erently, it was the diverging perspectives of the beholders that gave rise to this instability. Admittedly, being a poet, Schiller made his point far more concisely than the present author is able to do. 1 In certain traditions of historiography in the Balkans and elsewhere as well, denigrating the Ottoman Empire and making it responsible for all manner of “backwardness” is still widespread, although challenges to this view have been mounting during the last 30 years.
On the other hand, romanticising the images of Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81) or S ü leyman the Magnii cent (r. 1520–66) is also quite a popular enterprise: witness the statue of Mehmed II in downtown Istanbul – a new one is in the planning stage – and the double monument to Zr í nyi Mikl ó s and Sultan S ü leyman in a park of Szigetvar, Hungary. To claim “objectivity” means to deceive oneself and others, but the authors of the present volume, whatever their views, have all clearly tried to distinguish the points made by the primary sources from the interpretations that they propose as historians of the twenty-i rst century. Readers will notice that in spite of wide areas of consensus on certain topics specialists do not necessarily agree, and indeed it has been a major concern of the present editors to demonstrate the variety of approaches current among Ottomanist historians .
Paradoxically, this book, the second of the four-volume series The Cambridge History of Turkey , is the last to appear in print. While nobody had planned such an outcome, it is perhaps appropriate, for we will be dealing with what an eminent Ottomanist historian has called the “classical age”, a period of signii cance if ever there was one. Thus we are in the happy position of presenting, at the end of our project, what many readers will consider the most interesting part of our story. 2 Certainly most contributors to this series believe that it is a mistake to subsume everything that happened after 1600 under the blanket term “decline”. Yet during the period between the 1450s and 1600, more than before or afterwards, the Ottoman elite and its subjects made their mark in a variety of dif erent i elds, achievements which the contributors to this volume will discu ss.
Ottoman writing about the Ottoman world To the historian, sources are primordial, and the period between the midi fteenth and the early seventeenth century is special not only because of the signii cance of the events that occurred and the more long-term processes that played themselves out but also because for the i rst time Ottoman sources become reasonably abundant. Under the early sultans, before the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror, both Ottoman chronicles and archival documents were extremely rare. As a result, we can approach the image of Ottoman history as it may have appeared to contemporaries of Sultan Murad I (r. 1362–89) or Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) only in an indirect fashion: by the study of buildings and inscriptions, which, however, survive in their original shapes only in exceptional cases, or by a careful analysis of later narrative and documentary sources .
With the 1450s, however, matters begin to change: there survives the work of an Ottoman author who has written about the battle for Constantinople, and we also possess fragments of a tax register of newly conquered Istanbul (1455). When Mehmed II i nally incorporated the Karaman principality into his domain, his oi cials produced a careful list of the pious foundations of Konya, including the rich and precious library of Sadreddin-i Konevi (1207–74), son-in-law to the mystic Muhyi al-Din Ibn c Arabi (1165–1240) and an important intellectual i gure in his own right. Moreover, under the Conqueror’s son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), we encounter what may well have been the first dissenting voices from the Ottoman world that have come down to us, in the shape of certain anonymous texts describing the calamities that had befallen pre-Islamic Constantinople. Probably this i fteenth-century Cassandra, if indeed the author was a single person, intended to warn Bayezid II against making this accursed site into the seat of his sultanate . 3
About the background of this author – or these authors – we know nothing. But they were by no means the only writers active at this time, for Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II sponsored scholarly and literary activity, i lling the palace libraries with books and sending largesse to poets. Certain works produced by these men – and women, for a few female poets were also active – have survived, and after 1520, when S ü leyman the Lawgiver, also known as the Magnii cent, had ascended the throne, the number of works preserved increased exponentially. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Ottoman divan poetry developed its own special character and was no longer just an of shoot of the Iranian tradition, Timurid style. An encyclopaedia of Ottoman poets, which contained short biographies and poetry samples, also appeared for the i rst time in 1538; afterwards the genre became popular, and some of these texts had claims to literary merit.
During the same period, Ottoman chronicles, which before 1450 had mostly consisted of brief sketches, emerged as a genre in their own right. One of the most interesting is surely the collection of heroic stories put together by A ş ı kpa ş azade, the descendant of a line of dervish ş eyh s and authors from Central Anatolia. An old man in the 1470s and 1480s, he celebrated the conquests of the sultans from Osman I (d. ca. 1324) and Orhan (r. ca. 1324–62) down to his contemporary Mehmed the Conqueror. The works of A ş ı kpa ş azade and his colleagues have caused some disagreement among modern scholars. Very few historians have accepted the legends recounted in them just as they stand, but there is a real dispute between people who prefer to ignore these tales as so many meaningless inventions and those who ever since the days of Fuat K ö pr ü l ü have tried to interpret them with the help of the social anthropology and literary theories current in the researchers’ own time. 4 Whichever approach a given historian may favour, it is quite obvious that sixteenth-century authors tried hard to collect information about the earlier years of the Ottoman principality yet had a great deal of trouble in doing so. One of them, the chancery head ( ni ş anc ı ) Feridun Ahmed (d. 1583), apparently was so frustrated at not being able to i nd any documents issued by the earliest Ottoman sultans that he simply invented them; his deception was only discovered in the early twentieth century and has much damaged the reputation of his otherwise very valuable writings . 5
In the sixteenth century, a number of high oi cials wrote historical works which are of special interest because these men had access not only to oral information current in the palaces of sultans and vezir s but also to archival documents. Thus Celalzade Mustafa (ca. 1490–1567), another head of the sixteenth-century Ottoman chancery, produced what is still regarded as the standard Ottoman source on S ü leyman the Magnii cent. 6 Slightly later, the historian and litterateur Mustafa Ali (1541–1600) set the standard that many chroniclers working in the sultans’ realm were to follow down to the 1800s. But as the author could not know about his posthumous fame, he spent much of his energy during his later years lamenting the injustices of a system that had failed to promote him according to his merits . 7
Ottoman oi cials and literary men – who often played both roles simultaneously – from the late i fteenth century onwards also created a novel language. While the grammatical base remained Turkish, authors of the time imported Arabic and especially Persian words, and to some extent Persian grammatical constructions as well, to the point that in some works only the sentence endings indicate that we are not dealing with a Persian text. Unintelligible to the uninitiated, this language served only in written and not in oral communication. While it has fallen from favour during the last 150 years, and certain authors of earlier periods also preferred to write in a language closer to educated speech, the historian does need to keep in mind that many sophisticated subjects of the Ottoman sultans regarded this hybrid language as a major cultural achievement .
Furthermore, the sixteenth century was the period in which Ottoman geographers came into their own: Piri Reis (ca. 1465–1554/55) produced two world maps remarkable for the accuracy with which he had calculated the distances between continents. Dealing with realms closer to home, this scholarly admiral produced a collection of maps showing the Mediterranean, and especially its eastern sections, which by his time were a possession of the sultans. The author had intended his work as a handbook for sailors; however, many scribes rather seem to have produced richly decorated copies meant for the libraries of Ottoman gentlemen. 8 Piri Reis’s work thus served as a vehicle of elite geographical education as well .
Quantitatively speaking, however, the sultans’ administration was the greatest producer of written texts. The activities of this bureaucracy, which had begun in the mid-1400s but gathered speed a century later, necessitated the institution of government archives, which are still our major source in spite of losses due to accidents, neglect and also malice aforethought. Especially the great tax registers of this period, which contain the names of taxpayers and the dues payable by villagers and townsmen while listing also pious foundations and their benei ciaries, allow us to write social histories at least of certain towns and regions. Or, to be exact, this enterprise becomes fruitful if we can compare the information contained in the tax registers with documents recorded by the scribes of urban judges, for since the late i fteenth century in the Bursa case and since the 1500s in many other Ottoman towns, a number of scribes recorded not only court cases but also sultanic commands emanating from Istanbul. In addition, these men served as notaries. Since having one’s writing preserved was very much an elite privilege, even with this material at hand we cannot claim to write “history from below”. But at least these works do convey an image of societ y as it appeared to Ottoman elites .
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