The Cambridge History of Turkey Volume 2

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTOR Y OF
TU RKEY
*
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 six-
teenth 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 lourishing.
Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Turkey examines this
period from the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the acces-
sion of Ahmed I in 1603. The essays, written by leading scholars in
the ield, assess the considerable expansion of Ottoman power and
the efervescence 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.
Sur ai ya N . F aro q hi 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).
Kat e Fl eet is Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman

Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her pub-
lications 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).
Th e C am brid ge H isto ry of
TU RKEY
Founding editor
I. Metin Kunt, Professor of History, Sabanc University
The Cambridge History of Turkey represents a monumental

enterprise. The History, comprising four volumes, covers the
period from the end of the eleventh century, with the arrival of the
Turks in Anatolia, through the emergence of the early Ottoman
state, and its development into a powerful empire in the ifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, encompassing a massive territory from
the borders of Iran in the east, to Hungary in the west, and North
Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in the south. The last volume
covers its destruction in the aftermath of the First World War,
and the history of the modern state of Turkey which arose from
the ashes of empire. Chapters from an international team of
contributors relect the very signiicant advances that have taken
place in Ottoman history and Turkish studies in recent years.
VO LU ME I
Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453
Edited by Kate Fleet
VO LU ME 2
The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603
Edited by Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet
VO LU ME 3
The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839
Edited by Suraiya N. Faroqhi
VOL UM E 4
Turkey in the Modern World
Edited by Reşat Kasaba
THE CAM BRID G E
HI S TORY OF
T UR KEY
*
VOLU M E 2
The Ottoman Empire as a World Power,
1453–1603
*
Edited by
S UR A I YA N. FA ROQ HI
Istanbul Bilgi University
K AT E F L EE T
University of Cambridge
cambridge university press
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Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press

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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
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Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

The Ottoman empire as a world power, 1453–1603 / [edited by] Suraiya
Faroqhi, Kate Fleet.
p. cm. – (The Cambridge history of Turkey ; v. 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-62094-9 (hardback)
1. Turkey – History – Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918. 2. Turkey – History – 1453–1683.
3. Turkey – Foreign relations. 4. Turkey – Social conditions – 1288–1918.
5. Turkey – Civilization – 1288–1918. 6. Imperialism – History.
I. Faroqhi, Suraiya, 1941– II. Fleet, Kate. III. Title. IV. Series.
DR485.O866 2012
956′.015–dc23 2011036252
ISBN 978-0-521-62094-9 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
. List of Illustrations ix
. List of Maps xi
. List of Contributors xiii
. Chronology xvii
. A note on transliteration xxi
. 1 . Introduction 1
SU R AIYA N. F AR O QH I
pa rt i
AN EX PAN D I N G EMPIRE
. 2 . The Ottomans, 1451–1603: A political history introduction 19

K AT E F LE ET
. 3 . Ottoman expansion in Europe, ca. 1453–1606 44

P ALMIR A B RU MMETT
. 4 . Ottoman expansion in the East 74

EB R U BO YAR
. 5 . Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean 141

K AT E F LE ET
. 6 . Ottoman expansion in the Red Sea 173

SAL I ? H Ö Z BAR AN
vii
Contents
pa rt ii
G OVE R N M EN T, EC ON OM I C LI FE AND SOCIE TY
. 7 . Government, administration and law 205

C O LI N I M BE R
. 8 . The Ottoman government and economic life: Taxation,

public inance and trade controls 241
?
M UR AT Ҫ I zak ҪA
. 9 . Ottoman armies and warfare, 1453–1603 276

G É Z A D Á VID
. 10 . Religious institutions, policies and lives 320

G IL LE S VE INS TE IN
. 11 . Ottoman population 356

SU R AIYA N. F AR O QH I
pa rt iii
CULT UR E AN D T HE ARTS
. 12 . The order of knowledge, the knowledge

of order: Intellectual life 407
G OTT F RI ED HAG E N
. 13 . The visual arts 457

ҪIĞ? d em k af es C I o? Ğ lU
. 14 . The literature of Rum: The making of a

literary tradition (1450–1600) 548
SE L I ? M S . K U R U
. Glossary 593
. Bibliography 599
. Index 665
viii
Illustrations
13.1 The Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, aerial view page 460

13.2a The mosque complex of Mehmed II, Istanbul: (a) aerial view 463
13.2b The mosque complex of Mehmed II, Istanbul: (b) plan 464
13.3 Gedik Ahmed Paşa mosque-convent, Afyon, 1477: (a) exterior view
with side iwans; (b) plan 468
13.4a Bayezid II complex, Edirne, 1488 470
13.4b Bayezid II complex, Edirne, 1488: plan of complex (1, mosque;
2, soup kitchen; 3, caravansary; 4, hospital; 5, medrese) 471
13.5 Page from the “Baba Nakkaş” album, ca. 1470 478
13.6 Calligraphic album of Şeyh Hamdullah; page with naskh and
thuluth scripts 479
13.7a–b Underglaze ceramic plates: (a) dish with rumi and Baba Nakkaş–style
ornament and pseudo-Kuic inscription, ca. 1480; (b) dish with tuğrakeş
spiral design, ca. 1530–40 482
13.7c–d Underglaze ceramic plates: (c) dish with rosettes, lotus lowers and
saz leaves, ca. 1545–50; (d) dish with tulips and hyacinths, ca. 1560–75 483
13.8 Velvet with an ogival pattern, attributed to Bursa or Italy,
ifteenth century 484
13.9 Portrait of Mehmed II, attributed to Sinan Bey. Album, 1460–80 487
13.10 Bayezid II meeting with vezirs, Malik Ummi, Şehname, ca. 1495 489
13.11 The courts of Solomon and Bilqis, Uzun Firdevsi, Süleymanname,
ca. 1480 491
13.12 Découpage garden from the “Nishaburi” album F. 1426 496
13.13 The “Nishaburi” album, ink drawings of dragon and lotus blossom
in saz leaves 497
13.14 Frontispiece of Qur’an transcribed by Ahmed Karahisari, partly
attributed to Hasan Çelebi, ca. 1550, 1584, illuminations 1584–96 498
13.15 Ceremonial kaftan with ogival pattern, featuring tulips and rumis,
mid-sixteenth century 499
13.16 Detail of tile panel from the mihrab, Piyale Paşa mosque, Istanbul, 1573 500
13.17 Jewelled gold book binding, last quarter of the sixteenth century 503
13.18 Şehr-i İskenderiyye-i ‘Arab (Alexandria), in Piri Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye 506
13.19 View of Genoa, Matrakçı Nasuh, Tarih-i Feth-i Siklos, Estergon,
ve İstolbelgrad, ca. 1545 507
ix
Illustrations
13.20 Süleyman I presented with the legendary cup of Jamshid, Arii,

Süleymanname 510
13.21a Süleymaniye mosque and mausoleum, Istanbul, 1550–7,
architect Sinan: aerial view from the south 514
13.21b Süleymaniye mosque and mausoleum, Istanbul, 1550–7,
architect Sinan: interior view towards the mihrab 515
13.21c Süleymaniye mosque and mausoleum, Istanbul, 1550–7,
architect Sinan: plan 516
13.22 The mausoleum of Süleyman I: (a) interior; (b) section 517
13.23 Haseki Hürrem public bath, 1550s, Istanbul, architect Sinan: (a) aerial
view from the south; (b) plan 518
13.24a Rüstem Paşa mosque, Istanbul, ca. 1563, architect Sinan, interior
view towards the south 519
13.24b ?
I smihan Sultan and Sokollu Mehmed Paşa mosque, Istanbul,
1571–2, architect Sinan, interior view towards the south 520
13.25 (a) Köse Hüsrev Paşa mosque and mausoleum, Van, 1567–8, 1587–8,
architect Sinan (Photograph: Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive);
(b) Khan al-Gumruk, Aleppo, interior facade of courtyard, 1560s or 1570s 524
13.26 Sinan Paşa medrese, mausoleum and sebil complex Istanbul, 1593,
architect Davud Ağa: (a) view from the west; (b) plan 531
13.27 Mehmed III returns from the Eger campaign, Ta’likizade, Egri Fetihnamesi,
1596–1600 535
13.28 Cairo and the Nile; men enjoying cofee in boats, Şerif bin Seyyid
Muhammed, Tercüme-i Miftah-ı Cifrü’l-Cami, 1595–1600 541
13.29 Group portrait of Ahmet Karabaği, Seyyid Lokman, Ahmed Feridun
and the painters Üstad Osman and Nakkaş Ali; Seyyid Lokman,
Şehname-i Selim Han 545
x
Maps
I Ottoman expansion in Europe page xxii

II Ottoman expansion in the East xxiii
III Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean xxiv
IV Ottoman expansion in the Red Sea xxv
xi
Contributors
EBRU BOYAR is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations,

Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Her books include Ottomans, Turks and the
Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London, 2007) and A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul
(Cambridge, 2010), co-authored with Kate Fleet.
PALMIRA BRUMMETT is Visiting Professor of History at Brown University and

holds a Distinguished Professorship of Humanities in the History Department, University
of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her publications include Ottoman Seapower and Levantine
Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany, N.Y., 1994) and Image and Imperialism in the
Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany, N.Y., 2000). She also edited The ‘Book’ of
Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250–1700 (Leiden, 2009).
MURAT ҪIZ ? AK Ҫ A is now a professor at the International Centre for Education in

Islamic Finance, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; he has previously taught at Boğaziçi and
Bahçeşehir universities, both in Istanbul. His principal publications include A Comparative
Evolution of Business Partnerships: The Islamic World and Europe, with Speciic Reference to the
Ottoman Archives (Leiden, 1996); A History of Philanthropic Foundations: The Islamic World
from the Seventh Century to the Present (Istanbul, 2000); and Demokrasi Arayışında Türkiye,
Laik-Dindar-Demokrat Uzlaşmasına Bir Katkı (Ankara, 2002).
G É ZA D ÁV ID is a professor of Ottoman Studies at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest,

and Head of the Turkish Department at that university. He has written extensively about
the Ottoman period in Hungary. His publications include Hungarian-Ottoman Military and
Diplomatic Relations in the Age of Süleyman the Magniicent (Budapest, 1994, with Pál Fodor);
16. Yüzyılda Simontornya Sancağı (Istanbul, 1999); and Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in
Central Europe: The Military Conines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden, 2000); Afairs of
State Are Supreme: The Orders of the Ottoman Imperial Council Pertaining to Hungary (1544–1545,
1552) (Budapest, 2005); and Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders (Early Fifteenth–Early
Eighteenth Centuries) (Leiden, 2007) (all three co-edited with Pál Fodor).
S URAIYA N. FARO Q HI has taught at Middle East Technical University, Ankara,

and Ludwig-Maximilians Universitaet, Munich. She is currently a professor at Istanbul
Bilgi University. Her principal publications include Pilgrims and Sultans (London, 1994);
Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge, 1999); Subjects of
xiii
Contributors
the Sultans, translated from German by Martin Bott (London, 2000); The Ottoman Empire
and the World Around It (London, 2004); and Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under
the Ottomans (London, 2009). She also has edited Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire
(Istanbul, 2010) and volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Turkey: The Later Ottoman Empire
(Cambridge, 2006).
K ATE FLE E T is the Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham
College, Cambridge. Her books include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman
State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999) and (with Ebru Boyar) A Social
History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge, 2010). She is editor of The Cambridge History of
Turkey, Volume 1: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453 (Cambridge, 2008), editor-in-chief of The
Turkish Historical Review, and an executive editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three.
GOTTFRIED HAGEN is an Associate Professor of Turkish Studies in the Department

of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His books include Die
Türkei im Ersten Weltkrieg. Flugblätter und Flugschriften in arabischer, persischer und osmanisch-
türkischer Sprache eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert (Frankfurt and Berne, 1990) and Ein
osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit. Entstehung und Gedankenwelt von Katib Celebis Gihannüma
(Berlin, 2003). He has published extensively on German historiography concerning the late
Ottoman Empire and, with respect to an earlier period, Ottoman notions of geography
and the organization of human space. He is currently working on a study of Ottoman
biographies of the prophet Muhammad.
COLIN IM BER was Reader in Turkish at the University of Manchester until his retire-
ment in 2005. His publications include The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul, 1990);
Ebu’s-suùd: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997); The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650:
The Structure of Power (Basingstoke, 2001, new edition 2009); and The Crusade of Varna
(Aldershot, 2006). He also co-edited, with Keiko Kiyotaki and Rhoads Murphey, Frontiers
of Ottoman Studies (London, 2005) and Norman Calder’s posthumous Islamic Jurisprudence
in the Classical Era (Cambridge, 2010).
? DE M KAFESC IO
Ҫ IĞ ? Ğ LU is an Associate Professor at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul,
and the author of Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the
Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park, Pa., 2009). Together with Lucienne
Thys Şenocak, she has edited Aptullah Kuran için Yazılar: Essays in Honour of Aptullah Kuran
(Istanbul, 1999). She is the author of numerous articles on early Ottoman art history and
urbanism, including both the central lands and the Arab provinces.
S E L İ M S. K U RU is Associate Professor of Turkish Studies in the Department of Near

Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington, Seattle. He co-
edited Nazımdan Nesire Edebî Türler, with Hatice Aynur, Müjgân Çakır, Hanife Koncu
and Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul, 2010), and his articles include ‘Naming the Beloved in
Ottoman Turkish Gazel: The Case of İshak Çelebi’, in Gazel as World Literature II: From
a Literary Genre to a Great Tradition. Ottoman Gazel in Context, ed. Angelika Neuwirth,
M. Hess, J. Pfeifer and B. Sagaster (Würzburg, 2006) and ‘Pious Journey, Sacred Desire:
Observations on the Mi’raj in Early Anatolian Turkish Verse Narratives’, in The Prophet’s
xiv
Contributors
Ascension: Cross-cultural Encounters with the Islamic Mi’raj Tales, ed. Christiane Gruber and
Frederick Colby (Bloomington, Ind., 2010).
S AL İ H Ö ZBARAN was until his retirement Professor in the History Department of

Buca Eğitim Fakültesi, Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, İzmir. His publications include Tarih ve
Öğretim (Istanbul, 1992); The Ottoman Response to European Expansion: Studies on Ottoman-
Portuguese Relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Administration in the Arab Lands during
the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul, 1994); Portekizli Seyyahlar. İran, Türkiye, Irak, Suriye ve Mısır
Yollarında (Istanbul, 2007); Tarih, Tarihçi ve Toplum. Tarihin Çağrışımı, Doğası, Tarihçilik
ve Tarih Öğretimi Üzerine Düşünceler (Istanbul, 1997); Güdümlü Tarih (Istanbul, 2003); Bir
Osmanlı Kimliği: 14–17. Yüzyıllarda Rum/Rumi Aidiyet ve İmgeleri (Istanbul, 2004); Osmanlı’yı
Özlemek ya da Tarih Tasarlamak (Ankara, 2007); Ottoman Expansion towards the Indian Ocean
in the 16th Century (Istanbul, 2009); and Yemen’den Basra’ya Sınırdaki Osmanlı (Istanbul, 2004).
He also edited V. J. Parry’s Richard Knolles’ History of the Turks (Istanbul, 2003) and co-edited
Türk Denizcilik Tarihi (Istanbul, 2009), with İdris Bostan, Lütf ü Sancar and Zeki Arıkan.
G ILLES VEINSTEIN is a professor at the Collège de France in Paris. His numerous

publications include L’Empire ottoman et les pays roumains, 1544–1545 (Paris and Cambridge,
Mass., 1987, with M. Berindei); État et société dans l’Empire ottoman, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles: La
terre, la guerre, les communautés (Aldershot, 1994); Le sérail ébranlé (Paris, 2003, with Nicolas
Vatin); L’ Europe et l’Islam. Quinze siècles d’histoire (Paris, 2009, with Henry Laurens and John
Tolan). He is the editor of Salonique, 1850–1918. La ‘ville des Juifs’ et le réveil des Balkans (Paris,
1992); Les Ottomans et la mort. Permanences et mutations (Leiden, 1997); Syncrétismes et héré-
sies dans l’Orient seldjoukide et ottoman des XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles, Actes du Colloque du Collège de
France octobre 2001 (Leuven, 2005, with Alexandre Popovic); Les voies d’Allah. Les ordres mys-
tiques dans l’Islam des origines à aujourd’hui (Paris, 1996, with Nicolas Vatin); and Insularités
ottomanes (Paris, 2004).
xv
Chronology
1444–6, 1451–81 Mehmed II Fatih

1451 Campaign against Karaman
1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
1454–5 Ottoman campaigns in Serbia
1455 Fall of the Genoese settlements of Old and New Phokaea
1456 Conquest of Lemnos and Enez
1456 Unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Belgrade
1456 Capture of Athens
1457 Death of George Branković
1457 Papal leet active in the Aegean
1459 Conquest of Serbia
1459 Fall of Genoese colony of Amasra
1460 Ottoman conquest of the Peloponnese
1461 Conquest of Sinop
1461 Ottoman capture of the Byzantine empire of Trebizond
(Trabzon)
1462 Submission of Wallachia
1462 Conquest of Lesbos (Midilli)
1463 Conquest of Bosnia
1463–79 Ottoman–Venetian war
1466 Conquest of Herzogovina
1468 Death of George Kastriote (Scanderbeg)
1468, 1469 Campaigns against Karaman
1470 Conquest of Negroponte
1471, 1472 Campaigns against Karaman
1473 Ottoman defeat of Uzun Hasan at the battle of Otlukbeli
(Başkent)
1474 End of the principality of Karaman
1475 Ottoman conquest of Cafa (Kefe) and Tana (Azov)
Submission of Crimea
1476 Ottoman conquest of Wallachia
1480 Unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Rhodes
1480 Ottoman conquest of Otranto
xvii
Chronology
1481–1512 Bayezid II
1481 Ottoman withdrawal from Otranto
1482 Flight of Cem to the Hospitallers
1484 Ottoman conquest of Kilia and Akkerman
1485–91 Ottoman–Mamluk war
1495 Death of Cem
1497 Consolidation of Ottoman control of Moldavia
1500 Modon conquered
1500 Conquest of Coron
1501 Ottoman conquest of Durrës (Durazzo)
1501 Ismaʻil’s conquest of Tabriz
1508 Ismaʻil’s conquest of Baghdad
1511 Şah Kulu revolt
1512–20 Selim I
1514 Ottoman defeat of Shah Ismaʻil at the battle of Çaldıran
1516 Ottoman conquest of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem
1517 Ottoman conquest of Egypt and destruction of the Mamluk
sultanate
1517 Ottoman victory over the Portuguese of Jeddah
1520–66 Süleyman I
1521 Ottoman conquest of Belgrade
1522 Ottoman conquest of Rhodes
1524 Revolt of Ahmed Paşa, governor of Egypt
1526 Ottoman victory at the battle of Mohács
1526 Ottoman conquest of Zabid and Aden
1526 Revolt in Anatolia
1528 Revolt of Kalender in Anatolia
1529 Unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Vienna
1534 Ottoman conquest of Tabriz and Baghdad
1535 Habsburg capture of Tunis
1536 Ottoman–French alliance
1537 Unsuccessful Ottoman attack on Corfu
1538 Ottoman conquest of Naxos, Andros, Paros and Santorini
1538 Ottoman defeat of the naval forces of the Holy League at the
battle of Prevesa
1538 Ottoman campaign to Diu, India
1540 Establishment of the Ottoman beylerbeylik of Yemen
1541 Unsuccessful Habsburg attack on Algiers
1541 Ottoman conquest of Buda
1541 Portuguese campaign against the Ottomans in the Red Sea
1543 Renewal of the Ottoman–French alliance
1543–4 Ottoman navy wintered of Toulon
xviii
Chronology
1546 Ottoman conquest of Basra

1547 Ottoman–Habsburg peace
1549 Ottoman conquest of Van
1551 Ottoman conquest of Tripoli
1551 Ottoman–French alliance
1552 Incorporation of Temesvar under direct Ottoman control
1552 Ottoman campaign in the Persian Gulf
1553 Death of Şehzade Mustafa
1553–5 Ottoman–Safavid war
1554–5 Ottoman conquest of Ethiopia
1555 Peace of Amasya
1559 Defeat of Şehzade Bayezid
1562 Death of Şehzade Bayezid
1562 Ottoman–Habsburg treaty
1565 Unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Malta
1566 Ottoman conquest of Chios
1566–74 Selim II
1567 Suppression of revolt in Iraq
1568 Ottoman–Habsburg treaty
1569 Ottoman grant of capitulations to the French
1569 Ottoman expedition against Russia, siege of Astrakhan
1569–71 Ottoman campaign in Yemen
1570 Ottoman conquest of Nicosia
1571 Ottoman conquest of Famagusta
1571 Ottoman defeat at the battle of Lepanto by the naval forces
of the Holy League
1574 Ottoman conquest of Tunis
1574–95 Murad III
1578–90 Ottoman–Safavid war; annexation of Azerbaijan
1580 Ottoman–English capitulations
1583 Battle of Meşale
1585 Ottoman conquest of Tabriz
1593–1606 Ottoman–Habsburg war
1595–1603 Mehmed III
1596 (before and after) Military (Celali) rebellions in Anatolia
1596 Battle of Mesző-Keresztes
1600 Ottoman conquest of Kanizsa
1603–39 Ottoman–Safavid wars
1606 Peace of Zsitvatorok
xix
A note on transliteration
Ottoman Turkish has been transliterated using modern Turkish orthogra-

phy, and diacritical marking of long vowels has not been used for Arabic and
Persian terms or names. Names have been given in their Turkish form except
when in common usage in English. Where igures are more familiar under a
diferent form, both forms are given.
xxi
xxii
I Ottoman expansion in Europe. battle
xxiii
battle
II Ottoman expansion in the East.
xxiv
III Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean.
xxv
IV Ottoman expansion in the Red Sea.
1
Introduction
Sur aiya N. Faro qh i
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 Václav Eusebius z Valdštejna,
1583–1634). According to Schiller’s verse, the favour and hate of [conl ict-
ing] parties had caused confusion, producing a highly variable image of
Wallenstein’s character in history. Put diferently, it was the diverging per-
spectives 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 man-
ner of “backwardness” is still widespread, although challenges to this view
have been mounting during the last 30 years. On the other hand, romanti-
cising the images of Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81) or Süleyman the
Magniicent (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 Zrínyi Miklós and Sultan Süleyman 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 distin-
guish the points made by the primary sources from the interpretations that
they propose as historians of the twenty-irst century. Readers will notice that
in spite of wide areas of consensus on certain topics specialists do not nec-
essarily agree, and indeed it has been a major concern of the present edi-
tors to demonstrate the variety of approaches current among Ottomanist
historians.
1 ‘Von der Parteien Hass und Gunst verwirrt, schwankt sein Charakterbild in der Geschichte’.
See Wallensteins Lager, Prologue, in Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, 3 vols. (Munich, 1962),
vol. 2, pp. 270–5 (Internet version).
1
Sur aiya n. fa ro qh i
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
signiicance if ever there was one. Thus we are in the happy position of pre-
senting, 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 diferent ields, achievements which the contributors to
this volume will discuss.
Ottoman writing about the Ottoman world

To the historian, sources are primordial, and the period between the mid-
ifteenth and the early seventeenth century is special not only because of the
signiicance of the events that occurred and the more long-term processes
that played themselves out but also because for the irst 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 his-
tory 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 build-
ings 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 inally incorporated the Karaman principality into
his domain, his oicials 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 cArabi (1165–1240) and an impor-
tant intellectual igure in his own right. Moreover, under the Conqueror’s
son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), we encounter what may well have been the irst
2 Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and
Colin Imber (London, 1973). This work has been reprinted several times.
2
Introduction
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 ifteenth-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 liter-
ary activity, illing 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 Süleyman the
Lawgiver, also known as the Magniicent, 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 spe-
cial character and was no longer just an ofshoot of the Iranian tradition,
Timurid style. An encyclopaedia of Ottoman poets, which contained short
biographies and poetry samples, also appeared for the irst 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 Aşıkpaşazade, the descendant of a line of dervish şeyhs and
authors from Central Anatolia. An old man in the 1470s and 1480s, he cel-
ebrated 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 Aşıkpaşazade 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 Köprülü have tried to interpret them with the help of
the social anthropology and literary theories current in the researchers’ own
3 Halil Inalcik and Rhoads Murphey, Tursun Bey’s History of Mehmed the Conqueror (Chicago and
Minneapolis, 1978); Halil Inalcik, ‘Ottoman Galata 1453–1553’, in Premiè re rencontre interna-
tionale sur l’empire Ottoman et la Turquie moderne: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations
Orientales, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 18–22 janvier 1985, ed. Edhem Eldem (Istanbul and
Paris, 1991), pp. 17–116; Halil Inalcik, ‘The Ottoman Survey of İstanbul, 1455’, 1453, İstanbul
Kültür ve Sanat Dergisi 3 (2008), 19–27; Feridun Nafız Uzluk, Fatih Devrinde Karaman Eyaleti
Vakıl ar ı Fihristi (Ankara, 1958); Stéphane Yérasimos, La fondation de Constantinople et de
Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions turques: légendes d’empire (Istanbul and Paris, 1990).
3
time.4 Whichever approach a given historian may favour, it is quite obvious

that sixteenth-century authors tried hard to collect information about the ear-
lier years of the Ottoman principality yet had a great deal of trouble in doing
so. One of them, the chancery head (nişanc ı) Feridun Ahmed (d. 1583), appar-
ently was so frustrated at not being able to ind 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 oicials 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 vezirs 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 Süleyman the Magniicent.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 oicials and literary men – who often played both roles simul-
taneously – from the late ifteenth century onwards also created a novel lan-
guage. 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 lan-
guage 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.
4 Fuat Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatı’nda İ lk Mutasavv ıl ar, 2nd ed. (Ankara, 1966); Cemal Kafadar,
Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995).
5 Mükrimin Halil [Yinanç], ‘Ferīdūn Beg Münshe’ātı’’, in Tarih-i Osmani Enc ümeni Mecmuası,
XI–XIII, 771336–9/1920–3, pp. 161–8, XIV n.s. 1 (78) (1340/1924), 37–46, XIV n.s. 2 (79) (1340/1924),
95–104, XIV n.s. 4 (81), 216–26.
6 [Koca Nişancı], Geschichte Süleyman K ānūnīs von 1520 bis 1556 oder Tabakat ül-Memalik ve Derecat
ül-Mesalik von Celalzade Mustafa genannt Koca Ni şanc ı, facsimile edition with introduction by
Petra Kappert (Wiesbaden, 1981).
7 Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafâ
Âli (1541–1600) (Princeton, N.J., 1986).
4
Introduction
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 schol-
arly 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 foun-
dations and their beneiciaries, allow us to write social histories at least of cer-
tain 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 ifteenth 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 ema-
nating from Istanbul. In addition, these men served as notaries. Since having
one’s writing preserved was very much an elite privilege, even with this mate-
rial at hand we cannot claim to write “history from below”. But at least these
works do convey an image of society as it appeared to Ottoman elites.
The taxpaying subjects: Peasants and nomads

Like the governing classes of other empires from the Ancient Near East to the
nineteenth century, the Ottoman elite drew its resources largely from peasant
taxes. The vast majority of the Ottoman population in the Balkans as well
as Anatolia and the Arab provinces tilled the land; in certain regions, such as
the dry steppe of Inner Anatolia and Syria, nomads and semi-nomads also
were common. Due to the population increase which occurred in the entire
8 Svat Soucek, Piri Reis and Turkish Mapmaking after Columbus: The Khalili Portolan Atlas
(London, 1992).
5
Mediterranean world during the 1500s, a certain number of former nomads

settled down, and the Ottoman administration, which generally preferred
villagers because they were better taxpayers and did not pose any military
threat, was more than eager to record them as settled folk. In reality, people
in some regions seem to have had a foot in both worlds: peasants pastured
their animals on summer pastures, where they might move with their entire
households for the duration, while certain Anatolian nomads practiced small-
scale agriculture in their winter quarters. Presumably such people could be
villagers or nomads according to circumstances, especially if they had rela-
tives among the migrant population.
About the lives of Ottoman villagers we know very little, as the tax reg-
isters of the time only record the names of adult men and the villages or
tribal units to which they belonged. Due to the lack of surnames, we cannot
say anything about the number of families that remained on a given site for
generations compared to those who left and settled elsewhere. Certainly the
Ottoman administration ordered peasants to stay put unless they could get
permission from their local administrators to move away, or unless the sultan
decided on wholesale resettlement of certain groups of the population to
consolidate new conquests. But the government’s power of enforcement in
the more outlying regions must surely have been limited.
Yields from dry-ield agriculture tended to be low, and villagers were vul-
nerable to droughts, which were especially disastrous during the 1590s. At
least in Anatolia, where navigable rivers were few, the authorities probably
could enforce the rule that every administrative district should only feed the
local town, and any reserves should be at the disposal of armies that might
cross the area on their way to the front. The only exception was the coastal
regions, from which the owners of surpluses could export grain. Down to
the mid-1500s, the sultans in peacetime permitted sales to Venice, but once
the population increase of the sixteenth century had become obvious, they
strictly forbade such exportation. However, since merchants from outside the
realm often paid better prices, there always was a certain amount of smug-
gling not only of grain but also of raw materials such as cotton.
Trade and artisan production

At the same time, urbanisation was an ongoing process: cities such as Bursa,
Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo expanded in the sixteenth century as the popu-
lation gradually recovered from the plague epidemics of the 1300s and 1400s.
6
Introduction
Istanbul newly emerged as a major centre with a population of several hun-

dred thousand in the sixteenth century. Inter-empire trade focused on these
cities: although the Genoese withdrew from the eastern Mediterranean dur-
ing the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror, Florentines and especially Venetians
frequented Istanbul and Bursa, while Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects
of the sultan all traded in Venice. French commerce by contrast remained
limited: the often discussed ahidname (capitulations) of 1536 remained a draft
and were never implemented, and while the sultan did grant such a docu-
ment to the king of France in 1569, the French civil wars of the period pre-
vented merchants from making full use of them. By contrast, during the last
quarter of the sixteenth century, English merchants began to import woollen
cloth into Ottoman ports and exported Iranian raw silk that they purchased
in the same venues.9
However, the Ottomans traded with Eastern as well as Western countries.
Iran was a major source of raw silk, converted into cloth by weavers in Bursa
and Istanbul; however, Selim I briely interrupted the trade in the early 1500s
when he attempted to reduce the revenues of his Safavid rival by declaring an
embargo on silk.10 Spices from India and South-east Asia found avid consum-
ers in the Ottoman Empire, too, with pepper a special favourite. Moreover, in
this period the products of certain manufacturers found outlets beyond the
borders of the empire, traders from Poland and Venice for instance purchas-
ing camlets in Ankara.11 During the years covered by this volume, for a brief
period it seemed as if members of the Ottoman elite might ind the gains
from interregional and inter-empire trade so attractive that they would be
willing to allow long-distance traders a certain amount of leeway and loosen
the constraints of the “command economy”. Attractive possibilities opened
up especially in Aleppo and Cairo, where traders with India typically estab-
lished their businesses.12 However, around 1600, economic and inancial dii-
culties, doubtless in part due to war on both the western and eastern fronts,
tended to make life far more diicult for aspiring merchants.
9 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Les capitulations franco-ottomanes de 1536 sont-elles encore controvers-

ables?’, in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honor of Suraiya Faroqhi,
ed. Vera Costantini and Markus Koller (Leiden, 2008), pp. 71–88; Susan Skilliter, William
Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582 (London and Oxford, 1977).
10 Fahri Dalsar, Türk Sanayi ve Ticaret Tarihinde Bursa’da İpekç ilik (Istanbul, 1960).
11 Özer Ergenç, ‘1600–1615 Yılları Arasında Ankara İktisadi Tarihine Ait Araştırmalar’, in Türkiye
İ ktisat Tarihi Semineri, Metinler-Tartı şmalar, 8–10 Haziran 1973, ed. Osman Okyar and Ünal
Nalbantoğlu (Ankara, 1975), pp. 145–68.
12 Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian
Merchant (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998).
7
Florescence of the arts

In art and architecture as well, it is the period covered by this volume that
stands out, for the 1400s and 1500s were the time when Mehmed the Conqueror,
Bayezid II, Süleyman the Magniicent and Selim II (r. 1566–75) had great foun-
dation complexes built, usually in Istanbul but sometimes also in cities like
Damascus or Edirne. Moreover, vezirs also founded more modest but still
impressive complexes, and by the second half of the sixteenth century there
came the time when female members of the Ottoman dynasty were able to
sponsor major charities as well. The town of Üsküdar, opposite Istanbul on
the other side of the Bosporus, owed its growth and development at least
in part to the religious and charitable constructions of Süleyman’s daughter
Mihrimah (d. 1578) and the latter’s sister-in-law Nurbanu (ca. 1530–83), mother
of Murad III (r. 1574–95). Although claiming to be of noble Venetian descent,
Nurbanu had entered the imperial harem as a slave; yet, contrary to Ottoman
dynastic tradition, she ultimately became the lawful wedded wife of Selim II
and used her position to become a major patroness.13
In many of these projects, the architect Sinan (ca. 1490–1588) had a hand,
either because he had designed them and later supervised their construction
on site or because he approved – and perhaps revised – the projects of his
students. While Sinan outlived Sultan Süleyman by over 20 years and his rela-
tionship to this ruler had often been tense, in death the two were united: as a
gesture unique in the history of Ottoman building, Sinan’s mausoleum was
set close to an outer wall of the Süleymaniye complex.14
While architecture was the art form for which the Ottoman world has
become famous, the history of miniature painting was also signiicant, albeit
much shorter; to a very signiicant extent, major achievements occurred dur-
ing the period under review. As for the potters of İznik (Nicaea), in the period
covered by our volume, they produced splendid examples of faience as deco-
rative panels for mosques and palaces but also as tableware for the well-to-do.15
13 Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York
and Oxford, 1993); Leslie Peirce, ‘Gender and Sexual Propriety in Ottoman Royal Women’s
Patronage’, in Women, Patronage and Self-representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild
Ruggles (Albany, N.Y., 2000), pp. 53–68; Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneicence: An
Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany, N.Y., 2002); Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Saiye’s Household
and Venetian Diplomacy’, Turcica 32 (2000), 9–32; Benjamin Arbel, ‘Nurbanu Sultan (c. 1530–
1583): A Venetian Sultana?’ Turcica 24 (1992), 241–59.
14 Aptullah Kuran, Sinan, the Grand Old Master of Ottoman Architecture (Washington, D. C.,
and Istanbul, 1987); Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman
Empire (London, 2005).
15 Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, ed. Yanni Petsopoulos
(Istanbul and London, 1989).
8
Introduction
While today’s connoisseurs have learned to appreciate the art of the painter
Levni (d. 1730) and eighteenth-century architecture as well, it remains true that
some of the most memorable items that a visitor to Istanbul will retain are
the work of artists and architects who lourished in the sixteenth century.
Military and political successes

For us denizens of the 2000s, the Ottoman legacy in art and architecture
tends to take centre stage. But for contemporaries both within and outside
the sultans’ realm, the rapid expansion of the latter was far more important.
Reactions varied according to time, place and the social position of the people
concerned. As a result, contemporary texts relect fear and rejection, but also
acceptance and even anticipation.16
Our period begins with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and the
small principalities into which the Byzantine Empire had split after the “Latin”
campaign of 1204, also known as the Fourth Crusade. Venice had become a
major power in the eastern Mediterranean due to its territorial acquisitions
upon that occasion, which for about half a century even included a share
of formerly Byzantine Constantinople. However, in the reign of Mehmed II,
Venice lost Euboa (Negroponte) as well as the ports which the Signoria had
held on the Peloponnese. In the early 1500s, when Venice and the Ottoman
Empire were once again at war, the terriied inhabitants of the lagoon could
see the smoke rising from villages in Friuli, in today’s north-eastern Italy,
which had been burned by the advance guards of Sultan Bayezid’s army.17
With the occupation of Akkerman and Kilia (1484), today in Ukraine, the
Black Sea became an Ottoman lake, closed to Genoese and Venetian mer-
chants. As for the hanate of Crimea, in 1475 Mehmed the Conqueror made
it into a dependent principality. While the established dynasty remained in
place, the sultan could now depose a han and place one of the latter’s relatives
on the throne. This arrangement remained in place until the late eighteenth
century.
In the Balkans, Mehmed the Conqueror repressed the uprising of
Skanderbeg (1405–68) in Albania.18 At the same time, the Bosnian kingdom
16 Nevra Necipoğlu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the
Late Empire (Cambridge, 2009).
17 Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Turkish Raids in Friuli at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, in Acta
Viennensia Ottomanica, Akten des 13. CIEPO-Symposiums vom 21 bis 25. September 1998, ed.
Markus Köhbach, Gisela Prochaska-Eisl and Claudia Romer (Vienna, 1999), pp. 287–91.
18 One of the most recent additions to the long bibliography on this subject is Oliver Jens
Schmitt, Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan (Ratisbon, 2009).
9
also came to an end, and Saraybosna (Sarajevo), previously an insigniicant

village, became an important Islamic town and a showcase of Ottoman
power. In 1480, the forces of Mehmed II also took Otranto in southern Italy;
probably it was due only to the Conqueror’s death the next year and the long,
drawn-out struggle for the throne between his sons Bayezid and Cem that the
Ottomans attempted no further Italian campaigns.
With the – not altogether peaceful – accession of Selim I (r. 1512–20), the
empire expanded to the east and south. In a campaign against the newly
formed polity of the Safavids, whose founder Shah Isma’il I (r. 1501–24) had
taken over the defunct empire of the Akkoyunlu, Sultan Selim conquered
eastern Anatolia, including the cities of Erzurum and Erzincan in 1514. In
1516–17, there followed a victorious campaign against the Mamluk sultanate
of Syria and Egypt, which Selim I incorporated into his territory as a set of
directly ruled provinces. Given the dependence of the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina on Egyptian food supplies, the şerif of Mecca voluntarily submit-
ted to the Ottoman ruler. From 1517 to the end of the empire, the şerif s were
to form a subordinate princely dynasty.
With the conquest of the Mamluk Empire, the character and composition
of the Ottoman polity changed dramatically. Until 1517, it had been irst a prin-
cipality and then a regional empire on the margins of the Islamic world, albeit
with considerable prestige for having conquered Constantinople. But with the
acquisition of Egypt, Syria and – after a campaign in 1533–4 – Iraq as well, the
sultans no longer governed a largely non-Muslim population but controlled
the historic heartlands of the Islamic world, which had been largely Muslim
for centuries. In addition, the Ottoman rulers became the protectors of the
pilgrimage to Mecca, an essential requirement for all Muslims who can aford
the expense. But at the same time the sultans also came under considerable
pressure to legitimise their rule, for now they needed to compete, in terms of
“magniicence” and good government, with the Mamluk sultans, who after
all had been the only rulers capable of keeping the Mongol armies at bay.19 As
the Mamluk sultans were Sunni Muslims, scholar oicials called upon to legit-
imise the Ottoman conquest in religious terms were in a delicate position,
and it is impossible to say how many people were willing to accept Sultan
Selim’s claim that the Mamluks had deserved deposition because of the sup-
port they had given to the “heretic” Shah Isma’il. Be that as it may, through-
out the sixteenth century, Istanbul’s control over Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus
and Mecca remained on the whole quite solid.
19 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Egypt’s Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions, Waqf and
Architecture in Cairo, 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden, 1994).
10
Introduction
By contrast, Sultan Selim’s defeat of Shah Isma’il in 1514 meant not the
end but the beginning of a long series of Ottoman–Iranian confrontations.
While the armies of the sultans repeatedly conquered the long-standing
Safavid capital of Tabriz, causing the shahs to move their royal seat to Qazvin,
and at the very end of our period even to Isfahan, Ottoman conquests in the
Caucasus and Azerbaijan proved to be quite ephemeral. In addition, the con-
l ict between sultans and shahs had a signiicant religious component, and in
the 1500s both sides began to deine their Islamic character in opposition to
that of their respective opponent. The early Ottoman sultans had accommo-
dated quite a few holy men, seemingly without worrying very much about
whether the practices of these personages were acceptable to religious schol-
ars. But from the time of Bayezid II, sometimes called “the Pious” or even
“the Saintly”, Ottoman sultans began to deine their role as defenders of
Sunni right belief vis-à-vis the “heretic” shahs of Iran. Under Bayezid’s suc-
cessors Selim and Süleyman, this tendency was even more marked. In similar
fashion, the shahs of Iran and the religious scholars working in the realm of
the latter regarded their polity as representing the pure community of the
Prophet’s descendants. They upheld this claim even though, especially under
Shah Isma’il I, the warriors that had brought him to power and venerated him
as their almost-divine leader espoused a set of syncretistic beliefs that did not
endear them to Shi’ite men of religion. Both Ottoman and Safavid religious
scholars upon occasion declared that their opponents had lost any claim to
being regarded as Muslims.
Further Ottoman expansion took place in conl ict not with Muslim but
with Christian powers. During the years preceding the conquest of Egypt, the
Mamluk sultans, who did not possess a navy, had asked for Ottoman support
against the Portuguese, who threatened the Red Sea and thereby Mecca and
Medina. The resulting disputes between the two sultanates contributed to
the deterioration of relations that led to the war of 1516–17. Once the Mamluk
Empire had become part of the Ottoman domain, the protection of the two
holy cities against Portuguese attack became a major responsibility of the
sultans. In addition, the latter also were concerned about keeping Muslim
maritime traic through the Indian Ocean viable, so as to ensure that spices
reached the Ottoman realm and customs oicials could collect dues from this
valuable commodity just like their Mamluk predecessors had done.20
20 Giancarlo Casale, ‘The Ottoman Administration of the Spice Trade in the Sixteenth-Century
Red Sea and Persian Gulf ’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, 2 (May
2006), 170–98.
11
From the South-east Asian and Indian perspective as well, the Portuguese
appeared as a major threat. Especially the princes of Acheh on northern
Sumatra sought and obtained Ottoman aid against their Christian enemies,
in the form of guns and gunners. However, the Ottoman navy was unable to
make decisive conquests in the Indian Ocean region and in the second half
of the sixteenth century largely withdrew from the scene. However, once
again in the context of this Ottoman–Portuguese conl ict, the sultans’ forces
in eastern Africa established the province of Habeş, which was the respon-
sibility of the governors of Jeddah.21 Presumably holding this province also
permitted Ottoman governors to tax the local slave trade.
In the western Mediterranean and North Africa, freebooters who were
Ottoman subjects and later on oicial representatives of the empire confronted
the Spanish attempt to take the struggle against Muslim princes into Africa after
the emirate of Granada had fallen in 1492. Hayreddin (ca. 1466–1546), known
in European sources and also in modern Turkish as Barbarossa or Barbaros,
together with his brother, had been leading troops that he had brought from the
sultans’ domains, in addition to local warriors, in the ight against the Spaniards.
His stronghold was Algiers, which irst came to prominence at this time. In 1519,
Hayreddin submitted to Sultan Selim, later becoming Sultan Süleyman’s gov-
ernor in North Africa and ultimately the grand admiral of the Ottoman navy,
which he led to victory over a combined Christian leet at Prevesa in 1538.
In Tunis, the confrontation with Spanish power represented by Charles
V (1500–58) was even more direct: after Hayreddin had taken the city from
a local ruler in 1534, the latter persuaded Charles V to reinstate him, prom-
ising to become his vassal. As a result, between 1535 and the Ottoman con-
quest of 1574, Tunis was a Spanish possession. In the mid-1500s, the sultans
also acquired Tripoli in North Africa and thus controlled the entire southern
Mediterranean littoral all the way to the Moroccan border. However, as these
provinces were accessible from Istanbul only by ship, already by the late 1500s
local garrisons and sea captains came to run Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli more
or less autonomously. However, these military men always declared their alle-
giance to the sultan and found acceptance in Istanbul.22
Furthermore, the Ottomans took the dismantling of what remained of the
Venetian trade empire yet one step further when in the 1570s the vezir Lala
Mustafa Paşa conquered Cyprus. Thereafter Venice controlled no more than
21 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğ unun Güney Siyaseti, Habeş Eyaleti (Istanbul, 1974).
22 Soumaya Louhichi, Das Verhältnis zwischen der osmanischen Zentralgewalt und der Provinz
Tunesien: Versuch einer zusammenhängenden Deutung der osmanischen Herrschaft in Tunesien
während des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Saarbrücken, 2008).
12
Introduction
a stretch of Dalmatian coastline and the island of Crete, which the Ottomans
were to take in the mid-1600s, shortly after the end of the period that con-
cerns us here.
Given this record of almost constant expansion, Ottoman sultans and vezirs
of the time placed only limited importance on established borders. Certainly
they occasionally agreed on such delimitations, for instance in negotiations
with Venice or the king of Poland.23 However, according to Islamic law,
Muslim rulers could make treaties with “unbelievers” for only a limited time,
and thus such border agreements also were temporary. Once a major prize
such as Constantinople was in the sultans’ hands, the next “Kızıl elma” (“red
apple”), the term that Ottoman authors sometimes used for projected con-
quests, might be Rome or Vienna. Only after 1606, when even a long and
exhausting war against the Habsburgs had only led to minor gains, do we
encounter a border that both sides recognised, albeit with a great deal of raid-
ing even in peacetime, for almost 60 years.
Ordinary people: The struggle for survival

For sultans and vezirs of the period, war was legitimate in religious terms
because in this way they expanded the rule of Sunni Islam; it was also of
practical importance because warfare kept the soldiers busy at the frontiers,
where hopefully they would acquire booty and not challenge the central gov-
ernment. Nobody has recorded the opinions of artisans, merchants, peasants,
slaves and women of all social groups on these matters, and it is a truism yet
bears repeating that the mass of sources which we do possess were written by
a small number of elite men.
However, we should at least briely refer to the costs of war and conquest.
To begin with an example beyond the Ottoman borders, campaigns against
the Safavids and the earthquakes so frequent in this part of the world com-
bined to destroy most of the historical monuments that in the time of the
Ilkhanids and Akkoyunlu had adorned the city of Tabriz. As for Ottoman
territories, already in the time of Mehmed the Conqueror, armies did not
inance themselves and taxes increased accordingly.24 Even though quite a few
23 Maria Pia Pedani (ed.), Inventory of the Lettere e Scritture Turchesche in the Venetian State
Archives, Based on the Materials Compiled by Alessio Bombaci (Leiden, 2010), p. 5; Dariusz
Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated Edition
of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents’ (Leiden, 2000).
24 Heath Lowry, ‘Changes in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Peasant Taxation: The Case Study of
Radilofo (Radolibos)’, in Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society,
ed. Anthony Bryer and Heath Lowry (Birmingham and Washington, D. C., 1986), pp. 23–38.
13
border ighters subsisted largely on booty and – if they were lucky – ran-
som, the famously eicient Ottoman supply system needed large deliveries of
grain and other foodstufs, and these had to come from the sultans’ subjects.
Draught animals and camels being expensive to feed and breed, when the
army demanded that these animals be used to supply the soldiers on campaign,
peasants and townsmen must have sufered severely, particularly since many
of these creatures probably perished while providing campaign services. We
may also conjecture that the avar ız, which implied not only cash payments
but also deliveries in kind and corvée, for instance in building and repairing
fortiications, must have made survival in wartime diicult for Ottoman sub-
jects. This observation especially applies to the late 1500s, when the avar ız,
originally demanded only in wartime, became an annual tax. In addition, the
Ottoman government often forced its subjects to migrate in order to secure
control of newly conquered territories or enhance the capital city of Istanbul,
which in 1453 was but a shadow of its former self. We know more about the
migrations that resulted from the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1570–3: the
composition of the local population changed signiicantly as large numbers
of enslaved captives were taken away from the island and immigrants from
Anatolia were brought in to ill the gaps, often against their will.25
Ottoman commanders routinely drafted artisans, who had to show up in
the camp with their tools and materials ready for service. If they adhered
to sultanic law, these craftsmen made very small proits, and outitting one
of their number to follow the army must have been a major sacriice, to say
nothing of the risk to the family of the mobilised artisan: what happened to
his wife and children if he succumbed to illness while in the army camp or
was taken prisoner?
Other Ottoman subjects also risked captivity; while it is well known that
the sultans and their subjects enslaved their prisoners, we read less often
about the fates of Ottoman subjects taken in wartime or else by pirates, even
in times of peace.26 Yet such captives were numerous: a historian working on
early modern Italy has estimated that there were over ten thousand Muslim
slaves in Italy, and the overwhelming majority had started life as Ottoman
subjects. When the sultans and Venice were at war, their number should have
25 Vera Costantini, ‘Destini di guerra. L’inventario ottomano dei prigionieri di Nicosia (set-
tembre 1570)’, Studi Veneziani n. s. 45 (2003), 229–41; Şenol Çelik, ‘Türk Fethi Sonrasında
Kıbrıs Adasına Yönelik İskân Çalışmaları’, in Kaf Dağ ının Ötesine Varmak: Festschrift in
Honor of Günay Kut. Essays Presented by Her Colleagues and Students, ed. Zehra Toska, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), vol. 1, pp. 263–304 (Journal of Turkish Studies 27:1–3).
26 Nicolas Vatin, ‘Une afaire interne: le sort et la libération de personnes de condition libre
illégalement retenues en esclavage’, Turcica 33 (2001), 149–90.
14
Introduction
been even greater, for the Venetian government only held Ottoman prison-
ers as long as hostilities continued. At the conclusion of peace, the Signoria
normally sent these men home, apart from those considered too dangerous,
who were quietly executed.27 In addition, the knights of Malta, who consid-
ered themselves permanently at war with the sultan, took numerous prison-
ers; many of them wound up rowing the galleys of the order or those of
the pope. By the early 1500s, the kingdom of Naples had become a Spanish
possession, and given the Ottoman–Spanish conl ict, quite a few Ottoman
subjects must have rowed on Spanish galleys as well. In the second half of
the sixteenth century, moreover, the Austrian Habsburgs sponsored a pirate
community established in Senj (today in Croatia) on a clif overlooking the
Adriatic. These Uskoks, who also claimed to be permanently at war with the
sultan preyed on peaceful Ottoman merchants on their way to Venice. As
the complaints surviving in the Venetian archives amply testify, there were
numerous victims, to say nothing of the material damage.28
On the land borders of the empire as well, Ottoman subjects, belliger-
ents or not, risked captivity and enslavement. Given pay that was typically in
arrears on the Hungarian frontier, both sides had established a peculiar form
of “violent business”: captives that were able to ind ransom money could
avoid enslavement, but securing the money was a risky as well as a costly
afair.29 In a cash-poor environment, material goods, including valuable tex-
tiles, might make up part of the ransom; presumably the Ottoman captives
who needed to supply these goods turned to traders who could ind them
in Istanbul or elsewhere in the Ottoman core lands. It is not easy to imagine
the cost and efort involved in such transactions, but they all feature among
the costs of war, paid by military men and especially by members of the
Ottoman subject population.
Conclusion
Many if not most of the questions concerning the costs of war and expan-
sion which easily occur to present-day historians and their readers still are
impossible to answer, for even if we contextualise our sources and use them
creatively, we cannot produce documentary evidence which just is not there.
27 Salvatore Bono, Schiavi musulmani nell’ Italia moderna, Galeotti, vu’ cumprà, domestici
(Naples, 1999).
28 İdris Bostan, Adriyatik’te Korsanlık – Osmanlılar, Uskoklar, Venedikliler, 1575–1620 (Istanbul,
2009).
29 Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders (Early Fifteenth–
Early Eighteenth Centuries) (Leiden, 2007).
15
However, there is some hope for the future: once archaeology and the atten-
dant scientiic discipline now known as archaeometry become better known
among Ottomanists, we will be able to say something about health and nutri-
tion, the age at death or the continuities and discontinuities of rural settle-
ment and link these matters to the economic conjunctures determined by
warfare and peace.
Needless to say, in many cases archaeology is also our only hope of access-
ing the general layouts of Ottoman building complexes, of which only scanty
remainders have survived to our day. Salvage excavations of Istanbul sites
in preparation for the underground railway have already yielded a mass of
material for archaeological investigation.30 We hope that these inds will
encourage further studies on Ottoman society and its links to the material
environment.
30 From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of a Capital, exhibition catalogue, coordinated by Koray
Durak (Istanbul, 2010).
16
Part I
*
A N EXPAND ING E MP I RE
2
The Ottomans, 1451–1603: A political
history introduction
K ate Fle et
The period from the second accession of Mehmed II in 1451 to the accession
of Ahmed III in 1603 was one in which the Ottoman Empire was to reach the
limits of its territorial expansion, stretching from Iran in the east to Hungary
in the west, from the Crimea in the north to the borders of Morocco in the
south. The empire truly became a world power, one of the major players in
the politics of Europe (see Brummett, Chapter 3, this volume) and a domi-
nant naval power in the Mediterranean (see Fleet, Chapter 5, this volume).
With the conquest of Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans took control of the Red
Sea and entered the Indian Ocean, where they clashed with the Portuguese
for control of the lucrative trade routes from the east (see Özbaran, Chapter
6, this volume). From the early sixteenth century onwards, the Ottomans
were constantly challenged by the Safavid state of Iran, which efectively
undermined the Ottomans’ ability to control their territory and secure the
loyalty of their population in eastern Anatolia, and with whom warfare was
particularly exacting as, after the calamity of Çaldıran in 1514, they avoided
direct military confrontation, preferring retreat and scorched-earth tactics.
Ottoman victories against the Safavids were thus often pyrrhic ones (see
Boyar, Chapter 4, this volume).
The reigns of Mehmed II, Bayezid II and Selim I and the irst half of the
reign of Süleyman I represent a period of rapid conquest with an expanding
state pursuing generally lucrative wars. By the middle of the sixteenth century,
however, warfare had become more demanding and less rewarding, and the
state became increasingly faced with the need to secure borders rather than
extend them. The period was thus one in which the empire, as Géza Dávid
(Chapter 9, this volume) notes, “reached the apogee of its military potential”
but also one in which its efective military strength, although still formidable,
began to decline. In part as a result of the greater military demands of war-
fare towards the end of the sixteenth century, and the increasing failure of
military campaigns to produce lucrative returns, the empire faced, from the
19
K ate fl e et
mid-sixteenth century onwards, and particularly from the 1580s, increasing

inancial diiculties, the inl ux of silver from the New World, the diiculty of
stabilising the currency and chronic inancial deicits (for the economy of the
period, see Çizakça, Chapter 8, this volume).
The period was also one of great transformation, in which the makeup
of the population changed dramatically (Faroqhi, Chapter 11, this volume),
and, in the words of Gilles Veinstein (Chapter 10, this volume), the sultan
“unambiguously appeared as the champion of Sunni Islam”. These were
transformations to which, “despite its apparent conservatism”, the govern-
ment of the empire responded (Imber, Chapter 7, this volume), and the legal
and administrative innovations of this period “provided the solid foundation
to Ottoman government which allowed the Empire, irst to absorb and sta-
bilise the territories conquered during the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
and later to survive the multiple political, iscal and social crises which were
to beset it in the decades after the 1580s”.
An age for Çiğdem Kafescioğlu (Chapter 13, this volume), uniied by “visual
articulations of an imperial identity, as well as its dynamic encounters and
reformulations beyond the imperial locus”, the later ifteenth and sixteenth
centuries also constituted, in the words of Selim Kuru (Chapter 14, this vol-
ume), “the moment of origin of a literary tradition” which saw “the cre-
ation of a distinct written language of Anatolian Turkish, the appearance of
new forms, genres and themes based on this language, the development of
a literary archive and literary tools that deined norms and conventions, and
inally the genesis of a biographical and an autobiographical tradition that
made models available for literary production”. It was in this period, too, that
“Ottoman intellectual life gain[ed] breadth and splendour as well as regularity
and order” (Hagen, Chapter 12, this volume), with the birth of “a new, coher-
ent system of knowledge production and dissemination” and an Ottoman
canon of knowledge, which, Gottfried Hagen argues, “fully deserves to be
called classical in itself ”.
While thus an intellectually productive period and often regarded as a
golden age, and certainly one which Ottomans from the late sixteenth cen-
tury on held up as the epitome of excellence, an age to which return would
secure escape from all the ills of the modern declining and decadent world,
the period was not one of consistent splendour. The irst years of Süleyman’s
rule continued the expansion and triumph of the previous decades. He took
Rhodes, marched successfully into Hungary and reached the gates of Vienna
in 1529. The latter part of his reign, however, was less triumphal, and the
campaigns against the Safavids and the Habsburgs both showed the limits of
20
The Ottomans, 1451–1603
Ottoman military ability. Süleyman’s inal campaign, in which he died while

besieging Sigetvar, has been described as “a foolish venture”.1
Any attempt to divide the long sixteenth century, which can be taken to
have run from 1453, with the conquest of Constantinople, to 1606 and the
treaty of Zsitvatorok which ended the long war with Hungary, is dependent,
not surprisingly, on what one is focusing on, as Palmira Brummett shows
in her discussion of periodisation (Brummett, Chapter 3, this volume). In
the Mediterranean, 1574 can be taken as the date marking the turn from an
aggressive to a defensive policy, although the seeds of this change can per-
haps be seen in the Ottoman failure to take Malta in 1565 (Fleet, Chapter 5,
this volume). When looking at the campaigns against the Safavids, the second
campaign of 1548 was much more defensive than ofensive (Boyar, Chapter 4,
this volume), and, in Europe, the campaigns against the Habsburgs took on
a defensive quality from the 1550s and were not the success of the campaigns
earlier in Süleyman’s reign. In economic terms, the problems facing the state
were clear from the 1580s, but the seeds of economic concern were evident
in the middle of the century, when campaigns began to be less productive, or
even, Akdağ has argued, in the early decades of the 1500s.2 The middle of the
sixteenth century thus can be seen in many ways as marking a shift in fortune.
Indeed, Colin Imber (Chapter 7, this volume) divides the period into two, the
irst period running from 1453 to about 1540 and the second from about 1540
to 1603, arguing that before around 1540 the Ottoman government had to
deal with problems “attendant on conquest” but that from the mid-sixteenth
century the problems it faced were “those of how to maintain intact vastly
expanded territories within stable borders, and how to manage periods of
prolonged and no longer proitable warfare”.
For the purposes of a general overview therefore, this chapter will take
the period in two parts, the irst, from 1451 to the mid-sixteenth century, in
which the empire was on the rise, becoming a world power, conquering and
dealing with the efects of success, and the second period, the mid-sixteenth
century to 1603, in which the empire had rather to deal with the consequences
of its earlier successes, to ight to defend rather than conquer, to establish,
and keep, frontiers, and to grapple with the economic and social efects of
a decline in conquest and of the impact of the outside world. However one
divides the period, it is important to remember that although it is commonly
1 Alan Fisher, ‘The Life and Family of Süleyman I’, in Süleymân the Second and His Time, ed.
Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul, 1993), p. 14.
2 Mustafa Akdağ, Türkiye’nin İktisadî ve İçtimaî Tarihi (Istanbul, 2010), pp. 687–8; Mustafa
Akdağ, Türk Halkının Dirlik ve Düzenlik Kavgası Celali İsyanları (Ankara, 1999), p. 123.
21
K ate fl e et
called the classical age, it does not contain the cohesion or continuity that
such an epithet implies but is far more complex, shifting and l uid.
1451 to the mid-sixteenth century

Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481)
In February 1451, Mehmed II ascended the throne for the second time, for
he had occupied it briely, and unsuccessfully, between 1444 and 1446, after
his father’s abdication. His second reign was to be a very diferent afair and
was to see considerable expansion of Ottoman territory, the conquest of
Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire, the rising power of the
Ottomans as a naval force in the Aegean and the landing of Ottoman troops
in southern Italy with Gedik Ahmed Paşa’s capture of Otranto in 1480. One
of the best known of Ottoman sultans, Mehmed II ran his state both efec-
tively and irmly, indeed with a irmness which was to leave his successor,
Bayezid II, certain diiculties as he faced discontent over his father’s iscal
and land policies and found himself forced to backpeddle somewhat over the
more unpopular of Mehmed’s methods.
In the irst couple of years of his reign, Mehmed stabilised his position,
having perhaps learned from his previous experience on the throne, and his
initial actions were peaceful and reassuring. Constantine XI, the Byzantine
emperor who had received the throne, a rather poisoned chalice, in 1448, was
assured of continued Ottoman friendship; the emissary from Venice was well
received, as were the various representatives of the Latin-held Aegean islands.
Mehmed made treaties with John Hunyadi of Transylvania and George
Branković of Serbia and established cordial relations with the representatives
from Wallachia. The loathed grand vezir Çandarlı Halil, who had apparently
been instrumental in his removal from the throne in 1446, remained in place.
Other areas required a more forceful approach, and in autumn 1452
Mehmed despatched a force to the Peloponnese (the Morea, Mora) under
Turahan against Constantine XI’s obstreperous brothers, the despots Thomas
and Demetrios. To the east, in Anatolia, Mehmed faced a far more annoying
problem, that of Karaman, the unruly and powerful Turkish state centred
on Konya. On his accession, İbrahim, the ruler of Karaman, instigated upris-
ings in the regions of Menteşe, Aydın and Germiyan, in western Anatolia,
while he himself attacked Antalya on the southern coast. Initially unsuc-
cessful, Mehmed then defeated İbrahim, forcing him to sue for peace. With
Karaman now back under control, and having secured peaceful relations with
22
his neighbours in the west, Mehmed was free to turn his attention to the
conquest of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, an ambition which occu-
pied his every moment and “never left his tongue”.3 The motivation for the
conquest was both strategic and economic,4 and after the fall of the city, “an
island in the midst of an Ottoman ocean”,5 in May 1453, he invested much
time and energy in restoring the prosperity of his new capital. He began the
building of a great imperial palace, Topkapı, which was to be the palace of
the sultans until it was replaced by Dolmabahçe in the nineteenth century.
Mehmed also divested himself of his grand vezir, Çandarlı Halil, whom he
executed in 1453 after the capture of Constantinople, which Çandarlı Halil
had opposed, replacing him with Zaganos Paşa, who had not. Istanbul would
remain the capital of the empire until the creation of the Turkish Republic
in 1923.
From his new capital, Mehmed turned his attention to the west, where
a string of military expeditions would lead to the conquest of Serbia, the
Peloponnese, Bosnia, where King Stefan Tomašević was defeated in 1463,
Herzegovina and much of Albania. In 1462, the revolt of Vlad III Drakul, the
voyvoda of Wallachia who had come to power in 1456 and had switched alle-
giance to the Hungarians, was put down, Vlad being replaced by his brother
Radu, and the vassal status of Wallachia was restored. Moldavia, too, was a
vassal state, though not always an obedient one.
Mehmed’s main enemy in Rumeli, the European section of Ottoman ter-
ritory, was Hungary, with whom the initial bone of contention was Serbia.
In 1454 and 1455, Mehmed campaigned there, taking in 1455 the important
region of Novo Brdo, whose rich silver mines made it a prime target. By the
summer of that year, George Branković, the despot of Serbia, was forced
to come to an arrangement with Mehmed under which he paid tribute and
ceded Novo Brdo. Mehmed’s siege of Belgrade the following year, however,
was unsuccessful.
In December 1456, several months after the abortive siege of Belgrade, the
elderly George Branković died. His son and successor, Lazar, died shortly
afterwards, in January 1458, without leaving a male heir, a situation which
resulted in a succession problem. Two factions emerged, one pro-Hungarian
3 Tursun Bey, The History of Mehmed the Conqueror by Tursun Beg, ed. Halil İnalcık and Rhoads
Murphey (Minneapolis and Chicago, 1978), fol. 31a.
4 Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 6–27.
5 Julian Chrysostomides, ‘The Byzantine Empire from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century’, in
The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: From Byzantium to Turkey, ed. Kate Fleet (Cambridge,
2008), p. 33.
23
K ate fl e et
and one pro-Ottoman. The latter was headed by Mikhail Angelović, the
brother of the grand vezir Mahmud Paşa, who had replaced Zaganos Paşa in
1457. In March 1458, Mahmud Paşa marched towards Smederevo (Semendire),
but a revolt there in the same month saw the fall of Angelović and the rise
of the pro-Hungarian faction. Mahmud Paşa decided against a long siege of
Smederevo but forced the surrender of Golubać (Golubats) on the Danube
in summer 1458 by cutting of its water supply. With Hungarian backing, the
despotate of Serbia went to Stefan Tomašević, the son of the king of Bosnia,
who, in return, recognised Hungarian sovereignty. He ascended the throne
in March 1459 and the following month married Jelena, the daughter of the
now dead Lazar Branković, George Branković’s son and heir, thus giving his
position legitimacy. This was not a situation which Mehmed was likely to
ind acceptable. Smederevo fell to the Ottomans in June 1459, “as crushing
a blow to the spirits of the Hungarians as the loss of Constantinople had
been” according to Pope Pius II.6 Stefan Tomašević led, and Serbia became
an Ottoman province.
At the beginning of Mehmed’s reign, the Peloponnese was under the
somewhat inefective control of the Byzantine despots Thomas, based
at Patras, and Demetrios, at Mistra. In 1453, there had been revolts against
them during which both the despots and the rebels had appealed to the
Ottomans for help. Mehmed backed the despots, despatching a force into
the Peloponnese at the end of 1453. Putting down the revolt, he re-established
the despots, who, already tribute-paying, were now obliged to pay a higher
tribute to Istanbul for their positions.
The Ottoman policy of conquest was what a later European observer was
to call “progression by degrees”,7 whereby Mehmed, as had his predeces-
sors, advanced by stages, irst through vassalage and then, when the moment
was right, to outright conquest. Here, for the moment, the Byzantine des-
pots remained in place, as did, for example, the various Latin rulers in the
Aegean islands or the voyvoda of Wallachia. In 1458, however, Mehmed, most
unwilling to see any Latin power extending control in the region, invaded the
Peloponnese, taking much of the region, including Corinth and Athens. While
Demetrios was prepared to accept the loss of territory and to seek accom-
modation with the Ottomans, his brother Thomas was not. After launching
an attack on Patras, Thomas then turned his attention to his brother, who
6 Quoted in John Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century
to the Ottoman Conquest (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1987), p. 575.
7 Castlemaine, Earl of, An Account of the Present War between the Venetians and Turk; with the
State of Candie (in a Letter to the King of Venice) (London, 1666), p. 75.
24
promptly appealed to Mehmed for help. Realising at this point the danger
of the situation, the brothers patched up their relations, but only temporar-
ily, for by the end of 1459 they were once again ighting each other. As the
Peloponnese spiralled into anarchy, the Ottomans moved in and Mehmed
conquered it in 1460.
Farther to the west, Mehmed sought control of Albania, then under the
rule of the wily and eicient Scanderbeg (George Kastriote). Conquest here
would give him an outlet to the Adriatic and position him very close to Italy.
For the same reasons, Ottoman success in Albania was extremely unwelcome
to Venice, positioned at the top of the Adriatic, a sea which they regarded as
their own domain. Despite Mehmed’s tactics of “terror and deportation”,8
Scanderbeg survived undefeated until he died in January 1468, leaving Krujë
to Venice and Albania disunited. Several years later, in 1474, Mehmed initi-
ated a campaign against Venetian possessions in Albania, but his assault on
Shkodër (Scutari) failed.
By this time, the Ottomans were at war with Venice, war having broken out
in 1463. In its relations with the Ottoman state, Venice had always sought to
balance with diiculty on a tightrope suspended between commercial realism
and political expediency. Its ability to forestall conl ict, however, was limited,
as both sides were in direct competition for economic and strategic control
in the eastern Mediterranean. Mehmed’s conquests in the Aegean early in his
reign were not encouraging signs for Venice. With the Ottomans now threat-
ening the Venetians in the Aegean, in the Peloponnese, where its possessions
of Coron and Modon were surrounded by a sea of Ottoman territory, and in
Albania, war became inevitable. In 1464, the Venetians pillaged the island of
Lesbos but failed to take it; they did, however, capture Lemnos and Imbros.
As a result of the devastating plundering of the Ottoman port of Enez by
Nicolò da Canale, Mehmed launched an attack on Venetian-held Negroponte
(Eubeoa), an essential possession for Venetian commerce, and captured it in
1470. In 1477, the Ottomans laid siege to Lepanto (Navpaktos, İnebahtı) and
to Krujë, which fell the following year, as did Zhabljak, Drisht (Drivasto) and
Lezhë (Alessio). The war came to an end in 1479 when Venice sued for peace.
It had not been a good war for Venice, which now lost Shkodër, Lemnos
and lands in the Peloponnese and was forced to pay an annual sum of 10,000
lorins.
Mehmed’s success in the west was mirrored by his progress in the east,
where he extended his control along the southern shores of the Black Sea,
8 Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul, 1990), p. 195.
25
K ate fl e et
taking the Genoese trading colony of Amasra in 1459 and Sinop in 1461.
Trabzon (Trebizond), the last remaining Byzantine state, tributary to the
Ottomans since 1456, fell in 1461. With almost the entire Black Sea coast of
Anatolia under his control, Mehmed now shifted his sights across the water,
and in 1475 he despatched a leet under Gedik Ahmed Paşa, which took the
major Genoese trading settlement of Cafa (Feodosiya, Kefe) in the Crimea.
The han of the Crimea, Mengli Girey, who had called on Ottoman support in a
family feud, was restored to his position, but as an Ottoman vassal. Mehmed’s
dominant position in the Black Sea was thus conirmed.
While Mehmed controlled much of northern Anatolia, his position in the
southeast was less secure, for here he was faced with two powerful enemies,
the Akkoyunlu under Uzun Hasan, who had built up a powerful state in south-
eastern Anatolia, Iraq and Iran, and the Mamluks, who either controlled or
were inl uential in areas of Anatolia bordering their own state in Syria and
Egypt. The bone of contention between Mehmed and the Mamluk sultan
Quaytbay was the state of Dulgadir, which both sought to control by backing
various contenders for the throne, and that between Mehmed and Uzun Hasan
was the state of Karaman, centred round Konya. In 1465, Mehmed removed
İshak, the ruler of Karaman, who had come to the throne the year before
with Akkoyunlu backing, replacing him with Pir Ahmed, whose mother was
Mehmed’s aunt. In 1468, after Pir Ahmed had failed to provide troops for an
Ottoman campaign, Mehmed attacked Karaman, occupied much of its terri-
tory, and put in his son Mustafa as governor. The position was by no means
secure, however, and it was only after Uzun Hasan was crushingly defeated
at the battle of Otlukbeli, near Başkent, in August 1473 that Ottoman control
was assured. With the campaign the following year under Gedik Ahmed Paşa,
now grand vezir, the state of Karaman was extinguished.
At the end of his reign, Mehmed undertook two naval campaigns. In 1480,
Mesih Paşa attacked Rhodes, the Hospitaller stronghold which lay on the
route between Egypt and Istanbul, but was unsuccessful and withdrew after a
long and gruelling siege. Mehmed’s other naval campaign that year, however,
was a triumph. Ottoman forces under Gedik Ahmed Paşa, who had taken
the islands of Levkas, Cephalonia and Zante the year before, sailed across
the Adriatic from Albania and took Otranto in southern Italy. The Ottomans
now had a base on Italian soil and seemed poised for expansion across the
peninsula.
In 1481, Mehmed set out eastwards on yet another campaign, possibly
directed against the Mamluks, on which, shortly after its departure from
Istanbul, he died.
26
Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512)

Bayezid II was credited with being a very diferent man from his father, peace-
loving and religiously inclined. Not a man of action for Marino Sanudo,9 he
had, according to Alvixe Sagudino, a peaceful nature.10 This may, however,
have owed more to political necessity than to natural inclination: for almost
half his reign, he was to be handicapped by the existence of his brother
Cem.
On his death, Mehmed had left two sons, Cem, the younger, favoured by
the grand vezir Nişancı Mehmed Paşa and, according to some, his father,
and Bayezid, the older, who was reputed to have loathed his father and was
favoured by the janissaries. While Bayezid emerged successfully onto the
throne, Cem proclaimed himself sultan in Bursa. Defeated by Bayezid’s forces
at Yenişehir in June 1481, he led to the Mamluks. The following year he reap-
peared in Anatolia but was once more forced to lee, this time into the willing
arms of the grand master of the Hospitallers, who welcomed him “with joy”11
and promptly whisked him of to the distant, and safer, France. For the rest of
his life, Cem remained a useful hostage, irst in the hands of the Hospitallers
and then of the popes Innocent VIII and his successor, Alexander VI, until he
was handed over in January 1495 to the French king Charles VIII on his way to
Naples to begin his anti-Ottoman crusade. A month later, Cem was dead (his
body inally returned to Bayezid in 1499), and the crusade foundered.
For the irst 15 years of his reign, Bayezid’s political horizon was circum-
scribed by Cem’s captivity, and his relations with the states to the west were
initially more cautious and less aggressive than those of his father. While
Mehmed seemed poised for expansion in Italy, one of Bayezid’s irst acts as
sultan was to withdraw Ottoman forces from southern Italy, leaving the small
Ottoman garrison in Otranto to its fate. In November 1481, he made a truce
with the Hospitallers, and in 1485 presented the grand master with the hand
of John the Baptist and assured him that the Ottoman leet would not sail out
into the Mediterranean. In January 1482, he conirmed the peace with Venice,
renewed in 1485, and in 1483 made a ive-year treaty with Matthias Corvinus
of Hungary, which was then extended to 1491.
Although cautious, Bayezid was not completely inactive. In 1484, he set out
against the important commercial cities of Kilia, “Moldavia’s gateway to the
9 Marino Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanudo, 25 vols. (Bologna, 1969–70), vol. 1, p. 823.
10 Ibid., p. 398.
11 Vakıat-ı Sultan Cem, in Nicolas Vatin, Sultan Djem: Un prince ottoman dans l’Europe du xve
siècle d’après deux sources contemporaines: Vâkı‛ ât-ı Sultân Cem, Œuvres de Guillaume Caoursin
(Ankara, 1997), p. 145.
27
K ate fl e et
Black Sea”,12 and Akkerman (Cetatea Alba), at the mouth of the Dniester on
the Black Sea coast. Kilia surrendered in July, and Akkerman, where Ottoman
forces were joined by the Crimean han, Mengli Giray, fell in August. These
losses were keenly felt by the ruler of Moldavia, Stefan III, who, however, was
forced to lee before an Ottoman army under Hadım Ali Paşa which advanced
into Moldavia in July 1485, and took refuge with the Polish king Kazimierz IV.
After another failed attempt to retake Kilia and Akkerman, which prompted
another Ottoman strike, this time under Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey, Stefan submit-
ted, paying an annual tribute until his death in 1504. With the conquest of
Akkerman and the submission of Moldavia and the Crimean hanate, Poland
opted for peaceful relations with its Ottoman neighbour, signing a peace in
March 1489, renewed in 1492 by Kazimierz’s son and successor Jan Olbracht,
and renewed again in 1494 for three years.
In 1490, the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus died, resulting in a dis-
pute among the Hungarians over the choice of a new king. This dissension
was viewed as an opportunity by the Ottomans, and in spring 1492 Bayezid
set out on campaign. The succession dispute was, however, settled by the
selection of the son of the king of Poland as the new king of Hungary, and
Bayezid turned his attention instead to Albania, where he took various castles
in Venetian hands. At the same time, raids were conducted against Hungary
and Transylvania. Peace was restored in 1495 for three years, when Charles
VIII’s advance, accompanied by Cem, seemed threatening.
Although Bayezid did conduct some campaigns in the west, his most seri-
ous encounter in the irst years of his reign was in the east. Here he had
the perennial problem of controlling the territories in Anatolia, where he
was faced with unruly Turcomans, the vacillating allegiance of the state of
Dulgadir, the smouldering disloyalty of members of the Karaman dynasty
and the dangerous presence of the Mamluk state, which ofered a refuge to
opponents of the Ottoman sultan, Cem having led to Egypt in 1481. In 1485,
war with the Mamluks broke out, and in May Karagöz Paşa, the beylerbeyi of
Karaman, captured Tarsus and Adana, prompting the Mamluk sultan to des-
patch a force which inl icted a major defeat on the Ottoman army in spring
1486, in which the beylerbeyi of Anatolia, Hersekzade Ahmed Paşa, was cap-
tured. In response, the grand vezir Davud Paşa repelled the Mamluks and then
moved against the Turgutoğulları and Varsak Turcomans. The following year,
in August 1488, a large Ottoman force under Ali Paşa sufered a humiliating
12 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II. Cilt, İstanbul’un Fethinden Kanuni Sultan
Süleyman’ın Ölümüne Kadar (Ankara, 2006), p. 182.
28
defeat at the hands of the Mamluks at Ağa Çayırı, near Adana, and Alaüddevle,
the ruler of Dulgadir, calculating that the Ottomans were not the force to
ally with, now defected to the Mamluks. Bayezid transferred his support to
Alaüddevle’s brother, Şahbudak, who took refuge at the Ottoman court. In
1489, supported by Ottoman troops, Şahbudak attempted to take the throne
but was defeated, captured and despatched to Cairo. In 1490, Alaüddevle,
supported by Mamluk forces, attacked and besieged Kayseri but was unable
to take it, contenting himself with extensive ravaging of the region instead.
Bayezid began to prepare a large army to march into Anatolia.
By this time, both sides were running out of steam, both ground down by
an inconclusive war in which the Mamluks, though victorious, were unable
to achieve a decisive victory or to proit from their successes in a conl ict
which was costing them dearly. For the Ottomans, peace was attractive, both
because of the losses they were sustaining and because of the opportunity
which had presented itself in Hungary with the death of Matthias Corvinus.
Peace was therefore concluded in May 1491, with the Ottomans giving up
claims to Çukurova (Cilicia) and losing Tarsus and Adana.
For the rest of Bayezid’s reign, Ottoman–Mamluk relations improved.
When Bayezid’s son Korkud led to Cairo in 1509, Qansuh al-Ghuri, who had
come to the throne in 1501, was very careful in his handling of the situation,
eventually sending Korkud back to Istanbul. By this time, the Mamluks had
their own problems and were in need of Ottoman help rather than enmity. As
the sixteenth-century historian Abdüssamed Diyarbekri expressed it, “there
is a famous saying that to speak you need lips, and so to ight you need arms
and munitions suitable for your enemy”.13 For this the Mamluks turned to the
Ottomans, who contributed towards the construction of a Mamluk navy in
the Red Sea for operations against the Portuguese.
Shortly after the end of the war with the Mamluks and immediately after
the peace concluded with Hungary, Cem died and the political game changed.
Bayezid was at last free to pursue a more aggressive policy in the west. His
target was Venice. In May 1499, the Ottoman leet set sail from Istanbul under
Davud Paşa, thought by many, including the Venetians, who were presumably
misled by Bayezid’s letter assuring them that the “good peace” between them
would be maintained,14 to be headed for Rhodes, Corfu or Apulia. In fact, the
target was Lepanto, which fell to Bayezid in August. The next to fall were
Modon (Methone), taken by siege, Navarino (Navarin) and Coron (Korone),
13 Abdüssamed Diyarbekri, Tarih, in Benjamin Lellouch, Les Ottomans en Égypte: Historiens et

conquérants au XVIe siècle (Paris and Louvain, 2006), p. 294.
14 Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 2, p. 702.
29
K ate fl e et
which surrendered shortly afterwards. Durrës (Durazzo) fell in 1501. By 1502,

Venice, having sued unsuccessfully for peace in 1500, had had enough. Under
the peace concluded in May 1503, Venice lost Modon, Coron, Lepanto, Durrës
and Lef kas. It was a singular success for Bayezid. The Ottomans now domi-
nated the eastern Mediterranean, their position as a signiicant naval power
was established, and their control of the commerce of the region assured.
With the conclusion of the war with Venice, Vladislas II, king of Bohemia
and Hungary and son of the Polish king Kazimierz IV, concluded a seven-year
treaty with Bayezid in February 1503, to be renewed in 1510 and 1511.
While the beginning of the sixteenth century saw Ottoman victory over
Venice, it also saw the rise to power of a very threatening new state, that
of the Safavids in Iran. In spring 1501, Shah Isma‘il I, who had come to the
head of the Safavi order in 1494, captured Tabriz and made it his capital. In
1508, he took Baghdad. The state Isma‘il founded rested to a great extent on
the support of the Turcoman tribes in Anatolia, over whom the Ottomans
struggled to impose their authority. The Varsaklar and the Turgutoğulları,
for example, had supported Cem and in 1500 backed a claimant to descent
from the Karamanoğulları in a revolt which was only put down with dii-
culty by the grand vezir Mesih Paşa in 1501. In 1511, a serious revolt broke out
in Teke in south-western Anatolia led by Şah Kulu, whose allegiance lay with
the Safavids. He took Antalya, marched on Kütahya, defeating the troops of
the beylerbeyi Karagöz Paşa en route, and reached Bursa. The Ottoman army
under the grand vezir Hadım Ali Paşa and Şehzade Ahmed forced Şah Kulu
into retreat. Shortly afterwards, both Hadım Ali Paşa and Şah Kulu lost their
lives in an encounter near Sivas. Now leaderless, the followers of Şah Kulu
led into Iran.
By this time, the Ottoman Empire was embroiled in a power struggle
between Bayezid’s three sons: Ahmed, the eldest and apparently Bayezid’s
choice, Korkud, and the youngest, Selim. This instability within the Ottoman
Empire was clearly advantageous to Shah Isma‘il, who, at the beginning of
1512, instigated another rebellion, supported by Ahmed’s son, Murad. Selim,
backed by the janissaries, emerged victorious from the succession struggle,
and Bayezid was forced to abdicate, dying shortly afterwards on his way into
exile in Dimoteka (Didymoteichon).
Selim I (r. 1512–1520)

Having come to the throne in a power struggle, Selim’s irst move as sultan
was to eliminate his brothers. Korkud was disposed of in 1512 and Ahmed,
after defeat in battle at Yenişehir, in 1513. Selim’s reign, one of rapid expansion
30
in which the territory of the empire was to double, was dominated by con-
l ict with the Safavids and the Mamluks. His irst target was the Safavids.
Announcing, according to the contemporary Arab chronicler Ibn Iyas, that
“nothing could deter him from wiping of Ismā‘īl Shah from the face of the
earth”,15 Selim marched against him and in August 1514 inl icted a crushing
defeat on Isma‘il’s forces at the battle of Çaldıran, to the north-east of Lake
Van. As the shah led, the Ottomans moved on to take Tabriz. Conquest was
a comparatively easy matter. To keep possession of the city, however, was
not, and shortly afterwards Selim withdrew to winter in Amasya. This set
the pattern for future Ottoman–Safavid encounters, in which the Safavids,
having learnt the bitter lesson of Çaldıran, avoided direct confrontation with
Ottoman forces, choosing instead to employ scorched-earth tactics which left
the Ottomans without supplies in enemy terrain. Ottoman advance and vic-
tory were thus generally followed by retreat and Safavid return, and it was
to become increasingly diicult later on in the century to turn conquest into
permanent control.
For the moment, however, the Safavids had been satisfactorily dealt with
at Çaldıran, and Selim now turned his attention to south-eastern Anatolia.
In November 1514, he appointed as governor of Kayseri Şehsuvaroğlu Ali,
nephew of Alaüddevle, the ruler of Dulgadir, and sent him of to raid into
his uncle’s territories, Alaüddevle having failed to provide whole-hearted sup-
port to the Ottomans at the time of Çaldıran. In June 1515, the grand vezir
Sinan Paşa defeated and killed Alaüddevle and his four sons in battle, and
Dulgadir was put under Şehsuvaroğlu Ali, who ruled as an Ottoman vassal.
Selim also actively sought the alliance of Kurdish lords disgruntled with the
Safavid shah, and by 1516 Ottoman forces under Mehmed Paşa, the gover-
nor of Erzincan, had driven the Safavids out of south-eastern Anatolia. The
Ottomans now controlled Urfa, Mardin and Mosul.
The other factor undermining Ottoman authority in south-eastern
Anatolia was the Mamluks, who regarded Dulgadir as their own domain.
In 1516, Selim set of on campaign against them, careful to conceal its true
target and to persuade the Mamluks that the destination was Iran. That the
campaign was in fact aimed at the Mamluks became clear with the Ottoman
arrest and humiliation of an envoy from Qansuh al-Ghawri and the conquest
of Malatya. Advancing into Syria, the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks in
August 1516 at Marj Dabiq, near Aleppo, a catastrophe such as “to turn an
15 Ibn Iyas, An Account of the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt in the Year A.H. 922 (A.D. 1516), trans. W.
H. Salmon (London, 1921), p. 33.
31
K ate fl e et
infant’s hair white, and to melt iron in its fury”.16 With Qansuh al-Ghawri
dead and the Mamluks put to l ight, Selim entered Aleppo unopposed. By
September, he was in Damascus. Advancing into Egypt, a logistically chal-
lenging operation, he defeated the Mamluks under the new sultan Tumanbay
at al-Raydaniyya in January 1517 in an encounter at which the grand vezir
Sinan Paşa was killed. Despite continued resistance, Tumanbay was eventu-
ally defeated, captured and executed in Cairo in April. The Mamluk sultan-
ate was at an end. The conquest brought religious prestige, the Ottoman
sultan now master of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and great economic
gain, the region being both productive in its own right and a major, lucrative
transit market for luxury goods, in particular spices, from the east. The way
was now open for Ottoman expansion into the Red Sea and beyond into the
Indian Ocean, leading to an inevitable clash with the Portuguese for control
of trade routes.
Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566)

Süleyman began his reign at breakneck speed, putting down revolts in Egypt
and Anatolia, capturing Rhodes and invading Hungary three times, all in the
irst decade of his rule.
Although Selim had taken Egypt and Syria, the territory was not entirely
secure. On Selim’s death, the governor of Syria, Janbirdi al-Ghazali, revolted
and declared himself sultan at the beginning of 1521. Further unrest occurred
on the death of Khayrbay, the governor of Egypt, in 1522, to be followed by
a serious rebellion in 1524 when the new governor of Egypt, Ahmed Paşa,
revolted and proclaimed himself sultan. After the elimination of Ahmed
Paşa, Süleyman despatched İbrahim Paşa, his grand vezir and brother-in-law,
who left Istanbul in September 1524, reaching Cairo at the beginning of April
1525, where he stayed until June, establishing Ottoman authority.
While Egypt and Syria were being brought under control, Süleyman himself
set of in 1521 on a campaign against Hungary during which he took Belgrade,
thus opening up Hungary to further Ottoman penetration. The following year
he took Rhodes, and the Hospitallers were expelled to the west. Four years
later, Süleyman again invaded Hungary, defeated and killed Lajos II, king of
Hungary and Bohemia, at the battle of Mohács at the end of August, and in
September entered the Hungarian capital, Buda. Further Ottoman advance
was prevented by a serious rebellion which broke out in Anatolia, forcing
Süleyman to withdraw from the west in order to deal with it.
16 Ibid., p. 45.
32
With Süleyman engaged in his eastern territories, the Hungarians occu-

pied themselves with the succession to the Hungarian throne, for King Lajos
had died at Mohács without leaving an heir. Lajos’s wife was Maria, the sister
of the Habsburg Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, while
his brother-in-law twice over was Maria’s other brother, Ferdinand, the arch-
duke of Austria, who had married Lajos’s sister Anna. The Hungarian estates
elected John ( János) Szápolyai as king in November 1526, and he was crowned
at Székesféhervár. Ferdinand, however, laid claim to Hungary and Bohemia
through his wife and had himself elected in December and crowned the fol-
lowing year. Fleeing to the Polish border, Szápolyai appealed to the Ottomans.
Süleyman backed John Szápolyai, and Ferdinand occupied Buda.
The struggle with the Habsburgs, with Ferdinand for control of Hungary
and Charles in the western Mediterranean, dominated much of Süleyman’s
reign and resulted in a series of anti-Habsburg Ottoman–French alliances,
the irst of which was signed in 1536. The Ottomans became intricately
involved in European politics, well informed about the complex web of
matrimonial and political alliances and acting as astute puppet masters or
shrewd and calculating allies, sought after by the major powers of the day.
The next Ottoman campaign to Hungary, the third in less than a decade,
began in 1529 in response to Ferdinand’s occupation of Buda and removal
of the newly elected Hungarian king, John Szápolyai. Süleyman reoccupied
Buda in September and re-established Szápolyai back on the throne. He then
moved on to lay siege to Vienna before withdrawing, unsuccessful, in mid-
October. Undaunted by his earlier failure, Ferdinand again attacked Buda
in 1530, without success, but did manage to occupy the western part of the
kingdom of Hungary, prompting yet another Ottoman–Hungarian cam-
paign. The sultan left Istanbul in April 1532, but the campaign did not achieve
any notable success. In June 1533, an agreement was reached under which
Szápolyai remained in place but the kingdom was divided between him and
Ferdinand, both of whom ruled as Ottoman vassals. This opportune truce
left Süleyman free to deal with the east.
Several years later, Süleyman was back campaigning in the west. In 1538,
he removed Petru Rareş, the voyvoda of Moldavia, suspected of entering into
relations with the Habsburgs, and annexed south-east Moldavia. Two years
later, the situation in Hungary deteriorated when, in July 1540, Szápolyai died.
Under the terms of an agreement between Szápolyai and Ferdinand con-
cluded in 1538, the pact of Nagyvárad (Grosswardein, Oradea), one of whose
architects was George Martinuzzi, then bishop of Nagyvárad, John Szápolyai,
who was in a weak position sandwiched between the Ottomans on the one
33
K ate fl e et
hand and the Habsburgs on the other, or “between the victim and the knife”,17
had agreed that on his death his lands would pass to Ferdinand. One year later,
Szápolyai married Isabella, daughter of King Sigismond of Poland, and, at the
time of his death in 1540, had an infant son, John Sigismund ( János Zsigmond
Szápolyai). Süleyman recognised John Sigismund as king of Hungary, John
paying tribute to Istanbul. Ferdinand, in pursuit of his claims to Hungary,
attacked. Süleyman invaded Hungary in summer 1541 and took Buda. John
Sigismund was despatched to Transylvania with George Martinuzzi as regent.
In 1542, Ferdinand launched yet another attack on Buda, and the following
year Süleyman marched again into Hungary, taking Esztergom (Gran) and
Székesféhervár. There were further conquests under the beylerbeyi of Buda
in 1544. By now peace was becoming an attractive option to both Ferdinand
and Charles, who sued for peace in 1545. An agreement was concluded in 1547
under which Ferdinand paid tribute for the Hungarian lands he held. Once
again, this peace was opportune for the Ottomans, for Süleyman was again
faced with problems in the east.
As was the case with all sultans, Süleyman’s expansion was conducted
on a see-saw swaying between the eastern and western sections of his large
empire. This was a situation which the western states were keen to exploit,
seeking alliances with powers such as Uzun Hasan or the Safavids, who could
be encouraged into joint military action aimed at crushing the Ottomans
between two fronts, a policy which in fact never efectively materialised. For
the Ottomans, the regions to the east were in many ways far more threaten-
ing than their enemies to the west ever were. The Safavids and the unruly
and largely uncontrollable Anatolian Turcomans not merely threatened the
Ottomans militarily but also challenged Ottoman political and religious legit-
imacy and forced the Ottomans constantly onto the back foot. In comparison
to the dangerous and undermining inl uence of the Safavids, the encounter
with the west was much more straightforward, devoid as it was of any chal-
lenge to the legitimacy of Ottoman existence.
In 1526, Süleyman had been forced to cut short his campaigning in the west
because of a rebellion in Anatolia. In 1533, too, having settled the situation
in the west with the signing of a truce in that year, he again turned towards
the east and to the Safavids. In 1524, Shah Isma‘il had died. His successor
was his very young son Tahmasp, the irst years of whose reign were very
unstable. Regardless of any internal upheavals, Safavid inl uence in Anatolia
17 Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1976–84), vol. 3,
p. 434.
34
continued. In 1526, a serious revolt had broken out in Anatolia, followed by a

major rebellion under Kalenderoğlu. Both were thought to have been insti-
gated or encouraged by the Safavids. Having been unable to beneit directly
from the defection of the Safavid governor of Baghdad in 1528 or that of
the Safavid governor of Azerbaijan two years later, due to the Hungarian
campaign, Süleyman now, in 1533, launched a campaign against Iran. The fol-
lowing year, in July 1534, the grand vezir, İbrahim Paşa, occupied the Safavid
capital Tabriz, which ofered no resistance, and at the end of November the
sultan entered Baghdad. Once again, the problem for the Ottomans was less
the taking of Tabriz than the holding of it, and, in 1535, they again withdrew
from the Safavid capital. The campaign had, however, led to the formation
of the new province of Erzurum and the conquest of Iraq, a conquest which
gave the Ottomans an outlet onto the Persian Gulf, an asset with considerable
commercial advantages.
It was also a conquest which created a further area of conl ict with the
Portuguese, who were out to control the entrance to and exit from the Red
Sea and to redirect the lucrative trade from the east round the Cape of Good
Hope of southern Africa and away from the traditional route through Egypt
and Syria to the ports of the Mediterranean. In the Persian Gulf, they con-
trolled Hormuz, captured in 1515, Maskat and Bahrain. In 1538, an expedition
was sent from Suez under Hadım Süleyman Paşa, the beylerbeyi of Egypt,
against the Portuguese. In August, Hadım Süleyman Paşa took Aden and
then set sail across the Indian Ocean. In September, together with forces of
Gujarat, he tried to take Diu, but abandoned the siege in November and with-
drew to Yemen, where he concentrated on organising Ottoman administra-
tion. The Portuguese attack on Suez in 1541 was unsuccessful. Five years later,
the Ottomans conquered Basra, and in 1552 Piri Reis took Muscat from the
Portuguese and laid siege, unsuccessfully, to Hormuz. On the African coast
of the Red Sea, the Ottomans, who already held Sawakin, occupied Massawa
and conquered Ethiopia in 1554–5.
While Süleyman had been occupied with the Safavids, Charles V had been
busy in the western Mediterranean and in 1535 had captured Tunis, a con-
quest which was most advantageous for Habsburg prestige and strategically
annoying for the Ottomans. The Ottomans had, at least nominally, controlled
Algiers and Tunis since 1519, when Hayreddin, known as Barbarossa in the
west, had submitted to Selim I. In 1533, realising the need to improve his
navy, Süleyman had summoned Hayreddin from the Maghreb and made him
admiral of the Ottoman leet. Hayreddin promptly set about business, raid-
ing the Italian coastline in 1537 and attacking Corfu. With the Ottomans now
35
K ate fl e et
at war with Venice, he took the Venetian islands of Naxos, Andros, Paros and
Santorini in 1538 and, in the same year, defeated the forces of the Holy League
of Venice, Pope Paul III, Charles V and Ferdinand of Austria in the famous
battle of Prevesa. In 1540, the war with Venice ended, yet another triumph for
the Ottomans and a costly failure for Venice, which this time lost Monemvasia
and Nafplio (Nauplia, Napoli di Romania) and ceded the Aegean islands it had
lost to Hayreddin as well as paying a considerable indemnity.
In 1541, Charles V attacked Algiers, this time with less success, for almost
his entire leet was wiped out in a dramatic storm, a disaster which encour-
aged François I and Süleyman into another alliance, concluded in 1543. As a
result of this alliance, Hayreddin took part in an attack on Nice in 1543 and
wintered his leet in 1543–4 at Toulon, a city “without parallel among the
Franks” according to an anonymous sixteenth-century Ottoman account of
Hayreddin’s exploits.18 In 1550, Charles V’s admiral Andrea Doria attacked
Mahdia and Monastir on the North African coast, and, in the following year,
Jerba, prompting an unsuccessful Ottoman attack on Malta. In 1551, Ottoman
forces scored a signiicant victory with the capture of Tripoli, held by the
Hospitallers since 1530. In the same year, they concluded another alliance with
the French and, in 1555, conducted a joint naval attack on Naples. In 1556, they
took the Spanish fortress of Wahran (Oran), west of Algiers, and Bizerta,
near Tunis, in 1557. Malta, however, continued to elude them, and despite bit-
ter ighting they failed to capture the island in 1565, though they did take the
Genoese island of Chios in the following year.
The mid-sixteenth century to 1603

Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566)
While the irst part of Süleyman’s reign was marked by military success, both
in the west against the Habsburgs and in the east against the Safavids, the
latter part of his reign was less spectacular; his successes declined and cam-
paigns resulted in less conquest, less booty and more expense.
In 1548, Süleyman was once more campaigning against Shah Tahmasp,
whose brother, Alkas Mirza, had revolted against him and led the year before
to Istanbul. Once again the Ottomans occupied Tabriz, and once again,
18 From an anonymous account of Hayreddin’s voyage, in J. Deny and J. Laroche, ‘L’expedition

en Provence de l’armée de mer du sultan Suleyman sous le commandement de l’amiral
Hayreddin Pacha dit Barberousse (1543–1544)’, Turcica 1 (1969), 161–211 at p. 171. Laroche dates
the manuscript to the second half of the sixteenth or perhaps the beginning of the seven-
teenth century (p. 163).
36
following a by now familiar pattern, they withdrew. Having wintered in

Aleppo, Süleyman took Van, which he had taken in 1534 but lost to the Safavids
in 1535, in August 1549. Stymied by the Safavid scorched-earth tactics and frus-
trated by Tahmasp’s persistent refusal to come out and ight, Süleyman with-
drew in December 1549 without a great deal achieved. Two years later, the
Safavids laid waste to the region around the northern shores of Lake Van and
defeated the troops of İskender Paşa, the beylerbeyi of Erzurum. Süleyman
ordered the grand vezir, Rüstem Paşa, and Mehmed Sokollu, the beylerbeyi
of Rumeli, to recover the lost territory. The campaign was planned for 1552,
but before it could occur a crisis broke out between Süleyman and his son
Mustafa.
While the Safavids were raiding round Lake Van, intrigues erupted over
the Transylvanian throne. Martinuzzi, hostile to Isabella and her minister
Peter Petrović, who were “thorns in Martinuzzi’s lesh”,19 was in contact
with Ferdinand but anxious not to have a total break with Süleyman, at least
not until he could be sure of Habsburg backing. Isabella, whose hostility to
Martinuzzi stemmed from the agreement of 1538 which excluded her son’s
accession, turned, if somewhat indecisively, to the Ottomans. In July 1551,
Martınuzzi forced Isabella to accept the treaty of Alba Iulia under which, in
accordance with the 1538 treaty and acting on behalf of her son, Isabella gave
up the throne of Transylvania, which then went to Ferdinand. Throughout
this period, Martinuzzi was in communication with both Ferdinand and
Süleyman, a dangerous double game which was likely to win him no friends.
Indeed, Sokollu Mehmed Paşa described him in August 1551 as “mendacious”.20
Isabella, who heartily detested him, even suspected that he had personal
ambitions to be king of Hungary, while Ferdinand’s commander Giovan
Battista Castaldo, also no fan of Martinuzzi’s, was convinced that he was out
for the rule of Transylvania. Süleyman was distinctly annoyed by the treaty
of Alba Iulia, and Ottoman troops under Sokollu Mehmed Paşa advanced
into Hungary in autumn 1551, took Lippa (Lipova), and laid siege to Temesvár
(Timişoara) in October. By December, however, Lippa was under siege by
Castaldo and Martinuzzi. By this time, Castaldo’s mistrust of Martinuzzi was
total and, with Ferdinand, too, wanting him removed, Castaldo had him mur-
dered at the end of December. Fighting continued in 1552. The Ottomans
took Temesvár and re-occupied Lippa in spring 1552, and in August inl icted
a major defeat on Ferdinand’s forces. In September, they took the fortress of
19 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 4, p. 566.

20 Ibid., p. 568.
37
K ate fl e et
Szolnok but failed to take Eger (Erlau). Ferdinand continued to pursue his
claims to Transylvania until, with the Ottoman siege of Szigetvár in 1556, he
was inally forced to abandon them. John Sigismund and Isabella were put
back on the throne. Although the struggle between Ferdinand and Süleyman
continued until 1562, there was no real change in the situation, for Ferdinand
did not have the means to conduct a sustained ofensive and Süleyman could
not do so because of the situation with the Safavids and a dangerous conl ict
among his sons.
Süleyman’s eldest son, Mustafa, held the sancak of Amasya. Strongly
opposed by Hürrem Sultan, Süleyman’s extremely inl uential wife, who
wanted the succession for one of her own sons, and by Rüstem Paşa, mar-
ried to her daughter Mihrimah and grand vezir almost without interruption
from 1544 until his death in 1561, Mustafa set out to build up his own power
base and to garner support. His success fed into Süleyman’s suspicion of him,
encouraged by Hürrem Sultan and Rüstem Paşa. His concern was height-
ened by the discontent among the soldiers when, in 1552, Rüstem Paşa set
out with the army for a campaign against the Safavids. Claiming that the sul-
tan was too old for active military service, the soldiers muttered ominously
about the need to put a young and vigorous sultan on the throne. Forced to
assume command of the army himself, Süleyman set out in August 1553, sum-
moning Mustafa to join him. When Mustafa appeared before him in October
near Ereğli, he was instantly put to death. Mustafa’s execution, described by
the Habsburg ambassador Busbecq as a “somewhat precipitate action”,21 pro-
duced a very hostile reaction, forcing Süleyman to remove Rüstem Paşa, seen
as being behind the execution, from his position as grand vezir.
With Mustafa removed, Süleyman pursued his campaign, destroying Persian
border defences, particularly at Erivan (Yerevan) and Nakhchivan, and devas-
tating the rich lands round Karabakh. Süleyman could not get at the Safavid
army, which retreated, leaving him with only one option, that of destroying
the forward zone which Safavid forces used for raids into Anatolia. Süleyman
then withdrew to Erzurum. In September, he agreed to a truce with the shah,
and a formal peace, the peace of Amasya, was signed in May 1555. Under this
treaty, Süleyman abandoned all claim to Tabriz, Erivan and Nakhchivan but
kept Iraq and regions in eastern Anatolia. The frontier between the two states
was now, at least theoretically, ixed.
21 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, trans. Edward S.
Forster (Oxford, 1927), p. 65.
38
No sooner had the situation with the Safavids been stabilised than a sec-
ond succession struggle broke out between Süleyman’s two remaining sons,
Selim, the elder, and Bayezid. After a period of jostling in which the broth-
ers intrigued against each other and tracked each other’s moves by means of
spies,22 Bayezid, not disposed to wait for his father’s death before making his
move, went into open revolt, thus propelling his father into backing his non-
revolting son, Selim. Defeated in battle near Konya in 1559, Bayezid led to
Iran. In an earlier period, the arrival of such an advantageous hostage might
have led to open conl ict, but the situation had now changed and neither
Tahmasp nor Süleyman were keen to go to war over the issue. Instead, in
1562, after much diplomatic to and fro, money changed hands, the treaty of
Amasya was renewed and Tahmasp handed Bayezid over to Ottoman oi-
cials, who promptly strangled him.
In the same year, Süleyman signed an agreement with Ferdinand, in essence
a renewal of that of 1547. By this time, the international scene had changed,
for in 1559 Philip II, who had become king of Spain on his father Charles V’s
abdication in 1556 though not Holy Roman Emperor, and the French king
Henri II had signed the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, which signalled the end
of the period of Ottoman–French political alliance.
The peace signed between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs in 1562 was
not destined to last long, for in 1564 Ferdinand, Holy Roman Emperor since
1558, died and hostilities broke out between his son and successor, the new
emperor Maximillian II, and John Sigismund of Transylvania. In 1566, an
elderly and inirm Süleyman set out on what was to be his inal campaign.
The Ottoman army encamped before Szigetvár, where, two days before its
fall, Süleyman died.
Selim II (r. 1566–1574)

Selim II, Süleyman’s only surviving son, was faced in the irst years of his
reign by a war and two rebellions. The war, that with Hungary during which
his father had died, was brought to a conclusion in 1568 by an eight-year peace
treaty with the emperor Maximillian under which Maximillian agreed to pay
an annual tribute of 30,000 ducats. The revolts were in the south of his terri-
tories, one among the Arabs in Iraq under Ibn ‘Ulayyan, which resulted in the
cutting of communications between Baghdad and Basra, and the other, the
Zaydi revolt in Yemen, which had resulted in the loss of Ottoman control of
the province and of the entrance to the Red Sea. The revolt of the Arabs was
22 Şerafettin Turan, Kanuni Süleyman Dönemi Taht Kavgaları (Ankara, 1997), p. 54.
39
K ate fl e et
put down in 1567 by a river campaign, and Yemen was brought back under
Ottoman control after a diicult campaign between 1569 and 1571 under the
command of Sinan Paşa, the beylerbeyi of Egypt.
The great military success of Selim’s reign took place in the Mediterranean
with the conquest of the Venetian island of Cyprus, whose loss was oi-
cially recognised by Venice under the treaty of 1573, and the capture of La
Goletta and Tunis in 1574. Cyprus was one of the only two island strong-
holds left to Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. Strategically located on
the route between Egypt and Istanbul and in the midst of Ottoman terri-
tory, its conquest by the Ottomans was only a matter of time. Selim, sup-
ported by Piyale Paşa and Lala Mustafa Paşa but opposed by the grand vezir
Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, decided on an attack, despite the existing peace with
Venice. Nicosia fell in 1570, Famagusta in 1571. The Ottoman assault pro-
voked a response from the Holy League, whose naval force encountered
the Ottoman leet in the famous battle of Lepanto. A resounding defeat for
the Ottomans, who lost most of their ships and the majority of their com-
manders, the battle was noisily heralded as a great victory by the European
states. It was not, however, the crushing blow the West would have wished,
and a new, large Ottoman leet was constructed in time to sail out into the
Mediterranean the next spring. In summer 1574, an Ottoman naval expe-
dition under Kılıç Ali Paşa and Koca Sinan Paşa captured La Goletta and
Tunis. Much of the North African coast to the east of Wahran was now
under Ottoman control.
One of the interesting, if unsuccessful, projects of Selim’s reign was the
planned construction of two canals, one to link Suez to the Mediterranean
and one to connect the Don with the Volga. In both cases, the aim was
to facilitate Ottoman military operations. The Suez-Mediterranean canal,
ordered by Sokollu Mehmed Paşa in 1568, was to facilitate Ottoman opera-
tions in Yemen and against the Portuguese, for the canal would have allowed
the transportation of men and munitions directly from the Mediterranean
to the Red Sea. The Don–Volga canal would have given direct access from
the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and facilitated the movement of men and
munitions into the Caucasus and northern Iran. In the end, neither of these
constructions was successful, though concerted work on the Don–Volga
canal, whose attempted construction was prompted by the Russian occupa-
tion of Astrakhan, was begun in August 1569. However, cold weather and
the failure of Ottoman forces under Kasım Paşa to take Astrakhan forced
the Ottomans to abandon the canal after only one-third of it had been
excavated.
40
Murad III (r. 1574–1595)

By the time of Murad III’s reign, the strains in the economic fabric of the state
were becoming apparent. From the 1580s onwards, the empire sufered the
efects of severe inlation, and the constant warfare of the period drained the
state’s resources. Lawlessness and brigandage increased, and the deicit in
the treasury became chronic. The response of the government was to debase
the coinage. In 1589, the janissaries, who, as the contemporary historian
Selaniki noted, were given to getting what they wanted,23 revolted when they
received their pay in the new, debased currency, and in 1592 the sipahis of the
Porte rebelled because their pay was not issued to them in full. Later, in 1603,
there would be a more serious revolt of the sipahis of the Porte, which was
crushed by the janissaries.
One of the factors contributing to the economic diiculties was the long
war with Iran, which was to dominate most of Murad III’s reign, breaking
out in 1578 and ending in 1590. The opportunity for an Ottoman attack was
provided by the descent of the Safavid state into intertribal and internecine
feuding following the death of Shah Tahmasp in 1576 and the Uzbek inva-
sion from the east which this instability provoked. Claiming that continued
Safavid propaganda activities within Ottoman territories and the defection to
the Safavids of Kurdish leaders on the Ottoman frontier constituted a breach
of the Amasya treaty of 1555, Murad declared war in 1578. The Ottoman army
under Lala Mustafa Paşa set out to subjugate Georgia and conquer Shirvan.
In August, Ottoman forces occupied Tbilisi and had, by the end of the year,
taken Shirvan. As always, however, the problem that faced the Ottomans in
their campaigns against the Safavids was less conquest than retention, and on
this occasion, too, although they had conquered the region, they had prob-
lems holding it. In 1578–9, Lala Mustafa Paşa withdrew, with great diiculty,
to Erzurum. For the next couple of years, the Ottoman position was under
severe pressure from Safavid counter-attacks, but with the major Ottoman
victory at the battle of Meşale, the situation improved. In 1583, Ferhad Paşa
occupied Erivan, followed two years later by Özdemiroğlu Osman Paşa’s
occupation of Tabriz. By 1587, Georgia had become efectively an Ottoman
dependency.
In the same year, the Safavid ruler Khudabanda had been forced to abdicate,
and was succeeded by Shah Abbas I (1587–1629). Abbas soon found himself
23 Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, Tarih-i Selaniki, ed. Mehmet İpşirli, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1999), vol. 1,
p. 60.
41
K ate fl e et
facing war on two fronts, the Ottomans on one side and the Uzbeks, who
invaded from the east, took Herat in 1589 and advanced to Mashhad, on the
other. Threatened also by internal strife, Abbas was forced to sue for peace
with the Ottomans. Under the treaty concluded between them in 1590, the
Ottomans retained their conquests in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, together
with Luhristan, Nihavend, and Shehrizor in western Iran. These territorial
gains were only temporary, however, for between 1603 and 1606 Abbas was to
take them all back.
No sooner had Murad emerged from war with the Safavids than he plunged
into one with the Habsburgs. Although oicially at peace since 1568, there
had been much tension, with raiding and counter-raiding in the border zones
between Ottoman and Habsburg territory, and in 1593 war with Hungary
broke out. Although initially successful, Koca Sinan Paşa capturing Veszprem
and Paluta in 1593, the campaign was soon struggling. The Ottoman conquest
in 1594 of Tata and Györ (Yanık), whose fall was more down to luck than mil-
itary ability, Peçevi describing the conquest of Györ as “nothing other than a
miracle”,24 were more important for boosting morale than symbolic of any
efective Ottoman victory. In 1595, the situation deteriorated even further with
the defection of Stephen Bathori, king of Transylvania, who transferred his
allegiance to the Habsburgs, and the revolt of the voyvodas of Moldavia and
Wallachia. Defeated by both Wallachian and Moldavian forces, and struggling
to defeat the voyvoda Michael of Wallachia, the Ottomans lost Esztergom to
the Habsburgs in August 1595.
Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603)

By this time, Mehmed III had come to the throne, in the midst of a Hungarian
campaign that was going badly. In response to the deteriorating situation, the
new sultan himself set out for Hungary in 1596 at the head of the army. In
October, he took Eger, and in the same month the Ottomans, rather fortu-
itously, won a major victory at the battle of Mező-Keresztes, to the west of the
Tisza River, when the Ottoman troops, who had initially led, returned to the
attack against Austrian forces distracted by plundering the Ottoman encamp-
ment. The campaign in the following year under Satırcı Mehmed Paşa did
not, however, meet with success, and in 1598 Habsburg forces besieged Buda,
though unsuccessfully. In 1600, Ottoman fortunes changed when Mehmed
Paşa, the governor-general of Buda, captured Kanizsa in south-western
Hungary, a rather fortuitous conquest which owed much to the descent of
24 Peçevi, Peçevi Tarihi, ed. Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1982), vol. 2, p. 142.
42
an all-enveloping mist.25 In reply, the Austrians laid siege, unsuccessfully, to

Kanizsa in 1601, but did take Pest, opposite Buda, in 1602 and laid siege to
Buda, but were repelled by Lala Mehmed Paşa, who later re-conquered Pest.
This war eventually ended inconclusively in 1606 with the conclusion of the
peace of Zsitvatorok during the reign of Mehmed’s successor, Ahmed I (r.
1603–17).
The increasing economic diiculties of the later sixteenth century contrib-
uted to a wave of social unrest which was expressed in a series of revolts,
known as the celali revolts, which broke out in Anatolia in 1596. Sipahis dispos-
sessed after their poor performance at the battle of Mező-Keresztes and land-
less or dispossessed peasants gathered under the leadership of Kara Yazıcı,
who, in 1596, defeated the beylerbeyi of Karaman, sent by Mehmed III to put
down the rebellion. Having failed to crush Kara Yazıcı militarily, Mehmed
changed tactics, making him governor irst of Amasya and then Çorum.
This new position made no diference, for Kara Yazıcı continued to plunder
Anatolia as he had before. He was inally defeated by Sokollu Mehmed Paşa’s
son Hasan Paşa in 1601 and died the following year.
Kara Yazıcı’s death did not, however, mean the end of the revolt, for com-
mand of the rebellion was taken up by his brother Deli Hasan, who killed
Hasan Paşa at Tokat in 1602 before defeating an Ottoman force in August and
besieging Ankara. Mehmed’s response to Deli Hasan was the same as it had
been to his brother, and Hasan was made beylerbeyi of Bosnia. His departure
from Anatolia did not result in the end of the revolts, which continued on into
the reign of Mehmed’s successor, Ahmed I.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman state had
reached its territorial limits and had established itself as a world power. It was
now, however, faced with economic challenges with the inl ux of silver from
the new world and the diiculties of maintaining the value of its currency, a
warfare which was less for lucrative conquest than expensive defence, new
commercial competitors in the form of the Dutch and the English, who were
to dominate maritime trade, and an increasing wave of smouldering social dis-
content, which exploded in the violent and uncontrollable celali rebellions.
25 Ibid., p. 220.
43
3
Ottoman expansion in Europe, ca. 1453–1606
Pal mir a Brumm ett
The Ottoman Empire is often imagined in terms of major conquests and

major reigns, those that are expansive.1 Thus, the sixteenth century, in the
context of Ottoman “activity” in Europe, tends to be framed by the conquest
of Constantinople in 1453 and by the conclusion of the “long” Ottoman–
Habsburg war of 1593–1606, respectively, or by the reigns of Mehmed II
(r. 1444–6, 1451–81) and Murad III (r. 1574–95), with that of Süleyman the
Lawgiver (1520–66) as a focal point of consolidation and triumph. The six-
teenth century is also circumscribed by the emergence of the Shi’ite Shah
Isma‘il Safavi in Iran in 1501 and by the launching of the “long” Ottoman
war of 1603–18 against the Safavid regime. That state problematised Ottoman
expansion in Europe through the creation of an aggressive enemy on the
Ottoman eastern borders, one which actively recruited Ottoman subordi-
nates, especially in the mountainous areas of eastern Anatolia, fought the
Ottomans for control of Iraq and the outlets to the Persian Gulf, and rhetori-
cally challenged the sultans’ claims to sacred hegemony in the Islamic world.
The existence of a powerful Muslim challenger in Iran meant that Ottoman
military investment in Europe was always subject to the demands of the
eastern frontier. Another important idea afecting the conceptualisation of
the sixteenth century is the notion of a resurgence and re-coniguration of
European powers in the Mediterranean associated with the Christian forces’
victory at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the emergence of the English
as a rising commercial force in the Levant. That re-coniguration in the last
three decades of the century presented both limitations and opportunities for
the Ottomans. While such periods and events suggest an outline of Ottoman
expansion in Europe, as with all such historical markers, they do not suice
to convey the continuities, processes and universal rhetorics which transcend
the constraints of reigns, state-formation, battles and periods of war.
1 Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire, 1300–1914, vol. 1: 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. xv–xvii.
44
In many ways, the long sixteenth century (the time period comprising
roughly the years 1453 to 1606) is the century in which the Ottoman polity and
its governing classes articulated the state as empire. It is the period in which
the Ottomans secured and developed two imperial capitals, Constantinople
and Cairo, symbolising their power in the west (Rum) and in the east, an
arena which encompassed the three holy Islamic cities, Mecca, Medina and
Jerusalem. Each of these “ends” of empire is associated with a series of trading
spheres over which the Ottomans achieved dominance, as well as with a series
of rich, taxable lands. The Ottomans, in this era, deined themselves militarily
and ideologically in confrontation with the Catholic Habsburg Empire to the
north and west and the Shi‘ite Muslim Safavid Empire to the east. This was the
century of the Muslim millennium, a millennium which for Sultan Süleyman
certiied his own long reign as the embodiment of Islamic kingly and spiritual
might.2 In the Afro/Asian sphere, the conquest of Cairo and its attendant ter-
ritories gave the Ottomans control over the access points to the eastern trade
and avenues for sea-borne incursions into the Indian Ocean. In Europe, the
conquest of Constantinople and the development of expansive Ottoman ter-
ritories (and claims), along with expansive military and commercial agendas,
meant that the Ottomans became invested in a complex set of political, eco-
nomic and religious relationships. The nature of those relationships changed
signiicantly over the course of the century, one in which European familiarity
with the Ottomans broadened signiicantly. At the beginning of the period,
the captivity of Cem Sultan, Sultan Bayezid II’s (r. 1481–1512) brother and a
pretender to the throne, under various Christian powers, and the Ottoman
attempts to retrieve him, signiied an extended endeavour by rulers on both
sides of the European frontier to assess the relative power of their rivals.3 By
the end of the period under consideration here, that understanding of rela-
tive power was well advanced; it was embodied in a set of treaty agreements,
tested in warfare, and enhanced through the activities of a vast network of
commercial, political and intellectual intermediaries.4
2 Cornell Fleischer, ‘Shadows of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul’, International
Journal of Turkish Studies 13, 1–2 (2007), 51–62; see also Norman Housley, ‘The Eschatological
Imperative: Messianism and Holy War in Europe, 1250–1556’, in Norman Housley, Crusading
and Warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, 2001), sec. III, pp. 123–50.
3 Nicolas Vatin, Sultan Djem: Un prince ottoman dans l’Europe du xve siècle d’après deux sources
contemporaines: Vâkı‛ ât-ı Sultân Cem, Œuvres de Guillaume Caoursin (Ankara, 1997).
4 Jan Schmidt, ‘French-Ottoman Relations in the Early Modern Period and the John Rylands
Library MSS Turkish 45 & 46’, in Jan Schmidt, The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman
Literature, History and Orientalism (1500–1923), vol. II: Orientalists, Travellers and Merchants in
the Ottoman Empire, Political Relations between Europe and the Porte (Istanbul, 2002), pp. 375–436
at p. 419; Alexander De Groot, ‘The Historical Development of the Capitulatory Regime in
the Ottoman Middle East from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Ottoman
45
Pal mi r a b rum mett
Deining “Europe” and “expansion”

Before one determines the relative signiicance of battles, sovereigns, ideolo-
gies and entrepôts, it is worthwhile to examine the concepts of “Europe” and
“expansion”. The Ottoman Empire, after all, was inextricably European. Its
capital, Istanbul, spanned the two continents of Europe and Asia. Rumeli, in
the Graeco-Balkan peninsula, constituted a central core of Ottoman land,
one-half of the two major provinces (beylerbeyliks) of the empire (the other
being Anatolia) and the homeland of many of those taken in the devşirme
(state levy of non-Muslim subject boys), who served the empire as its elite
military/administrative class. Also, as Şevket Pamuk has pointed out, “The
Balkans, together with western and central Anatolia including the capital and
its environs, constituted the core region of the Ottoman monetary system”.5
That notion of a Eurasian iscal core helps transcend the notion of an empire
divided into continental “halves”. The Ottomans ruled what in the seven-
teenth century was labelled, on European maps, “Turkey in Europe” and
“Turkey in Asia”. But despite either contemporary or Ptolemaic notions of
a continental divide, in the sixteenth century the boundaries of Europe were
ideologically and visually negotiable.6 For some observers, the boundaries
of “Europe” were those circumscribing the land ruled by Christian kings;
for others the boundaries of Europe extended well east of Istanbul. Indeed,
the sixteenth century is particularly notable for its explorations, in text and
image, of the boundaries of Europe. However the “limits” of Europe were
imagined, a basic premise of this chapter is that the Ottoman Empire was a
European empire – its identity, ethos and ambitions deined by its possession
of European capitals and its investment in European economies and afairs.
Well before the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottomans had occupied
Europe and established their rule at Edirne. Thus the division of the empire
into continental western and eastern, or “Christian” and “Muslim” halves,
while roughly relective of administrative divisions and general demographic
realities, is not relective of the nature of Ottoman sovereign identity. That
Capitulations: Text and Context, ed. Maurits H. van den Boogert and Kate Fleet, Oriente
Moderno 22, 3 (2003), 575–604; Hans Theunissen, ‘Ottoman-Venetian Diplomatics: the ‘Ahd-
Names’, Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 1, 2 (1998), 1–698, on Venetian treaties; Maria
Pia Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al Senato, vol. 14: Costantinopoli. Relazioni
inedite (1512–1789) (Padova, 1996).
5 Şevket Pamuk, ‘The Ottoman Monetary System and Frontier Territories in Europe, 1500–
1700’, in Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities, and Political Changes, ed. Kemal Karpat
with Robert Zens (Madison, Wis., 2003), pp. 175–82 at pp. 177, 179.
6 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York, 1996), pp. 1–46.
46
identity combined “the two lands and the two seas” into one imperial real-
ity which exploited the layers and evolution of regional geographic, politi-
cal, religious and “national” identities rather than enforcing their “essential”
diferences. In order to understand the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire,
one must appreciate both its location in Europe and its participation in what
one scholar has called the “shared discourse” and “shared rhythms” of the
Ottoman and European worlds.7
Expansion is also a term which encompasses an array of meanings and
interpretations. In its simplest sense, “expansion” often means the movement
of conquering armies into neutral or enemy territory. But true “expansion”
requires some level of political, economic and socio-cultural occupation, inte-
gration and control over time, something which the Ottomans achieved in
Europe. How that control worked and its nature in any given area of conquered
territory are the subject of considerable debate in contemporary historiogra-
phies. Ottoman expansion has been read, historiographically, as the Ottoman
“yoke”, an occupation by a foreign, heretical and despotic power whose rule
constituted a dark era in the history of eastern Europe (what one scholar has
called “catastrophe” or “coercion” theory).8 In other readings, the Ottomans
provided their European territories with a period of multi-cultural, tolerant,
coherent and prosperous rule from Istanbul which was replaced, beginning
in the seventeenth century, by a long process of violent ethno-national and
religious factionalism that ultimately forced the expulsion of the Ottomans
from the Graeco-Balkan peninsula. In Ottomanist historiography, expansion
into Europe is often presented as a logical step in the process through which
the Ottomans established themselves as an imperial power, supplanting the
Byzantines, and gaining access to important agricultural, timber, mining and
commercial resources. “Europe” in this paradigm constitutes one end of an
uneven tripartite division of the empire into European, Anatolian and Arab
provinces, with island territories such as Cyprus occupying a separate and
somewhat undeined fourth category. World historical models provide an
alternative vision, with the Ottoman Empire serving as one in a succession of
exploitative, trans-regional, imperial entities that survived into the modern
7 Cemal Kafadar, ‘The Ottomans and Europe’, in Handbook of European History 1400–1600,
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 1: Structures and Assertions, ed. Thomas
Brady, Heiko Oberman and James D. Tracy (Leiden, 1994), pp. 589–635, esp. pp. 620–1. See
also Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and Beloved in Early-
Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, N.C., 2005).
8 Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social
Life, 1670–1730 (Leiden, 2004), p. 65; Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds.), The Ottomans and
the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden, 2002).
47
era. The Ottoman Empire controlled so much territory that, like Rome, it
does not it readily into regional and civilisational paradigms. Such models
highlight the dilemma of what to do with “Europe” when it becomes Ottoman
space. Part of this dilemma derives from the fact that the sixteenth century,
historiographically, often serves as a prelude to spatial divisions based on the
nation-states of the modern world. The Ottoman Empire, however, echoes in
its expansiveness both the trans-continental, multi-cultural, imperial entities
of the medieval world and the blue-water, Western European imperial pow-
ers of the early modern age. None of the available characterisations provide
a full and nuanced image of Ottoman expansion in Europe, which proceeded
in surges and lulls; operated diferently for coastal and inland areas; engaged a
diverse set of socio-political, legal, economic and institutional structures; and
met with greater or lesser resistance depending on the hierarchies of power
and culture in each conquered or partially conquered area.
While expansion cannot be comprehended through conquest alone, con-
quest itself is a vexed notion. Generally, conquest in the sixteenth century
took place along a limited number of routes and afected a limited number
of settlement centres. Any given segment of a conquered region might not
know or accept that it had been conquered. Conversely, the idea of Ottoman
conquest could serve to manipulate the sensibilities of communities that
anticipated its efects and ramiications and shaped their behaviours accord-
ingly. Certainly the “news” of Ottoman advances in Europe spread quickly,
and Ottoman successes and failures were commemorated in broad-sheets and
embedded in the maps and sermon literature of Europe within days, weeks
or months after individual acts of conquest. Yet beyond the image of con-
quest and the physical marching of armies along routes and into or past cities
and fortresses, it took time for territory, that is urban settlements and their
surrounding (revenue producing, mostly agricultural) lands, to be recognised
and acknowledged as “conquered” and moving from the “possession” of one
sovereign to another – from the possession of “Christian princes”, as they
were often deemed in the source materials, to the possession of the “padişah ”
or “Grand Turk”.
Conquest could, and often did, mean that designated local or regional lead-
ers were compelled to perform acts of submission to recognise publicly the
authority of the sultan and to commit themselves to providing taxes, goods
and sometimes men to the Ottomans to certify their obedience, however
long that obedience might or might not last. Viorel Panaite has referred to
such submission as a measure of “collective homage”, which the Ottomans
48
demanded and then acknowledged.9 That collective homage was more or less
enduring and representative. The Ottomans certiied their conquests through
the garrisoning of troops, the taking of censuses, the inscribing of tax regis-
ters, the creation of sancaks (sub-provinces), the assignment of judges (kadıs),
the levying of tribute, the taking of hostages, the granting of treaties and the
allocation of oices to local notables. Yet sancaks could be altered, treaties
broken, hostages absorbed into the Ottoman government and householders
lee the land, thereby escaping levies of taxes and goods. Some areas achieved
a modus vivendi with the conquerors, and others remained fractious, their
documents of “incorporation” requiring chronic negotiation and re-negoti-
ation. Taxpayers in frontier areas might ind themselves counted on the tax
rolls of two masters.10 Some conquests were tenuous, some temporary and
periodic; others endured throughout the period in question. Some societies,
especially on the edges of the frontier, endured conditions of chronic war-
fare; others settled into Ottoman rule, absorbed Muslim migrants and experi-
enced signiicant levels of conversion and inter-marriage. So expansion must
be measured in terms of tranquillity, conversions or settled tax status as much
as in terms of force of arms.
Events and periodisation: The long sixteenth century

The aftermath of 1453
To begin the long sixteenth century, Ottoman expansion into European
territory combined the conquest of the de-populated imperial capital of
Constantinople with campaigns against Serbia in 1454–5 and, in 1456, the failed
siege of Belgrade, a crucial step in the Danubian march to Vienna. By 1460,
the Ottomans had made signiicant advances on both land and sea salients,
conquering the Peloponnese and incorporating the kingdom of Serbia into
the empire. In 1463, the Ottomans invaded Bosnia, a key segment of the con-
tested trans-imperial zone shared with Venice and the Habsburgs, and became
embroiled in a naval war with Venice that would last for 16 years. In 1475, they
annexed the long-established Genoese colony of Cafa on the Black Sea. The
9 Viorel Panaite, ‘Ottoman Expansion to the North of Danube: Wallachia and Moldavia
(14th–16th Century)’, in The Turks, vol. 3: The Ottomans, ed. Hasan Güzel, C. Cem Oğuz and
Osman Karatay (Ankara, 2002), pp. 111–22 at p. 115.
10 Géza Dávid, ‘Administration in Ottoman Europe’, in Süleyman the Magniicent and His Age:
The Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World, ed. Metin Kunt and Christine Woodhead
(London, 1995), pp. 71–90, esp. p. 84; Gustav Bayerle, Ottoman Tributes in Hungary According
to Sixteenth Century Tapu Registers of Novigrad (The Hague, 1973).
49
Ottomans had declared their intentions as a sea power, determined to seize

bases in the Aegean and Adriatic and challenge Venetian hegemony in the east-
ern Mediterranean. They briely took Otranto, on the eastern Italian coast, in
1480, sending shock waves of alarm throughout the peninsula, and launched a
failed attack on the island fortress of Rhodes, just of the Anatolian coast. By
the death of Mehmed the Conqueror in 1481, the Porte had taken the territo-
ries of the Graeco-Balkan peninsula, including Wallachia (in 1476), up to the
borders of Hungary, except for a set of coastal enclaves controlled by Venice.
Croatia and Transylvania remained autonomous, key areas of opportunity
and resistance on the western and east-central sides of the frontier.11 Before
the turn of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had not only revived the
ancient imperial capital of Byzantium but had pushed Ottoman armies, claims
and administration well into a broad land- and sea-based European frontier
zone stretching from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. That expansion enhanced
the Ottoman reputation for power, wealth and imperial patronage, attracting
mercenaries, entrepreneurs, technicians and artists like Gentile Bellini to the
newly lourishing imperial capital at Istanbul.12 From 1492 on, in the aftermath
of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the empire also became a haven
for the displaced of Europe, granting refuge and tax breaks to these desir-
able, commercially oriented “settlers” from the west. The empire thus drew
“Europe” in at the same time as it ventured into European territory.
Bayezid II, Selim I and Süleyman I: 1481–1566

When Bayezid II ascended the throne in 1481, his authority was compromised
by factional politics and by the machinations of a pretender to the throne,
his brother Cem Sultan. Cem mobilised a revolt in Anatolia in 1482 but was
defeated and forced to lee to Rhodes; Bayezid paid the Knights Hospitallers
annually to keep him there under wraps. The sultan then launched a mili-
tary campaign (in conjunction with his Crimean vassals) against Moldavia in
1484, establishing his reputation by taking Kilia and Akkerman in the corridor
of conquest along the north-western coast of the Black Sea. These victories
were followed by an extended war, from 1485 to 1491, with the Mamluks who
ruled Egypt and Syria. In 1497, Ottoman forces were once again drawn to
Moldavia to ward of a Polish invasion; the army of the Porte was victorious,
and Ottoman control over the region was consolidated.13
11 Gunther Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana, Ill., 1960).
12 Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, Bellini and the East (London and Boston, 2005).
13 Stanford Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1: The Empire of the
Gazis (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 72–5.
50
Cem Sultan died in 1495 after sojourns in Rhodes, France and Italy. His
body, however, was returned to Istanbul only in 1499. This posthumous return
coincided with the Ottoman Porte’s renewing its naval war (1499–1502) against
the Signoria of Venice, and it signalled a new era in Ottoman–European rela-
tions. For the duration of the ensuing century, the Ottoman, Venetian and
Habsburg empires would confront each other in a long and intermittent
struggle to assert territorial and commercial dominance and to establish a
mode of co-existence in the Aegean, the Adriatic and the Graeco-Balkan pen-
insula. That adjustment was necessitated by the emergence of the Ottomans
as a world power. Their claims to that status were based on a combination of
Islamic, Byzantine, Persian and Turkish traditions of imperial grandeur, freely
adapted to the exigencies of day-to-day rule. The historian Kemalpaşazade
(d. 1536), writing for Bayezid II, proclaimed the Ottoman polity “superior”
to those of all the previous Muslim dynasties; it was more powerful, rich,
authoritative and, unlike its predecessors, was established through the con-
quest of the territories of the “inidel world”.14 The imperial ethos of the
empire was thus well advanced by the beginning of the sixteenth century.
While Bayezid’s reign was marked by consolidation and reorganisation,
that of his son Selim was marked by dramatic conquest on the Ottomans’
eastern frontier. Selim II did not wait until the death of his ailing father to
seize the throne; after defeating his brothers in a protracted succession strug-
gle, in 1512 he forced Bayezid II to abdicate. Once in power, he devoted him-
self to defeating Shah Isma‘il, the newly emergent Safavid ruler in Iran (1514),
overwhelming the Mamluk kingdoms in Syria, Palestine and Egypt (1516–17),
and gaining control of the holy cities (Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem). Those
conquests cemented Ottoman hegemony in the Muslim world. But with
Selim’s energies during his short reign focused in the east, Ottoman expan-
sion in Europe stalled.
That period of containment on the western frontier, however, would end
with the reign of Süleyman I, who turned his attention to consolidating power
over a more expansive European empire. Charles V was elected Holy Roman
Emperor in 1521, and in that same year Süleyman launched a new campaign
against Belgrade. It fell to the armies of the new sultan, and the following
year Rhodes, too, succumbed, displacing the Knights Hospitallers, who had
plagued Ottoman shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. The sultan then
pressed his advantage, allying with the French (at their request) and confronting
14 Halil İnalcık, ‘Periods in Ottoman History’, in Güzel, Oğuz and Karatay, The Turks, III, pp.
15–21 at p. 15.
51
the Habsburgs on their south-eastern frontier. The battle of Mohács in 1526

opened Hungary to the Ottomans, placing them in direct confrontation with
the Habsburg kingdom, with Buda serving as the focal point of the struggle.
By 1541, Süleyman had annexed Buda and could claim sovereignty over most
of Croatia and Hungary, leaving the narrow crescent of “Royal Hungary” as
a bufer between Ottoman lands and the Habsburg stronghold of Vienna, a
European outpost which remained beyond the Ottoman grasp despite deter-
mined sieges in 1529 and, later, in 1683. For roughly four decades, Süleyman
faced of against Charles V’s brother, Ferdinand I (r. 1526–64, archduke of
Austria, king of Hungary, and later emperor), along the shifting border of
Hungary, which was marked by a landscape of defensive fortresses.15 There
were intermittent armistices, but notable among them was that of August
1547, which included France and the Habsburg realm and obligated Ferdinand
to pay the Ottomans an annual tribute of the princely sum of 30,000 ducats.
In the second half of the century, the Ottomans expanded their European
territories marginally while waging an of-again, on-again struggle against
the Cossacks on the Black Sea salient and launching campaigns against the
Habsburgs in 1551–2 and 1566–7. Responding to renewed Habsburg aggres-
sion, in 1552 Süleyman incorporated Temesvar, part of Transylvania, into the
territories governed directly by the Ottoman Porte. On the Black Sea side of
the Balkans, the Ottomans held sway over Wallachia and Moldavia, which
served as dependent though not always quiescent principalities. The Crimean
hanate remained a vassal state. Other coastal territories of the western end
of the Black Sea were part of the great province of Rumeli, much of which
was already under Ottoman control by the turn of the sixteenth century.16
During Süleyman’s long reign, the limits of Ottoman sea-based expansion
were also explored and deined (see Fleet, Chapter 2, this volume). Ottoman
bases in the Aegean and Adriatic multiplied, plans to acquire similar bases
in the Indian Ocean seem to have been relinquished, and Süleyman’s leets
played an episodic but opportunistic role in the struggle for ports and trade in
the western Mediterranean. Perhaps emblematic of this deinition of limits is
the fact that while Süleyman’s reign began with the conquest of Rhodes, an
Ottoman attempt to expel the Hospitallers from Malta failed in 1565, near the
end of the Lawgiver’s reign.
15 Géza Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohács 1526 – Buda 1541, trans. Márió
Fenyö (Boulder, Colo., 1989), p. 83.
16 Donald Pitcher, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire (Leiden, 1972), with the rel-
evant maps for this era shown in plates 16–24 and 26–29; Paul Magocsi, Historical Atlas of
Central Europe, rev. ed. (Seattle, 2002), esp. plates 9, 10, 14 and 19.
52
Selim II, Murad III and Mehmed III (1595–1603): 1566–1603

Süleyman’s death in 1566 while on campaign in Hungary brought his less able
son Selim II to the Ottoman throne. Although the 1566 campaign was suc-
cessful in its conquest of Szigetvár, the loss of the long-reigning Süleyman
signalled possibilities (both naval and military) for the Christian princes of
Europe. The Ottomans had to keep a wary eye on the Russian tsar Ivan IV
(r. 1547–84), who had an expansionist agenda of his own in Europe. During
the reign of Süleyman, the tsar had advanced his armies into the northern
Caucasus and had meddled in the afairs of Moldavia (an Ottoman vassal
state). Under Selim II, in order to address the Russian threat on their north-
eastern frontier, the Ottomans launched a plan to construct a Don–Volga
canal that would enable a joint naval and military attack on the Russians; but
that endeavour failed in 1569.17 While the tsar negotiated with the Safavids
in Iran to promote an alliance against the Porte, the Ottomans engaged in
extensive diplomacy with Poland and Lithuania (joined in a commonwealth
in 1569) in order to contain Russian expansion. In 1572, when the tsar stood
for election to the Polish throne, the Ottomans thwarted his designs, ulti-
mately succeeding in having their Transylvanian vassal, Stephen Bathori, ele-
vated to the Polish kingship (r. 1575–86).18 Such negotiations and machinations
illustrate the complex matrix of Euro-Asian alliances which in the sixteenth
century linked powers from western Europe to Central Asia in a set of rela-
tionships that were determined, at least in part, by the expansive agenda of
the Ottoman state.
A direct threat to Selim’s rule also emerged on the Ottomans’ western
frontier. A “Holy League” allying Venice to Don Juan of Austria and other
European contenders was formed and accomplished its signal naval victory
over the Ottoman leet at Lepanto (of western Greece) in 1571. This vic-
tory was celebrated across Christian Europe as a sign of divine favour in the
context of the many portents of doom and destruction that characterised
the Reformation era. Indeed, the successes of the Ottomans and their rapid
expansion into European territory were viewed as a sign of divine displea-
sure and the need for Christians and their rulers to repent and prepare for the
17 Halil İnalcık, ‘The Origin of the Ottoman–Russian Rivalry and the Don–Volga Canal
(1569)’, Ankara Üniversitesi Yıllığ ı (1947), 47–110. See also Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of the
Ukraine-Rus, vol. 7: The Cossack Age to 1625, trans. Bohdan Strumiński (Edmonton, 1999), pp.
88–138, and p. 58 on the origins of Cossackdom.
18 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated
Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden, 2000), pp. 269–78.
53
Last Days.19 But, despite the stunning victory at Lepanto, the Holy League
was ephemeral, and in the same year that their leet was decimated and their
banners dragged through the sea, the Ottomans inished the conquest of the
Venetian stronghold of Cyprus, thus consolidating their control over the ter-
ritories of the eastern Mediterranean.
When Murad III came to the throne in 1574, the Ottomans were at peace
with both Venice and the Habsburgs. The sultan was thus free to embark, in
1578, on a series of Persian campaigns in a war which would last until 1590.
Once that conl ict ended and a truce was secured on their eastern frontier,
the Ottomans reopened hostilities with the Habsburgs. In the broad Balkan
frontier zone, negotiation, accommodation and intimidation of local war-
lords substituted for warfare in the periods of formal peace. But raiding
activities continued on both sides, and in 1591 Ottoman forces took ofensive
action in Bosnia. During the subsequent long war of 1593–1606, the Ottomans
lost control of the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania,
which were returned to the Ottoman fold only through a combination of
force, brokered negotiation and circumstance.20 This long war spanned the
reigns of Murad III and Mehmed III and sputtered into the reign of Ahmed I
(r. 1603–17). Mehmed III won a dramatic victory at Mesző-Keresztes (just west
of the Tisza River, near the western border of Transylvania in October 1596,
the last major battle directed by the sultan himself at a time when Ottoman
monarchs were preparing to withdraw into the palace. Although the sul-
tan marched back to Istanbul in triumph and his victory was celebrated in
Ottoman chronicles, the results of the long war were inconclusive. The bur-
dens of the war and an attack by the Safavid shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629) in 1603
made the Ottomans anxious to secure peace with the Habsburgs. That peace,
of Zsitvatorok, in November 1606, which included a lump sum payment to
the Ottomans of 200,000 lorins, brought to an end half a century of annual
“tribute” payments which the Habsburg ruler had undertaken as part of the
1547 armistice with Sultan Süleyman.21
19 Kenneth Setton, Western Hostility to Islam and Prophecies of Turkish Doom (Philadelphia,
1992); Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge,
Mass., 2008).
20 Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: The Ottoman Military Campaigns in Hungary,
1593–1606 (Vienna, 1988), pp. 7–20.
21 Ferenc Szakály, ‘The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606’, in A
History of Hungary, ed. Peter Sugar, Péter Hanák and Tibor Frank (Bloomington, Ind., 1994),
pp. 86, 99; and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1, pp. 186–8.
54
Periodisation
Ottomanist historians have dealt with the periodisation of the sixteenth cen-
tury in a variety of ways.22 Halil İnalcık argues that the conquests of Belgrade
in 1521 and Rhodes in 1522 signalled a “new stage in East-West relations” and
a new attitude towards cihad (“holy” war) as the Ottoman state acted “as
the protector of the Moslem world”.23 But he emphasises that the role of
protector also extended to the conquered territories in Europe.24 There the
Ottomans administered a system in which “land tenure, the tax system and
the military organization formed an integrated whole”.25 For İnalcık, this inte-
grated system was broken at the end of the sixteenth century by a combina-
tion of factors, including the low of cheap silver from the New World after
1580, the halting of the tide of conquest which disrupted the timar system of
land tenure, and the celali rebellions, which peaked in the years 1595–1610, all
contributing to a period of crisis.26 That experience of crisis, with its inter-
nal disorders and desertions, was shared by the Habsburg administration,
which ruled from a distance and never managed irmly to secure the alle-
giance of the Hungarian estates and the notables of Transylvania.27 There
seems to be general historiographic agreement regarding the coincidence of
this apparently era-ending crisis and the 1593–1606 Ottoman–Habsburg war.28
Interpretations of this periodisation, however, vary according to the factors
emphasised. Suraiya Faroqhi, for example, examines the concept of “crisis”
but ofers a periodisation oriented towards Ottoman relationships with the
major trading partners of the empire.29
22 Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and
Colin Imber (London, 1973; reprint, 2001); Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The
Structure of Power (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 66. Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the
Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 (New York, 2005), p. 114, points to the reign of Selim I as pivotal in
the establishment and securing of empire; see also pp. 195–6.
23 İnalcık, ‘Periods in Ottoman History’, p. 17.
24 See also Viorel Panaite, ‘The Re‛ayas of the Tributary-Protected Principalities: The Sixteenth
through Eighteenth Centuries’, in Karpat and Zens, Ottoman Borderlands, p. 84, on processes
of incorporation for the tributary principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania.
25 İnalcık, ‘Periods in Ottoman History’, pp. 19–21; also İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 15–31.
26 Ibid., pp. 20–1.
27 Szakály, ‘The Early Ottoman Period’, pp. 97–8.
28 Finkel, The Administration of Warfare; also Jósef Kelenik, ‘The Military Revolution in Hungary’,
in Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Conines in the Era of
Ottoman Conquest, ed. Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (Leiden, 2000), pp. 117–59 at p. 146.
29 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Understandings of History: Political and Economic Crisis in the Beginning
of the New Age’, in Güzel, Oğuz and Karatay, The Turks, III, pp. 22–30, esp. pp. 24, 26–7.
Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Crisis and Change, 1590–1699’, in İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and
55
It is clear that the long Ottoman–Habsburg war had signiicant impacts

on the military-administrative castes on both sides, their armies, the fron-
tier populations who directly bore the brunt of the conl ict and the imperial
governments faced with maintaining order at home while mobilising money
and supplies to support the war. Yet, if one focuses on trans-Adriatic trade, for
example, or on Ottoman investment in European commercial sectors, the last
quarter of the sixteenth century represents the augmentation of opportunity
rather than a set of territorial stopping points to expansion. The conquest of
towns and the levying of taxes on agriculture are part of the imperial project,
the spoils over which empires struggle. Trade, however, is a force that tran-
scends empires and their wars. Thus, one might imagine Ottoman expansion
in Europe as a measure of the Ottoman polity’s success in exploiting networks
of trade that functioned both within and beyond the reach of imperial centres.
In fact, the sixteenth century is critical for the Ottoman polity’s simultaneous
investment in a wider set of European trans-national relationships and in the
exploitation of a broader and more highly developed network of commercial
operations.30 Ottoman capitulations with England in 1580 signalled a new set
of trading relationships just at a time when the economies of the Balkans
were being transformed.31 Ottoman expansion is also measured by the pen-
etration of Ottoman goods into the Graeco-Balkan peninsula and the lands
beyond and the extent to which the Ottomans became an essential part of the
Afro-Eurasian commercial system, both inheriting the mechanisms of trade
utilised by their predecessors, like the Byzantines, the Serbs, and the Genoese,
and devising and implementing their own contributions (for example, in the
silk trade).32 Thus the Ottomans incorporated commercial personnel, space
and goods into their empire and sent their own goods and personnel into the
conquered European territories, where Ottoman commodities, luxury items
and literary and artistic conventions and motifs were integrated into broader
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 467, points out that the long war led to “economic
contraction”. Leslie Peirce, ‘Changing Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire: The Early
Centuries’, Mediterranean Historical Review 19, 1 ( June 2004), 6–28, emphasises the reorgani-
sation “of the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottomans between 1453 and 1555” (p. 23).
30 Mihnea Berindei, ‘L’Empire ottoman et la ‘route moldave’ avant la conquête de Chilia et de
Cetatea-Albă (1484)’, Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (Essays Presented to Halil İnalcık) (1986),
47–72.
31 See Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–
1720 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 1–47; Daniel Gofman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650
(Seattle, 1990); Gábor Ágoston, ‘The Costs of the Ottoman Fortress-System in Hungary in
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Dávid and Fodor, Ottomans, Hungarians, and
Habsburgs in Central Europe, pp. 195–228, esp. pp. 221–2.
32 Nurhan Atasoy, Walter Denny, Louise Mackie and Hülya Tezcan, İpek, the Crescent and the
Rose: Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets (London, 2001).
56
networks and habits of consumption. The Ottoman linking of European and

Asian commercial centres provided an infrastructure within which commer-
cial opportunities could lourish.
The zones, stages and contexts of Ottoman expansion

The historiographic approach to Ottoman space in Europe tends to follow
three general conventions. Beyond the generic categories of Christendom and
Islam, territories are characterised either by their ethno-linguistic identities
(Greek, Hungarian, Albanian), their imperial ailiations (Venetian, Habsburg,
Ottoman), or their degree of incorporation into the Ottoman state (sancaks,
principalities, contested borderlands). These are all useful and important cat-
egories, particularly when they do not anticipate the national identities of a
later era, and yet they do not fully comprise the geographic, logistic and repre-
sentational realities of the sixteenth century. Ottoman Europe can be viewed
as consisting of a set of land and sea salients approached on the basis of their
degree of accessibility. These, in turn, were marked by an enduring set of
routes which linked urban commercial nodes (much like those described by
Janet Abu-Lughod in her version of the thirteenth-century world system) and
defensive fortresses.33 The land part of this region consisted of a broad pen-
insula transected by a formidable riverine system which drew the sea salients
into the land, impeded the march of armies, facilitated communication
and loomed large in the geographic and historic imagination of sixteenth-
century peoples. This land was imagined as attached indelibly to the history
of Christendom and to the imperial ambitions of prospective Eurasian lords.
It was a central core of the commercial (and cultural) pathways connecting
the Mediterranean to the systems of north–south and east–west trade. To
understand Ottoman expansion in Europe, one must thus consider this land
and sea space not only in terms of its ethno-political zones but in terms of its
geographic constraints, its role in early modern conceptualisations of space
and its evolutionary patterns of imperial and extra-imperial identities.
Geographic conigurations and zones of operation

Ottoman ambitions and presence in Europe tend to be divided politi-
cally and geographically into discrete but overlapping territories: a zone of
islands and port bases spanning the Aegean and Adriatic coasts; the southern
33 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350 (New York,
1989).
57
Graeco-Balkan peninsula (Rumeli and Greece); the north-western Balkan

peninsula (Hungary, Bosnia, Croatia); the principalities of the north-east
(Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia); and a strip of Black Sea coast (Silistre)
that was incorporated into the Ottoman system early on. Rule in these zones
took several major forms: direct incorporation into the Ottoman sancak sys-
tem; rule by acknowledged princes who had considerable leeway in running
the internal afairs of their principalities as long as they submitted militarily
and conceded to demands for money and goods; autonomous tributaries
such as Ragusa (Dubrovnik), a city-state on the Adriatic; a mixed combination
of governance by tribute-paying warlords and Ottoman garrison command-
ers; and lawlessness in the frontier zones (and in many territories not directly
accessible to local or imperial security forces). Banditry (including raiding by
regular military forces and piracy) must be considered one element of gov-
ernance, as it conditioned the relations between imperial powers and those
between local and regional lords and their subjects.
Ottoman expansion can also be divided into inland and coastal forms. Thus
the Ottomans achieved dominance over an island-coast zone in which territo-
ries were not contiguous and access might be interrupted or periodic. A map
of the Adriatic region in 1570, for example, shows a series of Venetian bases
(islands and city-state ports) embedded in a large body of Balkan territory that
had already been incorporated directly into Ottoman sancaks.34 Zara, Sebenico,
Cattaro, the Ionian islands and, to the south and east of the Morea, Candia
(Crete) suggest the distinctive nature of islands and coastal spaces, particularly
those separated from inland provinces by mountainous terrain. Such places
were contested space; they required consistent seaborne support and defence.
They might change hands as naval forces approached or withdrew. They reveal
the limits that geography and sea power place on expansion. They also reveal
the limitations of the notion of Europe as a coherent continental space. This
latter point is clearly illustrated by the case of Cyprus, which despite its loca-
tion and incorporation into the Ottoman Empire is often counted as the east-
ernmost outpost of “Europe”. The Black Sea presents a somewhat diferent
type of sea space. Along its coasts, Ottoman expansion could not be complete
because the empire was never able to control the highly mobile Cossacks and
other peoples whose livelihood was rooted in the river tributaries and the occu-
pations of coastal raiding. And because regular “supervision” of the coasts was
not possible, pirates (and colluding notables) tended to create autonomous
zones of authority that were resistant to Ottoman (or any imperial) control.
34 Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, map 14.
58
Such a zone was created by the Uskoks in the upper Adriatic.35 A diferent type
of autonomous zone was created by established city-state ports like Ragusa,
which made use of their coastal positions, thick walls, commercial successes
and trans-cultural expertise to ward of incorporation (though not tributary
status) by the big states in this trans-imperial zone.36
Another delimiter of expansion, and perhaps the most signiicant measur-
able boundary between the Ottomans and their primary imperial rivals in
Europe, is the Danube River and its tributaries. The Danube served both to
facilitate and to impede (but more often the latter) the movement of armies
of expansion. Military conl icts were decided on the banks and in the waters
of these rivers, where animals and equipment became mired and stranded,
leeing armies were trapped and slaughtered by their pursuers, and inven-
tive commanders became expert in the arts of bridge building and the com-
mandeering of boats. Managing the Danubian space was a primary element
of conquest and control. To the east, the Danube separated the incorpo-
rated sancaks of Rumeli from the tributary principalities of Wallachia and
Moldavia. To the north and west, the Danube led to Buda, the Ottomans’
frontier command post, and to Vienna, the enemy capital that their armies
approached but could not seize. The Danube was thus a primary yardstick
by which Ottoman expansion and the movement of peoples and goods were
measured out. Narrating space meant narrating which side of the Danube one
was on. This mighty river also served as a unique type of intermediate river-
ine space that functioned diferently from either coastal or inland territories.
It required boats for navigation, provisioning and the transport of troops. In
the Ottoman system, it had its own “admiral”, the “Tuna kapudanı”, who was
in charge of the river’s lexible leet of transports, ferries and armed vessels
(which were built, restored, commandeered and stafed as need required).37
Empires and frontiers

Beyond the physical intersections and divisions of land and sea, Ottoman expan-
sion functioned in a trans-imperial zone, one in which three major contenders
35 See Victor Ostapchuk, ‘The Human Landscape of the Ottoman Black Sea in the Face of
the Cossack Naval Raids’, in The Ottomans and the Sea, ed. Kate Fleet, Oriente Moderno 20, 1
(2001), 23–95; Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War
in the Sixteenth Century Adriatic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).
36 İnalcık, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 256–70; Nicolaas Biegman,
The Turco-Ragusan Relationship According to the Firmāns of Murād III (1575–1595) Extant in the
State Archives of Dubrovnik (The Hague, 1967).
37 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Some Views of Provisioning in the Hungarian Campaigns of Süleyman
the Magniicent’, in Osmanistische Studien zur Wirschafts und Sozialgeschichte in memoriam
Vančo Boš kov, ed. H. G. Majer (Wiesbaden, 1986), pp. 177–85 at p. 182.
59
strove for territory, inluence and control of commerce. As the Ottomans

extended their reach into Europe, they encountered the claims, armies and
sovereign institutions of the Habsburg and Venetian empires in a tripartite
zone sometimes called the Triplex Coninium (Triple Border) region.38 Those
empires, in turn, were embedded in a complex system of rivalries which
linked and divided the powerful states of Europe and Asia. One might argue
that Venice was not a large territorial empire armed with military capabili-
ties equivalent to those of the Ottomans and Habsburgs. Yet Venice was a
prominent naval and commercial power in the sixteenth century, one with far-
lung bases and clients in the eastern Mediterranean, an old hegemon in the
region, whose authority and power extended well beyond that of an autono-
mous city-state. 39 Venice served as a primary mediator between the Ottoman
Porte and the royal powers of Europe, and it functioned as a European model
for interaction, diplomacy and trade with the sovereign powerhouse that was
the House of Osman. The designation Triplex Coninium thus captures the
nature of both the European zone into which the Ottomans expanded and
the diverse and complex matrix of state relations which afected that expan-
sion.40 Beyond the frontier, the empire became a determining factor in the
rivalries of France, England and the Habsburgs to the west and of Russia,
Poland and Lithuania to the north; it was one among the kingdoms in Europe
competing for dominance, territory, religious authority and control of the
low of goods.
Fortresses
Within this trans-imperial zone, one must focus on fortresses as points of con-
quest and administration. The Ottoman expansion into Europe moved along
speciic routes linking those fortress points, both in the interior of the Balkan
peninsula and along the coasts. Such urban-military-commercial nodes faced
of against each other, changed hands periodically and acted as centres for
the establishment of new elites and the dif usion of information and culture.
There, garrison commanders established themselves as local notables and
38 This designation applies to a project of Professors Drago Roksandić and Karl Kaser in
cooperation with the Institute for Croatian History at the University of Zagreb, Abteilung
f ür Südost-Europäische Geschichte, University of Graz, and the Institute for Southeastern
Europe at Central European University, Budapest.
39 Palmira Brummett, ‘The Ottoman Empire, Venice, and the Question of Enduring Rivalries’,
in The Evolution of Great Power Rivalries, ed. William Thompson (Columbia, S.C., 1999), pp.
225–53.
40 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Kanunî Sultan Süleyman’ın Macaristan ve Avrupa Siyasetinin Sebep
ve Âmilleri, Geçirdiği Saf halar’, in Kanunî Armağanı (Ankara, 1970), pp. 5–39.
60
garrison troops were integrated into the surrounding communities.41 If one

visualises Ottoman expansion in terms of such fortress points, the notion of
imperial borders is problematised. Fortresses might be in the hands of local
warlords who submitted to the Ottomans or Habsburgs when it was expedi-
ent to do so but who otherwise acted autonomously. The situation of indi-
vidual frontier fortresses also evolved over the course of the century.42 For
example, “in the 1570s, the revenue of the province of Buda covered 89 per
cent of the payments made to the salaried troops in the Ottoman fortresses as
opposed to 28 per cent in 1558–9 and 38 per cent in 1559–60”.43 Such variations
could afect deeply both the nature of imperial relationships and the ways in
which an individual fortress functioned in the Triplex Coninium. The critical
point, however, is that fortresses, ranging in size from major cities to much
less complex structures, were the stopping and staging points for Ottoman
expansion. They linked the pathways of military mobilisation and communi-
cation. They sheltered subjects, migrants and occupation forces. They were
the focal points of imperial strategy formation. And, in the texts and images
of the early modern era, they served as icons of possessed space.44
Intermediaries
While the physical structures of routes and fortresses delineated the fron-
tier, so too did the activities of intermediaries and the transmission of infor-
mation. The trans-national zone of expansion was one that was crafted and
occupied by an intriguing set of intermediaries whose operational ields,
identities and allegiances were also trans-national. These intermediaries were
of two major types: soldiers of fortune, merchants and entrepreneurs who
moved from one region of opportunity to another, serving multiple masters
in order to advance their own wealth and station, and those who were caught
41 See Szakály, ‘The Early Ottoman Period’, pp. 83–92; Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare,
1500–1700 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1999); Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power
and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Mark Stein, Guarding the
Frontier: Ottoman Border Forts and Garrisons in Europe (London, 2007).
42 Géza Pálfy, ‘The Origins and Development of the Border Defence System against the
Ottoman Empire in Hungary (Up to the Early Eighteenth Century)’, in Dávid and Fodor,
Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe, pp. 54–6; Géza Dávid, ‘An Ottoman
Military Career on the Hungarian Borders: Kasım Voyvoda, Bey, and Pasha’, in Dávid and
Fodor, Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe, pp. 265–97; Metin Kunt, The
Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550–1650 (New York,
1983), pp. 88–93, 104–6.
43 Ágoston, ‘The Costs of the Ottoman Fortress-System’, pp. 216–17.
44 Palmira Brummett, ‘The Fortress: Deining and Mapping the Ottoman Frontier in the 16th–
17th Centuries’, in Frontiers of the Ottoman World: Proceedings of the British Academy, ed.
Andrew Peacock (Oxford, 2009), pp. 30–55.
61
up in the processes of conquest and accepted a new master under whose

patronage they could exercise their linguistic, military, administrative or com-
mercial abilities. Military, transport and communication technologies lowed
in multiple directions across the porous boundaries among empires, just as
did the techniques and tropes of literature, art and material culture.45 As the
Ottomans expanded their rule into Europe, they capitalised upon the exper-
tise of artisans, mercenaries, technicians, clergymen, physicians, merchants,
diplomats and dragomen, who in turn beneited from Ottoman wealth, pres-
tige and power. The scope of their operations cannot be examined here, but,
particularly given the early modern and contemporary rhetorics of unbend-
ing religious devotion and divide, it is crucial to keep in mind the complex sys-
tem of individuals who moved between state capitals, conversed in multiple
tongues and participated in multicultural, cross-communal and inter-ethnic
networks of exchange. Despite their conl icts, sovereign states that aspired to
rule in the region shared these networks of exchange and the personnel that
served them. Bishop Antal Verancsics, the Habsburg envoy and a Dalmatian,
for example, could communicate directly in Slavonic with the grand vezir
Sokollu Mehmed Paşa when they were negotiating the Ottoman–Habsburg
peace treaty of 1567.46 Such communications were not unusual, but when a
common language could not be found, translation was a standard of the day –
an important mode of interaction and existence in Ottoman Europe, where
Venetians and Ragusans, in particular, served as expert translators of ways
and things Ottoman, and where multi-lingualism, at least in commercial cen-
tres, had become a way of life.47 The translated word, text and image served
to bridge and violate the physical, imperial, religious and ethno-linguistic bar-
riers of the trans-imperial zone.
The nature of expansion

The efects of Ottoman expansion on the populations and prosperity of
European territories are the subject of considerable historiographic debate.
What can be clearly stated is that the nature and form of Ottoman expansion
45 Rhoads Murphey, ‘The Ottoman Attitude Towards the Adoption of Western Technology:
The Role of the Efrenci Technicians in Civil and Military Applications’, in Contributions à
l’histoire économique et sociale de l’Empire ottoman, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and
Paul Dumont (Louvain, 1983), pp. 217–63.
46 Gustav Bayerle, Ottoman Diplomacy in Hungary: Letters from the Pashas of Buda, 1590–1593
(Bloomington, Ind., 1972), p. 3.
47 Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto,
2005), pp. 133–255.
62
were manifested diferently from region to region and within regions. The
factors which afected that diferential nature included the longevity and sta-
bility of occupation; status as incorporated, tributary or frontier territory;
proximity to the frontier; the extent of l ight, migration, settlement and con-
version of populations; the success of local (and imported) leaders in securing
relative autonomy and privileges; and variations in customary and Ottoman-
imposed administrative practice. Warfare and the machinations of surround-
ing states provided a basic frame within which these factors operated.48
Conquest and administration

Halil İnalcık has delineated the basic stages of Ottoman conquest (physical
conquest, institutional penetration, reorganisation, resistance, assimilation
and legitimation) and the attempts to standardise imperial rule, particularly
under Sultan Süleyman.49 As the conquered territories were surveyed (for
example, Rumeli in 1528 and Hungary in 1545–6), sancak beys (sub-province
governors) and kadıs (judges) assigned, and sources of revenue recorded, the
Ottoman government attempted to identify, visualise and gain control over
lands and their occupants. It was an onerous process. Ottoman policy was
thus conscious of circumstance and conditions when making the decision
to incorporate territories.50 In the broad frontier zone, Ottoman adminis-
trative practice was lexible and opportunistic, responding to economic and
military exigency as well as to the evolving demands and personalities of its
imperial rivals and the local leaders on the ground to whom the Ottomans
ceded power. Much of the conquered European territory was already accus-
tomed to evolving rule, with a combination of local strongmen, assemblies
of notables, and larger princes ruling from a distance and launching periodic
invasions.51 The Ottomans did not break that mode of existence; rather they
adapted it to their own system, manipulating local rule through backing or
withdrawing support from notables and princes. It can be argued, at least
48 See Dávid, ‘Administration in Ottoman Europe’, pp. 83–9.
49 Halil İnalcık, ‘Ottoman Methods of Conquest’, Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 104–29; Halil İnalcık,
‘The Turks and the Balkans’, Turkish Review of Balkan Studies 1 (1993), 9–41; Halil İnalcık,
‘State, Sovereignty, and Law during the Reign of Süleymân’, in Süleymân the Second and His
Time, ed. Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul, 1993), pp. 59–92 at pp. 78, 82–6.
50 Gilles Veinstein, ‘La politique hongroise du Sultan Süleymân et d’Ibrâhîm Pacha, 1534’, in
CIÉPO Osmanlı Öncesi ve Osmanlı Ara ştırmalar ı Uluslararası Komitesi, VII. Sempozyumu
Bildirileri, Peç: 7–11 Eylül, 1986, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, İlber Ortaylı and Emeri
van Donzel (Ankara, 1994), pp. 335–80 at pp. 335, 354–5.
51 See Nora Berend, ‘Hungary, “the Gate of Christendom”’, in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts
and Practices, ed. David Abulaia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 195–215, along with
her introduction in the same volume; Gábor Ágoston, ‘A Flexible Empire: Authority and Its
Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers’, in Karpat and Zens, Ottoman Borderlands, pp. 15–29.
63
for the sixteenth century, that the Ottomans were more adept than their
Habsburg rivals at enticing, threatening and mollifying the warlords. There
is no irony in the fact that Stephen Bocskai, the Calvinist magnate who was
elected prince of Transylvania and Hungary in 1605, joined the Ottomans in
their war against the Habsburg monarchy to advance his own political and
religious agendas and served as a mediator between the two imperial adver-
saries when the peace of 1606 was negotiated.52 In the trans-imperial zone,
the threat of an Ottoman alliance secured important leverage for regional
warlords, who could rescind those ainities once the situation altered. 53
Moving people
Both sixteenth-century witnesses and modern historians difer signiicantly
on the extent to which certain areas of Europe were de-populated and devas-
tated by the Ottoman conquests. Certainly some of the reports by contempo-
rary Christian observers are motivated by the desire to show the destructive
nature of the Ottoman regime, but Ottoman documents, too, conirm some
areas of de-population.54 In Ottoman Hungary, the cadre of ruling elites led
the occupied territories, along with many of the priests.55 Economic and social
structures were radically altered by the l ight of the nobility and wealthier
citizens, shifts in the nature of agricultural production and the ascent of the
cattle merchants of the prairie towns to elite status under Ottoman rule.56
That outcome distinguishes Hungary from many of the Graeco-Balkan ter-
ritories, where local power brokers preserved their positions under Ottoman
rule, populations remained stable or even increased, and gradual or precip-
itous conversion bolstered the Muslim population of garrison troops and
immigrants. Ottoman expansion also entailed the movement of signiicant
numbers of people in the form of prisoners taken in battle.57 Such prison-
ers might become slaves, freemen or hostages in territories not their own.
Captives constituted part of the booty permitted to soldiers after battle, a
52 Szakály, ‘The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606’, pp. 98–9.
53 See Géza Dávid, ‘The Mühimme Defteri as a Source for Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry in the
Sixteenth Century’, Archivum Ottomanicum 20 (2002), 167–209, esp. pp. 194–5; M. Tayyib
Gökbilgin, ‘Yeni Belgelerin Işığı Altında Kanunî Sultan Süleyman Devrinde Osmanlı-Venedik
Münasebetleri’, in Kanunî Armağanı, pp. 172–86, esp. 175–7.
54 İnalcık, ‘State, Sovereignty, and Law during the Reign of Süleymân’, p. 86; Barbara Flemming,
‘Public Opinion under Sultan Süleymân’, in İnalcık and Kafadar, Süleymân the Second and His
Time, pp. 49–58, esp. p. 57.
55 Dávid, ‘Administration in Ottoman Europe’, pp. 89–90; also pp. 76, 87–8.
56 Szakály, ‘The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606’, pp. 88, 92–4.
57 Kritoboulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Westport, Conn.,
1970), pp. 218–22.
64
potentially rich source of money, although, as Barbara Flemming has pointed

out, the price of slaves could fall dramatically after major military operations
which looded the market.58 This forced “migration” was complemented by
semi-voluntary and voluntary forms of migration, those in which migrants
responded grudgingly or opportunistically to changes in ground-level polit-
ical, commercial and social realities efected by the Ottoman conquests.
Expansion, in terms of its impacts, was thus a relative term. And, as new
scholarship on speciic locales and situations reveals variations in the causes
(forced or voluntary migration, economic hardship, political pressure, conver-
sion) and timing of the transformation of populations under Ottoman rule,
the diferential efects of expansion are becoming increasingly apparent.59
Islamisation
This region of intensive rivalries included a component of religious struggle
that transcends the notion of confrontation between Christianity and Islam.
There is no conclusive answer to the question of the scope of religious moti-
vation for Ottoman expansion in Europe. The terms “cihad ” or “holy war”
often mask a complex set of objectives and rationales for conquest or con-
version.60 Yet the sixteenth century does seem to have been an era marked
by an intensive confrontation of apocalyptic religious ideologies and their
accompanying rhetorics and structural changes.61 While the Reformation is
not a subject that will be treated here, it is important to keep in mind that
the Islamisation of Ottoman Europe in the sixteenth century took place
in the context of that ferocious ideological struggle.62 The Ottomans were
aware of both the political and rhetorical opportunities contingent upon the
Reformation, a confrontation which afected the ordering of alliances, the
58 Flemming, ‘Public Opinion under Sultan Süleymân’, p. 55.

59 For example, Nenad Moačanin, Town and Country on the Middle Danube, 1526–1690 (Leiden,
2006).
60 Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995),
pp. 55–8, 79–81, 109–20.
61 See Tijana Krstic, ‘Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman
Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization’,
Comparative Studies on Society and History 51 (2009), 35–63; Fleischer, ‘Shadows of Shadows:
Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul’; Pál Fodor, ‘The View of the Turk in Hungary: The
Apocalyptic Tradition and the Legend of the Red Apple in Ottoman-Hungarian Context’,
in Les Traditions Apocalyptiques au Tournant de la Chute de Constantinople, Actes de la Table
Ronde d’Istanbul (13–14 avril 1996), ed. Benjamin Lellouch and Stéphane Yérasimos (Istanbul,
1999), pp. 99–131.
62 Ferenc Szakály, ‘The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606’, notes
that the population of Hungary was 90 per cent Protestant by 1600. See also Peter Sugar,
Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Seattle, 1977), pp. 153–5.
65
movement of peoples and the interpretation of their own role in European

history. In the context of the Reformation, the Ottoman conquests made the
possibilities for religious identity in Europe even more expansive.
The Christian identity of Ottoman Europe is something that was taken for
granted in early modern sermon literature and literary sources from the lands
ruled by Christian kings. Such sources often viewed the Ottoman occupation
as temporary, even after a hundred years. But with Ottoman expansion came
Islamisation, a process which challenged the presumption of Christian iden-
tity for this part of Europe.63 In the ifteenth century, members of the military
gentry and warrior castes in the conquered European territories were assimi-
lated into the Ottoman military administrative class (askeri).64 The Ottomans
also used forced deportation and settlement to consolidate their power over
newly conquered lands. Muslim immigrants (besides garrison troops) arrived
with the conquerors, making their presence felt in the cities and along the
routes where Ottoman administration was most direct and consistent. Recent
scholarship has illuminated the complex processes by which European pop-
ulations in the sixteenth century were made “Ottoman”, including the dif-
ferential, temporary, tangential and gendered nature of many conversions.65
Islamisation took place in part through the “dif usion of Islamic institutions”
such as pious endowments (vakıf ) and dervish convents.66 It included trans-
formations of political, national, local, occupational and ethno-linguistic as
well as religious identity. “Conversion”, literally the process of “turning”,
might relect conviction, secure inancial advantage, be an attendant efect of
marriage, indicate a change of masters or follow upon enslavement, captivity
and hostage taking (as was the case with the Ottoman devşirme, the state levy
63 See Ronald Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World,
1571–1640 (New York, 1993); Machiel Kiel, ‘Ottoman Sources for the Demographic History and
the Process of Islamisation of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bulgaria in the Fifteenth–Seventeenth
Centuries: Old Sources, New Methodology’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (2004),
93–119. Halil İnalcık, ‘State, Sovereignty, and Law During the Reign of Süleymân’, pp. 85–6,
using the work of Barkan, estimates the Muslim population of the Balkans between 1520 and
1535 as approximately one-ifth of the population. See also Sugar, Southeastern Europe under
Ottoman Rule, pp. 50–2; Dávid, ‘Administration in Ottoman Europe’, p. 76.
64 İnalcık, ‘Ottoman Methods of Conquest’, pp. 113–15.
65 Rossitsa Gradeva, ‘On Kadis of Soia, 16th–17th centuries’, in Rossitsa Gradeva, Rumeli under
the Ottomans, 15th–18th Centuries: Institutions and Communities (Istanbul, 2004), pp. 67–106 at
p. 103; Antonina Zhelyazkova, ‘Islamization in the Balkans as an Historiographical Problem:
The Southeast-European Perspective’, in Adanır and Faroqhi, The Ottomans and the Balkans,
pp. 223–65; Natalie Rothman, ‘Becoming Venetian: Conversion and Transformation in the
Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean’, Mediterranean Historical Review 21, 1 (2006), 39–75.
66 Rossitsa Gradeva, ‘Researching the Past and the Present of Muslim Culture in Bulgaria:
The “Popular” and “High” Layers’, in Gradeva, Rumeli under the Ottomans, pp. 133–62, esp.
pp. 142, 145.
66
of non-Muslim subject boys).67 Through such variant forms of conversion,

the long sixteenth century served as an era of singular transformation, at least
for some of the conquered territories of Europe.68
Despite the climate of religious transformation and Ottoman policies
of settlement, however, Islamisation was hardly the primary motive for
Ottoman expansion in Europe. Rhoads Murphey has noted, for example,
that the Ottoman annexation of Hungary in 1541 was “fully intelligible …
as a case-speciic adjustment to the new realities that had begun to typify the
changing political order of sixteenth-century Europe”. Murphey character-
ises Süleyman’s reign as a time of both “change and changing perspectives”
spurred on, after the Habsburg emperor Charles V’s 1535 expedition against
Tunis, by the increasingly pressing need to confront “the new European
Habsburg superpower”.69 That change was rooted in an appreciation for the
rhetorics of religious legitimation, but it was forged in the context of imperial
competition. The historian Alfonso Ulloa, in his Le Historie di Europa, pub-
lished in Venice in 1570, explained Süleyman’s 1566 invasion of Hungary in
terms similar to Murphey’s. Ulloa notes that the sultan had pondered the
conquest of Hungary for many years. More speciically, he cites the following
reasons for the invasion: Süleyman had lost at sea by failing to take Malta and
thus turned his attention to the land; the emperor, Maximilian II (r. 1564–76),
had both denied the sultan the tribute that was due him and occupied cer-
tain territories of Hungary and Transylvania; and inally, Süleyman was not
accustomed to abandoning those to whom he had commitments, like his trib-
utary John Sigismund Zapolya (r. 1540–71) in Transylvania. Thus, the situation
compelled military action; the sultan’s “dignity and grandeur” were at stake.70
Ulloa does not dispense with the language of religion in his history, but, for
67 Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans, pp. 37–56, 66–109, suggests enhanced rural
conversion beginning in the later sixteenth century. See also Klára Hegyi, ‘Freed Slaves as
Soldiers in the Ottoman Fortresses in Hungary’, in Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders
(Early Fifteenth–Early Eighteenth Centuries), ed. Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (Leiden, 2007), pp.
85–91.
68 Rossitsa Gradeva, ‘Orthodox Christians in the Kadi Courts: The Practice of the Soia Sheriat
Court, Seventeenth Century’, in Gradeva, Rumeli under the Ottomans, pp. 165–94 at pp.
170–1.
69 Rhoads Murphey, ‘Süleyman I and the Conquest of Hungary: Ottoman Manifest Destiny or
a Delayed Reaction to Charles V’s Universalist Vision?’, Journal of Early Modern History 5, 3
(2001), 197–221 at pp. 219–20. See also Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Süleyman the Magniicent and the
Representation of Power in a Context of Ottoman-Habsburg-Papal Rivalry’, Art Bulletin 71
(1989), 401–27.
70 Alfonso Ulloa, Le Historie di Europa (Venice, 1570), pp. 3–4; Pietro Bizari, Historia di Pietro
Bizari della guerra fatta in Ungheria dall’invittissimo Imperatore de Christiani, contra quello de
Turchi: Con la narratione di tutte cose che sono avvenute in Europa, dall anno 1564, inino all’anno
1568 (Lyon, 1569), p. 2.
67
him, honour, loyalty and the urge to conquest suiced to explain Ottoman
expansion under Süleyman.
Certainly the ideology of religious confrontation cannot be ignored as a
signiicant factor in the legitimation of empire. The language of dar ülislam
versus dar ülharb (the realm of Islam versus the realm of war) was consis-
tently present in Ottoman rhetorical constructions and celebrations of self, as
the chronicler Neşri (d. ca. 1520) illustrated for the conquests of Smederevo
(Semendire) and Lesbos (Midilli) in 1460 and 1462, respectively. Neşri wrote
that: “the churches were turned into mosques” and “the deserted houses of
the inidels were shared out among the Muslims”.71 But eastern Europe did
not it neatly into that polarised division of space. In fact, in the sixteenth cen-
tury one might even suggest that the Ottomans in Europe were an inherent
political and cultural element of “Christendom”. Ottoman expansion in the
Balkans was a measure of the economic imperative to secure more and better
resources (cities, customs posts, agricultural lands, mines, forests) and of the
imperial imperative (enshrined in Ottoman origin myths) to acquire for the
dynasty and its peoples a rich and determinedly Islamic empire embracing
many lands and peoples. The success of that imperial endeavour was sup-
ported by powerful religious institutions and by the actions of individuals
and groups whose piety, communal allegiance and sophistication of religious
belief are often diicult to measure. More readily apprehensible are the ways
in which the Ottomans articulated and deployed the rhetorics of Islamic glory
to intimidate their enemies, inspire their armies and mobilise support among
the empire’s Muslim subjects.
Rhetorics: The narratives and visuals of expansion

One critical element of Ottoman expansion is its narration and reception –
the ways in which conquering, settling and integrating (or not integrating)
were told and visualised. This is an area of study which still requires much
elaboration, but there exist a set of what one might call artefacts of expan-
sion that tell, read and translate the process for victors, vanquished and those
viewing at a distance. Such artefacts include campaign chronicles and other
celebrations of sovereignty, appeals for conversion, treaties, sermons, maps,
broadsheets, “news” pamphlets and other ephemera.72 Such sources relect
71 Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-Nümâ: Neşri Tarihi, ed. Faik Reşit Unat and Mehmed Köymen,
2 vols. (Ankara, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 737, 761.
72 See Palmira Brummett, ‘The Lepanto Paradigm Revisited: Knowing the Ottomans in the
Sixteenth Century’, in Cultural Encounters: Europe, the Ottomans, and the Mediterranean World,
ed. A. Contadini and C. Norton (Farnham, Surrey, forthcoming) on maps and ‘news’.
68
the perspectives of a set of interested audiences for whom narratives of the

Ottoman conquest, occupation and incorporation were shaped to it a series
of objectives or ideological positions. They convey the “memory” and the
“experience”, direct or indirect, of Ottoman expansion.
Memory, reputation and the projection of power

In a 1493 letter to Pope Alexander VI, the bishop of Nin (in Croatia, near
Zadar), Juraj Divnić, wrote of the nature of Ottoman expansion:
Thus the irst and chief reason for the Turks’ sorties into the region, in my opinion,
is this: an insatiable appetite for the slaughter of the faithful and the avid desire to
seize power over the entire world. And then, the abundance of estates and men
nurtured and fed by fertile Bosnia. Bosnia, I say, is the best of all regions and can be
measured against any in human memory, a rich country with an abundance of all
that human life requires.73
Divnić’s ordering of Ottoman motives is in line with European rhetorics of

the time, stressing cihad over ambitions for world power and the desire to con-
trol economically prosperous regions. The bishop employed fear, citing the
“appetite for slaughter”, to catch the imagination of his audience as Christian
Europe confronted the Ottoman advance.
Divnić also invoked “human memory”, an essential element of the
“telling” of Ottoman expansion in Europe which was linked to the depreda-
tions of earlier conquerors like the “Scythians”. For the historians and spir-
itual advisors of the Christian kings, the territories the Ottomans seized in
Europe were an indelible part of the Christendom of both recent and dis-
tant memory and of a “classical” history which they claimed as their own.
These were the lands where Alexander set his gaze towards Persia and where
the church took shape. European texts and images stamped the memories of
Christendom (and of Greece and Rome) onto their maps of eastern Europe,
insisting that the conquests of the Ottomans were temporary or disregarding
them entirely.74
For the Ottomans, the projection of power was also rooted in the claims
of history and memory. The conquest of Rumeli and its hinterlands was part
of a prophetic vision of Islamic conquest reaching for the “golden apples”
73 Quoted in Snježana Buzov, ‘Ottoman Perceptions of Bosnia as Relected in the Works of
Ottoman Authors Who Visited or Lived in Bosnia’, in Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril, ed.
Marcus Koller and Kemal Karpat (Madison, Wis., 2004), p. 85.
74 Palmira Brummett, ‘“Turks” and “Christians”: The Iconography of Possession in the
Depiction of the Ottoman-Venetian-Habsburg Frontiers, 1550–1689’, in The Religions of
the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadield
(Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 110–39 at pp. 118–24.
69
of Vienna and Rome. The Greek chronicler turned servant of the sultan,
Kritoboulos, began the dedication of his history of Mehmed the Conqueror
by invoking human memory and the “everlasting remembrance” that accrued
to kings through the writing of histories. He proposed to address the injustice
done to his Ottoman master’s name by the fact that:
…. the deeds of others, petty as they are in comparison to yours, should be better
known and more famed before men because done by Greeks and in Greek history,
while your accomplishments, vast as they are, and in no way inferior to those of
Alexander the Macedonian … should not be set forth in Greek to the Greeks, nor
passed on to posterity for the undying praise and glory of your deeds.75
Kritoboulos here refers to the ongoing Eurasian competition for place in

the memories of the people, the sagas of the poets and the chronicles of
the historians. He goes on to point out diferent kinds of expansion, accom-
plished through new territory taken in battle (Istanbul), through peace-
ful transfer (the islands of Imbros, Lemnos and Thasos, formerly subject
to the Byzantine emperor) or through the forced submission of rebellious
tributaries.76 In the latter case, conciliation might be accepted or retribution
demanded, depending on the recalcitrance of the tributary. While the forms
of conquest might difer, Kritoboulos’s ultimate message, unsurprisingly, is
that expansion is the prerogative of emperors; it aggrandizes their empires
and guarantees, or should guarantee, their place in the recorded histories of
the world.
Spheres of operation and imagination

One can thus view Ottoman expansion in terms of spheres of operation
and spheres of imagination. For Ottoman chroniclers, the spheres of oper-
ation are the realms of foreign kings (outside the empire), regional lords,
and local authorities. Expansion is counted fortress by fortress.77 And while
territory is often crafted in terms of generic religious blocks, such as the
land of the inidels (diyar- ı küfar), within that broad classiication there are
many designations, including the land of the Franks (diyar- ı Firenc) or the
Venetian land (diyar- ı Venedik).78 Chroniclers also emphasise the divisions
75 Kritoboulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, p. 3.

76 Ibid., pp. 71–80, 86, 98–104, 145–7 and 211–15 (Illyria). See also Heath Lowry, Fifteenth Century
Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos (Istanbul, 2002).
77 İbrahim Peçevi (ca. 1572–1650), Peçevi Tarihi, ed. and transcription Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, 2 vols.
(Ankara, 1981–82), for example vol. 1, pp. 178–91.
78 Kemalpaşazade (Ibn Kemâl), Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman, VIII Defter, ed. Ahmet Uğur, (Ankara,
1997), pp. 143, 214.
70
between land and sea, with the land as the default and the sea as a separate
category.79
The Ottomans, like other conquerors before them, participated in the
rhetorics of intimidation. They wished, as the chronicler Celalzade Mustafa
(ca. 1490–1567) put it, to inspire “fear and awe” (korku ve dehşet) among the
“kings of Europe and the Christian countries” (Avrupa kırallar ı ve hıristiyan
ülkeleri).80 Celalzade, who served the Ottoman regime for over half of the
sixteenth century, does not simply incorporate these tropes of dominance
into his history of Sultan Selim I but provides a glimpse into the Ottoman
conception of Europe and its categories of territorial space. When Selim con-
quered his archenemy, the Safavid Shah Isma‘il, the news of conquest had to
be delivered to all the relevant rulers. Letters were written:
… to the kadıs of the capital cities (hükumet merkezi), Constantinople, Edirne and
prosperous Bursa and to other governors (hakimleri) of the Muslims; to the sancaks
of Mora, Bosna, Semendire and Hersek, on the borders (serhad) of Islam; to the
attendant tributaries (maıyyet hizmetlileri) who pay the haraç, the Wallachian and
Moldavian beys; and among the mighty and fortunate sovereigns (sultanlardan), to
the fortunate han of the Tatar country; and among the Christian kings, to those of
the Polish, Czech, Russian and Hungarian countries (vilayetleri); and among the
island kingdoms of Europe, to the beys of Chios and Venice.81
This passage places those who wield power in Europe in a hierarchy deined
irst and foremost by their relationship to the Ottoman Porte, then by their
faith, their functioning as border territories and, inally, their island nature.
Celalzade neatly summarised the possibilities for articulating space and status.
Edirne, notably, is one of the “capital cities of Islam”; its location in Europe
does not diferentiate it from Bursa in Anatolia or the continent-spanning
Istanbul. The Tatar Han enjoys special status as a Muslim, separate from that
of other tributaries, while Hungary is just one among several Christian king-
doms, undistinguished by its role as pre-eminent rival in the west or by its
79 For example, ibid., pp. 205, 144–45; Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman, X Defter, ed.
Şefaettin Severcan (Ankara, 1996), p. 247.
80 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-name, ed. Ahmet Uğur and Mustafa Çuhadar (Ankara, 1990), p. 444.
See also Christine Woodhead, Ta‛ līkī-zāde’s şehnāme-i hümāyūn: A History of the Ottoman
Campaign into Hungary, 1593–94 (Berlin, 1983), pp. 39, 197–9.
81 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-name, p. 382. See also Jan Schmidt, ‘Mustafā ‛Ālī of Gallipoli, a
Moralistic Littérateur on History and the Contemporary Ottoman World’, in Jan Schmidt,
The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History and Orientalism (1500–1923), vol. 1:
Poetry, Historiography, Biography, and Autobiography (Istanbul, 2002), pp. 130–1; Dávid, ‘The
Mühimme Defteri as a Source for Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry’, pp. 167–209, esp. 191–2; Viorel
Panaite, The Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and Tribute Payers (New
York, 2000).
71
proximity to the Ottoman frontier. Interestingly, Chios and Venice are both
mentioned as signiicant island territories despite the radical diferences in
their power and location vis-à-vis the imperial centre. Addressing events of
the early sixteenth century but crafted at a time when the Ottomans had con-
solidated their hold over the Graeco-Balkan peninsula, Celalzade’s history
reinforces the notion that religion-of-state was only one category among sev-
eral employed for the classiication of space. It also reinforces the notion that
the sea salient was a category inherently distinct from the default category of
inland space (or space approached from the land).82
Proclaiming conquest was an oicial act, designed to consolidate alle-
giances, moderate resistance, legitimise rule, conirm the hierarchy of status
and secure one’s coveted place in historical consciousness and memory. To
accomplish the latter task, such proclamations had to be set down and illus-
trated in text and image. Thus, for example, the famous Hünername (Book of
Accomplishments) of Lokman ibn Seyyid Hüseyin (d. 1601 or 1602) may be
viewed as an elaborate and celebratory presentation of conquest and its atten-
dant chain of submission rituals, from “accession ceremonies to battleield
acts of idelity”.83 But elaborate books took time to compose and decorate,
so in the aftermath of conquest more expeditious notiications were sent out,
as Celalzade suggests, to friend and foe alike. The historian Kemalpaşazade
notes that in 1526 concise and detailed conquest announcements (fethnames)
were written and couriers were sent far and wide with the good news “to
Bogdan, Elak, Deşti-Kıpçak, East and West, to the people of Islam, the Arabs,
the Persians and the Turks”.84 The news, of course, might be construed as
good or bad, depending on the audience. Beyond such oicial missives, how-
ever, news travelled even more swiftly through informal channels, borne on
82 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, pp. 287–308; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı
Devletinin Merkez ve Bahriye Teşkilatı (Ankara, 1984), pp. 389–546, esp. 420–36.
83 Palmira Brummett, ‘The Early Modern Ottoman Campaign: Containing Violence,
Commemorating Allegiance, and Securing Submission’, Eurasian Studies 3, 1 (2004), 1–24;
Palmira Brummett, ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Rituals of Submission along the East–West Divide’,
in Cultural Encounters between East and West, 1453–1699, ed. Matthew Birchwood and Matthew
Dimmock (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 2005), pp. 107–31; Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein, Le
Sé rail ébranlé: Essai sur les morts, dé positions et avè nements des sultans ottomans XIV e–XIXe
siècle (Paris, 2003).
84 Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman, X Defter, p. cxv (summary); Veinstein, ‘La politique
hongroise du Sultan Süleymân et d’Ibrâhîm Pacha, 1534’, p. 373. See also Câfer Iyânî, Tevâr îh-i
Cedîd-i Vil âyet-i Üng ür ü s (Osmanlı-Macar Mücadelesi Tarihi, 1585–1595), ed. Mehmet Kirişcioğlu
(Istanbul, 2001), p. 9; Faik Reşit Unat, Osmanlı Seirleri ve Sefaretnameleri (Ankara, 1968), pp.
221–38; Christine Woodhead, ‘Ottoman Historiography on the Hungarian Campaigns: 1596,
the Eger Fethnamesi’, in Bacqué-Grammont, Ortaylı and van Donzel, CIÉPO Osmanlı Öncesi
ve Osmanlı Ara ştırmalar ı Uluslararası Komitesi, pp. 469–77.
72
the lips of merchants, spies, clergymen and other travellers. News signalled
the approach of armies and conditioned the conduct of diplomacy.85 And
once news arrived, via whatever source, people talked, and new versions of
the Ottoman expansion were created.
Conclusion
The end of the sixteenth century does not signal the end of Ottoman expan-
sion but rather an advanced integration of the Ottoman Empire into a
European state system that had itself undergone intense political and ideolog-
ical transformation. That integration must be understood in the context of
contemporary conceptualisations of territory. Just as sixteenth-century texts
visualised regional spaces, both coastal and inland, as a system of routes and
city-nodes negotiated through stages of travel, conquest and legitimation, so
must historiographic approaches take into account those rhetorical and ref-
erential frames. The Ottomans and their rivals envisioned the trans-imperial
zone as one crafted in terms of accessibility, resources and opportunities for
optimal glory achieved preferably at containable costs. The documentation
for this Ottoman imperial venture may focus primarily on the mundane (cen-
sus and tax records) and the thrilling (accounts of battle confrontation and
holy war), but expansion was a process of negotiation populated by some-
times remote rulers, local wielders of power, and trans-imperial subjects, all
of whom had to exercise lexibility in order to ensure success. Islamisation
in this context must be considered not only as a question of communal or
“national” allegiance but as a question of spatial identity, conditioned by the
nature of cross-cultural contacts, levels of imperial and institutional interven-
tion, and access to mobility. Ottoman expansion is also a question of trans-
lation: the modes by which imperial power was projected, allegiances forged
and news disseminated.
85 Dávid, ‘The Mühimme Defteri as a Source for Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry’, pp. 189, 199.
73
4
Ottoman expansion in the East
Eb ru Boya r
In contrast to the lands to the west, what surrounded the Ottoman state to
the north, south and east were political structures which had the same reli-
gious, ethnic and/or cultural roots. Thus eastward expansion was not for the
Ottomans merely a territorial or economic matter but was, more importantly,
a struggle to establish and strengthen their own existence and legitimacy.
Expansion and control in Anatolia

Once he became master of Istanbul, Mehmed II turned his eyes to the pros-
perous regions of Anatolia, whose production and wealth were described
by his contemporary Tursun Bey as beyond calculation.1 Motivated by the
need to ensure the security of his newly conquered capital and the desire to
control the trade routes, as well as other economic resources of the region,2
Mehmed’s initial target was the Black Sea coast, and in 1460 he attacked
the strongly fortiied Genoese colony of Amasra. Surprised, according to
Aşıkpaşazade, that neither his father nor grandfather had taken it before, for
the town was a refuge for runaway slaves and a centre for piracy which caused
much damage to the surrounding population, he laid siege to it by land and
sea.3 Realising that if they were to resist, the Ottomans would “enslave our
wives and daughters, possess them, crumble our arrows in their hands, latten
our bows, cut of our heads with our own swords, and hang their own swords
round our necks”, the Genoese acknowledged the wisdom of handing over
the castle before any of this happened to them.4
1 Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, ed. Mertol Tulum (Istanbul, 1977), p. 41.
2 Selâhattin Tansel, Osmanlı Kaynaklarına Göre Fatih Sultan Mehmed’in Siyasî ve Askerî Faaliyeti
(Ankara, 1999), p. 249.
3 Tursun Bey, Fatih’in Tarihi, Tārih-i Ebul Feth, ed. Ahmet Tezbaşar (Istanbul, n.d.), p. 83;
Aşıkpaşazade, Â şık Paşazade Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, ed. Kemal Yavuz and M. A. Yekta Saraç
(Istanbul, 2003), bab 131, p. 502.
4 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 131, p. 503.
74
After the conquest of Amasra, Mehmed informed his grand vezir Mahmud
Paşa that he had three aims in mind, the fulilment of which he hoped that God
would grant him: the conquest of territory of the İsfendiyaroğulları, which
included Kastamonu and Sinop; of Koylu Hisar; and of Trabzon (Trebizond).
These aims, he explained, “really trouble me, their image is always before my
eyes and they remain engraved on my heart”.5 Quite when Mehmed intended
to attack these territories is not, however, clear, for he was not given to reveal-
ing such details, replying on one occasion when asked about the destination
of his land and sea forces, “if I knew that one of the hairs of my beard had
learned my secret [i.e., this information], I would pull it out and consign it to
the lames”.6
“Secretive and irascible”7 in Doukas’s words, Mehmed in fact launched
his next campaign eastwards in 1461 against İsmail Bey, the ruler of the
İsfendiyaroğulları, whose lands included the rich copper mines of Sinop
and Kastamonu.8 Although İsmail assumed that the campaign’s target was
Trabzon, the last remaining Byzantine state ruled by the Komnenos fam-
ily, Mehmed’s aim, before attacking Trabzon, was in fact Sinop. Situated, as
Kritoboulos noted, “at the favorable point on the Asiatic coast of the Euxine
Sea”, it had secure harbours that would form a good base for his leet for the
projected attack on Trabzon and the eastern Black Sea coast. Further, its posi-
tion “in the midst of the territory of the Sultan” but not under Ottoman con-
trol was, in Mehmed’s estimation, dangerous “from many standpoints”.9
Mahmud Paşa thus despatched a leet of 100 ships to Sinop.10 While the
leet was en route, he sent a letter to İsmail Bey informing him that the leet’s
destination was Trabzon and requesting troops. İsmail, unaware of the dan-
ger to his own territory, sent soldiers under the command of his son Hasan
Bey, who, on his arrival at the Ottoman camp, was seized and his sancak of
Kastamonu granted to Kızıl Ahmed Bey, İsmail’s brother, who had led to the
Ottomans when İsmail had become bey of İsfendiyar and had received Bolu
5 Ibid., bab 132, p. 504. Mehmed’s intention of conquering Koylu Hisar before the campaign
against Trabzon, as related by Aşıkpaşazade, has been questioned by Yaşar Yücel, who argues
that Mehmed II made his decision to attack the Akkoyunlu territories while en route to
Trabzon. See Yaşar Yücel, ‘Fatih’in Trabzon’u Fethi Öncesinde Osmanlı-Trabzon-Akkoyunlu
İlişkileri’, Belleten 49, 194 (1986), 287–311 at pp. 304–9.
6 Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, ed. and trans. Harry J. Magoulias
(Detroit, 1975), p. 258.
7 Ibid., p. 258.
8 Kritoboulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Westport, Conn.,
1954), p. 166; Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants
of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 115–16.
9 Kritoboulos, History, p. 168.
75
E b ru b oya r
as his sancak.11 Kızıl Ahmed Bey was not, however, to remain in this position
for long, for Mehmed, wanting direct control of these strategically important
lands, removed him and appointed him instead as sancak beyi of Mora, thus
efectively distancing him from Anatolia. Kızıl Ahmed did not comply with
this arrangement and instead took refuge with Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the
Akkoyunlu state and the main Ottoman rival in Anatolia.12 With the Ottoman
seizure of Kastamonu, İsmail escaped to Sinop but was forced to surrender to
Ottoman forces which laid siege to the city by land and sea13 and was granted,
on his request, the sancak of Yenişehir, İnegöl and Yarhisar in the vilayet of
Bursa. After the defection of Kızıl Ahmed to Uzun Hasan, Mehmed, wishing
to ensure that İsmail would not behave as his brother had, moved him from
Yenişehir to Filibe (Plovdiv), in modern Bulgaria, where he died of natural
causes.14
With the economically and strategically important İsfendiyar territory
under his direct control, Mehmed moved on towards Trabzon, taking the
strategically important castle of Koylu Hisar, near Sivas, en route. The
Ottomans had earlier attempted to take the castle from the Akkoyunlu and,
having failed to do so, had, following Mehmed’s orders, plundered the lands
around, devastating the region and burning the villages in order “to prevent
any productivity for many years to come”.15
In October 1461, Mehmed laid siege to Trabzon, the capital city of the
Komnenoi, whose state stretched from Giresun to Batum and its hinterland.
This was not the irst Ottoman attempt to take Trabzon, that during the reign
of Murad II having failed when a storm at sea forced the leet to abandon the
attempt. As a result of an Ottoman attack under Hızır Bey, the lala (tutor)
of Bayezid II, in 1456 the emperor John IV was forced to pay tribute of 2,000
gold pieces to the Ottomans, a sum increased to 3,000 in 1458. At the same
time, John married his daughter Katherine, later known as Despina Hatun,
to Uzun Hasan, with the expectation of using his new son-in-law against the
Ottomans if necessary.16
John’s brother and successor, David, who came to power in 1458, ceased
paying the tribute in 1460, relying on the support of Uzun Hasan, who saw
11 Ibid., bab 132, pp. 505–6.

12 Ibid., bab 135, p. 511.
13 Ibid., bab 132, pp. 504–8; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II. Cilt (Ankara, 2006), pp.
49–50.
14 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 132, pp. 506–7; bab 135, pp. 511–12.
15 Ibid., bab 134, pp. 509–10.
16 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 52; William Miller, Trebizond – The Last Greek Empire of the
Byzantine Era, 1204–1461 (Chicago, 1969), pp. 87–9.
76
Trabzon as part of his sphere of inl uence, and even, using Uzun Hasan as his
spokesman, went as far as to demand that Mehmed return what had previ-
ously been paid.17 In this period when David was attempting to build a for-
midable block against the Ottomans, Ludovico da Bologna was sent by Pope
Pius II to Trabzon and Georgia in search of an alliance against the Ottomans
in the east.18 In a letter dated 22 April 1459 to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the
Good, Uzun Hasan and the lords of Karaman and Sinop, as well as David of
Trabzon, who was said to be willing to provide 30 biremes and 20,000 men,
appear together in a list of Christian princes of the region who were ready to
form a bloc against the Ottomans.19 Although purported to have been written
by David, the letter was probably not in fact by him.20 Nevertheless, negotia-
tions of some sort clearly were taking place, for Kritoboulos noted that as
long as the rulers of Trabzon remained peaceful and paid tribute, they had
no problem with the sultan. Once they became rebellious, however, refusing
to pay tribute and allying themselves with other rulers of the region, such as
the Armenians, the Akkoyunlu and the Georgians, and began plotting against
the Ottomans, then the sultan determined to forestall them and gain mastery
over them before they could start a rebellion.21
For the Komnenoi, the outcome was disastrous, and David surrendered
Trabzon to Mehmed after a short siege, other territory east of Trabzon fall-
ing at the same time. David and his family were transferred22 to lands granted
them by Mehmed in Rumeli.23 Two years later, David, his sons and his nephew
were executed for intriguing, an accusation supported by a letter attributed to
Uzun Hasan’s wife, David’s niece Despina Hatun.24
Mehmed, praised by Aşıkpaşazade as the sultan who had conquered three
vilayets in one campaign,25 had thus, by placing the Black Sea coast of Anatolia
under Ottoman control, gained a dominant position in Black Sea trade. As a
continuation of his policy of controlling the Black Sea, Mehmed, who had
made Cafa a tribute-paying city in 1454, took the city from the Genoese in
17 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 53; Miller, Trebizond, pp. 99–100.

18 Anthony A. M. Bryer, ‘Ludovico da Bologna and the Georgian and Anatolian Embassy of
1460–1461’, in Anthony A. M. Bryer, Empire of Trebizond and the Pontos (London, 1980), chap.
10, p. 180.
19 Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer, Geschichte des Kaiserthums von Trapezunt (Munich, 1827), pp.
266–7.
20 Bryer, ‘Ludovico da Bologna’, appendix, pp. 196–7.
21 Kritoboulos, History, pp. 164–5.
22 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 135, pp. 510–12; Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p.
110.
23 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 56.
24 Miller, Trebizond, pp. 108–9.
77
E b ru b oya r
1475, conquered the Genoese castles of Azov (Azak) and Mangub (Menküb)26
and placed the Crimean hanate under Ottoman vassalage,27 thus achieving
both strategic control of the northern shores of the Black Sea and economic
dominance of the trade routes of the region.28 The Crimean hans were to
have a vital role in Ottoman expansion in the Caucasus at the expense of
Muscovy and Iran at the end of the following century.
Mehmed was also interested in control of the eastern Black Sea region
and had, as early as 1451, conducted operations against the Georgian petty
state of Mingreli (Dadyan) and Abkhazia (Apkaz- eli). In 1454, he took the
important coastal city of Sukhumi (Sokum), under Mingrelian control,
where there was a strong Genoese presence.29 Later in his reign, Mehmed
sought to extend Ottoman control in the region, and in 1479 Ottoman forces
conquered the Circassian lands of Anapa and Kuban (Kuba), whose people
occupied themselves “day and night with hatred and enmity” of the Muslim
Tatars,30 and these lands were annexed to the Crimean hanate. In the same
year, three castles in today’s Gümüşhane in Anatolia were taken from local
Georgian rulers who threatened the security of the merchants trading with
Iran.31
With the Black Sea coast of Anatolia securely under his control, Mehmed
had now to deal with his main obstacle in Anatolia, Uzun Hasan, whose
removal was necessary both for the consolidation of Ottoman control in
the newly conquered Anatolian lands and for further Ottoman conquests in
the region. For those who opposed a strong Ottoman presence in Anatolia –
Turcoman beys, who perceived him as a second Timur who would return to
them the territory they had lost to the Ottomans, as well as the Christians,
who saw him as a potential ally in a pincer movement against Mehmed –
Uzun Hasan was a igure of hope.32 For Mehmed, however, he was “a little
snake” to be hunted down before he grew into a dragon.33
26 Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ: Neşrî Tarihi, ed. Faik Reşit Unat and Mehmed A.
Köymen (Ankara, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 826–9.
27 Ibid., pp. 822–7; Halil İnalcık, ‘Yeni Vesikalara Göre Kırım Hanlığının Osmanlı Tâbiliğine
Girmesi ve Ahidname Meselesi’, Belleten 8 (1944), 185–229 at p. 197, pp. 193–6; Yücel Öztürk,
Osmanlı Hakimiyetinde Kefe (1475–1600) (Ankara, 2000), pp. 19–30.
28 İnalcık, ‘Yeni’, p. 195; Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, p. 271.
29 M. Fahrettin Kırzıoğlu, Osmanlılar’ın Kaf kas-Elleri’ni Fethi (1451–1590) (Ankara, 1998), pp. 1–7.
30 Kemalpaşazade (İbn Kemal), Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman VII. Defter, ed. Şerafettin Turan (Ankara,
1991), p. 468.
31 Ibid., p. 465; Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, pp. 33–41.
32 Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, ‘Uzun Hasan’ın Osmanlılara Karşı Katî Mücadeleye Hazırlıkları ve
Osmanlı-Akkoyunlu Harbinin Başlaması’, Belleten 21, 81–4 (1957), 261–84 at p. 270.
78
By accepting Kızıl Ahmed when he led from Mehmed to the Akkoyunlu

court, Uzun Hasan clearly allied himself with the İsfendiyaroğulları, and was
known by Mehmed to be plotting to take Sinop.34 At the same time, he laid
claim to Trabzon through his marriage to the Komnenain princess Despina
Hatun, sending his mother, Sara Hatun, as an envoy to Mehmed both to
inform him that Trabzon was his legitimate territory and to attempt to pre-
vent an Ottoman attack on his lands.35
The main bone of contention between the Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu
was Karaman. The ruler of Karaman, İbrahim Bey, who was married to
the sister of Murad II, came to the throne with Murad’s assistance in 1424.
İbrahim Bey was not, however, a loyal ally, for at every opportunity, when the
Ottomans were occupied in the European section of their territory, İbrahim
campaigned against Ottoman possessions in Anatolia. While Murad was
engaged in a campaign against Hungary, İbrahim once more went into action
and attacked Ottoman cities, forcing Murad to despatch troops against him.
Having signed a peace treaty with Hungary in 1444, Murad organised a cam-
paign designed to settle the matter of Karaman permanently. The result was
an agreement under which İbrahim, well and truly beaten, agreed to cease
entirely from hostile action against Murad or his son Mehmed and to send
one of his sons every year together with troops to serve Murad.36 The agree-
ment did not last long, for in 1451 İbrahim seized the opportunity of Murad’s
death to organise an uprising in the beyliks which had recently come under
Ottoman control. In retaliation, the new sultan Mehmed II campaigned
against Karaman. As Mehmed reached Akşehir, İbrahim Bey sent him “coins
[ilori] inside parrots”, asking for his forgiveness, agreeing to marry his daugh-
ter to him and to provide soldiers for his campaigns.37 For İbrahim such an
agreement was clearly not considered binding, for he was soon searching for
allies against his new overlord.38 In 1454, he signed an agreement with Venice.
Although the agreement itself was entirely related to trade, İbrahim refers
in the letter accompanying it to “the afection between us” and states that
he is ready “to act against your enemy over matters that will be useful to

35 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 135, pp. 510–11. See also Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, ‘Fatih
Sultan Mehmet-Uzun Hasan Rekabetinde Trabzon Meselesi’, Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 2,
2–3 (1964), 67–81.
36 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılıoğlu, ‘Karamanoğulları Devri Vesikalarından İbrahim Beyin
Karaman İmareti Vakiyesi’, Belleten 1, 1 (1937), 56–127 at pp. 117–22.
37 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 121, pp. 484–5; Uzunçarşılıoğlu, ‘Karamanoğulları
Devri’, pp. 123–4.
38 Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2: The Fifteenth Century
(Philadelphia, 1978), pp. 76, 108–9.
79
E b ru b oya r
us and to you”.39 Although he sent soldiers under the command of his son
to join the Ottoman campaigns against the İsfendiyaroğulları and Trabzon,40
his name appears at the same time in the 1459 letter to Philip of Burgundy
listing potential allies against the Ottomans.41 For Aşıkpaşazade, the “devil-
ishness of Karaman” was evident in İbrahim’s attempt to incite İsmail Bey
not to go to Yenişehir, as ordered by Mehmed, but instead to join an alliance
of Karaman and Uzun Hasan in order to catch Mehmed, then on campaign
against Trabzon, in a pincer movement. İsmail Bey rejected this ofer and
accused İbrahim of irreligious behaviour and double-dealing.42
During the last years of his reign, İbrahim Bey favoured İshak, his eldest
son by a concubine, who became the de facto ruler of the beylik during
İbrahim’s illness. His six other sons, whose mother was Mehmed II’s aunt
and were thus regarded by İbrahim as being “stained by Ottoman blood”,43
revolted. Attacking Konya, they forced İshak and İbrahim to lee to the castle
of Gevele, where İbrahim died.44 İshak initially appealed to the Mamluks for
help, sending an ambassador to Cairo from his headquarters in Silif ke. For
the Mamluks, Karaman’s strategic position as a bufer zone on the borders
of Mamluk-controlled territory meant that it was in Mamluk interests to pre-
vent any move by the Ottomans, who supported İshak’s brothers, to gain con-
trol of the beylik. The Mamluk sultan thus responded favourably to İshak’s
appeal for help.45 When the promised help failed, however, to materialise,
İshak sent an embassy to Uzun Hasan. According to Ottoman sources, it was
as a result of this embassy that Uzun Hasan attacked Karaman,46 although it
has also been argued that Uzun Hasan actually initiated his campaign before
the arrival of İshak’s envoy47 since possession of Karaman, regardless of any
provocation by İshak, would have facilitated his progress westwards and given
him the possibility of extending his control to the Mediterranean coastline.48
39 Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum sive acta et diplomata res venetas graecas atque Levantis
illustrantia, ed. G. M. Thomas and R. Predelli, 2 vols. (Venice, 1880–99), vol. 2, doc. 210, p. 387
(12 February 1454).
40 Uzunçarşılıoğlu, ‘Karamanoğulları Devri’, p. 124; Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi,
bab 132, p. 505.
41 Fallmerayer, Geschichte, p. 267.
42 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 133, p. 508; Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp.
746–9.
43 Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 772–3.
44 Ibid., pp. 770–3.
45 Adnan Sadık Erzi, ‘Akkoyunlu ve Karakoyunlu Tarihi Hakkında Araştırmalar. II. Uzun
Hasan’ın Birinci Karaman Seferi’, Belleten 18, 70 (1954), 179–221 at pp. 210–11.
772–3.
47 Erzi, ‘Akkoyunlu ve Karakoyunlu Tarihi’, pp. 212–13.
80
Whether or not as a direct result of İshak’s appeal, Uzun Hasan did attack
Karaman, expel İshak’s brothers and return İshak to the Karaman throne, Pir
Ahmed, the eldest of the rebelling brothers, leeing to Ottoman protection in
Istanbul.49 Despite this, it is clear that İshak was not entirely trusting of Uzun
Hasan, for he sent an envoy to Mehmed ofering him Akşehir and Beyşehir
in return for Mehmed’s not releasing Pir Ahmed. Mehmed, however, found
this ofer insuicient and instead released Pir Ahmed, who, with Ottoman
military assistance, retook Karaman and surrendered Sıklanhisar, Kayseri,50
Akşehir, Beyşehir and Ilgın to Mehmed.51 Leaving his wife and son in Silif ke,
İshak took refuge with Uzun Hasan, where he died.
According to Ottoman sources, Pir Ahmed had, in return for Ottoman sup-
port, promised not to oppose Mehmed and to send him troops whenever
and wherever requested to do so.52 However, in 1468, when Mehmed reached
Afyonkarahisar on a campaign against Egypt, according to Tursun Bey and
Kemalpaşazade, or against Uzun Hasan, according to Aşıkpaşazade and
Neşri, or even the Hexamillion, the defensive wall built across the isthmus of
Corinth, according to Angiolello, Pir Ahmed failed, despite Mehmed’s order,
to join the army with his troops53 and to act as a guide for Ottoman forces.54
Well aware of the level of Pir Ahmed’s trust in him, Mehmed expected such
disobedience,55 for Pir Ahmed was known to have no intention of waiting on
Mehmed with presents as was the custom for all Mehmed’s “barons”.56 The
ickleness of Karaman was well known to Aşıkpaşazade, who wrote, “if you
go to Karaman and say let’s abide by our treaty, they will either kill you or expel
you from their land”.57 Pir Ahmed, more Karamani than Ottoman according
to Hoca Sadeddin,58 plundered Ottoman land and showed his insolence by
49 Ebu Bekr-i Tihranî, Kitab-ı Diyarbekriyye, trans. Mürsel Öztürk (Ankara, 2001), pp. 223–4;
Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 772–3; Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 140,
p. 520.
50 Tursun Bey, Fatih’in Tarihi, pp. 105–6; Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 129; Neşri, Kitâb-ı
Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 774–5.
51 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, ed. İsmet Parmaksızoğlu (Ankara, 1999), vol. 3, p. 80;
Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, p. 286.
52 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 142, pp. 522–3; Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2,
780–1; Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 145; Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih VII, pp. 273–4.
53 Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, p. 288.
54 Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 145.
55 Tursun Bey notes that Mehmed repeatedly asked Mahmud Paşa whether Pir Ahmed would
or would not abide by the agreement, thus implying that Mehmed did not trust Pir Ahmed.
See Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 146.
56 Giovan Maria Angiolello [Donado da Lezze], Historia Turchesca (1300–1514), ed. I. Ursu
(Bucharest, 1909), p. 40.
58 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 3, p. 94.
81
E b ru b oya r
demanding from Mehmed Ilgın and the natural springs of the region.59 While
Mehmed was on campaign in Albania, Pir Ahmed’s campaign of pillage and
rape against the Ottoman subjects of Anatolia was so vicious, according to
Neşri, that the people appealed to their “just” sultan, Mehmed, complaining
that the constant plundering had turned them into poverty-stricken beggars
and threatening that if he did not expel the Karamanoğulları and take control
of the territory, they would leave, taking their “shitty infants” with them, and
settle elsewhere.60
In consequence, Mehmed embarked on a crushing campaign against
Karaman, taking Konya, Larende, Gevele and Ereğli, and despatching troops
against the Turgutoğulları Turcomans, driving them into the region of the
plain of Tarsus, which was under Mamluk control.61 With these lands in his
possession, Mehmed next ordered the forced expulsion of the population,
a task which Mahmud Paşa failed to carry out to Mehmed’s satisfaction.
Mahmud Paşa was replaced by Rum Mehmed Paşa, who oversaw a destruc-
tive operation involving wholesale plunder and the forced transfer of much
of the population to Istanbul.62 Thus, in the words of the ifteenth-century
Ottoman historian Kemal, “the han [Mehmed II] razed Karaman to the
ground, and took and placed [its population] in Istanbul”.63
The result of this harsh campaign was not, as might have been expected,
the removal of any tie between the population and the beys of Karaman but
rather the strengthening of such ties, and Mehmed proved unable completely
to remove the Karamanoğulları. Using İçel and Taşeli as a base, and with sup-
port from the Varsaklar, Turgutoğulları and other tribes of the region, Pir
Ahmed and his brother Kasım conducted damaging operations against the
newly acquired Ottoman territory, while another bey of Karaman, the son of
İshak Bey, had control of the castle of Silif ke.64
In order to prevent the continued inl uence of the Karamanoğulları in
Karaman and to destroy the loyalty of the population to them, Rum Mehmed
Paşa plundered Larende and Ereğli. A campaign was also organised against
59 Ibid., pp. 80–1; Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 140, p. 521.

pp. 782–3; Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih VII, p. 276.
63 Kemal, Selâtîn-nâme (1299–1490), ed. Necdet Öztürk (Ankara, 2001), p. 176.
64 M. C. Şehabeddin Tekindağ, ‘Son Osmanlı Karaman Münasebetleri Hakkında Araştırmalar’,
İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi 13, 17–18 (1962–3), 57–63; Tansel, Fatih
Sultan Mehmed, pp. 288–90.
82
Karaman’s most important supporters, the Varsaklar, but without success,65

thus propelling Mehmed into a new campaign against Karaman in 1471 when
he despatched the army under the command of İshak Paşa.66 As a result of
this campaign, Ottoman control was once more established in the territories
and Silif ke was surrendered to them.67 Gedik Ahmed Paşa also took Alanya,
which had been held by Lüti Beyoğlu Kılıç Arslan and was under Mamluk
inl uence.68 Kılıç Arslan was known to have supported the Karamanoğulları
in their struggle against the Ottomans and had cooperated with the Venetians
on Cyprus.69
As a result of these Ottoman operations, both Pir Ahmed and Kasım led
to Uzun Hasan. While, on the one hand, Uzun Hasan’s mother, Sara Hatun,
wrote to Mehmed requesting him to forgive his cousins, Pir Ahmed and
Kasım,70 Uzun Hasan himself, prey to “an ignorant anger” and “stupid mis-
take”,71 dreamed of seizing Mehmed’s lands and, feeling stronger due to the
arrival of Pir Ahmed and Kasım, believed that now was the right moment to
confront Mehmed, whom he regarded as “a good warrior”.72 Uzun Hasan sent
Pir Ahmed and Kasım, together with Akkoyunlu soldiers, to take Karaman. En
route this force plundered Tokat and acted “in an inidel manner”.73 According
to Neşri, these forces were more tyrannical than Timur had been in Sivas.74
Taking a large portion of Karamanid territory, they forced Mehmed’s son
Şehzade Mustafa, who had ruled the territory since the Ottoman conquest,
to lee Konya.75 In response, Mehmed despatched reinforcements which
defeated the Akkoyunlu forces, whose commander, Yusufça Mirza, was taken
prisoner and, a rope tied round his neck, “was led around like a dog”.76 Pir
Ahmed and İsfendiyaroğlu Kızıl Ahmed, who had joined the campaign, led
pp. 788–91.
790–1.
67 Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 153; Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 796–7.
pp. 792–5; Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 147; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Anadolu Beylikleri
ve Akkoyunlu ve Karakoyunlu Devletleri (Ankara, 1984), pp. 93–4.
69 Tekindağ, ‘Son Osmanlı Karaman’, pp. 59–61.
70 Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, pp. 292–3.
71 Tihranî, Kitab-ı Diyarbekriyye, p. 343.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., pp. 800–1.
83
E b ru b oya r
to Uzun Hasan, only Kasım Bey withdrawing to İçel77 and being able to hold
Silif ke, which he took with the help of a leet under the command of Pietro
Mocenigo and made up of Venetian, Neapolitan, Papal, Rhodian and Cypriot
ships.78
While Uzun Hasan represented a dangerous enemy for Mehmed, he was,
precisely because of this, a most attractive ally for the states to the west.
Pope Pius II apparently had high hopes of Uzun Hasan, whom he described
in a letter he sent in January 1460 to Philip the Good, a most ardent supporter
of crusade, as one of the “friends of the Christians”,79 and whom he counted
among those powers “expressing support for the destruction of the most
arrogant Turk”.80 Although Pius, who relied entirely on the dubious infor-
mation given by Ludovico concerning the possibility of a ready and strong
eastern alliance against the Ottomans, was probably misled, this did not
deter the Venetians from seeking an alliance with Uzun Hasan. Following a
decision to this efect taken in the Venetian Senate in 1463, various missions
were sent to Uzun Hasan,81 who was himself clearly much attracted by this
possibility.
In 1473, Giosafatte Barbaro was sent as ambassador to Uzun Hasan, together
with men and munitions, which according to Barbaro were worth 4,000
ducats82 but which actually never reached him. While the Venetian weapons
and munitions were sitting in Cyprus,83 Mehmed sent a large force, recruited
from every part of the empire,84 against Uzun Hasan and the two armies met
at Otlukbeli (or Başkent), near Tercan, in August 1473. Despite his initial victo-
ries, Uzun Hasan, deprived of these irearms, lost the battle to the Ottoman
army, which was technologically superior to that of the Akkoyunlu, Uzun
Hasan having, as Neşri noted, “not seen battle with guns and cannon”.85
77 Tihranî, Kitab-ı Diyarbekriyye, pp. 343–4; Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 798–803;
Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 93–4; Tekindağ, ‘Son Osmanlı Karaman’, pp. 64–8.
78 Kasım Bey to Barbaro, 27 April 1473, in Lettere al senato veneto di Giosafatte Barbaro ambascia-
tore ad Usunhasan di Persia, ed. Enrico Cornet (Vienna, 1852), p. 35. See also Barbaro’s letter
to the doge of Venice, 21 May 1473, ibid., pp. 37–8; Walther Hinz, Uzun Hasan ve Şeyh Cüneyd.
XV. Yüzyılda İran’ın Millî Bir Devlet Haline Yükşelişi, trans. Tevi k Bıyıklıoğlu (Ankara, 1992),
p. 53.
79 Fallmerayer, Geschichte von Trapezunt, p. 268.
80 Ibid., p. 269.
81 Vladimir Minorsky, La Perse au XVe siècle entre la Turquie et Venise (Paris, 1933), pp. 12–13 and
note 21 on p. 20.
82 L. Lockhart, R. Morozzo Della Rocca and M. F. Tiepolo (eds.), I viag i in Persia degli ambas-
ciatori veneti Barbaro e Contarini (Rome, 1973), p. 103.
83 Barbaro to Uzun Hasan, 25 October 1473, in Cornet, Lettere, p. 85.
85 Ibid., pp. 818–19. See also Tihranî, Kitab-ı Diyarbekriyye, pp. 350–2, for the importance of the
use of guns and cannon in the battleield.
84
With the efective removal of Uzun Hasan, who, after the defeat at Otlukbeli,
undertook not to attack Ottoman territory,86 Mehmed’s son Şehzade Mustafa
and Gedik Ahmed Paşa strengthened the Ottoman presence in Karaman. The
castles of Minan, the residence of Pir Ahmed’s family, Silif ke and Lüle (Lülve)
were captured and Pir Ahmed, who had fallen ill during the hostilities and
led after Otlukbeli, died while his brother Kasım, unable to resist further, had
taken refuge with the Mamluk sultan by 1476.87
Despite this crushing defeat of Uzun Hasan, which, according to Neşri,
left him so dispirited that he instructed that those who succeeded him should
never go to war with the Ottomans, an injunction which they apparently
took to heart,88 Venice nevertheless remained hopeful of concluding an anti-
Ottoman alliance with him.89 This search for an alliance, however, never
produced a concrete result.90 For the remaining ive years of his life, Uzun
Hasan was occupied with the revolts of his sons and brother and consumed
his remaining energy on a campaign against Georgia.91
Mehmed, who, according to Neşri, could have conquered Uzun Hasan’s
territory and reduced Uzun Hasan himself to nothing had he so wished,92
remained wary of the Akkoyunlu ruler and refrained from continued con-
quest of Akkoyunlu territories. However, he did not miss any opportunity to
interfere in the internal afairs of the Akkoyunlu state. In this he was helped
by the revolt of Uzun Hasan’s very able and popular son, Uğurlu Mehmed,
who had shown great courage and success at Otlukbeli. Uzun Hasan was
under the inl uence of his favourite wife, Selçukşah Hanım, described unlat-
teringly as a “hyena” by the Akkoyunlu historian Tihrani93, who wished to
put her own son Halil on the Akkoyunlu throne. Uğurlu Mehmed led to the
Ottoman court, where Mehmed welcomed him as his “son”, married him to
his daughter and granted him the vilayet of Sivas near the Akkoyunlu bor-
der. Receiving from his father’s beys the false news of his father’s death, a
86 Tekindağ, ‘Son Osmanlı Karaman’, p. 68; Şerafettin Turan, ‘Fatih Mehmet-Uzun Hasan
Mücadelesi ve Venedik’, Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 3, 3–5 (1965), 65–138 at p. 128.
87 Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 800–1; Tekindağ, ‘Son Osmanlı Karaman’, pp. 68–72.
89 Turan, ‘Venedik’, pp. 129–38.
90 Minorsky, La Perse, pp. 15–16; Hinz, Uzun Hasan ve Şeyh Cüneyd, p. 56; Setton, The Papacy and
the Levant, vol. 2, p. 321.
91 John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, a Study in 15th/9th Century Turko-
Iranian Politics (Minneapolis and Chicago, 1976), pp. 134–7; H. R. Roemer, ‘The Türkmen
Dynasties’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, ed. Peter
Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (Cambridge, 2006), p. 180.
92 Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, vol. 2, pp. 820–1. For a discussion of the reasons for Mehmed’s not
wishing to follow the Akkoyunlu forces, see Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, pp. 325–7.
85
E b ru b oya r
fabrication intended to lure him back, Uğurlu Mehmed, without the sultan’s
permission, returned to Akkoyunlu territory, where he was killed in a battle
with his father’s forces a short time before Uzun Hasan’s own death in 1478.94
Uğurlu Mehmed’s son, Göde Ahmed Bey, escaped to Mehmed II’s court after
the murder of his father and there married Bayezid II’s daughter in 1490.95
Several years later, in 1496, envoys from leading Akkoyunlu arrived at the
Ottoman court requesting the return of Göde Ahmed in order to oppose the
current ruler, Rüstem, who had arrived on the throne by murdering the pre-
vious incumbent, Baysungur, who had succeeded Uzun Hasan’s son Yakub
(r. 1478–90). What exactly happened at this point is not clear. While some
sources present Bayezid as unsure of how to respond to this request, others
state that he rejected it. Ahmed either led from Istanbul, joined those who
had come to collect him, defeated Rüstem and took the throne96 or, according
to Rumlu Hasan, was despatched by Bayezid with Ottoman troops, since this
suited Bayezid’s purpose, Bayezid apparently thinking that he would be able
easily to take Azerbaijan and Iraq, which were in internal chaos.97
On the night that the news arrived that Ahmed had taken the Akkoyunlu
throne, his wife, Bayezid’s daughter, produced a son, two events which
brought much joy to Bayezid. Giving “great thanks to almighty God” for
now “the Persian vilayet, too, is ours”, he sent the news to “all states”, and
the cities were accordingly decked out in celebration.98 He also despatched a
messenger to Venice, which had long sought an anti-Ottoman alliance with
the Akkoyunlu, to pass on the good news of his son-in-law’s accession to the
Akkoyunlu throne.99 Bayezid’s joy was short lived, for Ahmed was unable to
remain long on the throne and was killed in 1497 during a power struggle with
Hibe Sultan.100
Although Ottoman–Akkoyunlu relations in the aftermath of Otlukbeli
were calm on a diplomatic level, with the despatch to the Akkoyunlu court
of Ottoman ambassadors bearing costly gifts,101 such relations were not
94 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 3, pp. 330–2; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp.
104–5.
95 Oruç, Oruç Beğ Tarihi [Osmanlı Tarihi 1288–1502], ed. Necdet Öztürk (Istanbul, 2007), p. 144,
facsimile 100a.
96 Richard D. Kreutel (ed.), Haniwaldanus Anonimi’ne Göre Sultan Bayezid-i Velî (1481–1512),
trans. Necdet Öztürk (Istanbul, 1997), pp. 29–33; Oruç, Tarihi, p. 146, facsimile 101a; p. 154,
facsimile 105b; pp. 172–3, facsimile 117a–118a.
97 Rumlu Hasan, (Ahsenü’t Tevârih) Şah İsmail Tarihi, trans. Cevat Cevan (Ankara, 2004), p. 17.
98 Oruç, Tarihi, p. 173, facsimile 118a.
99 Marino Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, 25 vols. (Bologna, 1969–70), vol. 1, p. 691.
100 Rumlu Hasan, Ahsenü’t Tevârih, pp. 21–2; Oruç, Tarihi, p. 174, facsimile 118b.
101 V. Minorsky (trans.), Persia in A.D. 1478–1490: An Abridged Translation of Fadullāh b. Rūzbihān
Khunjī’s Tārikh-i ‘Ā lam-Ārām-yi Amīnī (London, 1957), p. 85.
86
grounded on any secure feeling of trust, and whenever the opportunity

arose, the Ottomans endeavoured to provoke internal agitation within the
Akkoyunlu state. The Akkoyunlu, too, sought to utilise any Ottoman weak-
ness and adopted a pro-Mamluk, rather than a pro-Ottoman, stance during
the Ottoman–Mamluk war of 1485–91. According to an intelligence report
received by Bayezid, the Ottoman defeat in this war was seen by at least one
member of the entourage of the Akkoyunlu ruler Yakub as a golden opportu-
nity not to be missed. This individual proposed that Yakub should attack the
Ottomans, and not merely retake Şebinkarahisar, captured by Mehmed en
route to Otlukbeli,102 but, most ambitiously, even conquer Anatolia up to the
straits at Gelibolu, a suggestion oddly not dismissed by Yakub, who enquired
“[and] how many days will it take us to arrive there?”103 Such ambitions, or
even more modest ones, were in reality unrealisable due to the internal insta-
bility in the Akkoyunlu state.104
The removal of the Akkoyunlu threat did not mean that the Ottoman posi-
tion in the east was now secure, for the region of eastern Anatolia was regarded
by the rulers of the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria, too, as their sphere
of inl uence. During Mehmed II’s campaigns against Karaman, the Mamluks
had indirectly supported İshak Bey and aided Pir Ahmed.105 When a power
struggle broke out among the sons of Süleyman Bey (1442–54), the ruler of
the principality of Dulgadiroğlu, which controlled territory in the region of
Maraş and Elbistan, the Mamluks and the Ottomans conducted a proxy war
by backing rival claimants to the throne. In 1465, Süleyman’s son and suc-
cessor, Melik Arslan, was murdered. The Mamluks promptly despatched his
brother, Şahbudak, who was in Cairo, with a document of appointment to
assume the throne of the beylik, which had in fact been established under
Mamluk protection.106 However, according to Ottoman sources, Şahbudak
was not accepted by the beys of Dulgadir, who wanted Melik Arslan’s other
brother, Şehsuvar, then at the Ottoman court, as ruler.107 Mehmed was related
to the Dulgadiroğulları through his marriage in 1450 to Süleyman Bey’s daugh-
ter Sitti Hatun,108 Murad II calculating that, although the Dulgadir ruler was

103 John E. Woods, ‘Turco-Iranica I: An Ottoman Intelligence Report on Late Fifteenth/Ninth
Century Iranian Foreign Relations’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 38, 1 (1979), 1–9 at p. 2
and ig. 1.
104 Uzunçarşılı, Anadolu Beylikleri, pp. 195–7.
105 Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, pp. 290–1.
106 Refet Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği (Ankara, 1989), p. 10.
108 Ibid., bab 120, p. 481.
87
E b ru b oya r
not his equal in either power or wealth, the location of his state between
Karaman and Iran made him a potentially useful ally worth securing through
a marriage alliance.109 For Mehmed, this turmoil in the Dulgadir state pre-
sented him with the opportunity of taking a region which posed a threat to
Karaman, now an Ottoman vassal. It had been Dulgadiroğlu plundering of
Karaman during the power struggle among İbrahim’s sons which had pro-
vided a pretext for Uzun Hasan’s intervention.110 Control of Dulgadir was fur-
ther made attractive because of its location on the route for any southward
Ottoman expansion against the Mamluks.111
Backed by the Ottoman sultan and provided with Ottoman troops,
Şehsuvar Bey defeated his brother and took the Dulgadir throne,112 a posi-
tion he owed to Mehmed’s “grace and favour”.113 Once in power, Şehsuvar
adopted an openly aggressive stance towards the Mamluks, occupying various
Mamluk towns on his borders, attacking the beylik of the Ramazanoğulları,
which included Adana, Sis, Misis, Ayas and Payas114 and was under Mamluk
inl uence, and defeating a Mamluk force sent against him.115
Boosted by these successes, Şehsuvar, who had “a brain full of intrigue”
and was “illed with the passion of pride”, “entrusted himself to the devil,
put aside the path of righteousness, and gave himself over to the occupa-
tion of deadly revolt”,116 a revolt which led him into collision not just with
the Mamluks but, perhaps more dangerously given his position, also with the
Ottomans. Arrogantly announcing, according to Kemalpaşazade, “like the
Ottomans, I, too, have my sultanate, my land, my tribe, my country is pros-
perous and my army victorious, what have I to fear from anyone and to
whom should I feel inferior?”, Şehsuvar destroyed the drum and standard pre-
sented to him by the Ottomans, an act of treachery for which Kemalpaşazade
presents him as being punished by God, his deiance of the Ottomans being
in efect a deiance of the Almighty. Kemalpaşazade recounts how, after his
destruction of the drum and standard, Şehsuvar had a vision in which a man
appeared before him and put a chain around his, Şehsuvar’s, neck. For the
next three years, Şehsuvar was accompanied wherever he went by the man
109 Doukas, Decline, p. 186.

113 Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih VII, p. 273.
114 Uzunçarşılı, Anadoln Beylikleri, pp. 176–8.
115 Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, pp. 63–71.
116 Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih VII, p. 393.
88
who held the end of the chain in his hands, a clear allusion to the fate which
was to befall him in 1472.117
Şehsuvar’s failure to send troops to join Mehmed’s Karaman campaign as
promised, together with the negative impact on this campaign of Şehsuvar’s
attacks on territory under Mamluk inl uence and his cooperation with Pir
Ahmed, who led to Dulgadir after his defeat by the Ottomans,118 were suf-
icient reasons for Mehmed to accept the Mamluk proposal in 1471 that
Mehmed, while retaining his inl uence over the beylik, should withdraw his
support from Şehsuvar.119 With this guarantee secured, the Mamluks moved
against Şehsuvar, sending a force against him and detaching the Turcoman
beys’ support from him by a combination of bribery and reference to their
agreement with the Ottoman sultan.120 In 1472, Şehsuvar was captured and
taken to Cairo, where, with a chain round his neck, he was paraded before
the populace.121
Not content merely with the removal of Şehsuvar, the Mamluks, who per-
ceived Mehmed’s support for Şehsuvar as a direct sign of hostility,122 now put
their own man, Şahbudak, back on the throne, provoking Mehmed to com-
plain to the Mamluk sultan Quaytbay that the Mamluks had not kept their
word that the beylik was to remain under Ottoman control. The Mamluk
response did nothing to improve relations between the two states, for
Quaytbay simply pointed out that what had been said had only been for prag-
matic necessity, laconically commenting “whatever we said, we said, and we
tricked the enemy”.123
Mehmed had no intention of abandoning his control over Dulgadir, and
for this purpose he made use of Şahbudak’s brother Alaüddevle, who had,
after Şehsuvar’s execution in Cairo, taken refuge at the court in Amasya of
Mehmed’s son, and Alaüddevle’s son-in-law, Bayezid, the future Bayezid II,
who had married Alaüddevle’s daughter Ayşe Hatun, mother of the future
Selim I.124 Alaüddevle was initially unsuccessful in his attack on Dulgadir, for
he was defeated by Şahbudak’s forces, and the heads of the Ottoman soldiers
ighting with him were sent to Egypt, where, on the sultan’s order, they were
used in games of polo, news which, when it reached Mehmed, was most
117 Ibid., pp. 395–6.

120 Ibid.
123 Ibid., bab 174, p. 577.
89
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displeasing to him.125 Alaüddevle’s second attack, however, this time with

increased Ottoman military support, was a success. Şahbudak led to Egypt,
and Alaüddevle took over the beylik.126
The confrontation between the Ottomans and the Mamluks over Dulgadir
was only one of the fault lines between the two states, and given Mehmed’s
determination to stamp his control over Anatolia, demanding the instant
appearance before him at the beginning of his reign of representatives from
all in his territories, from the “Arabs, Persians, Bulgars and Indians”,127 conl ict
with the Mamluks, despite initial cordial relations,128 was inevitable. The cool-
ing of relations was clear in the failure of the Mamluks to send an envoy to con-
gratulate Mehmed on his successful campaign against the İsfendiyaroğulları
and Trabzon, something other states did not neglect to do and which Mehmed
interpreted as a breach of etiquette among allies. In response, Mehmed did not
send an envoy to congratulate Khushqadam when he ascended the Mamluk
throne in 1461.129 Mehmed’s perceived interference over the pilgrimage route
further served to sour relations. Responding to a report that the wells on the
road to Mecca were in a total state of collapse, Mehmed sent men and money
for their repair together with letters addressed to Mamluk oicials in which
he demanded that assistance be given to his men,130 an approach not received
well by the Mamluks, who, regarding Mehmed’s ofer as a “trick”, replied
“are we powerless that he [Mehmed] should repair our wells?”131 Although
Aşıkpaşazade reported that the Mamluks were inl uenced by the claim of the
ruler of Karaman that Mehmed was simply using the issue of the wells as a
pretext for inciting the emir of Mecca against them,132 they were in any case
touchy over any perceived infringement of their control of the holy places, a
source of considerable prestige for them, and responded later in a similar vein
to Uzun Hasan’s attempt to gain inl uence in the same region.133
Despite the increasing hostility caused by the struggle for inl uence in
Karaman and Dulgadir, diplomatic contacts and exchanges of ambassadors
continued between the Ottomans and the Mamluks, but rather than serving
to normalise relations, they fed into further tension. Mehmed addressed the
125 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 175, p. 578; Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, p. 79.
128 Shai Har-el, Strugle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War, 1485–1491
(Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1995), pp. 77–8.
129 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 171, pp. 572–3.
130 Ibid., p. 572; Tansel, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, p. 330.
132 Ibid.
133 Har-el, Strugle, pp. 96–8.
90
Mamluk sultan as “my brother” rather than “my father” in a letter he sent
him, and his envoy refused to kiss the ground before the sultan; the Mamluk
sultan in turn insulted Mehmed by sending a mere low-level oicial to his
court. Such strained relations continued until Mehmed’s death in 1481.134
In view of such rifts between the two states, some Ottoman sources
argued that the initial destination of Mehmed’s campaign which resulted in
the expulsion of Pir Ahmed from Karaman was in fact Egypt. Tursun Bey
describes Mehmed’s aim as being the forcible removal of the Circassians, that
is the Mamluks, from the sultanate of Egypt and the taking of “the throne of
the prophet Joseph”.135 In 1481, Mehmed prepared another long-distance cam-
paign, the destination of which was unclear, for although its general direction
was known, whether it was aimed at the Iranians or the Arabs was not,136
it being Mehmed’s custom that “when he organised a campaign he would
tell no one where he was going”.137 Tursun Bey implies that its target was
the Mamluks, for he states that Mehmed Paşa, in seeking to comfort the ill
Mehmed, who was to die shortly into this campaign, said, “All bounteous
God willing, you will be sultan of Egypt”.138
Upon his death, Mehmed was succeeded by his son Bayezid, who imme-
diately found himself in a power struggle wth his brother Cem, a struggle
from which the Mamluks sought to beneit. Defeated by Bayezid, Cem led to
the protection of the Mamluk sultan Quaytbay, who received him with great
enthusiasm, saying, “you are my son, do not be sad”,139 and gave him per-
mission to go on pilgrimage.140 This was not the irst time the Mamluks had
received members of the Ottoman royal family. In the irst years of Murad
II’s reign, the grandchildren of Süleyman Çelebi, one of the unsuccessful
contenders for the throne in the succession struggle after 1402 and brother
of Mehmed I, took refuge with the Mamluk sultan, who refused to hand
them over to Murad.141 In 1482, Cem returned to Anatolia, supported by the
Mamluk sultan, who provided troops according to Cam-ı Cem Ayin, and again
attacked his brother. Defeated in battle near Ankara, Cem led and boarded
134 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, babs 172–6, pp. 575–9; Har-el, Strugle, p. 79.
136 Ibid., p. 181.
139 Vakıat-ı Sultan Cem, in Nicolas Vatin, Sultan Djem: Un prince ottoman dans l’Europe du xve
siècle d’après deux sources contemporaines: Vâkı‛ ât-ı Sultân Cem, Œuvres de Guillaume Caoursin
(Ankara, 1997), p. 131.
140 Ibid., p. 133.
141 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, ‘Memlûk Sultanları Yanına İltica Etmiş Olan Osmanlı Hanedanına
Mensup Şehzadeler’, Belleten 17, 68 (1953), 519–35 at pp. 525–6.
91
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a boat at Antalya. Unable to reach Egypt, he landed instead at Rhodes and

disappeared into the hands of the Hospitallers.142 Bayezid was not to forget
this Mamluk support of Cem,143 which he perceived as evidence of continued
Mamluk hostility, commenting, in Aşıkpaşazade’s account, “how strange are
these Egyptians. They did not conclude a friendship with my father, and with
me, too, they began with enmity. And what is more, my brother became a
prisoner of the inidel because of them”.144
The hostility occasioned by Mamluk support of Cem was increased by
Mamluk seizures of envoys on their way to Istanbul from the Bahmani ruler
of the Deccan in India.145 This increasing rift in relations was perceived by
Alaüddevle, who had shown his loyalty to his son-in-law during the Cem
afair,146 as an opportunity to attack and, in 1483, he beseiged the Mamluk-
held castle of Malatya. In response, Quaytbay despatched troops against him.
Realising that he would be unable to resist, Alaüddevle appealed to Bayezid
in 1484 for military aid, saying, “give me troops, let me conquer the Arab
vilayet and let it be my sultan’s [i.e., Bayezid’s]”.147 Ottoman military support
was despatched, but despite initial success, the Ottoman-Dulgadiroğlu forces
were defeated.148 The warning, however, was clear, and the threat of a direct
conl ict with the Ottomans caused Quaytbay, for whom covert operations
were desirable but not open warfare, to backpeddle. Adding “inestimable
gifts” to those he had seized from the Bahmani envoys, he despatched both
his own ambassador and the Bahmanis to Istanbul.149 But, in the words of
Kemalpaşazade, “the matter of enmity was not removed”,150 and Bayezid pre-
pared to take the ofensive in Çukurova (Cilicia) against the Mamluks.
Bayezid’s determination to attack was encouraged by an intelligence
report that the Mamluks were occupied with a Bedouin revolt and that the
Turcomans were ravaging the Syrian countryside.151 He therefore sent forces
under Karagöz Paşa, then in Konya, to Çukurova. Aşıkpaşazade justiies this
142 Bayatlı Mahmud Oğlu Hasan, Câm-ı Cem Āyîn, in Osmanlı Tarihleri I, ed. Fahrettin Kırzıoğlu
(Istanbul, 1949), p. 397.
143 Kemalpaşazade (İbn Kemal), Tevariḫ-i Âl-i Osman, VIII. Defter, ed. Ahmet Uğur (Ankara,
1997), pp. 84–5.
145 M. C. Şehabeddin Tekindağ, ‘İkinci Bayezid Devrinde Çukur-Ova’da Nüfuz Mücâdelesi.
İlk Osmanlı-Memlûklu Savaşları (1485–1491)’, Belleten 31, 123 (1967), 345–73 at p. 348;
Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, pp. 83–4.
146 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, pp. 35–7.
148 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, pp. 82–3; Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, pp. 80–2.
149 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, p. 85; Oruç, Tarihi, p. 136, facsimile 94b.
150 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, p. 85.
151 Har-el, Strugle, pp. 133–4.
92
attack by claiming that the inhabitants of Çukurova requested Ottoman help

against the tyranny of the Mamluks and because of continuous Mamluk sup-
port for the Varsaklar and Turgutoğulları, who were constantly attacking the
Ottoman vilayet of Karaman.152 During this successful attack, the Ottomans
occupied the castles of Tarsus, Adana and Gülek.153 Responding immediately,
the Mamluks inl icted a humiliating defeat on the Ottomans at Adana in 1486,
and the beylerbeyi of Anadolu, Hersekoğlu Ahmed Paşa, was captured.154
Although the climate of the region had proved a problem for the Ottoman
soldiers155 and, in an attempt to rescue the honour of the defeated troops,
Oruç had described the Ottomans as “left powerless” before the unstoppable
might of the “Arab bandits”,156 the humiliation was clear. The Mamluks, in the
words of Aşıkpaşazade,
took them prisoner, they lined them up, hungry, barefoot, naked, and some they
sent to Aleppo, some to Damascus and some to Egypt. In every city they reached
they had an inidel cross hung insultingly round their necks, those who could not
walk and who remained on the road, they decapitated, they martyered them . . .
they drove Hersekoğlu with insults to Egypt, and they made him kiss the feet of the
throne of the sultan of Egypt.157
The day on which the Ottoman captives were brought into the presence of
the Mamluk sultan was deined in a Mamluk inscription from 1496 as “a day
the like of which had not been seen in the history of the kings”.158
The Mamluks were busy not merely on the military front, for Quaytbay,
according to a rumour in a letter received by Bayezid II in 1487, was in pursuit
of Cem, ofering the grand master of Rhodes, Pierre d’Aubusson, money to
secure possession of the Ottoman sultan’s brother159 while at the same time
investigating the possibility of an anti-Ottoman alliance with the West.160
Faced with military defeat and political intrigue, Bayezid once more sent
Ottoman forces with “cannons, guns and a great quantity of equipment”161
152 Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, bab 178, p. 555 and bab 179, p. 581.
153 Ibid., bab 178, p. 581; Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, p. 87.
154 Oruç, Tarihi, pp. 137–9, facsimile 95a–97a.
156 Oruç, Tarihi, p. 138, facsimile 95b.
157 Ali (ed.), Tevarih-i Ali Osman. Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi (Istanbul, 1332), p. 231.
158 Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova’, pp. 356–8, quotation at p. 358.
159 Jacques Lefort (ed.), Documents grecs dans les archives de Topkapı Sarayı. Contribution à
l’histoire de Cem Sultan. Topkapı Sarayı Arşivlerinin Yunanca Belgeleri. Cem Sultan’ın Tarihine
Katkı, trans. Hatice Gonnet (Ankara, 1981), p. 175.
161 Necdet Öztürk (ed.), Anonim Osmanlı Kroniği (1299–1512) (Istanbul, 2000), p. 132, facsimile
83a.
93
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under the command of Davud Paşa against the Varsaklar and Turgutoğulları,
whom the Ottomans had been unable to subjugate and who had supported
Cem against Bayezid, collaborating with the Mamluks and choosing “the
route of rebellion”.162 Although inl icting a severe defeat on the Varsaklar and
the Turgutoğulları, Davud Paşa, following the orders of the sultan, did not
extend the campaign but withdrew.163 A few months later, the Ottoman army
entered Çukurova to capture various castles.
In despatching troops against the Varsaklar and the Turgutoğulları, the
Ottomans had been aware of the possibility of a clash with Mamluk forces
and had even despatched an Ottoman leet into the Mediterranean with this
in mind. When they entered Mamluk-controlled territory, they were defeated
by the Mamluks in battle in 1488 at Ağa Çayırı, near Adana.164 Davud Paşa
had earlier, during the Varsak campaign, called for a widening of operations
and for a direct war with the Mamluks, arguing that all eyes were focused on
events in the region and if the Ottomans did not go for war then all their ene-
mies there would revolt.165 The observing eyes were not merely those of their
enemies but also of friends who were made uneasy by the poor Ottoman per-
formance. The defeat at Ağa Çayırı led Alaüddevle, who had until this point-
given open support to the Ottomans, to change sides. In reality, Alaüddevle
had, since his ascent to the throne, tried to play both sides, displaying an
attachment also to the Mamluks,166 but the Mamluks had not trusted him,
regarding him as hostile because of his connection with the Ottomans.167
Wishing to prove his loyalty to the Mamluks, Alaüddevle sent one of his sons
as a hostage to Quaytbay and married his daughter to the son of Özbey, the
commander of the Mamluk army. The Ottoman response to this shift in alle-
giance was to support Alaüddevle’s brother Şahbudak, who had led from
the Mamluks to Ottoman protection.168 With Ottoman support, Şahbudak
attacked in 1489 but was defeated by Alaüddevle, and during the encounter
the sancak beyi of Kayseri, Mihailoğlu İskender Bey, was captured.
Despite these setbacks, the Ottomans managed to hold various castles,
including Sis (Kozan) and Tarsus. Quaytbay sent an ambassador to Bayezid,
162 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, p. 11 and p. 103.

163 Oruç, Tarihi, p. 139, facsimile 96a–96b; Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova’, pp. 359–61.
164 Oruç, Tarihi, pp. 141–3, facsimile 98a–99a; Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova’, pp. 363–7; Öztürk,
Anonim, pp. 134–5, facsimile 84b–85a.
165 Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova’, p. 361.
166 Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, p. 80.
168 Ibid., pp. 115–17; Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, pp. 85–8; Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova’, pp. 368–70.
94
who demanded, “Give back the castles that you have taken in Çukurova,
otherwise be it on your own head.”169 Bayezid, already greatly enraged by
the Mamluks, rejected the ambassador’s proposal and imprisoned him.170
In response, Mamluk forces, together with troops from Dulgadir, laid
siege to Kayseri but, upon hearing that an Ottoman force was approach-
ing, abandoned the siege and instead plundered the surrounding region.171
Although Ottoman control was thus far from secure, Bayezid did not him-
self set out on campaign. According to Tursun Bey, the reason for this was
Bayezid’s perception of his own superiority over the Mamluks, who were
“slaves [kul]”, and thus he despatched his own “slaves” against them.172
Haniwaldanus, however, explained this failure as being due to the rumour
that Cem would come to Istanbul, Bayezid therefore not wishing to leave
the capital.173 That Haniwaldanus may well have been correct is indicated
by Quaytbay’s request to the pope for Cem. Intending to lead a campaign
with Cem against Bayezid, Quaytbay promised that he would return the
cities which had previously been in Christian hands, including Istanbul, to
the Christians.174
By 1491, Bayezid was preparing for a campaign against the Mamluks under
his own command,175 but both sides were by this time exhausted and both
were inclined to come to a settlement. The Ottomans had been defeated in
most of the encounters of the war, their resources drained and their prestige
severely dented. The Mamluks had expended much manpower and money
in order to secure the existing status quo but were not in a position to pur-
sue the war further. This mutual exhaustion forced peace on both, and, after
an exchange of ambassadors, peace was arranged.176 The Ottomans returned
Tarsus, Adana and their other conquests to the Mamluks and accepted the
former frontier between them.177 This was in reality a humiliating conclusion
to the war for the Ottomans, and one which Ottoman sources sought to jus-
tify. Thus, Bayezid, the “gazi sultan”, was presented as agreeing to these terms
169 Ali, Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi, p. 239.

170 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, p. 117; Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova, p. 369; Selahattin Tansel, Sultan
II. Bâyezit’in Siyasî Hayatı (Istanbul, 1966), p. 113.
171 Ali, Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi, p. 239.
173 Kreutel, Haniwaldanus, p. 20.
175 Tansel, Sultan II. Bâyezit, p. 113.
176 Ali, Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi, p. 240; Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, pp. 122–3; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı
Tarihi, II, pp. 194–5; Har-el, Strugle, pp. 204–14.
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because the income of the region of Çukurova, which he was returning to

the Mamluks, was in any case used for Mecca and Medina, holy sites for both
states, thus making the ownership of the area, from a religious point of view,
immaterial.178 Further, the war had closed the pilgrimage route, which would
now be open, while the end of the conl ict would free Bayezid to devote his
energies to ighting the Christian inidels.179 Regardless of any justiication,
“the world found peace and security”, in the words of Oruç, and communica-
tion and travel between the two states recommenced.180
From this period on, there was no direct clash between the Ottomans and
Mamluks, but nor was there an environment of total security.181 However,
there were apparently attempts to cement a sound relationship. After
Quaytbay’s death in 1496, his son Mansur requested Bayezid’s daughter in
marriage in 1498. This request was accepted in order, according to Oruç,
to create a kinship between them.182 The relations, which were in any case
improving, were made tighter because of the Safavid threat.183 In 1502, the
Ottomans sent an envoy to Cairo to propose joint cooperation against the
Safavids.184 In this climate, although no actual agreement was reached,
the Ottomans and the Mamluks were very careful over their relations, to
the extent that when Bayezid’s son, Korkud, led in 1509 to the Mamluk
court, the sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri was most cautious in his handling of the
situation and refused to grant him permission to go on pilgrimage without
Bayezid’s consent, stressing “there is no division between us and the sultan of
Rum”.185 Upon Bayezid’s not agreeing to Korkud’s pilgrimage, Korkud was
returned to Ottoman territory.186 In 1511, Bayezid, on the request of Qansuh
al-Ghawri, sent both men and construction material for the building of ships
to be used against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.187
178 Ali, Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi, p. 240. See also Tekindağ, ‘Çukur-Ova’, p. 372; Har-el, Strugle, p. 211.
180 Oruç, Tarihi, p. 146; p. 147, facsimile 101a and 102a.
181 Tansel, Sultan II. Bâyezit, pp. 115–16; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 195; W. W. Cliford,
‘Some Observations on the Course of Mamluk-Safavi Relations (1502–1516/908–922): I+II’,
Islam 70 (1993), pt. II, 245–78 at p. 276.
183 Selahattin Tansel, ‘Yeni Vesikalar Karşısında Sultan İkinci Bayezit Hakkında Bazı Mütalâalar’,
Belleten 106, 27 (1963), 183–236 at p. 206.
184 Cliford, ‘Observations’, pt. II, p. 268.
185 V. L. Ménage, ‘Edirne’li Rûhî’ye Atfedilen Osmanlı Tarihinden İki Parça’, in Ord. Prof.
İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı’ya Armağan (Ankara, 1988), pp. 311–33 at p. 321.
186 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, ‘II inci Bayezid’in Oğullarından Sultan Korkut’, Belleten 30, 120
(1966), 550–9.
187 Abdüssamed Diyarbekri, Tarih, in Benjamin Lellouch, Les Ottomans en Égypte: Historiens et
conquérants au XVe siècle (Paris and Louvain, 2006), p. 294.
96
The rise of the Safavids

While Bayezid, freed of Cem, who died in 1495, and of the Mamluks, the war
with whom had ended in 1491, occupied himself with afairs in the west, a new
political power centre was rising beyond the eastern borders of the Ottoman
Empire. The turmoil round the Akkoyunlu throne created a power vacuum
in the region which was illed not by the Ottomans but by Isma‘il, the son of
Haydar, the şeyh of the Safavids of Ardabil, a Sui order which was established
in Ardabil in Azerbaijan at the beginning of the fourteenth century and came
to attract followers in Azerbaijan, Syria and Anatolia,188 where the order had
many followers in Teke, Hamit and among the Karamanoğulları.189
The Safavid order’s popularity was not limited to the common people, for
the şeyhs of the order had established close connections with the political
powers of the region in which they functioned. The reputation of the order
reached the Ottoman sultans in Bursa and every year they sent “çerağ akçesi”
(money given by a mürid to a şeyh) to Ardabil.190 With the coming to the head
of the order of Cüneyd in 1447, its political nature became more pronounced.
Cüneyd’s political ambition, together with his growing number of followers,
alarmed the Karakoyunlu ruler, Şah Cihan, then ruler of Azerbaijan. Pressured
by Şah Cihan and with the consent of his uncle Şeyh Cafer, Cüneyd, accom-
panied by his closest followers, left Ardabil for Ottoman territory. Presenting
prayer beads, a prayer mat and a Qur’an to Murad II, Cüneyd requested permis-
sion to settle in Ottoman territory in order “to occupy himself with prayer”.
After consultation with his vezir Halil Paşa, Murad, suspicious that Cüneyd’s
aims were political, not religious, rejected his request, commenting that “there
cannot be two sultans on one throne”. Presenting Cüneyd with 200 lorins,
he expelled him from Ottoman territory.191 Wandering through Anatolia and
Syria, Cüneyd sought a location in which to settle, even undertaking a gaza
from Canik against Trabzon in 1456, but without success.192 Finally Cüneyd
found protection in 1456 at the court of the Karakoyunlus’ main rival, the
Akkoyunlu Uzun Hasan. Uzun Hasan’s motivation for his support of Cüneyd
was political rather than religious and, “hoping to catch from his shirt the aura
188 V. Minorsky (trans. and ed.), Tadhkirat al-mulūk: A Manual of Ṣafavid Administration (circa
1137/1725) (London, 1943), pp. 190–1; H. R. Roemer, ‘The Safavid Period’, in Jackson and
Lockhart, The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6, pp. 191–3.
189 Hinz, Uzun Hasan, p. 8.
190 Ibid., p. 7.
191 Aşıkpaşaoğlu Ahmed Aşıki, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, in Osmanlı Tarihleri I, ed. Çiftçioğlu Nihal
Atsız (Istanbul, 1949), pp. 79–318 at p. 249.
192 Hinz, Uzun Hasan, pp. 19–22.
97
E b ru b oya r
of sanctity of his ancestors,193 he married him to his sister.194 This matrimonial

connection strengthened Cüneyd’s hand. News of his marriage reached “even
. . . the farthest corners of Rūm and Syria” and attracted halifes of other şeyhs
to him.195 Cüneyd’s connection with Uzun Hasan was not satisfactory from an
Ottoman point of view and, according to Haniwaldanus, it was at this time
that Mehmed II, in contrast to the practice of his father, ceased sending the
“çerağ akçesi” to the Safavid order.196
After only three years in Akkoyunlu territory, Cüneyd returned to Ardabil,
where he was, however, unable to settle. From then on until his death in 1460,
he became involved in various conl icts until he was killed ighting Sultan
Halil, the ruler of Shirvan. His position was later taken up by his son Haydar,
who was brought up by his uncle Uzun Hasan and then married to his cousin,
the daughter of Uzun Hasan and Despina Hatun, a marriage which produced
Isma‛il, the future founder of the Safavid state.197
Haydar’s ambition when he assumed leadership of the order in Ardabil
was, according to Fadullah b. Ruzbihan Khunji, to change “the (dervish) cap
of poverty for a crown of world domination”.198 Putting religious consider-
ations to one side, he focused his energies on the capture of Shirvan. Haydar’s
campaigns against Shirvan and against the Circassians greatly concerned the
Akkoyunlu ruler Yakub,199 as well as Bayezid, for, as Khunji pointed out in
1487, the Ottoman sultan, “despite all his army and dominions, was afraid
of the turbulence of the subjects of the shaykh”.200 Haydar’s success would
have had serious implications for the Ottomans as it would have attracted and
incited trouble among his followers within Ottoman territory. The Ottomans
were, however, rescued from this possibility by the removal of Haydar from
the scene by Sultan Halil’s son, who had secured assistance from Yakub, dur-
ing a campaign against Shirvan in 1488. Under Haydar, the order had thus
gained a more military outlook, and it was during the period of Haydar’s
leadership that the order’s followers had adopted the distinctive 12-pleated red
headgear201 from which they, and later Safavid subjects and Ottoman subjects
193 Minorsky, Persia, p. 63.

196 Kreutel, Haniwaldanus, pp. 35–6.
197 Hinz, Uzun Hasan, pp. 33–6, 62–4.
199 Aşıkpaşaoğlu, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, p. 249; Hinz, Uzun Hasan, pp. 65–76; Minorsky, Persia,
pp. 66–82; David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040–1797 (London, 1988), p. 110.
98
loyal to the Safavid state, got their name “red crowned”, “red-headed” and
“red head”.202
In 1494, Haydar’s young son Isma‘il became head of the Safavid order in
place of his older brother Sultan Ali, who had been killed by the Akkoyunlu.
Following his father and grandfather, Isma‛il set out to establish a state. As
a result of a rapid series of military successes, the initially limited number
of Isma‘il’s followers quickly increased and were joined by the Ustacalu,
Şamlu and Rumlu populations of Sivas, Amasya and Tokat, the Tekelü from
Antalya, and the Turgutoğulları and Varsaklar from the Karaman region.203
In 1500, Isma‘il appeared on the Ottoman frontier at Erzincan to be joined
by his followers who were Ottoman reaya204 and who “began to sell up lock,
stock and barrel, to leave [their homeland] and to help their şeyhs”.205 The dra-
matic nature of this migration of Turcomans from Teke is graphically illus-
trated by Kemalpaşazade’s account: “[A]ll was in turmoil and they all wanted
to leave. The Turks left their territories, selling their houses for nothing”.206
These Anatolian Turcoman tribes provided the military force upon which
Isma‛il’s state largely relied for its power,207 and it was with their support that
he took the Akkoyunlu capital, Tabriz, in 1501 and made it the capital of his
own state.
The regions in Anatolia where Isma‛il was popular were territories in
which the Ottomans had so far been unable to consolidate their hold. Apart
from the perennial problem of the Turcoman tribes such as the Varsaklar and
the Turgutoğulları, the Ottomans had still to contend with descendants of
the Karamanoğulları, even though the state itself had been extinguished by
Mehmed II in 1474. In 1501, a Karamani pretender, Mustafa Bey, attracted the
support of the Varsaklar in Taşeli and pillaged Larende. Although defeated by
the Ottomans, the pretender escaped.208 According to Aşıkpaşazade, corrup-
tion in the system of registering timars drove the sipahis in Karaman to sup-
port Mustafa.209 Allouche has argued that the main reason for Isma‛il coming
202 See, for example, Oruç, Tarihi, p. 219, facsimile 148b; Öztürk, Anonim, pp. 139–40, facsimile
129–30.
203 Faruk Sümer, Safevî Devletinin Kuruluşu ve Gelişmesinde Anadolu Türklerinin Rolü (Ankara,
1999), pp. 18–19; Minorsky, Tadhkirat al-mulūk, pp. 190–5; Ghulam Sarwar, History of Shāh
Ismā‘īl Ṣafawī (Aligarh, 1939), pp. 32–9.
204 Rumlu Hasan, Ahsenü’t Tevârih, p. 51.
207 Morgan, Medieval Persia, pp. 118–19. See also Masashi Haneda, Le Châh et les Qizilbāš: Le
systeme militaire safavide (Berlin, 1987).
208 Oruç, Tarihi, pp. 207–9, facsimile 142a–143a.
209 Ali, Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi, pp. 260–1.
99
E b ru b oya r
in person to Erzincan at this date was to ally with this pretender, whose sup-
port was considerable, and to iniltrate Ottoman territory.210
Ottoman structural reforms aimed at strengthening the state’s control and
imposing irm authority alienated large elements of the population, and even
if Bayezid II reversed some of his father’s more unpopular land reforms, exist-
ing structures had sustained considerable damage.211 An administrative crisis
which had made itself felt at the beginning of the sixteenth century deepened
as a result of rising inancial problems. There were complaints of Bayezid’s
withdrawal from the day-to-day running of the state, leaving the administra-
tion in the hands of incompetent vezirs, and of the subsequent bribery and
corruption, timars which had previously been distributed according to mili-
tary competence now being sold for money. Many sipahis were thus driven
into opposing the state, while the state itself, unable to increase income
through campaigns, sought to raise revenue by means of high taxation.212
In such an environment, Isma‘il became, according to Celalzade, author
of a eulogy for Selim I, a source of salvation for the Anatolian population.
Those who had earlier left Anatolia to join Isma‘il and who now heard about
the “tyranny and terror” there sent news to their relations telling them that
Isma‘il “is just to the reaya and gives dirliks to useful and courageous men”.
Much of the Ottoman population thus turned to the Safavids,213 for their pros-
pects in Iran, where Isma‘il promised them a central role in the construction
of his state, were good, something that was not the case in the Ottoman
Empire.214
Apart from word-of-mouth reports among family members, friends and
acquitances, Isma‘il used his representatives, known as halife (khulafa),215 to
spread propaganda among his followers in Ottoman territory, or, as the six-
teenth-century historian Hadidi expressed it, to commit “treachery and deceit
in Rum and the Arab lands”, where they “led astray the ignorant populace”.216
210 Adel Allouche, The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conlict (906–962/1500–
1555) (Berlin, 1983), pp. 72–82.
211 Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, ‘Le règne de Selīm Ier; tournant dans la vie politique et
religieuse de l’empire ottoman’, Turcica 6 (1975), 34–48 at pp. 46–7.
212 Celalzade Mustafa, Celâl-zâde Mustafa Selim-Nâme, ed. Ahmet Uğur and Mustafa Çuhadar
(Ankara, 1990), pp. 55–60; Çağatay Uluçay, ‘Yavuz Sultan Selim Nasıl Padişah Oldu?’, Tarih
Dergisi 6, 9 (1954), 53–90 at pp. 54–5; Mustafa Akdağ, Türkiye’nin İktisadî ve İçtimaî Tarihi
(Istanbul, 2010), pp. 677–88; Mustafa Akdağ, Türk Halkının Dirlik ve Düzenlik Kavgası (Celalî
İsyanları) (Ankara, 1999), pp. 115–17.
213 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-Nâme, p. 59.
214 Morgan, Medieval Persia, p. 116.
215 R. M. Savory, ‘The Oice of Khalīfat al-Khulafā under the Ṣafawids’, Journal of the American
Oriental Society 85 (1965), 497–502 at p. 497.
216 Hadidi, Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman (1299–1523), ed. Necdet Öztürk (Istanbul, 1991), pp. 385–6.
100
Unable to prevent such propaganda, the Ottomans further failed to secure the
loyalty of their population in these regions by use either of political or eco-
nomic means, and although the Ottomans were militarily stronger, “Persian
propaganda was more subtle and penetrating”.217 The order, which was in
tune with a folk understanding of Islam and appealed in particular to the
nomadic Turcomans,218 secured an even stronger allegiance during the leader-
ship of Cüneyd and Haydar.219 Seyi Çelebi, writing at the end of the sixteenth
century, relates a conversation between Şeyh Cüneyd and the Karakoyunlu
Şah Cihan during which Şah Cihan asked if it was his army which was greater
or the followers of Cüneyd, to which Cüneyd replied, “both your army and
the Iranian reaya are my followers”.220 This conversation, according to Seyi
Çelebi, resulted in Cüneyd’s expulsion. Isma‘il now further strengthened
loyalty to him by the use of poems which he wrote in Turkmen Turkish
under the pseudonym Hatayi/Khatai.221 Even when Isma‘il moved to a more
Orthodox Twelver Imam understanding as the state religion, this close link
between him and the population of Anatolia was not weakened.222 The
şeyhülislam, Hoca Sadeddin, whose father was a member of the ulema and
who came to Istanbul after the taking of Tabriz by Selim I, condemned this
excessive devotion of Isma‘il’s followers who “on merely hearing his name,
prostrate themselves”.223
For the Ottomans, the Safavid threat went far beyond the economic one of
Ottoman reaya abandoning their land and migrating to Safavid territory, for
Isma‘il stated his intentions clearly in a line in the Mathnavi, written probably
in his youth, in which he stated, “I shall conquer Anatolia and Syria, and then
217 V. Minorsky, ‘Shaykh Bālī-Efendi on the Safavids’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 20, 1–3 (1957), 437–50 at p. 441.
218 J. R. Walsh, ‘The Historiography of Ottoman-Safavid Relations in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries’, in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt
(London, 1962), pp. 197–211 at pp. 202–4; Michel M. Mazzaoui, The Origins of the Ṣafawids:
Šī ‘ism, Ṣūi sm, and the Ġulāt (Wiesbaden, 1972), pp. 58–63; Morgan, Medieval Persia, pp.
110–11; Roemer, ‘The Safavid Period’, p. 223.
219 Minorsky, Persia, pp. 63–8; Aşıkpaşaoğlu, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, pp. 249–51; Ali, Aşıkpaşazade
Tarihi, pp. 264–9.
220 Josef Matuz (ed.), L’ouvrage de Seyfī Çelebī, historien ottoman du xve siècle (Paris, 1968), pp.
147, 208. For a diferent version of this conversation said to have occurred between Şeyh Sai
al-Din, the founder of the Safavid order, and Abu Said, the Ilkhanid sultan, see Mazzaoui,
The Origins of the Ṣafawids, p. 71.
221 V. Minorsky, ‘The Poetry of Shāh Ismā’īl I’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies 10, 4 (1942), 1006a–1053a at pp. 1007a–8a; Irène Melikof, ‘Le problème Kızılbaş’,
Turcica 6 (1975), 49–67 at pp. 57–60.
222 Kathryn Babayan, ‘The Safavid Synthesis: From Qizilbash Islam to Imamite Shi’ism’,
Iranian Studies 27, 1–4 (1993), 135–61 at p. 140.
223 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, ed. İsmet Parmaksızoğlu (Ankara, 1999), vol. 4, p. 171.
101
E b ru b oya r
think of conquering the Franks”.224 While he looked for an opportunity to

enter Ottoman territory, 225 the Ottoman reaya transferred their allegiance to
him, “wave[ing] their swords on every side, being traitors to the sultan and
committing treason”.226
As Marino Sanudo noted in his diary, the rising power of Isma‘il had for
years “given much thought”227 to Bayezid, who followed Isma‘il’s every
movement closely.228 In 1501, aware that Isma‘il’s strength came from his
Anatolian followers, he forbade their movement from his own territory to
Iran, orders he later renewed, instructing that those who disobeyed were
to be hanged and their goods seized,229 their names registered and the sul-
tan informed.230 These measures failed to staunch the low of followers to
Isma‘il, and Bayezid therefore ordered the enforced migration of all Suis
and “red crowned” in Anatolia and Rumeli, together with their children, to
the vilayet of Mora and the castles of Coron and Modon,231 and according to
the consul on Chios, to İnebahtı (Lepanto, Nafpaktos) and Albania.232 The
pitiful condition of those who were the victims of these enforced migrations
is clear from the consul’s letter of 27 July 1502, where he notes, “It is moving
to see the exhausted condition of these people and their wives and children”,
adding that “there is never a day in which 100 or 200 families do not pass
from Anatolia to Greece”.233 In an attempt to legitimise such measures, Oruç
commented that this was “the command of the sultan, it is the policy of the
sultan, this enforced migration was imposed before. It is the custom of the
sultans”.234
Bayezid’s attempt to isolate Isma‘il from his followers is also evident in his
conduct of diplomatic relations, where again he was at pains to minimise
any potential Safavid inl uence among his own population. Thus, while he
received Isma‛il’s envoys as envoys of a sultan,235 he forbade their approaching
224 For the original of this line, see Minorsky, ‘Shāh Ismā’īl I’, pp. 1041a, 1051a, 1025a.
227 Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti (ed.), Šāh Ismā‘īl I nei «Diarii» Marin Sanudo (Rome, 1979), 12,
p. 12.
228 See, for example, İlhan Şahin and Feridun Emecen (eds.), Osmanlılarda Divân-Bürokrasi-
Ahkâm. II. Bâyezid Dönemine Ait 906/ 1501 Tarihli Ahkâm Defteri (Istanbul, 1994), hüküm 453,
p. 125.
229 Ibid., hüküm 27, p. 8; hüküm 71, p. 21; hüküm 281, pp. 78–9.
230 Ibid., hüküm 454, p. 126.
231 Oruç, Tarihi, p. 219, facsimile 148b; Kreutel, Haniwaldanus, p. 45.
232 Amoretti, Šāh Ismā‘īl, 12, p. 12.
233 Ibid.
235 Ibid., facsimile 148b–149a.
102
the people along their routes.236 Isma‛il, in turn, was at pains to reassure
Bayezid that he had no territorial ambitions over Ottoman lands,237 request-
ing that permission be granted for his followers to join him.238 Not all his
messages were of reassurance, however. In 1510, he informed Istanbul of his
victory over the Uzbeks by sending Bayezid the straw-illed skin of the head
of Muhammad Shaybani Han, the han of the Sunni Uzbek state.239
Although Venetian observers, from the moment they became aware
of the rising power of Isma‘il, had been expecting a clash between the
Ottomans and the Safavids,240 neither Bayezid nor Isma‘il were yet ready
for war, and Bayezid contented himself with following Isma‘il’s struggle
with the Dulgadiroğlu and the Kurdish beys of the region.241 In 1507, when
Isma‘il advanced as far as Sivas within Ottoman territory in order to attack
the Dulgadiroğulları, Bayezid assembled a large army which, in the end,
remained idle in Ankara, observing the movements of Isma‘il’s forces.242
Şehzade Ahmed’s control of the routes between Tokat and Amasya efec-
tively prevented Isma‘il’s followers in Ottoman territory from joining him
on this occasion.243 Bayezid’s other son, Şehzade Selim, based at Trabzon,
conducted raids around Bayburt and Erzincan, both under Isma‘il’s control,
and campaigns against Georgia.244 Selim, convinced of the danger posed by
the Safavids, adopted a more aggressive response than his father, who was
anxious about Selim’s activities. Warning him that “I will not consent to
increasing our enemies”,245 he ordered him to withdraw from Isma‘il’s terri-
tory, the result, according to some sources, of complaints from Isma‘il about
Selim’s activities.246
Towards the end of his reign, the elderly Bayezid, who supported his son
Ahmed, was unable to prevent a succession struggle among his sons which
was fought out in Anatolia, where they held their governorships, and which
further deepened the power vacuum in the region, Hadidi commenting that
“Anatolia remained under foot, if there is no head, does the foot walk the
236 M. Akif Aydın, Bilgin Aydın and Ekrem Tak (eds.), İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri Üsküdar Mahkemesi
1 Numaralı Sicil (H. 919–927/ M. 1513–1521) (Istanbul, 2008), pp. 129–30.
237 Aşıkpaşaoğlu, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, p. 252; Tansel, Sultan II. Bâyezit, p. 240.
238 Allouche, Ottoman-Safavid, pp. 75–6.
240 Amoretti, Šāh Ismā‘īl, 3, p. 7; 6, p. 8; 12, p. 12.
242 Tansel, Sultan II. Bâyezit, pp. 240–1.
243 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, pp. 251–2.
244 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-Nâme, pp. 59–62; Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, pp. 259–60; Tansel,
Sultan II. Bâyezit, pp. 264–6.
246 Tansel, Sultan II. Bâyezit’, pp. 246–7; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 258.
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E b ru b oya r
road?”247 In 1511, a major revolt broke out under the leadership of a dervish
known as Şah Kulu Baba Tekeli, the son of Hasan Halife, who was in the ser-
vice of Şeyh Haydar.248 Bayezid had sent an annual sum as a gift both to the
leader of the revolt, described in Ottoman sources as “Şeytan Kulu” (Devil’s
Slave), and to his father.249 Thousands of sipahis, caught up in the power vac-
uum and the general collapse of authority in Anatolia, joined the movement
and gathered round Şah Kulu,250 who was convinced that “now an opportu-
nity has come for us”.251 The revolt was immensely destructive; according
to one contemporary source, even if “the Kızılbaş [i.e., Isma‛il] had come
himself, there would not have been this much disaster”.252 It exploded as a
result of internal Ottoman problems, there being no proof of direct Safavid
involvement, but when the Ottomans ultimately began to put it down, the
followers of Şah Kulu, who died in battle with the Ottomans, led to Isma‘il.
Isma‘il’s reception was not entirely warm, for he punished the commanders
of Şah Kulu’s followers, who had killed 500 merchants going from Tabriz
to Ottoman territory and pillaged their goods, and divided the followers
among his emirs.253 Amidst this confusion and chaos, Şehzade Selim seized
the throne.
Eastern expansion and consolidation

Instructed by Bayezid to “take revenge for the Ottomans on the Mamluks
and on the Kızılbaş for the people of Islam”,254 according to Süleyman I’s
grand vezir Lüti Paşa, Selim irst turned his sights on Isma‘il, who had rap-
idly extended the borders of his state from the Euphrates to Herat and to
Iraq, taken control of the regions of Erzurum, Erzincan and Kemah on the
Ottoman frontier, and reached the shores of the eastern Black Sea, where
only Rize and Hopa remained Ottoman possessions. “How”, Selim asked,
“can I turn a blind eye to that tyrant, for otherwise the lands of Rum will be
engulfed in sedition”.255
247 Hadidi, Tevârih, p. 363.
248 Rumlu Hasan, Ahsenü’t Tevârih, pp. 154–5, 157–8. Hasan Halife was also said to have served
Cüneyd; see Allouche, Ottoman-Safavid, p. 94.
249 Şahabettin Tekindağ, ‘Şah Kulu Baba Tekeli İsyanı’, Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi 3 (1967),
34–9 at p. 36.
250 Ibid., pp. 35–6, 39; Kreutel, Haniwaldanus, pp. 48–9.
251 Ludwig Forrer (ed.), Die Osmanische Chronik des Rustem Pascha (Leipzig, 1923), p. 26.
252 Şahabettin Tekindağ, ‘Şah Kulu Baba Tekeli İsyanı’, Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi 4 (1968),
54–9 at p. 55.
253 Rumlu Hasan, Ahsenü’t Tevârih, p. 155; Tekindağ, ‘Şah Kulu’, 4, pp. 58–9.
254 Lüti Paşa, Lüti Paşa ve Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman, ed. Kayhan Atik (Ankara, 2001), p. 196.
104
Although not directly involved in the Şah Kulu rebellion, Isma‘il had nev-
ertheless exploited the ensuing chaos, in 1512 sending his halife Nur Ali Rumlu
to the region, where he gathered many followers.256 Şehzade Ahmed’s son
Murad even “girded the Kızılbaş crown”257 and joined this revolt, unswayed
by his father’s eforts to dissuade him.258 Murad took refuge with Isma‘il,
thus providing him with a useful royal Ottoman pawn against Selim,259 while
Nur Ali’s successes mounted, Nur Ali even having the hutbe (sermon) read
in Isma‘il’s name in Tokat.260 According to intelligence which Selim received
from spies in December 1512 or January 1513, Isma‘il’s aim was to conquer
Anatolia with the help of Rumlu Dev Ali, to give the Rum beylerbeylik to
Murad and to divide the remaining territory among the Kızılbaş.261
Before his accession, Selim had been well aware of the major challenges
posed to Ottoman authority and legitimacy by the Safavids. The basic aim of
the campaigns organised by Selim against Georgia in 1508–9 and 1511 was to
prevent the movement from Ottoman territory to Isma‘il. Selim conducted
propaganda among his Anatolian troops, whom he had collected for these
campaigns and who returned home content with the booty gained, promis-
ing them that when he became sultan dirliks (land holdings) and high oices
would be given to those who deserved them, and instructing that this message
should be spread among the “brave and courageous” in the home regions to
which the soldiers were returning, thus encouraging the Anatolian popula-
tion to “abandon their inclination for friendship towards the Kızılbaş”.262
The Safavid threat was not conined to the eastern part of the empire, for
a section of the population in Rumeli, some of whom were there as a result
of the forced transfer under Bayezid, was sympathetic to Isma‘il. The states
in the west, too, were interested in Isma‘il. As early as 1502, Venice, at war
with the Ottomans, had established contact with Isma‘il and attempted to

257 Çağatay Uluçay, ‘Yavuz Sultan Selim Nasıl Padişah Oldu?’, İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat
Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi 7, 10 (1954), 117–42 at p. 128, note 25.
258 Ibid., pp. 127–31. According to Uluçay, Ahmed, despite Isma‘il’s encouragement, did not
cooperate with him (a view repeated in Sümer, Safevî, pp. 35–6, and Selah attin Tansel,
Yavuz Sultan Selim (Ankara, 1969, p. 32), but according to Tekindağ, Ahmed did cooperate
with Isma‘il; see Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, p. 52.
259 E.8758, Topkapı Palace Archives, Istanbul, in Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Introduction’,
in Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, Les Ottomans, les Safavides et leur voisins: Contribution à
l’histoire des relations internationales dans l’orient islamique de 1514 à 1524 (Leiden, 1987), pp.
40–1.
261 E.6478, Topkapı Palace Archives, in Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Introduction’, pp. 32–3.
262 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-Nâme, pp. 60–1.
105
E b ru b oya r
incite him to support the revolt of the Karamani pretender.263 The constant
failure of the policy pursued by Bayezid against Isma‘il led the West to over-
estimate Isma‘il and underestimate the Ottomans. The situation towards the
end of Bayezid’s reign, with the succession struggle among Bayezid’s sons,
the Şah Kulu revolt and, in the middle of 1511, the circulation of rumours
of Bayezid’s severe illness, seemed to conirm their views. In May, the grand
master of Rhodes, Emery d’Amboise, wrote to the English king Henry VIII
that, according to intelligence he had received, “last winter the Sophi [Isma‘il]
cut to pieces a whole army of the Turks” and concluded that Isma‘il “is able
to drive the Turks and Sultan from their dominions”.264
A conl ict between Isma‘il and Selim was, at least from Selim’s point of
view, inevitable. Although presented in religious terms as a Sunni–Shii clash,
it was in reality a struggle for political supremacy, as shrewdly noted by the
Protestant priest Schweigger, at the Habsburg embassy in Istanbul from 1578
to 1581, who commented that the two states concealed the hatred they felt
for each other “in a very masterly way behind problems of religion”.265 If one
accepts Mazzaoui’s explanation of the Safavid order’s leaning to Shii practices
as “religious change for political ends”,266 the same must be said of Selim’s
appropriation of a more orthodox Sunniism. Deining the religious belief of
the Turcomans, who remained outside the orthodox Sunni belief and iden-
tiied themselves with a heterodox belief system, as Shiism and “Raizilik”
(heresy) prepared the ground for a counter-propaganda campaign against the
Safavids,267 while the war against the Safavids was legitimised by designating
it a “cihad”.268
Before the Çaldıran campaign of 1514, Selim mobilised backing. He
requested support from the leading military men, explaining the Safavid
threat not merely as one undermining the allegiance of the population but
263 Amoretti, Šāh Ismā‘īl, 42–3, pp. 32–9.

264 R. H. Brodie (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 1,
pt. I (London, 1920), no. 766, p. 412 (10 May 1511).
265 Salomon Schweigger, Sultanlar Kentine Yolculuk, 1578–1581, ed. Heidi Stein and trans. Türkis
Noyan (Istanbul, 2004), p. 80.
266 Mazzaoui, Origins of the Ṣafawids, p. 73.
267 Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhidler (15.-17. Yüzyıllar) (Istanbul,
2003), pp. 99–100.
268 Ibid., p. 100. See also Minorsky, ‘Shaykh Bālī-Efendi’, pp. 437–50; Colin Imber, ‘Ideals and
Legitimation in Early Ottoman History’, in Süleyman the Magniicent and His Age: The
Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World, ed. Metin Kunt and Christine Woodhead
(London and New York, 1995), pp. 138–53 at pp. 147–9; Markus Dressler, ‘Inventing
Orthodoxy: Competing Claims for Authority and Legitimacy in the Ottoman-Safavid
Conl ict’, in Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, ed. Hakan T.
Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (Leiden and Boston, 2005), pp. 151–73.
106
as being behind sedition in the Ottoman army.269 Despite hesistancy among

some of the men of state about the wisdom of such a campaign, Selim was
determined,270 and sought support also among the religious scholars.271 Müftü
Hamza Saru Görez, one of the eminent religious scholars of the period,
issued a fetva deining the supporters of Isma‘il as “inidels and heretics”, a
description also applied to those who supported them, declaring it a duty and
an obligatory act “to destroy and disperse them”. This fetva permitted the kill-
ing of such men and the division of their goods, women and children “among
the gazis of Islam”.272 Kemalpaşazade, another leading religious scholar,
expressed a similar viewpoint and described the war against the Safavids as
a “cihad”.273 Armed with such religious pronouncements, Selim set out on
a campaign, justiied by the desire of Sunnis in Iranian territory for his help
and by Isma‘il’s ruination of mosques and mescits, oppression and murder of
Sunnis, contempt for religious books, and the Safavid practice of denigrating
the irst three rightly guided caliphs and the companions of the Prophet.274
Apart from providing justiication for the campaign against the Safavids,
Hamza Saru Görez’s fetva also created legitimacy for Selim’s actions against
his own subjects in Anatolia. According to the fetva, “if there is someone in this
vilayet [i.e., Ottoman territory] who is known as one of them [i.e., a Kızılbaş]
and/or is captured when going to Kızılbaş territory, let him be killed. This
entire group consists of people who are both inidels and heretics, and people
of sedition. Their killing is legitimate on both counts”.275 Before setting out
on campaign, Selim ordered the registration of known Safavid sympathisers
in Anatolia and had a large number of Turcomans killed. Various Ottoman
sources give the number of those registered and killed as 40,000,276 a igure
some historians have argued is improbably high in view of the total popula-
tion of Anatolia at that time, although, given the circumstances, it is probable
that Selim would have neutralised known and active supporters of Isma‘il
within Ottoman territory.277
269 İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-Nâme, ed. and trans. Hicabi Kırlangıç (Ankara, 2001), pp. 122–3.
270 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 259–60.
271 İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-Nâme, pp. 123–4.
272 Nos. 6401 and 12077, Topkapı Palace Archives, in Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, p. 55.
273 Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, p. 55.
274 Abdüsselam Bilgen (ed. and trans.), Adā’i-yi Şirāzi ve Selim-nāmesi (Ankara, 2007), pp. 60–2;
İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-Nâme, p. 125; Abdüssamed Diyarbekri, Tarih, pp. 296–8.
275 Nos. 6401 and 12077, Topkapı Palace Archives, in Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, p. 55.
276 Tekindağ quotes from Ebul Fazl, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, p. 55; Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih,
vol. 4, p. 176; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 258.
277 Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Selîm Ier et le refus du dialogue’, in Bacqué-Grammont, Les Ottomans,
les Safavides et leurs voisins, p. 53; Sümer, Safevî Devletinin Kuruluşu, p. 36.
107
E b ru b oya r
According to Rumlu Hasan, there were two immediate causes for the out-
break of the war: the insulting letter sent to Selim by Ustajalu Muhammad
Han, Isma‘il’s governor of Diyarbakır, and halife Nur Ali’s destructive cam-
paign in Anatolia.278 Added to this were the continuing relations between the
Safavids and groups of the Anatolian population, such as the Turgutoğulları,
whom the Ottomans were unable to control, and Isma‘il’s failure to congrat-
ulate Selim on his assumption of the Ottoman throne.279 In March 1514, Selim
set out from Edirne. His advance was hampered by problems over provision-
ing, increased considerably by Alaüddevle’s announcement that he would
not join the campaign. Instead, Selim secured provisions from the Georgian
Mirza Çabuk, the atabeg of Samtskhe-Saataboga, a bufer state between the
Ottomans and Safavids, although these were insuicient. Isma‘il’s policy of
destruction along Selim’s route and forcible migration of the population cre-
ated major problems over feeding a very large Ottoman army on the march
and forced Selim to bring provisions from Trabzon. Conscious of the inse-
curity in Anatolia, Selim left a reserve force behind him as he advanced east-
wards to ensure that any uprising would be put down.280
The diiculties of terrain, the problem over provisioning and the failure
of Isma‘il’s army to face the Ottomans in battle led to discontent among the
janissaries, whose tie to Bektaşi belief created suspicion about their attitude
towards Selim.281 With the support of some of their commanders, they began
to demand that the campaign be abandoned. Selim, not of the same opinion,
had the bearer of this demand, the beylerbeyi of Karaman, Hemden Paşa,
killed. The demands, however, continued, the janissaries even attempting to
force the sultan’s hand by iring on his imperial tent.282 Incensed, Selim com-
pared their loyalty to that of Isma‘il’s soldiers, who went willingly to meet
death, happy “to slice their own children to pieces with their own hands” for
their shah. The janissaries, showing no similar inclination, were even hinder-
ing their sultan in the conduct of the campaign.283
Selim’s campaign was further undermined by Isma‘il’s failure to engage in
battle, leading to an exchange of increasingly insulting letters between them.

279 Tansel, Yavuz, p. 32.
280 Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, pp. 59–60; Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 204–5; İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-
Nâme, p. 147; Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 183–91.
281 Tansel, Yavuz, 33; Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, p. 65.
282 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 187–94.
283 Ibid., pp. 192–3. See another version of the same speech related by Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali
in Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 264–5, note 3.
108
In language similar to that used by his grandfather to Uzun Hasan,284 Selim

sent letters and gifts, including a dervish cloak, a staf and a cloak, symbols of
dervishness, and even wine barrels, implying that “it more becomes the son of
the Sui to sit in the tekke”.285 In response, Isma‘il despatched a letter together
with opium paste and a golden opium pot, commenting that Selim’s letters
could only have been written by scribes lost in the oblivion of opium.286 Some
historians have argued that the opium and opium pot were sent in order to
imply that Selim, like his father, was an opium addict.287 Stressing his own
friendship with the Ottomans, Isma‘il made it clear that if Selim did not wish
such friendship, then he was ready for war.288 Enraged by these gifts and the
tone of the letter, Selim had Isma‘il’s envoy killed289 and sent a return missive
accusing Isma‘il of cowardice for failing to enter battle. The letter, accompa-
nied by a set of female garments, including a veil, advised Isma‘il to dress in
women’s clothing for “masculinity is illegitimate [haram] for you”.290
What eventually lured Isma‘il into battle was, according to some Ottoman
sources, a trick perpetrated by Selim’s spy, Şeyh Ahmed, who informed
Isma‘il that various Turcoman, Kurdish beys loyal to the Ottomans and men
of Rumeli would change sides during the battle. Relying on this false intel-
ligence, Isma‘il decided to ight.291 In August 1514, the two armies met in
the plain of Çaldıran, 80 kilometres to the south-east of Doğubeyazıt. The
Safavids were defeated, and Isma‘il, deserting his wife, or favourite, Taclu
Hanım, and his treasury, led from the battleield. Selim’s army entered the
Safavid capital, Tabriz, without opposition, and there the hutbe was read
in the name of the Ottoman sultan. Apparently met with joy, Selim, who
adopted a merciful policy towards its inhabitants, only remained in Tabriz a
few days292 for, despite his joyful reception, he did not feel secure surrounded
by Kızılbaş.293 His intention was to winter in Karabakh, but the commanders
and the janissaries wanted to return to Amasya, where they argued provisions
284 V. L. Ménage, ‘On the Constituent Elements of Certain Sixteenth-Century Ottoman

Documents’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 2 (1985), 283–304 at pp.
289–90.
286 Ibid., p. 185; Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, pp. 60–1.
287 See, for example, Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 263.
288 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, p. 185; Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, pp. 60–1.
289 Ibid.
290 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 190–1; Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 205.
291 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 195–7; Bilgen, Adā’i-yi Şirāzi, pp. 78–80;
Yavuz Senemoğlu (ed.), Haydar Çelebi Ruznâmesi (Istanbul, n.d.), pp. 73–4.
292 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 219; Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 220–1; Rumlu
Hasan, Ahsenü’t Tevârih, p. 184.
293 Tekindağ, ‘Yeni Kaynak’, pp. 71–2.
109
E b ru b oya r
were both more plentiful and cheaper. Left with no choice, Selim was forced
to pass the winter in Amasya.294 A short while after Selim had left Tabriz,
Isma‘il returned to the city.295
Despite the victory of Çaldıran, Selim’s work in the east remained unin-
ished, and Isma‘il’s capital, although captured, did not stay in Ottoman hands.
The lands on the western borders of the state did, however, pass under
Ottoman control. Taking Erzincan en route to Çaldıran, the Ottomans also
took Bayburt (1514) and Kemah (1515), and, after hard ighting, Diyarbakır,
Mardin and the surrounding area were added to Ottoman territory.296 Selim
was also successful in winning over some local Kurdish, Turcoman and Arab
rulers with the help of İdris-i Bitlisi, a respected member of the ulema and a
man of high standing among the Kurdish tribes. Regarding “the protected
lands of Rum” as the only place among the lands of Islam where there was
security, he had moved from Tabriz to Istanbul after Isma‘il’s conquest of
Tabriz in 1501 and had entered Bayezid’s service.297 In return for the loyalty
and collaboration of these tribes, Selim permitted them to continue to rule
their traditional lands, which included Bitlis, Hasan-Keyf and Imadiyye.298
In the aftermath of Çaldıran, Selim also campaigned against the beylik of
Dulgadir, a region the Mamluks considered under their own authority. In 1514,
Selim ordered Şehsuvaroğlu Ali, son of Şehsuvar, the brother of Alaüddevle,
to attack the sancak of Bozok, which was under the Dulgadiroğulları.
Şehsuvaroğlu Ali had taken refuge with the Ottomans during Bayezid’s reign
and had been made sancak beyi of Kayseri by Selim, whom he had served well
during the Çaldıran campaign. Şehsuvaroğlu Ali now attacked Bozok and
killed Alaüddevle’s son Süleyman, sending his head to Selim.299 In response,
Alaüddevle attacked the Ottoman supply lines during Selim’s campaign
against Kemah. After the taking of Kemah, Selim despatched the beylerbeyi of
Rumeli, Sinan Paşa, against Elbistan. The beylik of Dulgadir was conquered in
June 1515 and Şehsuvaroğlu Ali put in as ruler under Ottoman control.300
According to the Fetihname of the beylik of Dulgadiroğlu and of Kemah
which Selim presented to his son, the reason for the attack on Alaüddevle
was his failure to join the Ottomans during the Çaldıran campaign and, more
294 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 220; Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 221–30.
296 Tansel, Yavuz, pp. 70–89; İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-Nâme, pp. 261–301.
297 İdris-i Bitlisi, Heşt Bihişt, ed. Mehmet Karataş, Selim Kaya and Yaşar Baş, 2 vols. (Ankara,
n.d.), vol. 1, pp. 59–60.
298 İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-Nâme, pp. 236–46; Tansel, Yavuz, p. 78.
300 Ibid., pp. 97–8.
110
signiicantly, his agreement to give help to the Safavids.301 Alaüddevle, who had
earlier stabilised his relations with Shah Isma‘il, had not joined the Çaldıran
campaign, using his advanced age as an excuse, had forbidden the selling of
foodstufs and animal fodder to the Ottoman forces in his territories and even,
according to some sources, plundered Ottoman provisions and supplies.302
According to Kemalpaşazade, Alaüddevle was inconsistent in his allegiance,
loating like the wind between the Ottomans and the Mamluks, and it was
his incitement which had brought the two sultans into conl ict.303 Selim was
credited with claiming, when still a prince in Trabzon, that Alaüddevle had
proited from the rift in relations between the Ottomans and the Mamluks,304
a view supported by Alaüddevle’s remark about the two states: “I have two
hens, one lays gold, the other silver”.305
Unhappy with the Ottoman conquest of Dulgadir, which he had sought
through diplomatic channels to prevent, Qansuh al-Ghawri, the Mamluk sul-
tan, now came under intense pressure. Sending him the decapitated head of
Alaüddevle’s son and vezir,306 Selim announced, according to Lüti Paşa, that,
in efect, his head was next.307 Such a threat was not unexpected, for Qansuh
al-Ghawri thought that whoever emerged victorious from Çaldıran would
then invade Egypt.308
Selim was in fact merely waiting for an opportunity to invade. Bayezid’s
defeat had not been forgotten, and Selim’s countenance “was etched by the
lines of revenge”.309 The chance for revenge, according to Ottoman sources,
came with Shah Isma‘il’s anti-Ottoman agreement with Qansuh al-Ghawri
after his rout at Çaldıran.310 The existence of such an agreement is disput-
able, for although it is known that after his defeat Isma‘il approached the
Mamluks for an anti-Ottoman alliance, as he did with states in Europe, there
is no convincing proof that Qansuh al-Ghawri accepted this.311 In any case,
301 Senemoğlu, Haydar, pp. 92–3.

302 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-Nâme, pp. 165–6; Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, pp. 95–6.
303 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ VIII, p. 115; see also p. 117.
304 Tansel, Yavuz, p. 101, note 3.
306 Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, p. 99; Michael Winter, ‘The Ottoman Occupation’, in The
Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1: Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, ed. Carl E. Petry (Cambridge,
1998), pp. 490–516 at p. 495.
307 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 222.
308 Ibn Iyas, An Account of the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt in the Year A.H. 922 (A.D. 1516), trans. W.
H. Salmon (London, 1921), p. 1.
309 Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-Nâme, p. 174.
310 İdris-i Bidlisi, Selim Şah-Nâme, pp. 302–3; Celalzade Mustafa, Selim-Nâme, pp. 173–5; Lüti
Paşa, Tevârih, p. 222; Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 276–7.
311 Winter, ‘Ottoman Occupation’, pp. 495–6. See also Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 279–80.
111
E b ru b oya r
this claim gave Selim the necessary legitimacy for his campaign, a campaign
justiied, according to Hoca Sadeddin, because “those who help the enemy,
are enemies”.312
Concealing the true destination of the campaign, Selim acted as though
the assault was aimed at Iran. When the advance force under Sinan Paşa,
bypassing the Mamluk city of Malatya on Selim’s orders, requested permis-
sion to proceed to Diyarbakır, the Mamluk governor of Malatya refused.313
This suited Selim well and was interpreted as proof of an agreement between
the Mamluks and the Safavids.314 Still concealing his intentions, however, Selim
sent an envoy with a letter and valuable presents to Qansuh al-Ghawri.315 The
tone of this letter was misleading, for he addressed him as “my father” and
explained that he had conducted his campaign against Alaüddevle with his,
Qansuh al-Ghawri’s, permission.316 If the Mamluks wanted, he assured him, he
would remove Şehsuvaroğlu Ali. Selim also noted that he had put no impedi-
ment in the way of merchants bringing slaves to Qansuh al-Ghawri317 and
that the Arabic, Iranian and Ottoman merchants who did not have Safavid
goods on them had not been touched.318 Despite such reassuring words, Selim
had in fact, a few months earlier, forbidden merchants and slave traders from
entering Mamluk territory.319 Qansuh al-Ghawri, who did not believe in the
genuineness of the friendly tone of Selim’s letter, which Ibn Iyas described
as “a piece of trickery and deception”,320 advanced into Syria. Sending a fur-
ther letter to the sultan, now at Aleppo, and requesting sugar and sweetmeats
from him, Selim made it clear once again that his target was the Safavids.321
Qansuh al-Ghawri, however, remained unconvinced. In August 1516, the two
armies met at Marj Dabiq in Syria. The battle left the Mamluks defeated and
Qansuh al-Ghawri dead. The Ottomans took over control of greater Syria
and of the territory of the Ramazanoğulları, previously under the Mamluks
but who now switched to the Ottomans. At irst considering leaving the new
sultan Tumanbay in place in Egypt as an Ottoman vassal, an ofer in any

313 Forrer, Rustem Pacha, pp. 45–6; Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. 4, pp. 274–7.
315 Ibid., pp. 278–9.
316 Abdüssamed Diyarbekri, Tarih, pp. 306–7.
317 Ibn Iyas, Conquest, p. 16.
318 Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Études Turco-Safavides, I. Notes sur les blocus du com-
merce iranien par Selîm Ier’, Turcica 6 (1975), 68–88 at p. 76, note 15.
319 An entry from the Edremit Şeriye Sicili, from the beginning of Şevval 921, in Kamil Su,
‘Yavuz Selim ve Seferleri’, Ülkü, Halkevleri ve Halkodaları Dergisi 16, 93 (November 1940),
p. 262.
321 Ibid., pp. 32–3.
112
case rejected by the Mamluk ruler,322 Ottoman forces defeated the Mamluks
under Janbirdi al-Ghazali, who had been governor of Hamah under Qansuh
al-Ghawri and was now Tumanbay’s governor of Damascus at Khan Yunus,
near Gaza, which was followed by the defeat of the Mamluk army by Selim
at al-Ridaniyya, near Cairo, in January 1517. Tumanbay led, Selim entered
Cairo and the hutbe was read in his name. Permission was granted for three
days of pillaging and “Not a horse, nor mule, nor clothing, not anything great
or small was left untouched”.323 Tumanbay, however, continued to resist, and
there was ighting between Mamluk and Ottoman forces in the streets of
Cairo. Although the Ottomans put down such conl icts, Tumanbay escaped,
and so long as he remained alive, the total submission of Cairo proved impos-
sible. After a concerted pursuit, he was eventually captured and was handed
over to Şehsuvaroğlu Ali Bey, who hanged him at the Zuwayla Gate, the place
at which the Mamluks had hanged his father, Şehsuvar.324
With the surrender of the keys of Mecca and Medina, brought by the son of
the şerif of these cities to Selim in Cairo,325 Aşıkpaşazade’s prayer for Bayezid
II that “May God grant that his hutbe be read at the Kabe [Ka‘aba]”326 was now
realised by Selim. Selim, who remained in Egypt for eight months, appointed
Khayrbak to the governorship of Egypt. Former governor of Aleppo, his bad
relations with Qansuh al-Ghawri had led him to provide intelligence to Selim,
and after Selim’s victory he had openly sworn allegiance to the Ottoman
sultan. Passing from Egypt through Syria on his return to Istanbul, Selim
appointed another Mamluk, Janbirdi al-Ghazali, whom he had pardoned, to
the governorship of Syria.
The conquests of Selim’s reign had turned the Ottoman state into a large
Asian empire. The fall of the Mamluks had brought the Ottomans control
over important trade routes and had, even if only temporarily, weakened the
contacts between Iran and the West. After Selim’s death in 1520, his son and
successor Süleyman set out both to consolidate Ottoman control in the areas
his father had captured in the east and, following in his father’s footsteps, to
expand Ottoman territory still further.
One of Süleyman’s irst moves once on the throne was to dismantle vari-
ous of his father’s measures which had had negative economic and political
322 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 287–8.

324 Winter, ‘Ottoman Occupation’, pp. 496–504; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 284–92;
Uzunçarşılı, Anadolu Beylikleri, p. 178.
325 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 292; Tansel, Yavuz, pp. 195–6.
113
E b ru b oya r
efects. He gave permission for the return to Cairo of families whom Selim
had forced to move to Istanbul, where they had been living under misera-
ble conditions.327 He also reversed his father’s policy on trade with Iran and
normalised trade relations between the two states.328 Before the Çaldıran
campaign, Selim had banned Ottoman trade with the Safavid state. In conse-
quence, merchants had had their goods seized, and some had received harsh
punishment.329 After Çaldıran, Selim ordered that those who ignored this
prohibition should be put to death and all their goods and possessions, their
provisions and their slaves seized for the state.330 In compliance with Selim’s
order, the seized goods were included in the imperial treasury and kept in
Bursa and other places.331 As Ottoman territory expanded, so did the area to
which this strictly enforced trade ban applied.332 What lay behind this ban was,
according to Celalzade Mustafa, the fact that the Kızılbaş owed their power to
Anatolia, for it was from here that all their arms and equipment came.333 The
efect, however, was economically damaging for the Ottomans, the famous
Gelincik market of Bursa, for example, being turned into “the ruined abode
of the destitute”, and, because silk could not be found and cloth not pro-
duced, the workshops became “withered rose gardens, water mills without
water”.334 Application of the ban also resulted in the punishment of innocent
merchants, whose goods were unjustly seized. Complaints to Selim had no
efect, for he merely advised patience.335 Süleyman, in contrast, both over-
turned the ban and, in cases where Ottoman or Iranian merchants proved
that goods seized were theirs, the goods were either returned or the mer-
chants compensated.336 While this policy was an important step in his drive to
consolidate his power within his territories, it also represented the restoration
of an important source of income for Süleyman, who needed money.
Süleyman’s task was initially made more diicult due to suspicions that
he would be unable to ill the place of a sultan as powerful as his father. At
327 Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman X. Defter, ed. Şefaettin Severcan (Ankara, 1996), pp.
39–40.
328 Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih X, p. 44.
329 Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Notes’, pp. 69–73; Su, ‘Yavuz Selim ve Seferleri’, pp. 261–2.
330 An entry from Edremit Şeriye Sicili, beginning of Şevval 921; see Su, ‘Yavuz Selim ve
Seferleri’, p. 262; Tansel, Yavuz, p. 84.
331 Celalzade Mustafa, Geschichte Sultan Süleymān Kānūnīs von 1520 bis 1557 oder Ṭabaḳāt ül-
Memālik ve Derecāt ül-Mesālik von Celālzāde Muṣṭafā genannt Ḳoca Nisā nc
̡ ı, ed. Petra Kappert
(Wiesbaden, 1981), p. 27b.
332 Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Notes’, pp. 77–8.
333 Celalzade, Ṭabaḳāt, 27a.
335 Celalzade, Ṭabaḳāt, p. 27b.
336 Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih X, p. 44 and note 38; Celalzade, Ṭabaḳāt, pp. 27b–28a.
114
the head of such doubters was Janbirdi al-Ghazali, who sprang into action as
soon as he heard of Selim’s death. Janbirdi al-Ghazali, who had a considerable
level of support among the Mamluks and the populace, was defeated by the
Ottomans in February 1521.337 Despite Janbirdi al-Ghazali’s invitation to join the
revolt,338 Khayrbak, the governor of Egypt, remained loyal to the Ottomans.
Further revolts broke out after his death, in 1523 and 1524. A series of revolts
erupted among local Mamluk oice holders on the arrival from Istanbul of
Mustafa Paşa, who had been appointed as governor on Khayrbak’s death in
1522, but were put down without diiculty.339 Mustafa Paşa was replaced by
Kasım Paşa, and in 1523 the second vezir Ahmed Paşa became governor. He
promptly revolted, relying on the local forces he had gathered round him,
and proclaimed himself sultan. Remembered as a “traitor”, Ahmed Paşa was
inally captured and executed in 1524.340 Süleyman then despatched his grand
vezir İbrahim Paşa to Egypt.341 İbrahim established irm Ottoman control,
hanging the Arab şeyhs who had supported Ahmed Paşa and bringing in a
new law code, the Kanunname-i Mısır.342
While revolts broke out in the new, and distant, province of Egypt, revolts
also occurred nearer to the centre, in Anatolia. At the beginning of 1520, a
major revolt broke out under Şah Veli bin Celal343 in the region of Tokat. The
Ottomans successfully put down the revolt, killing Şah Veli and massacring
many of his followers, but sufered heavy casualties in the process.344 The
revolt had been provoked among followers of Isma‘il who wished to prevent
another campaign against the Safavids by keeping Ottoman forces occupied
in Anatolia. Even if one accepts that Safavid provocation played a part in the
revolt, Selim’s oppression and exclusion of the non-Sunni population, together
337 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 244–5; Hasan Beyzade Ahmed Paşa, Hasan Bey-zâde Târîhi. Metin
(926–1003/1520–1595), ed. Şevki Nezihi Aykut, 3 vols. (Ankara, 2004), vol. 2, pp. 5–16; David
Ayalon, ‘The End of the Mamlūk Sultanate (Why Did the Ottomans Spare the Mamlūks
of Egypt and Wipe Out the Mamlūks of Syria?)’, Studia Islamica 65 (1987), 125–48 at pp.
136–40; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 307; Hüseyin G. Yurdaydın, Kanunî’nin Cülûsu ve
İlk Seferleri (Ankara, 1961), pp. 6–12.
338 Ayalon, ‘End’, p. 138.
339 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 251–2; Winter, ‘Ottoman Occupation’, pp. 513–14.
340 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 252–3; Winter, ‘Ottoman Occupation’, pp. 514–15; Uzunçarşılı,
Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 318–20.
342 Ibid.; Winter, ‘Ottoman Occupation’, p. 515; Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘CV Mısır Kanunnâmesi’,
XV ve XVI inci Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Ziraî Ekonominin Hukukî ve Malî Esasları
(Istanbul, 1943), pp. 355–87; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 320–1.
343 Although this dervish’s name appears in some sources as Celal, Celal was, according to
Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, the name of the revolter’s father. See Jean-Louis Bacqué-
Grammont, ‘Etudes turco-safavides, III. Notes et documents sur la révolte de Ṣâh Velî B.
Şeyh Celâl’, Archivum Ottomanicum 7 (1982), 5–69 at pp. 17–23.
344 Ibid., pp. 27–67.
115
E b ru b oya r
with the increasing economic diiculties in the region brought about by his
policies, alienated the population from the state and created an environment
ripe for rebellion.
According to Akdağ, whose argument is contrary to the normally accepted
view, the Ottoman treasury on Selim’s death was almost empty. Revenue was
thus needed for new campaigns. Süleyman’s response was to order new land
surveys, with the intention of increasing the income from the land. Oicials
were sent to the provinces, where they re-registered certain sipahi holdings
and increased the registered yield of certain lands. They thus both ensured
a large income for the treasury345 and, by registering the population, further
strengthened central authority in these regions.346 However much the aim of
this new registration was said to be “to register completely and to protect the
possessions of the sultan and to bind the reaya and the sipahis together”,347 the
result was a breakdown in social order. In 1526, widespread agitation among
the Bozok Turcomans against the increased tax registered by the oicials
turned into a revolt, followed by the outbreak of revolts one after the other
across south and inner Anatolia. One of these was led by Kalender, a descen-
dant of Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli, in the Ankara-Kırşehir region, which erupted in
1528. Kalender attracted an enormous following, including sipahis who had
been dispossessed of their timars. Although ultimately successful in suppress-
ing these revolts, the Ottoman state did so only with great diiculty and with
much loss of life.348 Even if the Safavid state was not directly involved in these
revolts, it ofered an attractive alternative power centre, and it is highly likely
that the Safavids were inl uential in these events.349 Indeed, the rebels’ turning
frequently towards “the eastern country”,350 meaning “the Kızılbaş”,351 shows
clearly the indirect inl uence of the Safavid state in these events.
These revolts once more highlighted the dangerous inl uence of the
Safavids within Ottoman territory. As the Şah Veli revolt clearly showed,
Isma‘il, even after his defeat at Çaldıran, still held high prestige in Anatolia,
and even his death did not bring any decrease in his spiritual power. Even
30 years on, Süleyman was still worried about Isma‘il’s inl uence among the
345 Akdağ, Dirlik ve Düzenlik, pp. 118–20; Akdağ, Tarihi, pp. 687–8.
347 Ibid.; Hasan Beyzade Ahmed Paşa, Târîhi, vol. 2, p. 81.
348 Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1283/1866–87), vol. 1, pp. 117–23; Kemalpaşazade,
Tevarih X, pp. 342–3; Akdağ, Dirlik ve Düzenlik, pp. 118–22; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II,
pp. 310, 346–7; Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, ‘Un rapport inédit sur la révolte anatolienne
de 1527’, Studia Islamica 62 (1985), 155–71 at pp. 160–4.
349 Bacqué-Grammont, ‘1527’, p. 160.
350 ‘Ibid., p. 165.
116
populace, ordering the pursuit of a man who claimed that a leather shoe
which had once belonged to Shah Isma‘il cured barren women and the sei-
zure of the shoe itself.352 The belief in, and loyalty to, the spiritual power of
the Safavid leader was evident also with Isma‘il’s son and successor Tahmasp.
Michele Membré, the Venetian envoy sent to Iran in search of an alliance
with Tahmasp against the Ottomans during the Ottoman–Venetian war of
1537–40, recounted how a Turcoman from Adana had managed with great
diiculty to obtain one of the shah’s kerchiefs, giving a horse in exchange.
He believed that his sick father, who had seen the shah in a dream and had
wanted a cloth belonging to him, would recover when he received it.353
Süleyman thus, like his father and grandfather before him, regarded the
Safavid state as a major threat to order in his own territories. Like his father,
Süleyman, too, from the time he ascended the throne, gave great importance
to intelligence about the Safavid state and sought to follow Isma‘il’s move-
ments closely.354 The intelligence that Isma‘il had ordered the Şah Veli revolt,
together with that which showed Isma‘il’s direct involvement in the revolt
of Janbirdi al-Ghazali, made these events more than mere internal afairs.355
Although Ayalon has argued that there is no proof of a connection between
Isma‘il and Janbirdi al-Ghazali,356 intelligence had earlier reached Selim that
Janbirdi al-Ghazali was in contact with Isma‘il.357 It was the suspicion that he
was working with Isma‘il that in 1522 cost Şehsuvaroğlu Ali, prominent in the
suppression of both the Şah Veli and Janbirdi al-Ghazali revolts,358 his head.
Gossip that he wanted independence359 and had thus entered into relations
with Isma‘il reached Süleyman,360 who had Şehsuvaroğlu Ali and his sons
killed and his territory turned into an eyalet (province).
For Süleyman, peace in the east was essential for the success of his cam-
paigning in the west, which was undermined by problems in Anatolia. This
352 5 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (973/ 1565–1566), Özet ve İndeks and Tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara,
1994), no. 205 (8 Sefer 973/4 September 1565). Michele Membré related an event, which
he himself witnessed, involving the curative efect attributed to Tahmasp’s shoe. See
Michele Membré, Mission to the Lord Sophy of Persia (1539–1542), trans. and ed. A. H. Morton
(Wiltshire, 1999), p. 42.
353 Membré, Mission, p. 41.
354 Allouche, Ottoman-Safavid, p. 132.
355 Hadidi, Tevârih, pp. 422–4; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 308, note 1.
356 Ayalon, ‘End’, p. 140.
357 E.5469/2, E.6627/2 and E.1021, Topkapı Palace Archives, in Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont,
‘Ṣâh İsma‛îl et la révolte de Cânberdi Gâzalî’, in Bacqué-Grammont, Les Ottomans, les
Safavides et leurs voisins, pp. 278, 282 and 288.
359 Hadidi, Tevârih, p. 436; Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, pp. 103–5; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II,
pp. 309–10.
360 Ayalon, ‘End’, p. 140; Yinanç, Dulkadir Beyliği, p. 104; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 309.
117
E b ru b oya r
was the case, for example, in 1526, when Süleyman hastily returned from
his campaign in Hungary on the outbreak of a major revolt in Anatolia.361
Receiving an envoy from Isma‘il,362 Süleyman was not entirely inclined to
making peace but was also not attracted by the idea of immediately entering
into a campaign against him.363 In 1525, however, after the death of Isma‘il and
the accession of his ten-year-old son Tahmasp, who was caught up in a power
struggle with dissident Kızılbaş elements whom he inally brought under con-
trol in 1533,364 Süleyman sent a letter to the new Safavid ruler threatening that
he would set up his “imperial tent” in Safavid territory, and if Tahmasp did
not become a şeyh like his forefathers, then he would ind him “even if you
became an ant and burrowed into the ground, even if you became a bird and
lew up into the sky” and would destroy him.365
Despite such belligerent language, Süleyman in fact did not campaign in
the east, unable to ight on two fronts simultaneously, and focused instead
on the west. It was thus not the Ottomans but the Uzbeks who beneited
from the internal confusion within the Safavid state. Nor was Süleyman,
occupied in Hungary, able to use the opportunity ofered by the anti-Safavid
revolt of the ruler of Baghdad, Züli kar (Zu’l-Faqar Sultan Mausillu), who
presented Süleyman with the keys of the city and had the hutbe read in his
name. Without Ottoman support, Züli kar was killed by his brothers, who
supported Tahmasp.366
In 1530, Süleyman gave permission for the governor of Azerbaijan, Ulama
Han, one of the leading igures in the Safavid government, to take refuge
with the Ottomans. Ulama Han was a member of the Tekelü tribe from
Anatolia, which had played a major role in the establishment of Isma‘il’s
state. As a result of the coniscation of his dirlik, he had joined the Şah Kulu
revolt and had then been among those who had led to Isma‘il.367 The rea-
son for Ulama Han’s l ight now to the Ottomans was the devastating attack
launched by other tribes against the Tekelü, the most powerful tribe in the
Safavid state, and the subsequent loss of the Tekelü tribe’s inl uence in the
361 Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih X, p. 341; Hasan Beyzade Ahmed Paşa, Târîhi, vol. 2, pp. 80–1.
362 Allouche, Ottoman-Safavid, p. 132.
363 Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, ‘X Soliman et le “désengagement à l’est”’, in Bacqué-
Grammont, Les Ottomans, les Safavides et leurs voisins, p. 377.
364 Morgan, Medieval Persia, pp. 124–6; Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of A Persian
Empire (London and New York, 2006), pp. 26–7.
365 Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, pp. 125–6.
366 Celalzade, Ṭabaḳāt, pp. 242a–242b; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, p. 175; Roemer, ‘The Safavid Period’,
pp. 240–1; Allouche, Ottoman-Safavid, p. 137.
367 Sümer, Safevî Devletinin Kuruluşu, p. 32.
118
Safavid administration.368 By giving him a “useful” sancak in Diyarbakır on

the Safavid border,369 Süleyman made his intentions towards the Safavids
plain. While Ulama Han defected to the Ottomans, Şeref Han (IV), the
head of the hanate of Bitlis, who had accepted Ottoman authority during
the reign of Selim, defected to the Safavids. According to Lüti Paşa, Şeref
Han’s loyalty was always questionable.370 The grandson of Şeref Han and
writer of the Şerefname, however, blames Şeref Han’s defection not on any
lack of loyalty to the Ottomans, as implied by Lüti Paşa, but on Ulama
Paşa’s intrigues against him. According to the Şerefname, Ulama Han, on his
arrival in Istanbul, claimed that Şeref Han had pro-Safavid sympathies. In
consequence, orders were given for the direct incorporation of the hanate
of Bitlis into the Ottoman state, leaving the han without any option but to
request help from Tahmasp.371 Tahmasp then took Bitlis under his protection.
In 1532, Süleyman appointed Ulama Paşa to the beylerbeylik of Bitlis and sent
him, together with the beylerbeyi of Diyarbakır Fil Yakup Paşa, against Şeref
Han, who, with Safavid help, survived this irst attack.372 Claiming that other
Kızılbaş emirs would join the Ottomans, Ulama Han worked to persuade
Süleyman to send a campaign against Tahmasp.373 He constantly sent news
to Süleyman that Tahmasp was busy with the Uzbeks, Mongols and Tatars,
and claimed that “Azerbaijan and Persian Iraq lie undefended”.374 Once again
despatched against Şeref Han, Ulama Han and Fil Yakub were this time suc-
cessful. Şeref Han was killed and Bitlis taken in September 1532.375 Instead of
incorporating the hanate directly into the Ottoman state, Süleyman gave the
sancak as an ocaklık to Şemseddin III, the son of Şeref Han, who submitted
to the Ottomans.376
With the end of yet another Hungarian campaign in June 1533, Süleyman
decided on an eastern campaign. While Tahmasp was still involved in clashes
with the Uzbeks,377 the Ottoman army marched eastwards in October 1533
368 Ibid., pp. 60–2; Roemer, ‘The Safavid Period’, p. 241.

370 Ibid.
371 Şeref Han, Şerefname: Osmanlı-İran Tarihi, trans. Mehmet Emin Bozarslan (Istanbul, 1971),
p. 180; Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, pp. 128–9.
372 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas the Great, trans. R. M. Savory, 2 vols. (Boulder,
Colo., 1978), vol. 1, p. 110; Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, p. 129.
374 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, p. 110.
375 Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, pp. 131–2; Şeref Han, Şerefname, p. 182.
376 Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, p. 132.
377 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Arz ve Raporlarına Göre İbrahim Paşa’nın Irakeyn Seferindeki İlk
Tedbirleri ve Fütuhatı’, Belleten 21, 81–84 (1957), 449–81, docs. I–II, pp. 463–5.
119
E b ru b oya r
under the command of the grand vezir İbrahim Paşa, taking the castles of
Adilcevaz, Erciş, Van and Ahlat, and passed the winter of 1533–4 at Aleppo.
İbrahim gathered intelligence about Tahmasp which he forwarded to
Süleyman in Istanbul.378 The presence of Süleyman in Istanbul rather than
at the head of the army caused mutterings among the soldiers, who wanted
Süleyman to lead them, for “a shah was necessary for a shah”.379 İbrahim
reported this disquiet to Süleyman but, without waiting for him, set of in the
spring to Tabriz, and, without encountering Tahmasp’s forces, entered the
city in July 1534. Azerbaijan was added to the empire as a province.
In the autumn of 1534, Süleyman joined the army under İbrahim Paşa but,
since the Safavid forces persistently avoided any direct conl ict, inally left for
Baghdad, which he reached after an extremely diicult march in December
1534. Ofering no resistance, the city fell.380 Producing an adaletname as the basis
for Ottoman administration of the new province of Iraq, Süleyman revoked
the heavy taxation imposed by the Safavids. During his stay in the city, he
visited the tombs of various igures holy both for Sunnis and Shiis, both in
Baghdad and elsewhere, had such sites repaired and alms given to the poor.381
While Süleyman was in Baghdad, news arrived that Tahmasp had re-taken
Tabriz and that Ulama Paşa, who was responsible for the protection of Tabriz
and the Van region, had taken refuge in the castle of Van. Tahmasp, who saw
Ulama as “a mortal foe”,382 besieged the castle. Süleyman sent relief forces,
but, hampered by the winter weather, the campaign ended without any
engagement.383 In 1538, the ruler of Basra, Rasid ibn Makamis, sent his son to
Edirne and announced his acceptance of Ottoman overlordship. Appointing
him as beylerbeyi, Süleyman recognised the local administration.384 Süleyman’s
campaign in the east ended without any decisive victory over Tahmasp,
despite İbrahim Paşa’s letter to Şehzade Mustafa announcing that Iran “had
been completely conquered and subjugated”.385 However, by taking Baghdad,
378 Ibid., doc. III, p. 466.

379 Celalzade, Ṭabaḳāt, p. 249a; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, p. 178. For a similar account, see Eskandar
Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, p. 111.
380 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 273; Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 111, 113;
Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 351–2.
381 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 273–4; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 184–7; Halil İnalcık, ‘Adâletnâmeler’,
Türk Tarih Kurumu Belgeler, Türk Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi 2, 3–4 (1965), 49–145 at pp. 140–2.
383 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 274–6; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 187–8.
384 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, p. 352, note 2; Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, Vivianne
Rahmé and Salam Hamza, ‘Textes ottomans et safavides sur l’annexion de Bassora en 1546’,
Eurasian Studies 3, 1 (2004), 1–33 at p. 1.
385 Çağatay Uluçay, ‘Kanunî Sultan Süleyman ve Ailesi ile İlgili Bazı Notlar ve Vesikalar’, in
Kanunî Armağanı (Ankara, 2001), pp. 226–57 at p. 256.
120
the Ottomans had extended their control southwards, and by conquering

Georgian territory, they had established the beylerbeylik of Erzurum.
The Iranian campaigns had cost the Ottomans dearly, particularly in eco-
nomic terms, and even if the Ottoman army remained undefeated, it had
gained very little from the war. The climatic conditions and diicult ter-
rain had created major problems,386 soldiers freezing to death and equip-
ment destroyed, for example, when the army was caught in a snowstorm at
Sultaniyya on the way to Baghdad, an event described in a couplet quoted by
Eskandar Beg Monshi:
When I went to Soltānīya, that splendid pasturage/I saw two thousand corpses lay-
ing there without grave or burial shroud/I said, “Who slew all these Ottomans?”/
The morning breeze replied, “It was I”.387
What did most damage to the Ottomans, however, were the scorched-earth
tactics employed by Tahmasp, adopted also to great advantage by his father.
For Tahmasp, the best way to render the Ottomans inefective was to prevent
them obtaining provisions,388 a tactic he was to use with success in later wars.
Thus, in the campaign of 1548–9, Tahmasp instructed men to lay waste to
the land between Tabriz and the Ottoman borders “so that no trace of grain
or grass remained”.389 Aware of this, the Ottomans set of on the Iranian
campaigns having made extensive preparations beforehand. In the middle of
the sixteenth century, the Habsburg ambassador, Busbecq, noting that in the
campaign that the Ottomans conducted in Iran, in contrast to other cam-
paigns, beasts of burden were loaded with “cereals of every kind, especially
rice”, commented that the reason for this, apart from being that the coun-
try of the Safavids was less productive than Busbecq’s own, was related to
the fact that “it is the custom of the inhabitants, when their land is invaded,
to lay waste and burn everything, and so force the enemy to retire through
lack of food”.390 This need to transport all food supplies imposed a costly
burden on the campaign, and on the population: in 1534, a nüzül (collection)
was imposed on the population of Larende to pay for the hiring of the many
camels necessary for the campaign.391
386 Sümer, Safevî Devletinin Kuruluşu, pp. 62–3.

388 Sümer, Safevî Devletinin Kuruluşu, p. 65, note 28.
389 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 120–1.
390 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial
Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554–1562, trans. Edward Seymour Forster (Oxford, 1968), pp.
109–10.
391 Alaaddin Aköz (ed.), Kanunî Devrine Ait 939–941 / 1532–1535 Tarihli Lârende [Karaman] Şer‘iye
Sicili. Özet-Dizin-Tıpkıbasım (Konya, 2006), fermans 32.1, 34.1 and 35.1, pp. 17–20.
121
E b ru b oya r
After the campaign of 1533–5, relations between the two states remained
tense. Clashes occurred throughout the border zone,392 and even though
Ottoman–Safavid trade continued, it did so under very diicult conditions.393
While the Safavids conducted a successful war of attrition, Süleyman sought
to avoid needlessly exhausting his troops and ordered commanders along the
frontier to avoid unnecessary clashes.394 Süleyman, however, was aware of the
limits of Ottoman power on the borders but was still irritated by his com-
manders’ failure to cope efectively with the situation. Annoyed at the insuf-
icient response of the beylerbeyi of Diyarbakır to a Safavid attack on a castle
under construction at Ahtamar, whose stones the Safavid troops had thrown
into “the sea”, meaning Lake Van, Süleyman demanded, “[I]s this any way to
protect the frontier?”395
Despite all Süleyman’s attempts to seal the frontier, it remained totally
porous: smuggling and the l ight of the population continued regard-
less. Michele Membré speaks of a group of 800 households of Turcoman
families who, in 1539, migrated together with their animals from Erzincan
to Tahmasp’s territory and swore allegiance to him.396 When news reached
Süleyman of the movement of “useful” horses and mules from Ottoman ter-
ritory to “the defeated enemy”, as the Safavids were, rather hopefully, known,
he instructed the beylerbeyi of Baghdad that this must be prevented.397 If one
accepts the account of Lüti Paşa, Tahmasp’s threat to the Ottomans had an
international dimension. Before the Hungarian campaigns of 1541, according
to Lüti Paşa, the Hungarian king John Szápolyai, under Ottoman protec-
tion, had contacted Tahmasp, who had proposed an attack on the Ottomans
on two fronts. Upon hearing this, Süleyman had sent soldiers to both fronts
and had himself waited ready in Istanbul. When Tahmasp remained inactive
and the situation became more pressing in Hungary, Süleyman had turned his
attention to the west.398
With the situation stabilised in the west, Süleyman now planned a new
campaign against the Safavids. In March 1545, he wrote to leading igures
392 See, for example, Halil Sahillioğlu (ed.), Topkapı Sarayı Arşivi H. 951–952 Tarihli ve E-12321
Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (Istanbul, 2002), nos. 151–2 (Şevval 951/December–January 1544–
5); no. 487 (Zilhicce 951/February–March 1545).
393 Membré, Mission, p. 11; Sahillioğlu, E-12321 Numaralı Mühimme, no. 381 (Muharrem 952/
March–April 1545).
394 Sahillioğlu, E-12321 Numaralı Mühimme, no. 151 (Şevval 951 December-January 1544–5); no.
294 (Zilhicce 951 February–March 1545).
395 Sahillioğlu, E-12321 Numaralı Mühimme, no. 499 (Zilhicce 951/February–March 1545).
396 Membré, Mission, p. 18.
397 Sahillioğlu, E-12321 Numaralı Mühimme, no. 381 (Muharrem 952/March–April 1545).
122
in Shirvan, which had been taken by the Safavids in 1538, claiming that the
“Kızılbaş . . . were being more treacherous than before and were conduct-
ing oppression and seizing goods”399 in Shirvan, informing them that he was
resolved on a campaign against the Safavids and requesting that the necessary
aid be given to the Ottoman oicial Maksud Ali Bey.400 The opportunity for
which Süleyman was waiting occurred when in 1547 Alkas Mirza, Tahmasp’s
brother and, since the Safavid conquest, the governor of Shirvan and thus,
ironically, the igure responsible for the oppression referred to by Süleyman,401
led to the Ottomans after the failure of his revolt against his brother.402 Alkas
Mirza’s arrival gave “much delight and joy”403 to Süleyman, who received him
so well404 that, according to Lüti Paşa, “Alkas could not have seen in the vilayet
of Persia such a high and honourable position even in his dreams”.405 Alkas
Mirza was not merely received in splendour but also drowned in very valuable
gifts.406 Süleyman’s display of such great interest in Alkas Mirza did not please
everyone. In a letter which he sent to the grand vezir and Süleyman’s son-in-
law, Rüstem Paşa, Şeyh Bali Efendi, one of the leading religious scholars of
the period, openly criticised Süleyman’s behaviour. Asking “if on our part,
we shower honours and favours on Alqās, or someone else, what will be the
proit?” Şeyh Bali Efendi added that “they [the Kızılbaş] are the seeds of error
and sparks . . . of the infernal ire. . . . Alive or dead, in the Islamic territory
they are nothing but harm, and their removal from it is very happiness”.407
The people of Istanbul, too, criticised such expense lavished by the sultan on
someone like Alkas Mirza, who was a traitor and an inidel in origin and who
had taken refuge with the Ottomans in order to save his own skin. Süleyman
was forced to defend himself from such criticism by saying that he had done
this for the honour of the state.408
Alkas Mirza’s taking refuge with the Ottomans was for Süleyman “an
invaluable piece of good fortune as presenting him with the means of sub-
jugating Iran”.409 Süleyman calculated that, using Alkas Mirza, it would be
401 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, p. 273.
402 J. R. Walsh, ‘The Revolt of Alqas Mirza’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
68 (1976), 61–78 at pp. 76–7.
404 Uluçay, ‘Vesikalar’, p. 251.
406 Forrer, Rustem Pascha, p. 149.
407 Minorsky, ‘Bālī-Efendi’, pp. 447–8.
408 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, p. 269; Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul
(Cambridge, 2010), p. 45.
123
E b ru b oya r
possible to remove Tahmasp and put Alkas Mirza on the throne as an Ottoman
puppet.410 According to a Venetian ambassador’s report, Alkas Mirza’s aim
was to persuade Süleyman to undertake a campaign against his brother
Tahmasp,411 which he in fact succeeded in doing,412 although Süleyman had
had such a campaign in mind for some time. Having sent Alkas Mirza and
Ulama Paşa of with an advance force, Süleyman set of in haste at the head
of the army, even before the campaign season had started.413 In summer 1548,
he reached Tabriz and entered the city unopposed, the shah’s army having
retreated. It was impossible to stay in Tabriz for more than four days, how-
ever, as the city had been plundered and the Ottomans “could ind nothing
edible for either man or beast”, resulting in the death from hunger of several
thousand Ottoman horses and mules.414 Withdrawing from Tabriz, the army
took the castle of Van, deined as “the frontier and castle of the kingdom of
Tahmasp”,415 whose possession had been constantly in dispute between the
two states.
Adopting their usual tactics of devastation, the Safavids raided extensively
in the border regions round Adilcevaz, Muş, Erzurum, Erzincan, Bayburt
and Kars416 and set out to reduce the zone to a wasteland in which survival
would be impossible, thus preventing Ottoman movement eastwards.417
Although Süleyman wished to pursue Tahmasp, this scorched-earth tactic
and Süleyman’s desire to preserve the strength of his troops left him with no
option but to remain in Diyarbakır while Tahmasp continued to devastate
Ottoman territory.418
In revenge for Tahmasp’s actions, Süleyman ordered Alkas Mirza to plun-
der Iranian territory. Süleyman accepted Alkas Mirza’s claims that the major-
ity of beys on the Iranian border and the sipahis would rise in his support, but
this did not in fact happen.419 Alkas Mirza’s repeated assurances that “in their
hearts [the Kızılbaş tribes] support me. I have only to set foot on Persian soil,
and they will lock to me”, together with his promise to return with large
quantities of booty, encouraged Süleyman to despatch him to raid Tahmasp’s
410 Walsh, ‘Alqas Mirza’, p. 77.
411 Relazione di Alvise Renier, in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al senato, vol. 14: Costantinopoli.
Relazioni inedite (1512–1789), ed. Maria Pia Pedani-Fabris (Padua, 1996), pp. 72–3.
412 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, p. 268; Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 115–17.
414 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, p. 119. See also Lüti Paşa, Tevârih,
p. 303.
416 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 274–5, Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, p. 119.
418 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 303–4.
419 Ibid.
124
territory.420 Alkas Mirza returned from Isfahan, Kum and Kaşan with, if not
the support of the Kızılbaş as he had promised, much booty, which was
greatly pleasing to Süleyman.421 Having gone to Diyabakır and then Aleppo,
Süleyman himself returned to Istanbul when the soldiers objected to remain-
ing in Aleppo.422
Alkas Mirza did not prove the asset Süleyman had hoped. Escaping from
Ottoman anger, he led back to Iran and begged for Tahmasp’s forgiveness.423
With Süleyman back in Istanbul, the war of attrition continued, and in 1551
the Safavids took the castles of Adilcevaz, Erciş and Ahlat.424 The forces under
the command of İskender Paşa, the beylerbeyi of Erzurum, were defeated by
the forces of Tahmasp’s son Isma‘il,425 and the region was “plundered and
burned” by the Safavids, who returned “laden with booty”.426 In response,
Süleyman sent the grand vezir Rüstem Paşa with an army to the east. Rüstem’s
target was Şehzade Mustafa rather than Tahmasp. Mustafa, Süleyman’s eldest
son and considered heir apparent, whose court was at Amasya, was much
in favour of a new campaign against Iran.427 In the politics of the capital, he
was opposed by Rüstem Paşa and Süleyman’s wife Hürrem Sultan, whose
ambition was for one of her own sons to ascend the throne. Rüstem spread
rumours that Mustafa was preparing to revolt against his father and that he
was even in contact with Shah Tahmasp. In consequence, Süleyman became
suspicious of his son. He recalled Rüstem and prepared to set out on cam-
paign himself.428 His initial aim was to solve the problem of Mustafa, whom
he had strangled when he joined the campaign near Ereğli.429 After wintering
in Aleppo, he set of once more on campaign in the spring of 1554. From Kars
he sent Tahmasp a letter in an attempt to provoke him into battle, some-
thing which Tahmasp had no intention of doing. Süleyman plundered Revan,
Nakhchivan and Karabakh, seizing much booty and many slaves, but was
forced to withdraw without encountering the Safavid ruler.430
420 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 304; Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, p. 120;
Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 276–7; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, pp. 359–60.
421 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 304–5; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 278–9.
423 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 282–3; Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 123–4.
424 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 309–10; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 296–7; Eskandar Beg Monshi,
History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 126–9.
425 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 297–8.
427 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Rüstem Paşa ve Hakkındaki İthamlar’, Tarih Dergisi 8, 11–12 (1956),
11–50 at p. 21.
428 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 299–301; Gökbilgin, ‘Rüstem Paşa’, pp. 20–8.
430 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 312; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 305–14.
125
E b ru b oya r
The treaty of Amasya (1555): A precarious peace

Although the last two Iranian campaigns may have been planned as campaigns
of expansion, they can, in view of their outcome, be deined as defensive
wars. Gaining very little, the Ottomans had instead exhausted their military
at a time of breakdown in the socio-economic order of the empire, evident
particularly in the revolts of the levends and softas (theological students).431
The unattractiveness of service in the east and the inability of the state to
control this region were highlighted by janissary complaints about being sent
to Erzurum, a location they did not wish to go to and from where they led,
with their weapons, to the Safavids.432 Discontent was felt even in the most
remote corners of the empire, the representative of the şerif of Mecca com-
plaining to Şehzade Bayezid, then governor of Kütahya, that the Arab regions
“had become a wasteland”.433
In these circumstances, concluding a treaty with the Safavids was imperative
for the Ottomans. Thus, when Tahmasp sent envoys to Süleyman, then winter-
ing in Amasya, with an ofer of peace, discussions were begun and in June 1555
peace was agreed.434 Under this agreement, the region of Lake Van and Şehrizor
remained Ottoman and the frontier was ixed at Arpaçay.435 Both sides undertook
to refrain from attack and to ensure the security of the frontier, the Ottomans
thus securing their border and Tahmasp rescuing his territory from continuous
attack and ensuring that Azerbaijan would be safe from further Ottoman aggres-
sion. Süleyman also demanded that the Safavids desist from their traditional den-
igration of the irst three rightly guided caliphs and Muhammad’s wife Aysha
but was reassured by the Safavid ambassador that this tradition had already been
banned. Süleyman gave permission for Iranian subjects to visit the Ka‘aba in
Mecca, the tomb of the prophet Muhammad in Medina and various other holy
sites in Iraq, such as the shrines of Ali in Najaf and Husayn in Karbala, and prom-
ised that these visits would be undertaken in safety.436
431 Akdağ, Tarihi, pp. 687–8; Akdağ, Dirlik ve Düzenlik, pp. 122–9; Şerafettin Turan, Kanuni
Süleyman Dönemi Taht Kavgaları (Ankara, 1997), p. 10.
432 E. 5856, Topkapı Palace Archives, in Gökbilgin, ‘Rüstem Paşa’, doc. 7, pp. 48, 31.
433 Ekrem K âmil, ‘Hicrî Onuncu – Milâdî On Altıncı – Asırda Yurdumuzu Dolaşan Arab
Seyyahlarından Gazzi – Mekki Seyahatnamesi’, Tarih Semineri Dergisi 1, 2 (1937), 3–90 at
p. 40.
435 Remzi Kılıç, XVI. ve XVII. Yüzyıllarda Osmanlı-İran Siyasî Antlaşmaları (Istanbul, 2001), p. 73;
Sümer, Safevî Devletinin Kuruluşu, p. 68.
436 Feridun Bey, Münşeat-i Feridun, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1274), vol. 1, pp. 623–5; Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, p.
244; A. Ekber Diyanet, İlk Osmanlı-İran Anlaşması. 1555 Amasya Musahalası (Istanbul, 1971),
pp. 6–9.
126
The result of realpolitik rather than any genuine desire for enduring peace,
the Ottomans were nevertheless anxious to display the treaty as a strong and
lasting one. Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador, who was in Amasya at the
same time as the Persian ambassador, commented that, “No possible honour
towards the Persian was omitted, that we might have no doubt about the gen-
uineness of the peace which had been made with him”.437 In the period fol-
lowing the conclusion of the treaty, both Süleyman and his successor, Selim
II, took care to conform to its terms.438 Tahmasp’s desire, as expressed in a
letter he wrote to Süleyman, that there should be open exchange of informa-
tion between the two states439 was put in place, and requests and complaints
coming from Iran were dealt with carefully by the Ottomans.440 Ottoman
border oicials were repeatedly ordered to be vigilant over the application of
the clause441 requiring that “anyone from either side who might seek sanctu-
ary with the other side should be returned and not given any support”,442
regardless of Safavid contravention in accepting, for example, Ottoman sub-
jects from Erzurum in 1557.443 The Ottomans also abided by the agreement
over permitting entry to those from Iran who wished to go on pilgrimage
and to visit the holy sites in Iraq.444 This applied equally to Iranians who were
no longer alive, for the dead, too, were accepted into Ottoman territory for
burial in the holy places.445
An event which occurred only four years after the signing of the Amasya
peace proved a serious test for the relations between the two states. In 1559,
a succession struggle broke out between Süleyman’s sons Bayezid and
Selim. Defeated, Bayezid, together with his sons and a large, armed group
of supporters, led to Iran.446 Tahmasp, thus presented with the opportu-
nity to take revenge for the reverse l ight of his own brother some years
before, received Bayezid with great honour, as Süleyman had Alkas Mirza.447
437 Busbecq, Letters, p. 63.

438 Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, p. 244; 7 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (975–976/ 1567–1569), Özet –
Transkripsiyon ve İndeks, 4 vols. (Ankara, 1998), no. 2703 (6 Recep 976/25 December 1568).
439 Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, pp. 241–2, note 354.
440 For example, see 7 Mühimme, no. 1242 (Şevval 975/March–April 1568).
441 For example, see 5 Mühimme, no. 147, no. 153 (27 Muharrem 973/24 August 1565), no. 618 (10
Cemaziyülevvel 973/3 December 1565), no. 690 (Cemaziyülahir 973/21 November 1568); 7
Mühimme, no. 1797 (17 Safer 976/11 August 1568).
443 Turan, Taht Kavgaları, p. 112.
444 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (972/ 1564–1565), Özet – Transkripsiyon ve İndeks, 2 vols. (Ankara,
1995), no. 1432 (19 Zilhicce 972/18 July 1565); 7 Mühimme, no. 2491 (24 Cemaziyülahir 976/14
December 1568).
445 See, for example, 6 Numaralı Mühimme, no. 354 (4 Rebiülahır 972/9 November 1564).
446 Turan, Taht Kavgaları, pp. 102–13.
447 Ibid., p. 114.
127
E b ru b oya r
Although Tahmasp’s receiving of Bayezid in contravention of the Amasya

treaty was a reason for war, Ottoman territories were in a state of near com-
plete disorder448 and Süleyman therefore sought to solve the crisis through
diplomatic channels. He immediately despatched a letter to Tahmasp, before
Bayezid had reached the frontier, pointing out that if Tahmasp were to accept
Bayezid, he would be obliged, in accordance with the treaty, to send him back.
Süleyman also noted that Ottoman forces were massed on the border to inter-
cept him.449 Tahmasp was unmoved. Next, Süleyman, in a move to get Bayezid
and his sons back, sent ambassadors with expensive gifts, as did Selim, the one
remaining son and now clear heir to the throne, who also had a vested inter-
est in Bayezid’s return.450 In 1560, Iranian ambassadors to Süleyman and Selim,
sent to conduct negotiations over Bayezid’s release, were lavishly received
with their expenses, and those of their entourage, in Ottoman territory paid
by the Ottomans, down to those for clothes and fees for the public baths.451
Tahmasp, aware that Süleyman was prepared to make enormous concessions
to secure Bayezid, was keen to use his uninvited guest to the best possible
advantage and drew out the negotiations. With the bargaining dragging on,
Süleyman threatened Tahmasp with war. Tahmasp, aware that this was not
possible, promptly threatened Süleyman with sending Bayezid to Anatolia.
Tahmasp, whose demands included the castle of Kars and Baghdad, eventu-
ally agreed in 1562 to hand Bayezid and his sons over to Ottoman representa-
tives in return for a large quantity of valuable gifts and the renewal of the
Amasya treaty. Bayezid and his sons were immediately strangled and their
bodies brought to Sivas for burial.452
Despite this major crisis, peace was preserved between the two states. This
did not mean, however, that there was any great trust in relations with the
Safavids or sense of security among the Ottoman population in the border
zones. The mere phrase “the Kızılbaş have come” was suicient to cause the
448 Akdağ, Dirlik ve Düzenlik, pp. 163–71; Turan, Taht Kavgaları, pp. 145–9; 3 Numaralı Mühimme
Defteri (966–968/ 1558–1560), Özet ve Transkripsiyon; Tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1993), no. 36
(17 Ramazan 966/23 June 1559).
449 3 Mühimme, no. 144 (18 Şevval 966/24 July 1559).
450 Şeref Han, Şerefname, pp. 216–7; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 399–412; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı,
‘İran Şahına İltica Etmiş Olan Şehzade Bayezid’in Teslimi İçin Sultan Süleyman ve Oğlu
Selim Taralarından Şaha Gönderilen Altınlar ve Kıymetli Hediyeler”, Belleten 24, 93 (1960),
103–10 at pp. 106–10.
451 Şerafettin Turan, ‘1560 Tarihinde Anadolu’da Yiyecek Maddeleri Fiyatlarını Gösteren Bir
İran Elçilik Hey’eti Masraf Defteri’, Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi
Dergisi 22, 3–4 (1964), 273–94 at pp. 276–7, 281–92.
452 Turan, Taht Kavgaları, pp. 125–36; Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp.
171–2, 192.
128
reaya to descend into “agitation and terror”.453 While the Ottomans abided by
the terms of the treaty, they did so keeping their own interests irmly in mind.
Although permission was granted for Safavid subjects to enter Ottoman ter-
ritory in order to visit the holy places, their movements were closely moni-
tored, they were forbidden to move away from ixed routes and not permitted
to stay any longer than necessary. Any contacts with Ottoman subjects were
strictly controlled.454 Although permission was granted for burial, the exact
location was decided by the Ottomans.455 Flight of population into Ottoman
territory continued, and these people were not necessarily immediately
returned to Iran.456 While trade between the two states continued, the export
of war materials, horses, silver, copper and iron to Iran was banned,457 a ban
which the Ottomans wished to be strictly enforced,458 and goods in contraven-
tion of the prohibition were seized,459 but smuggling went on.460 Continuing
to collect intelligence on the Safavid state, the Ottomans closely observed
Safavid internal and external afairs,461 for as Selim II commented, “it is not
permissible to be heedless of the upper lands [i.e., Iran]”.462 He ordered the
beylerbeyi of Erzurum to remain on guard regardless of the peace, to be in
a constant state of military preparedness, to keep a very tight watch on the
region and to provide Istanbul with a constant low of reliable intelligence.463
Ever anxious to know what was happening in Iran, the Ottomans also
made sure that the Safavids should be very well aware of the might of the
453 7 Mühimme, no. 2257 (24 Cemaziülahır 976/14 December 1568).

454 See, for example, 6 Mühimme, no. 39 (16 Muharrem 972/9 August 1564), no. 1432 (20 Zilhicce
972/19 July 1565); 7 Mühimme, no. 2491 (24 Cemaziülahır 976/14 December 1568), no. 2717 (9 Receb
976/28 December 1568); 12 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (978–979/1570–1572), Özet–Transkripsiyon
ve İndeks, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1998), nos. 896 and 897 (7 Rebiülevvel 979/30 July 1571).
455 6 Numaralı Mühimme, no. 39 (16 Muharrem 972/24 August 1564), no. 354 (4 Rebiülahır 972/9
November 1564).
456 See, for example, 12 Mühimme, nos. 144 and 145 (12 Şevval 978/9 March 1571), no. 874
(Rebiülahır 979/August–September 1571), no. 938 (7 Rebiülevvel 979/30 July 1571).
457 See, for example, 5 Mühimme, no. 217 (12 Safer 973/8 September 1565); 6 Mühimme, no.
233 (6 Rebiülevvel 972/12 November 1564), no. 346 (5 Rebiülahır 972/10 November 1564);
7 Mühimme, no. 479 (27 Cemaziülevvel 975/29 November 1567), no. 1939 (24 Safer 976/18
August 1568).
458 See, for example, 5 Mühimme, no. 217 (12 Safer 973/8 September 1565).
459 See, for example, 6 Mühimme, no. 233 (6 Rebiülevvel 972/12 November 1564); 7 Mühimme, no. 2086
(26 Rebiülevvel 976/18 September 1568), no. 2548 (8 Cemaziülahır 976/28 November 1568).
460 See, for example, 7 Mühimme, no. 1939 (24 Safer 976/18 August 1568), no. 2021 (14 Rebiülevvel
976/6 September 1568).
461 See, for example, 5 Mühimme, no. 938 (6 Receb 973/27 January 1566); no. 1000 (19 Receb
973/9 February 1566); no. 1051 (27 Receb 973/17 February 1566); no. 1613 (25 Şevval 973/15
May 1566); 7 Mühimme, no. 1560 (19 Zilhicce 975/15 June 1568); 12 Mühimme, no. 118 (13 Şevval
978/10 March 1571).
462 12 Mühimme, no. 118 (13 Şevval 978/10 March 1571).
463 7 Mühimme, no. 2703 (6 Receb 976/25 December 1568).
129
E b ru b oya r
Ottoman state, missing no opportunity to display magniicence and power.

In 1567, when Şah Kulu Han, the ruler of Revan and Nakhchivan and Safavid
ambassador, came to congratulate Selim on his accession to the throne, he
was received with great pomp and circumstance. Before leaving for Edirne,
where Selim was in residence, he was irst taken round Istanbul to see all the
important sites of the city.464 Selim personally interested himself in the prepa-
rations for the visit and gave instructions about everything, from the number
of boats to be used for the ambassador’s crossing of the Bosphorus to the
quantity of sugar and wax he was to be given.465 However, when it came to
the letter which was to be sent back to Tahmasp, Selim simply ordered Piyale
Paşa to write whatever was suitable, it thus being clear that what was impor-
tant was the pomp of the reception rather than the words on paper.466
In this insecure environment, the reception of Shah Tahmasp’s “great
favourite”467 and vezir Masum Sultan Safavi, who wished to enter Ottoman
territory to go on pilgrimage, was an important issue for Selim. He ordered
the beylerbeyi of Van “to adorn his men and troops with weapons and armour
so that [Masum] should be conquered by fear and terror and so that it should
be made clear that the soldiers of victory . . . were always present and ready
on the frontier”.468 Ottoman concern in this matter did not stem merely from
a desire to display power but was also connected to the Ottoman belief that
Masum Sultan’s aim in entering Ottoman territory was not an innocent one
and that he in fact had a secret mission to stir up revolt in Anatolia.469 As
Masum Sultan and his son advanced with the pilgrimage caravan, dressed as
pilgrims, they were attacked by Bedouin and killed. According to Abbas I’s
historian, Eskandar Beg Monshi, even if the Ottomans denied it, the Ottoman
administration lay behind this attack and the attackers of Masum Sultan’s
caravan were Ottoman soldiers dressed as Bedouin.470
Immediately before Masum Sultan set of on pilgrimage, news reached
Selim that Gilan, whose population was Sunni and was under Safavid inl u-
ence, had been taken over by Tahmasp and a Safavid governor appointed.
Selim ordered the beylerbeyi of Erzurum to ensure that any military deicien-
cies were made up and preparations for a campaign begun. This was to be
464 Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 67–72; Boyar and Fleet, Istanbul, p. 141.
465 7 Mühimme, no. 733 (16 Receb 975/16 January 1568).
466 7 Mühimme, no. 1158 (Şevval 975/March–April 1568).
468 7 Mühimme, no. 2491 (24 Cemaziülevvel 976/14 November 1568).
469 Bekir Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran Siyâsî Münâsebetleri (1578–1612) (Istanbul, 1993), p. 12.
470 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 253, 192–3. This accusation is sup-
ported by several Ottoman sources; see Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran, p. 12, note 39.
130
done without alerting the Safavids to what was going on.471 Despite any peace
that might exist, the Ottomans were thus not prepared to back away from any
direct conl ict with the Safavids if they considered it necessary.472
While using every opportunity to display their own strength, both Süleyman
and Selim did everything possible to prevent any similar display of prestige by
the Safavids within Ottoman territory. When the Süleymaniye mosque was
completed, Tahmasp sent an ambassador with a letter of congratulation and
three Qur’ans to Süleyman, and requested the measurements of the mosque
so that he might present a suitably sized Iranian carpet. Not wishing any such
carpets to ornament his mosque, Süleyman rejected the ofer, saying that all
the needs of the mosque had already been met.473 Likewise, Selim ordered the
removal of the Iranian carpets, decorated with writing, from the shrines of
Ali and Husayn in Iraq, and their replacement with carpets from Anatolia.474
Selim’s response to Tahmasp’s proposal that alms be distributed to the poor
throughout Ottoman territories for the soul of Süleyman was equally irm:
“if they [the Safavids] have money to be given as alms to the poor, then let it
be distributed to the poor of their own lands”.475
Despite all Ottoman precautions, however, it proved impossible to pre-
vent Safavid inl uence seeping into Ottoman territories. As the Venetian bailo
Giovanni Correr noted in 1578, the sultan could make very little progress
against the shah, who, in contrast, was in a position easily to stir up “very
great revolutions” in Ottoman territory due to the hostility of the population,
the majority of whom “even within sight of Constantinople” shared the reli-
gion of the shah.476 Fully aware of this, the Ottoman sultans kept the relations
of their own population with Iran under strict surveillance.477 Even in times
of oicial peace, the Ottoman administration, from the very beginnings of
the Safavid state onwards, always regarded their own subjects in Anatolia as a
potential ifth column for the Safavid state. Views outside the understanding
of Islam imposed by the state were perceived as a threat to central authority
471 7 Mühimme, no. 1476 (14 Muharrem 976/9 July 1568).

472 7 Mühimme, no. 321 (8 Rebiülahır 975/12 October 1567).
473 Diyanet, 1555 Amasya, pp. 12–4.
474 Ahmet Rei k, On Altıncı Asırda Rafızîlik ve Bektaşilik (Istanbul, 1932), no. 36 (Rebiülahır 979/
August–September 1571), p. 30.
475 Ahmet Rei k, Rafızîlik ve Bektaşilik, no. 24 (17 Şevval 975/15 April 1568), p. 24.
476 Relazione di Giovanni Correr, in Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni, p. 236.
477 See, for example, 5 Mühimme, no. 1105 (4 Şaban 973/24 February 1566); no. 1142 (14 Şaban
973/6 March 1566); 7 Mühimme, no. 2617 (22 Cemaziülahır 976/18 December 1568); Ahmet
Reik, Rafızîlik ve Bektaşilik, no. 52 (28 Şaban 987/20 October 1579), pp. 39–40; C. H. Imber,
‘The Persecution of Ottoman Shīítes According to the Mühimme Defterleri, 1565–1585’,
Der Islam 56 (1979), 245–73 at p. 250.
131
E b ru b oya r
and thus to “the order of the world”.478 One aspect of such Safavid inl uence
among the Ottoman population had economic implications for the state:
the halifes collected alms and donations among the followers of Isma‘il in
Anatolia, and these were sent to Iran.479 Even though the Safavid shah was
not the leader of a tarikat but rather a head of state, this practice continued
and the treaty of Amasya was unable to put a stop to it.480 Ottoman sources
show that this practice continued on into the new period of war under Murad
III, the sultan being informed in 1579, for example, of the collection of 1,500
lorins being handed to Emir Ali Halife, who had arrived from Iran.481
From the reign of Selim II, the methods of control imposed on sections of
the population in suspect locations from the time of Bayezid II began to be
inserted into a legal framework, further elaborated between 1545 and 1574 by
the şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi.482 Ruling that “the killing of this group [i.e.,
the kızılbaş] is more important than the killing of other inidels”, Ebussuud
stipulated that it was unlawful to try anyone who “was righteous” or punish
them without evidence.483 To what extent such dictates were put into practice
is not known, but it is clear that in both times of peace and war with Iran,
the Ottomans continued to persecute their own subjects who were deined as
Kızılbaş,484 even exiling them to Cyprus.485 Particularly in times of campaigns
to the east, before the 1569 Ejderhan (Astrakhan) campaign and in particular
in 1577, and during the preparations for the campaign which Murad III con-
ducted against Iran, surveillance, punishment and persecution increased.486
Long Iranian wars and Pyrrhic victories

In 1576, Tahmasp sent an ambassador to Istanbul to congratulate Murad III
on his accession to the throne. The ambassador was Tokmak Han, the ruler
of Erivan (Yerevan) and Nakhchivan and son of Şah Kulu, who had previ-
ously been sent as ambassador to congratulate Selim on his accession. The
478 Ocak, Zındıklar ve Mülhidler, p. 84.

479 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II, 2. Kısım, p. 243.
480 7 Mühimme, no. 1984 (29 Safer 976/23 August 1568); Imber, ‘Persecution’, pp. 254–5.
481 Ahmet Rei k, Rafızîlik ve Bektaşilik, no. 52 (28 Şaban 987/20 October 1579), pp. 39–40.
482 Elke Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik gegen die Safawiden im 16. Jahrhundert nach arabischen
Handschriften (Freiburg, 1970), pp. 48–53, 164–7.
483 M. Ertuğrul Düzdağ (ed.), Şeyhülislâm Ebussuûd Efendi Fetvaları Işığ ında 16. Asır Türk Hayatı
(Istanbul, 1983), hüküm 481, p. 111.
484 Hanna Sohrweide, ‘Der Sieg der Ṣafaviden in Persien und seine Rückwirkungen auf
die Schiiten Anatoliens im 16. Jahrhundert’, Der Islam 41 (1965), 95–223 at pp. 186–96; 12
Mühimme, no. 619 (2 Zilkade 978/28 March 1571).
485 12 Mühimme, no. 674 (3 Safer 979/27 June 1571).
486 Imber, ‘Persecution’, pp. 254–5, 257–8.
132
ambassadorial party was denied permission to enter the towns and villages on
its route and was forced to make stops out in the open and to pass the nights
in tents, measures designed to prevent any exchange of information with the
local population.487 The group’s reception in the capital, in contrast, was one
full of pomp and circumstance, intended to dazzle the Iranians with Ottoman
magniicence and power.488 According to Murad’s doctor, Domenico, the sul-
tan’s crossing the city accompanied by a magniicently dressed company of
10,000 to 12,000 men489 was an act intended “to terrify” the Iranian ambas-
sador, Murad instructing one of his paşas to say to Tokmak Han that “all
this cavalry which he had seen were only the chickens in the coop and that
he should consider how ininite a number remained (outside) in so many
ields”.490 Before Tokmak Han had left Ottoman territory, however, he had
other things on his mind, for news arrived that Tahmasp had died, his son
Haydar had been murdered and his other son, Isma‘il, described as “mad” by
Selaniki, had come to the throne. A massacre had followed and, renouncing
Shi’ism, Isma‘il had become Sunni.491
At the beginning of 1578, the Ottoman state, always attentive to intelli-
gence gathering, redoubled its eforts, instructing the beylerbeyis and emirs on
the Iranian border to be even more attentive over providing information to
the centre.492 Forwarding the news that Isma‘il had died and been succeeded
by his nearly blind brother Muhammad Hudabanda, Hüsrev Paşa, the beyler-
beyi of Van, stressed that this was an opportunity for attacking Iran.493 Murad
was in fact in no need of such encouragement, for “following his natural
instinct to occupy that of others”, in the words of Soranzo, he had already
perceived the Iranian situation as an opportunity for occupying Shirvan and
thus Iran.494
From the beginning of his reign, Murad had displayed an approach to
the Safavids which was not entirely friendly. On his accession, he had sent
ambassadors in all directions to announce the good news of his assumption
487 Bekir Kütükoğlu, ‘Şah Tahmasb’ın III. Murad’a Cülus Tebriki’, Tarih Dergisi 11, 15 (1960),
1–24 at pp. 2–3, note 5, and p. 4; Stephan Gerlach, Türkiye Günlüğ ü, 1573–1576, ed. Kemal
Beydilli and trans.Türkis Noyan, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 2006), vol. 1, p. 292.
488 Gerlach, Türkiye, vol. 1, pp. 334–40; Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 112–14; Kütükoğlu, ‘Cülus
Tebriki’, pp. 4–6.
489 Gerlach, Türkiye, vol. 1, p. 339.
490 Michael Austin (trans.), Domenico’s Istanbul, ed. Geofrey Lewis (Wiltshire, 2001), p. 30.
491 Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 115–16.
492 Ibid., p. 116.
493 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 2, p. 36; Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî ve Künhü’l Ahbâr’ında
II. Selim, III. Murat ve III. Mehmet Devirleri, ed. Faris Çerçi (Kayseri, 2000), II, p. 262.
494 Relazione di Giacomo Soranzo, in Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni, p. 292.
133
E b ru b oya r
of the Ottoman throne. The one ruler to whom an ambassador was not sent
was Tahmasp, for Murad wished to see how the Safavid ruler would react.495
Tahmasp had thus received the news not from Murad but from merchants
and travellers, and had then despatched a large ambassadorial party with very
valuable goods to Istanbul, thus denying Murad the opportunity to exploit any
failure to ofer congratulations to make a hostile move against the Safavids.
Murad’s father, Selim, had, at the time of Bayezid’s revolt, promised that he
and his descendants would abide by the Amasya treaty,496 and had not under-
taken any direct military attack against the Safavid state. This had not, how-
ever, prevented him from using other means to attack Safavid interests. While
the 1569 Ejderhan campaign was directed at curbing the rising Russian power
to the south of the Black Sea, it was also aimed at weakening the Safavid state.
The Ottomans claimed rights over Kazan and Astrakhan through the Crimean
hanate. The Kazan hanate had been occupied in 1552 and Astrakhan in the
mid-1550s by the Russians, and thus these hanates, important for north–south
trade, had passed into Russian hands.497 Although the Ottomans had wished
from 1562 on to campaign against Astrakhan, this had proved impossible in
the last years of Süleyman’s reign.498 But in 1569 Selim decided on an ofen-
sive. The architect of the campaign, Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, advocated the
construction of a canal between the Don and the Volga which would allow
the Ottomans to transport grain directly from the Black Sea into Georgia
and from there to Shirvan, Karabakh and Azerbaijan, thus solving one of the
main obstacles to Ottoman military penetration, lack of food supplies. The
canal would further allow transportation of men and munitions directly into
the Caucasus, thus facilitating and consolidating Ottoman control.499 Selim’s
positive response to a letter from the han of Khorasan, requesting the rescue
of Khorasanian pilgrims imprisoned in Iran on their return from pilgrimage,
concerning the opening of an alternative route through Astrakhan for pil-
grims and merchants clearly indicates that the basic target of Selim’s cam-
paign was the Safavids.500 Selim’s intention was to control Iranian trade, his
ambassador threatening the shah that the Ottomans “would not permit any
495 Kütükoğlu, ‘Cülus Tebriki’, pp. 1–2 and note 1.

496 Turan, Taht Kavgaları, doc. 15, pp. 190–1, pp. 132–3.
497 Mihail Hudyakov, Kazan Hanlığ ı Tarihi, trans. Ayaz İshaki and ed. İlyas Kamalov (Ankara,
2009), pp. 67–9, 132–49.
498 Halil İnalcık, ‘Osmanlı-Rus Rekabetinin Menşei ve Don-Volga Kanalı Teşebbüsü (1569)’,
Belleten 12 (1948), 349–402 at pp. 366–8.
499 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l Ahbâr, vol. 2, pp. 6–7; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 468–9; İnalcık,
‘Osmanlı-Rus’, pp. 372–3.
500 7 Mühimme, no. 2723 (10 Receb 976/29 December 1568).
134
cloth to be brought into his country”,501 regardless of any apparent “policy

of friendship” or “father-son relationship”502 between the two states. The
campaign was not, however, successful, the Ottomans instead sufering con-
siderable hardship and expense,503 while the aim of preventing Iranian trade
inding alternative routes out of Ottoman control was undermined by the
development of closer relations between the Russians and the Safavids during
the reign of Abbas I.504
When in 1578 Murad took the decision to launch a campaign against the
Safavids, the grand vezir Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, according to Peçevi, sought
to dissuade him, pointing out that if war was declared on Iran, the soldiers
would be obstreperous, salaries and expenses would increase, the reaya would
be crushed by taxes and ravages of the troops, and provincial income would
not be suicient to cover the campaign expenses. Even if Iran were conquered,
the reaya would not accept Ottoman overlordship. In short, Sokollu Mehmed
Paşa argued, those who were pushing for the campaign had no experience
of ighting against the Safavids.505 Soranzo conirms Peçevi’s account, for he
informed the Venetian Senate in 1584 that Murad, despite the paşas’ warnings,
had decided on war.506
Claiming that Isma‘il was conducting activities in contravention of the
peace, the Ottomans began raiding within the Iranian borders in the period
immediately after Isma‘il’s death. Emirs on the border, who had been unable
to change allegiance to the Ottomans due to the Amasya peace terms, were
now told by the Ottomans that their allegiance would be accepted and their
help requested.507 While an army was being prepared under the command of
Lala Mustafa Paşa, who had been appointed serdar (commander) at the begin-
ning of 1578, for a campaign via Georgia against Shirvan, conquest of which,
in the sultan’s estimation, would “open a major route for the acquisition of the
501 Letter of M. Arthur Edwards, 8 August 1566, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages Traiques
and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. Richard Hakluyt (London, Toronto and New York,
1927), vol. 2, p. 44; R. W. Ferrier, ‘The Terms and Conditions under which English Trade
Was Transacted with Safavid Persia’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49,
1 (1986), 48–56 at p. 51.
503 Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, p. 190.
504 Rudi Matthee, ‘Anti-Ottoman Concerns and Caucasian Interests: Diplomatic Relations
between Iran and Russia, 1587–1639’, in Safavid Iran and Her Neighbors, ed. Michel Mazzaoui
(Salt Lake City, 2003), pp. 101–28 at pp. 106–20; Rudi Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid
Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 76–8.
505 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 2, 36–7.
507 Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran, pp. 24–6.
135
E b ru b oya r
whole of the kingdom of Persia”,508 Lala Mustafa Paşa himself sent letters to
various beys in the Caucasus and even to rulers of regions under Safavid inl u-
ence, ordering them to provide assistance to the Ottomans.509 Setting out in
the spring, the army’s irst target was Georgia, an object of campaigns under
both Selim and Süleyman. In 1546, defeating an army made up of soldiers from
the small Georgian kingdoms of Imereti, Kartli and Meskheti (Samtskhe),
Süleyman had succeeded in establishing control over the Caucasian moun-
tains in the north and as far as Kakheti in the east. As a result of Ottoman
raids there in 1550 and 1552, Süleyman had established his inl uence over
Guria on the Black Sea coast. Under the Amasya peace, these territories, a
natural region for Safavid expansion, had been split into spheres of inl uence,
Meskheti, Kartli (Gori and Tbilisi) and Kakheti being left to the Safavid state
and Imereti (Başıaçuk), Guria (Güriyan), Mingreli (Dadyan) and the lands of
Ardahan, Ardanuç, Tortum and Oltu (Dav-Eli) to the Ottomans.510 When, at
the beginning of 1578, the Ottoman army had crossed over the border from
Ardahan into Georgian territory, Tokmak Han, governor of Çukur-Saad, the
commander of the Safavid forces, immediately went into action, clearly unin-
terested in the Rumeli beylerbeyi ’s letter warning him that any assistance to
the “inidel” Georgians would be contrary to the peace treaty.511 Defeating
the Safavids and the Georgian forces with them in August 1578 on the plain
of Çıldır, the Ottomans advanced on as far as Tbilisi and added this impor-
tant city to Ottoman territory. In September 1578, the Ottomans advanced
to Shirvan, where they again defeated the Safavids in battle at Koyun-Geçidi
(near the river Kur). Having taken the area of Sheki, the army moved on,
capturing the cities of Shirvan one by one and turning the region into an
eyalet with Demirkapı (Derbent) on the Caspian Sea as its capital. Before the
onset of winter, Lala Mustafa Paşa led the army under very diicult circum-
stances to Erzurum, leaving behind a force under Özdemiroğlu Osman Paşa,
who had been made a vezir. Faced with the perennial Ottoman problem of
holding the territory they had captured, Özdemiroğlu Osman Paşa was soon
under severe pressure from Safavid attack and was saved only by the arrival of
Crimean forces under Kalgay Adil Giray, who then fell prisoner to the Safavids

509 Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran, pp. 39–42; Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, pp. 278–81.
510 Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 191, 280–1, 283–4; Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 305; Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-
İran, p. 41; Kırzıoğlu, Kaf kas, p. 245; Carl M. Kortepeter, ‘Ottoman Imperial Policy and
the Economy of the Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the American
Oriental Society 86, 2 (1966), 86–113 at p. 94.
511 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l Ahbâr, vol. 2, p. 268.
136
and was later put to death.512 The Crimean han Mehmed Giray now came to
the Ottomans’ aid.
Despite such reinforcements and the subsequent improvement of the
Ottoman position, the Safavids refused to abandon the territory. In 1583,
Özdemiroğlu Osman Paşa defeated the troops of the governor of Gence,
Imam Kulu, at Baştepe, outside Derbent, in a battle which continued into the
night and was fought under torch light, for which it became known as the bat-
tle of Meşale (lantern, torch). Two years later, in 1585, Özdemiroğlu Osman
Paşa, now grand vezir, was once more in Iran. In command of the Ottoman
forces, he took Tabriz but died in subsequent ighting. Tabriz, now under
great pressure, was rescued by the newly arrived commander, Ferhad Paşa,
who also took Gence and Karabakh. In the same period, Cığalazade Sinan
Paşa entered Iran from Iraq and took Nihavand.513
Having achieved these military victories through the mobilisation of
large military forces, the Ottomans were most anxious to secure the alle-
giance of local rulers in order to be able to sustain their hold on these areas,
a strategy they had adopted earlier, particularly in their relations with
petty Sunni states, and had seen as useful in their military strategy against
Iran. Although Ottoman success did win over some Georgian rulers, the
Ottomans had to work both to ensure continued success and to keep such
rulers allied to them. In 1583, Murad III thus sent 21 hilats (robes of honour)
to the Circassian beys and rulers of Daghistan.514 The need to prove power-
ful enough to attract and maintain the support of local rulers had been
graphically demonstrated in an earlier period. During the campaign of
1533–5, the han of Gilan Mozafar and the han of Khorasan Gazi had sworn
allegiance to the Ottomans.515 When the Ottomans had proved unable to
hold the region, the han of Khorasan had returned again to the Safavids,516
but Mozafar Han had paid for his changing sides in the most appalling way,
strung up between two minarets and set on ire.517 The Ottomans estab-
lished relations with the Uzbeks, another important competitor and enemy
of the Safavids, encouraging them to attack the Safavids at times when the
512 Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran, pp. 57–107; Sümer, Safavî, pp. 121–4.

513 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, III, I. Kısım (Ankara, 2003), pp. 60–3; Kütükoğlu,
Osmanlı-İran, pp. 126–94.
514 Hikmet Ülker (ed.), Sultanın Emir Defteri (51 Nolu Mühimme) (Istanbul, 2003), no. 23, p. 12.
515 Gökbilgin, ‘Arz ve Raporlar’, doc. 5, pp. 472–3; Peçevi, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 180, 186.
137
E b ru b oya r
Ottomans themselves were at war with Iran and on occasion providing

them with men and arms.518
From the beginning of the Ottoman campaign, the Safavids had sought to
make peace through diplomatic channels and had several times despatched
ambassadors with peace overtures.519 The Ottoman troops, too, were inclined
to peace, for, according to Selaniki, the soldiers taking part in the eastern
campaign in 1581–2 were unwilling to continue ighting and, muttering “peace
is a blessing”, wanted the Iranian ofer of peace accepted.520 According to the
Venetian bailo Soranzo, the Ottomans sufered considerably during this cam-
paign, losing “150,000 people, a huge quantity of horses, of goods, of soldiers
and spend[ing] a vast amount of money”.521 Despite this, however, Murad was
not interested in the peace ofered by the Safavids, for he desired “to make
himself at least equal to the glory of his ancestors”.522 In this he was to be
helped not by the Ottomans but by Iranian military diiculties, for when Shah
Abbas came to the throne in 1588 he was faced by war on two fronts, with the
Ottomans and the Uzbeks, a situation which forced him to seek peace with
the Ottomans at almost any cost. In 1590, he sent an embassy to Istanbul and
accepted Murad’s crushing peace terms.523 Under the treaty between Murad
and Abbas, the Ottomans took the important states of Georgia, Shirvan,
Gence, Tabriz, Revan and Nihavand; the frontier now reached the Caspian.
As in the Amasya treaty, the Ottomans here, too, demanded the cessation of
the denigration of the irst three rightly guided caliphs and the Prophet’s wife
Aysha, as well as the retention of Shah Abbas’s nephew Haydar Mirza as a
hostage in Istanbul.524 With this long war, the Ottomans had extended their
territories, but, according to Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, who had taken part in
the campaigns,525 they paid heavily for this: “Rich became poor. The powerful
fell into the ranks of the weak and endless blood lowed on both sides. . . . Full
treasuries became empty. The land of Rum . . . changed from one of justice
and fairness into a land of tyranny and oppression and many thousands of
towns and villages were deserted by the reaya.”526 This costly and exhaust-
ing expansion did not mean that the Ottomans were the efective rulers of
518 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, III, 2. Kısım (Ankara, 2003), pp. 252–5.
519 Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 129, 132.
520 Ibid., p. 130.
522 Ibid.
523 Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran, pp. 194–200.
524 Kılıç, Siyasî Antlaşmaları, pp. 126–32; Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran, pp. 194–206.
525 Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian
Mustafa Âli (1541–1600) (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 70–86.
526 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l Ahbâr, vol. 2, p. 265.
138
these newly conquered regions. War between the two states would begin
again in 1603, and Shah Abbas would not merely recapture the lands which
the Ottomans had now taken but would also occupy Baghdad.
Conclusion
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman position in the east
was dominated by the Ottoman–Safavid clash. This vicious conl ict cost the
Ottomans as dearly as it did the Safavids. With the foundation of the Safavid
state by Isma‘il, the West had sought to establish relations with it and had sent
ambassadors proposing anti-Ottoman alliances.527 Even if no oicial agree-
ment materialised, the Ottoman–Iranian wars caused the Ottomans to divert
their energy and attention from the West, and Western observers who visited
Ottoman territory all carefully followed Ottoman relations with Iran.528 For
Schweigger, the Ottoman–Iranian wars beneited only the Christians, God
ensuring a balance by “caus[ing] the Turks to clash with the Iranians. . . . In
order for the poor innocent Christians not to be completely destroyed and for
them to be able to take a few peaceful breaths, the community of Muhammad
must ight amongst itself ”.529
By the end of the century, the Iranian campaigns had brought the empire
great expense and very little gain. This constant warfare, the increasing expense
and the failure of the state’s income to meet it was, Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali
noted, a major factor in the increasing economic and social chaos,530 epito-
mised by the celali revolts which broke out in Anatolia in 1596.531 Ottoman
state policy towards its own population further contributed to this deteriorat-
ing situation, and the pressure applied to sections of its own population as a
result of this ongoing conl ict with the Safavids alienated such people, who
in turn saw the Safavid state, as long as the Safavids themselves wished to
preserve their close connection with the Anatolian population, as an alterna-
tive power centre. This pressure and alienation within a section of Ottoman
Anatolian society was graphically captured by the famous sixteenth-century
527 Laurence Lockhart, ‘European Contacts with Persia, 1350–1736’, in Jackson and Lockhart,
The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6, pp. 373–411.
528 See, for example, Busbecq, Letters, pp. 165–6; Gerlach, Türkiye, vol. 1, pp. 452–3, 472; vol. 2,
p. 565; Schweigger, Sultanlar, pp. 80–1.
529 Schweigger, Sultanlar, p. 81.
530 Ahmet Uğur, Osmanlı Siyâset-Nâmeleri (Istanbul, 2001), p. 122. See also Selaniki, Tarih, vol.
2, p. 716.
531 Akdağ, Dirlik ve Düzenlik, pp. 355–501; William J. Griswold, Anadolu’da Büyük İsyan 1591–1611,
trans. Ülkün Tansel (Istanbul, 2002), pp. 2–4.
139
E b ru b oya r
Anatolian poet Pir Sultan Abdal, who openly proclaimed that “the religion of
Muhammad is our religion”532 and complained that, although Muslims, they
were not accepted as such by the rulers of the state:
If they [the Ottoman rulers] make me do ablutions which I have already done
If they make me say prayers which I have already said
If you Ottomans kill those who pronounce the name Shah
Then this year we will go from the summer pastures to the Shah.533
532 Sadettin Nüzhet, XVII inci Asır Sazşairlerinden Pir Sultan Abdal (Istanbul, 1929), p. 65.
533 Pir Sultan Abdal, Bütün Şiirleri, ed. Cahit Öztelli (Istanbul, 1974), 72, p. 149.
140
5
Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean
K ate Fle et
Although traditionally considered more of a land than a sea power, maritime

afairs, in the words of Katip Çelebi, mattered to the Ottomans,1 and by the
later sixteenth century, they had become a major power in the Mediterranean,
dominating the east, active in the west and with at least a level of authority
over the North African coast to Morocco.
1451–1481: Expansion in the eastern Mediterranean

For Mehmed II, sea power was “a great thing”, domination of the sea
“essential” and naval operations “of the irst importance”.2 Without control
of the Aegean, his territories, and his ships, remained vulnerable to attack
from the sea. Latin-controlled islands such as Rhodes, a “source of evil and
sedition and a gathering point for the people of immorality”,3 represented
hostile bases within Ottoman territory from where efective enemies such
as the Hospitallers, so skilful that they could attack a galley with a row-
boat,4 and the hordes of pirates and corsairs who infested the waters of the
Aegean, could operate. Certain territories represented strategic locations for
Ottoman advance, the Peloponnese being conquered in 1460 in part because
of its situation on the route of Mehmed’s planned expedition against Italy,5
and Rhodes being attacked unsuccessfully in 1480 because of the island’s
1 Katib Çelebi, Deniz Savaşları Hakkında Büyüklere Armağan (Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr fî Esfâri’l-Bihâr)

(Istanbul, 2007), p. 372 (facsimile), p. 191.
2 Kritoboulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror. By Kritovoulos, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Westport,
Conn., 1954), pp. 141–2.
3 Kemalpaşazade (İbn Kemal), Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman VII. Defter, ed. Şerafettin Turan (Ankara,
1991), p. 501.
4 Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, p. 501.
141
K ate Fl e et
location, which made it an ideal naval base from which to attack, and con-
trol, lands to the east.6
Apart from any strategic considerations, Mehmed also had economic con-
siderations in mind in his plans for maritime conquest. The Aegean was a rich
trading zone, linking the West to the luxury markets of Cairo and Istanbul,
and beyond to the northern commerce via the Black Sea. Istanbul, captured
in 1453, was a major market, whose economic importance had been a moti-
vating factor in its conquest.7 Continually served by the encircling sea,8 mari-
time commerce was vital for its wealth and prosperity, just as ensuring regular
shipments of food provisions, in particular grain, was essential for the sur-
vival and contentment of its population, and thus for the political stability of
the state. Mehmed was keen to control trade routes through the Aegean, to
capture the lucrative mainland and island ports rich in customs revenue and
to secure the safety of commercial shipping. The prosperity of coastal ports
such as Enez, with its harbour and rich salt mines,9 the major alum mines
and customs revenues of Old and New Phokaea (Foça and Yeni Foça) and the
major market of Negroponte (Ağrıboz, Eubea),10 made such locations targets
for Ottoman acquisition. Not content merely with conquest, Mehmed was
also anxious to ensure the economic prosperity of the islands once he had
conquered them, ofering tax exemptions, for example, to those wishing to
settle on Samos (Sisam),11 Lemnos (Limnos, Limni) or Bozcaada (Tenedos);
on the latter, he also built a castle to protect Ottoman commercial vessels.12
Early in his reign, Mehmed set out on a campaign of maritime conquest.
Despatching two expeditions in 1455, one under the “conscientious” Hamza13
6 Guglielmo Caoursin, L’assedio della città di Rodi, trans. Francesco Rappini (Genoa, 1992),
p. 23. See also Selahattin Tansel, Osmanlı Kaynaklarına Göre Fatih Sultan Mehmed’in Siyasi ve
Askeri Faaliyeti (Ankara, 1999), p. 232.
7 Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge, 2010),
pp. 11–14.
8 Abdüsselam Bilgen (ed. and trans.), Adā’yi Şīrāzī ve Selim-Nāmesi (Ankara, 2007), p. 25.
9 Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, p. 105; Kritoboulos, History, pp. 107, 108, 159. There were also
other economic reasons for the conquest: the seizing of Muslim slaves, attacks on surrounding
villages and the selling of salt to foreigners that was supposed to be sent to the Ottomans. See
Aşıkpaşazade, Â şık Paşazade Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, ed. Kemal Yavuz and M. A. Yekta Saraç
(Istanbul, 2003), pp. 490–1, 221–2; Aşıkpaşazade, Die Altosmanische Chronik des Ašıkpašazade,
ed. Fredrich Giese (Leipzig, 1929, reprinted Osnabrück, 1972), pp. 135–6; Tursun Bey, Târîh-i
Ebü’l-Feth, ed. Mertol Tulum (Istanbul, 1977), pp. 76–7; Tansel, Mehmed, p. 232.
10 Tursun Bey, Târîh, p. 148; Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, p. 291.
11 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, II. Cilt, İstanbul’un Fethinden Kanunî Sultan
Süleyman’ın Ölümüne Kadar (Ankara, 2006), p. 41–2.
12 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibar, p. 244 (facsimile), p. 34; Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye (Istanbul, 1935),
p. 89.
13 Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, trans. and ed. Harry J. Magoulias
(Detroit, 1975), p. 246.
142
and the other led by the “handsome” Yunus,14 Mehmed attacked various
islands, including Kos, clashed with the Genoese on Chios and took the
Genoese settlements of Old and New Phokaea. Lemnos was captured in 1456
and Enez, where “ire fell on the soul of the Tekfur [local ruler] . . . and the
power of fear dried his blood”,15 in the same year, the inhabitants suing for
peace “before the explosion of cannon had even had time to deafen the ears
of the efete inidels”.16
Mehmed’s aggressive policy resulted in the despatch of a papal leet,
which took Lemnos, Samothrace and Thasos in 1457. Although temporarily
disruptive, the impact of the papal intervention was negligible, and, largely
undisturbed, Mehmed turned his attention to the Peloponnese, where
Ottoman forces had already taken Athens and conquered it in 1460; Lesbos
fell in 1462, its ruler, Nicolò Gattilusio, “drawn into the chain of subjec-
tion”17 and “the clanging and echoing of bells rendered silent by the call to
prayer”.18
Ottoman success in the Aegean and the Peloponnese was viewed with alarm
from Venice, whose commercial interests in the region were threatened by
these developments. In 1463, the Senate declared war, which was to last for the
next 16 years. While some in the Peloponnese supported the Venetians, who
had occupied the isthmus of Corinth, many were more cautious, waiting to
see what would happen,19 an approach justiied by the rapid re-establishment
of Ottoman control over the isthmus and the successful defence of Corinth.
The following summer, the Venetians attacked Lesbos, pillaging the island
(though not excessively so, as they hoped to gain possession of it)20 but fail-
ing to take the city. They were, however, more successful with Lemnos and
Imbros, both of which fell to them. In December 1466, perhaps alarmed by
their recent failure at Patras,21 the Venetians sued for peace on the basis of
the status quo, an ofer rejected by the Ottomans, who demanded the return
of Imbros and Lemnos and annual tribute. The war therefore continued.
The Venetians attacked and plundered Enez, taking many of the popula-
tion, including the kadı and the hatib, back to “their nest”, as Kemalpaşazade
14 Doukas, Decline and Fall, p. 252; Kritoboulos, History, p. 96.

15 Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, p. 108. The ruler himself was actually in Samothrace for the winter
at the time. See Kritoboulos, History, p. 110; Doukas, Decline and Fall, p. 254.
16 Tursun Bey, Târîh, p. 77.
19 Kritoboulos, History, pp. 189–91, quotation at p. 191.
20 Ibid., pp. 204–6.
143
K ate Fl e et
described Negroponte.22 In response,23 Mehmed attacked Negroponte, the

“country of the evil one [i.e., the Venetians]”,24 where the hand-to-hand ight-
ing was so close that Muslim and inidel were “hair to hair, beard to beard”.25
Negroponte fell in 1470, the Ottomans killing the “boorish inidels”, leaving
no male alive26 and enslaving their wives and daughters.27 Venice had thus lost
one of its possessions which, together with Coron, Modon and Crete, it had
described a century before as places which “can well be called the right eye
and hand of the Venetian commune”.28
The year after the fall of Negroponte, Mehmed took Alanya during his
campaign against Karaman in Anatolia, followed in 1472 by the capture of
Silif ke, giving him control of the Mediterranean coastline of Anatolia. It
was on this coast where the Venetians next struck when in 1472 the Venetian
captain-general Piero Mocenigo, together with forces from King Ferrante of
Naples, the Hospitallers and the pope, attacked Antalya, “the greatest and
most famous seaport in Asia”.29 Although unsuccessful, the attack was very
lucrative in terms of spoils. Next, Mocenigo attacked İzmir, inl icting damage
and sailing away with a considerable quantity of booty.
By 1475, however, the Venetians were again seeking peace, an ofer again
rejected by the Ottomans. For the next couple of years, Ottoman atten-
tion was not on the war with Venice but on the Black Sea campaign, which
resulted in the capture of the Genoese trading settlement of Cafa (Kefe)
and attacks against Moldavia and Hungary. Two years later, their focus had
shifted and they were attacking Lepanto (Navpaktos, İnebahtı), laying siege
to Krujë and even raiding Venetian territory close to Venice itself. In the fol-
lowing year, Venice opened negotiations for peace, unsuccessfully, while the
Ottomans took Krujë, Drisht and Lezhë and laid siege to Shkodër. Finally,
in 1479, the Venetians, “showing inferiority and shame” in the words of the
22 Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, p. 284; Giovan Maria Angiolello [Donado da Lezze], Historia
Turchesca (1300–1514), ed. I. Ursu (Bucharest, 1909), p. 34.
23 According to Giovan Maria Angiolello, who was himself captured at the fall of Negroponte,
Mehmed’s attack was in revenge for Nicolò da Canale’s sacking and burning of Enez. See
Giovan Maria Angiolello, Viag io di Negroponte (Vicenza, 1982), pp. 1–2.
26 Anonim Osmanlı Kroniği (1299–1512), ed. Necdet Öztürk (Istanbul, 2000), p. 127.
27 Lüti Paşa, Lüti Paşa ve Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman, ed. Kayhan Atik (Ankara, 2001), p. 187; Lüti
Paşa, Tevarih-i Al-i Osman (Istanbul, 1341/1922–3), p. 187.
28 Spiridonos M. Theotoke, Ιστορικά κρητικά έγγραφα εκδιδόμενα εκ του αρχείου της Βενετίας
αποφάσεις μείζονος συβυλίου Βενετίας 1255–1669 (Athens, 1933), p. 145, 4 March 1369.
29 Domenico Malipiero, Annali veneti dal MCCCCLVII ad MD, in Archivio Storico Italiano
(Florence, 1843), vol. 7, pt. 1, p. 74.
144
Ottoman grand vezir Karamanlı Nişancı Mehmed Paşa, sent an ambassador

to Istanbul and “threw themselves on the mercy of the sultan”.30 Venice lost
Shkodër, Lemnos and lands in the Peloponnese,31 and was forced to pay an
annual sum of 10,000 lorins, the signiicance of which was not, according
to Mehmed Paşa, the money itself, for the sum was “less than a simple, salty
drop in the great sweet water oceans”, but the fact of forcing the Venetians
“to bow their heads” before the might of the sultan.32 The new bailo, Battista
Gritti, duly handed over the “gift” of money, which Mehmed “graciously and
with great pleasure” accepted.33 The outcome of the war with Venice was
thus, for the Ottomans, a most satisfactory victory over the pre-eminent naval
power of the region.
The year after the defeat of Venice, Mehmed despatched two naval expe-
ditions, one to Italy, which was successful, and one against Rhodes, which
was not. Despite the use of spies, propaganda campaigns, threats of sack-
ing, slaughter and enslavement, and a cannon which produced smoke like a
great cloud and a huge roar like a clap of thunder heard 100 miles away,34 the
Ottoman siege of Rhodes failed. The Ottoman leet sailed away after 89 days,
taking with it “defeat and shame”,35 the failure, according to Tursun Bey, due
to Mesih Paşa’s hesitant and mistaken strategy,36 an estimation supported by
another contemporary, Angiolello, who commented that in everyone’s opin-
ion the enterprise would have been a success had it been led not by Mesih
Paşa but by Gedik Ahmed Paşa, the commander of the successful siege of
Otranto.37 Katip Çelebi, too, blamed Mesih Paşa, whose meanness in prohibit-
ing plundering, as well as the soldiers’ greed for booty, lay behind the failure
of the siege.38
The other major expedition of that year was much more successful. Having
earlier taken the Ionian islands of Lef kas (Lef kada, Santa Maura, Ayamavra),
Cephalonia and Zakynthos (Zante), Gedik Ahmed Paşa was now despatched
with a “magniicent” leet which looked like “a 1000-handed giant”.39 Crossing
30 Karamanlı Nişancı Mehmed Paşa, Osmanlı Sultanları Tarihi, trans. Konyalı İbrahim Hakkı,
in Osmanlı Tarihleri, ed. Nihal Atsız (Istanbul, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 321–69 at pp. 359–60.
31 Diana Gilliand Wright and Pierre A. MacKay, ‘When the Serenissima and the Gran Turco
Made Love: the Peace Treaty of 1478’, Studi Veneziani 53 (2007), 261–77 at pp. 276–7.
32 Karamanlı Nişancı Mehmed Paşa, Osmanlı Sultanları Tarihi, p. 360.
33 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Documenti Turchi, Busta 1, doc. 9 b, letter from Mehmed to
Giovanni Mocenigo, doge of Venice, 17 September 6988 [1479].
34 Caoursin, L’assedio, pp. 26–7, 30, 32, 33–4, 42, 44–6.
35 Ibid., p. 56.
36 Tursun Bey, Fatih’in Tarihi, Tārih-i Ebul Feth, ed. Ahmet Tezbaşar (Istanbul, n.d.), p. 158.
37 Angiolello, Historia, p. 114.
38 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibar, p. 244 (facsimile), p. 35.
145
K ate Fl e et
over from the Albanian coast to southern Italy, he captured Otranto,40 quickly
re-fortifying it.41 For some, the Ottoman attack had been instigated or encour-
aged by the Venetians, Sigismondo de’Conti noting that while he could not him-
self conirm this suspicion, it was certainly true that the Ottomans would never
have attempted this had they not been at peace with Venice.42 From Otranto, the
Ottomans conducted raids against Brindisi, Lecce and Taranto. They imposed
a 1 ducat tax on every family, melted down the church bells to make cannon,
and sent 8,000 captives of to Albania,43 measures, as Tansel remarks, that
were “inconvenient” from the point of view of winning over the population.44
As people began to migrate away, the Ottoman policy changed to one more
adapted to appeasement, ofering a ten-year tax break and religious freedom in
an attempt to defuse the situation and ensure a calm and settled population.45
The fall of Otranto was seen as merely the irst step in a wider campaign of
conquest, and many now feared for the fate of Italy.46 Gedik Ahmed Paşa was
regarded as seeking to enlame Mehmed’s desire to conquer Italy,47 and it was
generally felt that it was only Mehmed’s death which prevented the spread of
“that plague” over Italian territory.48 Had Otranto not been re-captured, in the
words of the humanist Galateo, “we would not be in Bari today, nor the Pope
in Rome, nor would this kingdom [i.e., Calabria] be in the Christian faith, nor
Sicily, nor Lombardy”.49
By 1480, therefore, Mehmed had not only captured many of the Aegean
islands and the Peloponnese but had also established a base in Italy, believed
to presage the conquest of a far greater area of Italian territory. Various fac-
tors account for his success. Apart from access to the considerable manpower
and resources of his ever-expanding territories, Mehmed was also served by
expert seamen such as the grand vezir Mahmud Paşa, “an intelligent and skil-
ful sea bey”, whose construction and organisation of the leet sent against
Negroponte in 1470 was such as to have drawn the sound of congratulation
40 According to Angiolello, his original target had been Brindisi, but a contrary wind had blown
the Ottoman ships to the west. See Angiolello, Historia, p. 110.
41 Ilarione da Verona, ‘Copia Idruntine expugnationis’, in Gli Umanisti e la guerra Otrantina.
Testi dei secoli XV e XVI, ed. Lucia Gualdo Rosa, Isabella Nuovo and Domenico Deilippis
(Bari, 1982), pp. 36, 37; Giovanni Albino Lucano, ‘De bello hydruntino’, in ibid., pp. 60, 61;
Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo, ‘De Situ Iapygiae’, in ibid., pp. 236, 237.
42 Sigismondo de’ Conti, ‘Historiarum sui temporis Libri XVII’, in ibid., pp. 226, 268, 227, 229.
43 Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo, ‘De Situ Iapygiae’, in ibid., pp. 236, 237.
44 Tansel, Mehmed, p. 133.
45 Ibid.
46 Ilarione da Verona, ‘Copia Idruntine expugnationis’, pp. 36, 37.
47 Lucano, ‘De bello hydruntino’, pp. 62, 63.
48 Marcantonio Sabellico, ‘Enneades sive Rhapsodia historiarum’, in Rosa, Nuovo and
Deilippis, Gli Umanisti, pp. 214, 215.
49 Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo, ‘Esposizione del Pater Noster’, in ibid., p. 233.
146
from the soul of the legendary naval hero Gazi Umur Bey.50 Mehmed also
beneited from foreign expertise, for the Ottoman arsenal and leet ofered
an alternative source of employment for skilled mariners from the West, and
Venetian master mariners such as Georgio de Tragurio could move from the
Venetian navy to Ottoman service.51 Corsairs, too, could change sides, for
example, Zuan Monaco Corsaro falling out in 1467 with the Venetians with
whom he had been cooperating in harassing the Ottomans in the archipelago.
Insulted by the “strange words” the Venetian captain-general had addressed
to him, he promptly moved over to the Ottomans.52
Mehmed’s tactics also played a considerable role in his success. He adopted
what might be called a policy of progressive conquest, attaching the Aegean
islands and the coastal regions to the empire in stages, irst through tribute
and then outright conquest, Dorino Gattilusio for example holding Enez by
paying tax and two-tenths of the annual salt production to the Ottomans,53
and the Gattilusio of Lesbos paying tribute until inally, after a rather up-and-
down relationship, Mehmed conquered the island in 1462.
Mehmed also sought to use inter-Latin rivalry or Latin–Greek divisions among
the inhabitants of the Aegean islands. Lemnos fell as a result of the Lemnians’
request that the Ottomans take the island from its ruler, Nicolò Gattilusio,54
and in a dispute between Dorino Gattilusio and his brother’s widow in Enez,
the widow appealed through her uncle to Mehmed.55 That Mehmed attempted
to exploit Greek–Latin hostility is indicated by the speech of the nuncio of the
grand master of the Hospitallers during the unsuccessful siege of Rhodes, in
which he replied to the Ottoman ambassador that, “We are not frightened
by your threats. We are in agreement and there is no discord between the
Greeks and the Latins. We adore Christ with a single faith and sound spirit”.56
Interestingly, there had been a disturbance in the city at the beginning of 1477
related to diiculties between the Latin and the Orthodox populations,57 and

51 Victor Lamansky, ed., Secrets d’état de Venise, documents extraits, notices et études servant à
eclaircir les rapports de la Seigneurie avec les Grecs, les Slaves et la Porte Ottomane à la in du
XVe et au XVIe siècle (St. Petersburg, 1884), doc. 14, pp. 16–17 (16 March 1463). Condemned and
imprisoned for transporting forbidden goods to the inidels, Georgio de Tragurio escaped
and led to Istanbul.
53 Kritoboulos, History, p. 109; Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, pp. 490–1, 221–2;
Aşıkpaşazade, Chronik, pp. 135–6.
54 Doukas, Decline and Fall, p. 255.
55 Kritoboulos, History, pp. 105–7.
56 Caoursin, L’assedio, p. 47.
57 Zacharias N. Tsirpanlis, ‘Il decreto iorentino di unione e la sua applicazione nell’arcipelago
Greco. Il case di Creta e di Rodi, Θησαυρίσματα 21 (1991), 43–88 at p. 55, note 1.
147
K ate Fl e et
a year before the Hospitallers had decreed that all non-Orthodox priests were
to be expelled and no Greek priest who was not a subject of the Order was
to be allowed onto the island, for such priests had been “spreading false reli-
gious views” and “deceiving the simple people”.58 This Greek–Latin discord is
alluded to later in a letter sent in 1503 to Bayezid II’s son Korkud by a captive in
Rhodes, Abu Bakir Darani, who urged the ease with which the Ottomans could
take the island, drawing attention to the Hospitallers’ “tyranny” over the Greek
Orthodox population.59
In 1481, shortly after his troops landed in Otranto and before any further
advance in Italy could be undertaken, Mehmed II died, a death “opportune
for the Christian world” in the words of Galateo and one much welcomed by
Caoursin, the vicecancilliere of the Hospitallers, who commented that “God
has not conceded us any blessing . . . more important, better or more appreci-
ated than the death of Mehmed II”.60 Mehmed’s departure from the scene
was certainly opportune for many, for the role played by Bayezid in the east-
ern Mediterranean was, at least initially, to difer considerably from that of
his father. Otranto was abandoned, despite Gedik Ahmed Paşa’s eforts to
prevent this,61 and the Ottoman soldiers there were left to their fate,62 their
wells poisoned, decimated by attacks and disease and reduced to eating cats
and dogs63 until they surrendered on 10 September 1481.64
1481–1533: Consolidation in the eastern Mediterranean

Two factors in the irst part of Bayezid’s reign served to curtail any expansion-
ist maritime ambitions he might have had: the revolt and subsequent l ight of
58 Tsirpanlis, ‘Decreto’, doc. 3, p. 79 (10 June 1476).
59 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, ‘Rodos Şövalyeleri Hakkında Antalya Valisi Sultan Korkud’a
Gönderilmiş Bir Mektup’, Belleten 18, 91 (1954), 347–55 at pp. 352–4. According to Gerlach, a
Protestant priest attached to the Habsburg embassy between 1573 and 1578, Chios fell in 1566
because the locals did not like the Genoese and asked the Ottomans to take it, while noting
that the Venetians treated their subjects on Cyprus very badly. See Stephan Gerlach, Türkiye
Günlüğ ü, 1573–1576, ed. Kemal Beydilli, trans. Türkis Noyan, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 2007), vol. 1, pp.
127, 240–1. He later states that the Ottomans took Chios on the pretext that the Chians had
in the past given refuge to leeing slaves (ibid., vol. 2, p. 603).
60 Caoursin, L’assedio, p. 67.
61 Angiollello, Historia, pp. 170–1.
62 Giovanni Michele Marziano, ‘Successi dell’armata turchesca nella città d’Otranto nell’anno
MCCCCLXXX’, in Rosa, Nuovo and Deilippis, Gli Umanisti, p. 168.
63 Lucano, ‘De bello hydruntino’, pp. 74, 75, 86, 87; Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, p. 519.
64 According to Giovanni Albino Lucano, there were on the ships leaving after the surren-
der very many Pugliesi girls “who had in two years easily learnt the religion and barbarian
language” and had been hidden away during the loading of the ships. See Lucano, ‘De bello
hydruntino’, pp. 86, 87. Of the Turks who survived the ighting, many went to Macedonia
and many went to ight for Alfonso II, duca di Calabria (ibid., pp. 88, 89).
148
his brother Cem into the willing arms of the Hospitallers in July 1482 and his
war with the Mamluks, which broke out in 1485 and ended in 1491, four years
before the death of Cem.
From 1495, however, with the Mamluk war behind him and having now
“freed himself from the fear of Cem”,65 as one Ottoman chronicler put it,
Bayezid turned his attention to the sea. In fact, even before this date Bayezid
had not been entirely inactive in the Mediterranean. Venice complained of
attacks on its possessions in the Peloponnese from Ottoman ships,66 and in
1492 Bayezid had apparently contemplated taking Corfu but found it too well
defended.67 Now, in 1496, he began major naval preparations. Alarmed, Venice
inquired as to the purpose of these preparations, only to be told that the leet
was being itted out for an expedition against corsairs in the Mediterranean.
In 1498, Bayezid was again preparing a large leet, and by 1499 the Ottomans
were at war with Venice.
Venice had throughout the period of Cem’s captivity remained cautious in
its dealings with Bayezid, assuring him in 1482 that Cem would not be given
refuge in any Venetian port and despatching instructions to Venetian oicials
that no assistance was to be provided to him. They even went as far as assur-
ing Bayezid that if they received any information about Cem, they would
pass it on to him.68 However, in 1487 Venice did refuse Bayezid permission
to use the port of Famagusta during the war with the Mamluks, prompting
the Ottomans to attempt to seize it, prevented only by the swift arrival of
Francesco di Prioli, sent there post haste to defend the city.69
In the period leading up to the outbreak of hostilities, Bayezid had taken steps
to improve his navy, increasing its size and, importantly, recruiting the corsairs
Piri Reis, Burak Reis and Kemal Reis as navy commanders. These men were
highly experienced in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and brought
with them not only their skill but also their ships and men. Kemal Reis’s fame
was such that his name was celebrated “throughout the world”. Inidels in the
65 Richard F. Kreutel (ed.), Haniwaldanus Anonimi’ne Göre Sultan Bayezid-i Veli (1481–1512), trans.
Necdet Öztürk (Istanbul, 1997), p. 29.
66 Jacques Lefort (ed.), Documents grecs dans les archives de Topkapı Sarayı. Contribution à
l’histoire de Cem Sultan. Topkapı Sarayı Arşivlerinin Yunanca Belgeleri. Cem Sultan’ın Tarihine
Katkı, trans. Hatice Gonnet (Ankara, 1981), letter 1, Giovanni Mocenigo, doge of Venice, to
Bayezid, September 1480, pp. 33, 35.
67 Angiolello, Historia, pp. 191–2; Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye, p. 330. Piri Reis refers to the lateness
of the season and contrary winds.
68 Lefort, Documents, letter 1, Giovanni Mocenigo, doge of Venice, to Bayezid, September 1480,
pp. 32, 34. According to Angiolello, Cem tried to go to the Venetians, but they did not want
him because they feared ending up in a war with Bayezid. See Angiolello, Historia, p. 181.
149
K ate Fl e et
Maghreb frightened their children into submission by threatening them with

him: “if the inidels saw him, they died of fright, if they heard him, they became
powerless . . ., if his name was mentioned, they lost control”.70 The Hospitallers
were more afraid of Kemal Reis “than [of] the angel of death”.71
The use of corsairs, a rather slippery term, for one man’s corsair was
another man’s pirate, but who in essence were men who operated under the
aegis of a state, was not new. Mehmed II used them, for example, in the cap-
ture of Otranto.72 But Bayezid’s initiative involved a greater, institutionalised
corsair involvement within the naval structure. Clearly such a policy was not
without risk, Nicolas Vatin arguing that by using pirates to re-construct his
leet Bayezid “opened Pandora’s box”.73 Certainly some observers were not
over-impressed by Ottoman corsairs, the Venetian bailo Danielle de’ Ludovisi
dismissing them in 1534 as “confused and unruly people”.74 Nevertheless, the
advantage of using highly skilled, highly experienced mariners who knew the
eastern Mediterranean backwards, there being, for example, “no island in that
sea on which his [Kemal Reis]’s foot has not stepped”, 75 was evident in the
subsequent performance of the leet. It was after all Kemal Reis’s nephew Piri
Reis, a man who had gained his extensive knowledge of the Mediterranean
from sailing with his uncle and other “sea gazis”, who was to present his
world map, which he completed in 1513, to Selim in 1517 and his portolan on
“the climate of the sea and the art of ships”, containing detailed descriptions
and charts of the Mediterranean, to Süleyman in 1526.
As it had under Mehmed II, the navy continued to beneit from the pres-
ence of skilled foreign labour. The designer of the two large göke (cocca) built
for the leet and used in the siege of Lepanto was, according to some reports,
a man called Yani, who had gained his skill in Venice.76 The Serenissima was
by no means pleased with Venetians serving the Ottoman leet, and in 1495 the
Senate even considered a proposition by a certain Jacobo de Venetis to poison
Benedicto Barbera, a Venetian and “most expert master of the maritime art”,
who had gone into Ottoman service and converted. If successful, Jacobo was
to receive 5 ducats per month for life.77
70 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ-i Âl-i Osmân VIII. Defter, ed. Ahmet Uğur (Ankara, 1997), p. 145.
71 Uzunçarşılı, ‘Rodos Şövalyeleri’, p. 347.
72 Marziano, ‘Successi’, p. 118.
73 Nicolas Vatin, L’Ordre de St. Jean de Jérusalem, l’empire ottoman et la Méditerranée orientale
entre les deux sièges de Rhodes (1480–1522) (Louvain and Paris, 1994), p. 294.
74 Relazione di Danielle de’ Ludovisi, in Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato durante il XVI
secolo, ed. Eugenio Albèri, Serie 3, 3 vols. (Florence, 1842–1855), vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 18.
75 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ, VIII, p. 145.
77 Lamansky, Sécrets, doc. 26, pp. 30–1 (29 January 1495).
150
With Venice with his new, improved navy, whose sailors moved their ships
with a skill that no cavalryman could match,78 and whose speed was such
that if an arrow was ired ahead of the ship it would still fall on deck, Bayezid
entered war with Venice.79 At the end of May 1499, the leet sailed into the
Mediterranean, its progress observed from Modon (Methone) by the com-
mander of the Venetian leet, Antonio Grimani. Thought to be headed for
Corfu, its target was in fact Lepanto. In a major sea battle of Lepanto, Burak
Reis was killed, his galley together with two Venetian galleys going down in
lames.80 After further ighting during which “God blew out the candle of
their wind”, leaving the French ships becalmed,81 and “the face of the sea
was entirely painted with men’s blood”,82 the Ottomans entered Lepanto
harbour and the defenders surrendered, victims, according to one contem-
porary, of Venice’s failure to defend them. The fall caused consternation in
Modon, where a stunned population feared that they, too, would be aban-
doned by Venice.83 By 1500, the Venetians were suing for peace, to no efect,
for the Ottomans wanted Coron (Korone) and Modon, referred to earlier
by the Venetians as “the right eye of Venice”,84 Nafplio (Nauplia, Napoli di
Romania), Monemvasia and an annual payment of 10,000 ducats.85
In the same year, Bayezid assembled his forces for an attack on Modon,
described by Andrea Balastero, who survived the siege and was taken captive
to Istanbul, as being as dear to Venice as the heart is to the body of a man,86
and by Kemal Reis as one of the two eyes of Venice, the other being Corfu.87
Despite the propaganda tactic of iring letters attached to arrows into the city,
urging the population to surrender and explaining the dire consequences of
resistance,88 the defenders held out until the city inally fell, its male popula-
tion put to the sword and the women and children enslaved.89

79 Ibid., p. 212.
80 Anonim Osmanlı Kroniği, p. 127 (facsimile), p. 138; Katip Çelebi, Tuhfatü’l-Kibar, p. 246 (facsim-
ile), p. 37; Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, pp. 183–5. Piri Reis recorded that an island there was
called Burak Adası after this incident. See Piri Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye, p. 277.
81 Theodore Spandounes, On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, trans. Donald Nicol
(Cambridge, 1997), p. 58.
83 Angiolello, Historia, p. 231, account of Andrea Balastero.
84 J. Chrysostomides, Monumenta Peloponnesiaca: Documents for the History of the Peloponnese in
the 14th and 15th Centuries (Camberley, 1995), doc. 26, p. 55 (23 January 1385).
85 Malipiero, Annali veneti, p. 194; Marino Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, 25 vols. (Bologna,
1969–70), vol. 3, p. 180.
87 Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye, p. 330.
89 Anonim Osmanlı Kroniği, p. 127 (facsimile), p. 138.
151
K ate Fl e et
From Modon, the leet set sail for Coron, their ships lying like the wind
on the face of the sea and speeding along like birds.90 Having taken Navarino
(Navarin), the leet arrived at Coron, where, as an encouragement to surren-
der, the Ottoman commanders referred to their recent success at Modon,
whose inidels they had despatched “into the ires of hell”. Resistance would
result in a cruel destruction, surrender, a “joyful celebration in the stronghold
of the protection of the sultan of the world”.91 Coron surrendered.
Despite losing Coron and Modon, Venice did have some success that year.
In conjunction with French, Spanish and papal forces, the Venetians cap-
tured Cephalonia and retook Navarino, only to lose it again to Kemal Reis in
May 1501 when, confronted by Ottoman forces who “raised their heads like
a crowd of excited crocodiles coming to the surface of water”,92 it surren-
dered. Active in the Aegean, the Venetians attacked various islands,93 landed
on the Anatolian coast, attacking Çeşme, where many, including the kadı,
were killed,94 and later plundering Meğri.95 Franco-Venetian forces attacked
Lesbos, unsuccessfully, where, by the time the Ottoman leet arrived, the
Venetians had, according to one anonymous Ottoman history, attacked the
castle of Mytilene 18 times without success.96 Venetian forces plundered
Thessaloniki, and, together with papal, French and Rhodian ships, attacked
and took Lef kas,97 thus, at least temporarily, establishing control over the
Ionian islands of Corfu, Lef kas, Cephalonia and Zakynthos. However, they
lost Durrës (Durazzo) on the Adriatic, taken by the Ottomans in 1501.
By 1502, Venice was once more desirous of peace, bereft of money and
strength, according to Kemalpaşazade, who went on to explain that as a trad-
ing nation Venice did not produce anything but relied on commerce for the
wealth with which to pay its soldiers. The war had thus “eaten its soul. The
knife had bitten to the bone and its strength was gone”.98 While Angiolello
stressed that the Ottomans needed peace because of the Safavids,99 the
Ottomans were in fact in no pressing need for peace at this point. Under the
treaty concluded in May 1503, Venice lost Modon, Coron, Lepanto (Nafpaktos),
Durrës and Lef kas. The Venetian position in the eastern Mediterranean was

91 Ibid., p. 206.
92 Ibid., p. 213.
93 Angiolello, Historia, pp. 262, 267.
94 Kemalpaşazade, Tevâriḫ, VIII, pp. 214–5.
95 Ibid., p. 229.
96 Anonim Osmanlı Kroniği, p. 128 (facsimile), pp. 138–9.
97 Angiolello, Historia, p. 267; Kemalpaşazade, Tevârih, VII, p. 229.
99 Angiolello, Historia, pp. 267–8.
152
considerably weakened, while that of the Ottomans, in contrast, was strength-

ened, thus, Tansel has argued, assisting Selim’s subsequent conquest of Egypt
and Syria. According to Tansel, had Venice been able to remain a force in the
eastern Mediterranean, Süleyman’s siege of Rhodes in 1522 would not have
been an Ottoman victory.100 Bayezid’s victory over Venice both signalled the
emergence of the Ottomans as a major naval power and delivered control of
maritime trade in the region into Ottoman hands.
For the rest of Bayezid’s reign and for that of his successor, Selim I, naval
conquest took second place. The main concerns for the Ottomans were the
Safavids in Iran, defeated by the Ottomans in 1514, and the Mamluk sultan-
ate in Egypt and Syria, ended by Selim in 1517. At sea, the main concern was
coastal defence and the drive against piracy, a perennial problem for all. Pirates
and corsairs raided indiscriminately from their island bases, Piri Reis noting
that the monks of Mount Athos did not reveal the whereabouts of Turkish
pirates to Christian pirates or vice versa.101 Bayezid’s son Korkud sponsored
corsairs, including Hayreddin, known in European sources as Barbarossa,
who plundered ships in the Aegean before sailing of to the west.102 The
Venetians complained to the Ottomans about the seizure of Venetian ships.
In 1507, corsairs captured two Venetian vessels from Crete headed for Istanbul
loaded with grain,103 and in 1508 another Venetian ship fell prey to a certain
Fra Bernardino, a corsair from Rhodes.104 Several years later, the Venetian
bailo Andrea Foscolo was forced to pay a considerable sum of money in a case
involving an Ottoman ship sailing from Alexandria carrying merchandise and
janissaries which was seized by corsairs at Mykonos.105 In 1512, Foscolo was
discussing with Ottoman oicials the necessity of punishing corsairs.106
Although sea campaigns were not of foremost importance in Selim’s reign,
the navy remained signiicant, the leet taking part in the conquest of Egypt
and Syria. Towards the end of his reign, Selim was planning an extension to the
naval arsenal at Istanbul107 and preparing a large naval force, thought by many to
be intended for an attack on Rhodes, an attack urged by his vezirs, who “tried to
turn the eyes of the sultan . . . to contemplating the destruction of the castle of
100 Selahattin Tansel, Sultan II. Bâyezitʾin Siyasî Hayatı (Istanbul, 1966), p. 224.
101 Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye, pp. 111–12.
103 Relazione di Andrea Foscolo, in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al senato, vol. 14: Costantinopoli.
Relazioni inedite (1512–1789), ed. Maria Pia Pedani-Fabris (Padova, 1996), p. 8.
104 Ibid., p. 9.
105 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
106 Ibid., p. 6.
107 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Merkez ve Bahriye Teşkilatı (Ankara, 1988), pp.
396–7.
153
K ate Fl e et
Rhodes”.108 Selim, however, did not attack, due, apparently, to the insuiciency
of resources for the lengthy siege he foresaw would be necessary.109
After only seven years on the throne, Selim died in 1520. The news was
well received in the West, it being felt that “an enraged lion had left a docile
lamb as successor”.110 Much less of a lamb than expected, one of Süleyman’s
irst acts was the conquest of Rhodes, “the refuge of the vile Franks . . . the
place of residence of those condemned to hell”. 111 This “great business house
of the wealth of the Franks”112 seethed, at least according to Lüti Paşa, with
hundreds of Muslim slaves kept in shackles in dungeons by night and used for
hard manual labour by day.113 Strategically placed on the route between the
newly acquired Egyptian territory and Istanbul, Rhodes was the ideal base
for Hospitaller attacks on Ottoman commercial shipping, complained of by
Lüti Paşa, and for their seizure of Muslim pilgrims, whom they “dishon-
oured . . . with shackles and chains”.114
Having observed the castle, Süleyman adopted a festina lente approach
to the conquest, commenting that “you do not destroy your enemy by
speed because by using caution the problem of the matter will be easy, and
with speed easy work will be diicult”.115 After ive months, Rhodes fell.
“Innumerable Muslims [including] sayyid and şeyh and ulema and many men
addicted to asceticism, of all communities and sects, whose necks had been
dishonoured by a chain of pain, whose feet had been bent by the shackles of
the people of error” were rescued, “their sad days transformed into joy, their
destiny converted, through the power of the victorious emperor Padişah,
into happiness”.116 Having taken Bodrum and İstanköy (Kos), replete with a
fortress “whose walls reached to the heavens and whose base touched the
ishes”,117 the sultan boarded his galley, which “ploughed the sea with the
speed of a lash of lightening”, and set sail with his leet for Marmaris, “the
vast plane of the sea, full of ships high like mountains, . . . strewn with sails of
various colours and resembl[ing] the multi-coloured face of the heavens”.118
108 Hoca Sadettin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, ed. İsmet Parmaksızoğlu, 5 vols. (Ankara, 1999), vol. 4,
p. 352.
109 Ibid., pp. 352–4; Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibar, pp. 251–50 (facsimile), pp. 40–1.
110 Paolo Giovio, Commentario delle cose dei Turchi (Venice, 1538), p. 26.
111 Mustafa Celalzade in Assedio e conquista de Rodi nel 1522, secondo le relazioni edite ed inedite dei
Turchi, ed. Ettore Rossi (Rome, 1927), p. 27, Ottoman text pp. 23–4.
112 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 249; Lüti Paşa, Tevarih, p. 311.
114 Mustafa Celalzade, in Rossi, Assedio e conquista, p. 27, Ottoman text pp. 23–4.
116 Mustafa Celalzade, in Rossi, Assedio e conquista, p. 39, Ottoman text p. 31.
117 Ibid., p. 43, Ottoman text p. 34.
118 Ibid., p. 46, Ottoman text p. 38.
154
The fall of Rhodes was a very satisfactory outcome for the Ottomans, but
“all of Frengistan mourned and grieved for Rhodes and St. John because it
was the talisman of the Franks”.119 According to Lüti Paşa, the Hospitallers
reproached the European leaders whom they regarded as having neglected
them, saying “what shameless people you are that you did not send us troops
and did not help us that the Turk came and despised and insulted St. John and
the religion of Jesus and us”, something which, at least according to Lüti
Paşa, the “great men of Frengistan” accepted.120
Having captured Rhodes, Süleyman turned his attention away from the
sea to the Hungarian campaign. When he returned to maritime afairs, he
found that the navy he had was not suicient to combat his opponents in
the Mediterranean, in particular the Hospitallers, now based in Malta, and
the Spanish leet based at Messina. According to Venetian reports, it sufered
from a lack of skilled personnel,121 and many of the galleys were in poor
condition.122 Lüti Paşa blamed the failure of the Ottoman naval expedition
against Coron, which had been recaptured from the Ottomans by Andrea
Doria in September 1532, on maritime incompetence, commenting that “the
commanders were frequenters of taverns and wine drinkers and were unable
to provision the ships and the ships were destroyed because of their folly”. If
the navy had not fallen into the hands of incompetent commanders, then, in
Lüti Paşa’s estimation, the inidels would not have been able even to contem-
plate plundering.123
1533–1574: The western Mediterranean

Faced with the need for a more efective naval force, Süleyman turned to
an expert in the waters of the western Mediterranean, the renowned corsair
Hayreddin, summoning him from the Maghreb in 1533 and making him admi-
ral of the imperial leet. Hayreddin Reis now became Hayreddin Paşa.124
Originally from the Aegean, where he had traded grain before turning to
piracy,125 Hayreddin had led to the west with his brother Uruç in 1513, after
119 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 254; Lüti Paşa, Tevarih, pp. 317–18.
120 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, pp. 254–5; Lüti Paşa, Tevarih, pp. 318–19.
121 Relazione di Danielle de’ Ludovisi, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 17–18; Relazione di
Antonio Barbarigo, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 3, pp. 151–2.
122 Relazione di Mario Minio, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 73.
125 Aldo Gallotta, ‘Le Gazavāt di Hayreddīn Barbarossa’, Studi Maghrebini 3 (1970), 79–160 at p.
147; Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibar, p. 252 (facsimile), p. 44.
155
K ate Fl e et
Korkud’s murder by Selim. There they set themselves up as rulers respec-

tively of Algiers and Tunis. In 1519, Hayreddin, under threat in Algiers from
local political opposition and from the Spanish at sea, had submitted to Selim,
after which Algiers and Tunis became nominally Ottoman territory.
Corsairs were something of a two-edged weapon whose loyalty was lexible,
for, as Piri Reis had pointed out in response to Venetian complaints against the
well-known corsair Kurdoğlu, “he is a corsair, he attacks us too”.126 From their
various “nests”, such as Algiers, Durrës (Durazzo) and Velona,127 Ottoman
corsairs attacked commercial shipping, Ottoman territory and Ottoman sub-
jects, seizing livestock, goods and people.128 There were constant reports of
corsair attacks, and streams of instructions to take precautions against corsairs
and to investigate complaints of corsair activity.129 Orders were issued for the
arrest of known corsairs,130 and protection promised to those on the Aegean
islands such as Andros.131 In 976/1568–9, orders were issued that corsair ships
coming to over-winter in the harbour of Lef kas were not to be allowed to do
so unless they had a guarantor (keil), and the corsairs were to be scattered
around to avoid concentration of numbers and to prevent harm coming to
the population.132 In short, corsairs were useful but only when controlled, as
relected in the judgement of the bailo Marino Cavalli, who commented that
126 Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 23, p. 385 (24 October 1516, Leonardo Bembo, bailo, from Pera).
127 Giuseppe Coniglio, Il viceregno di Napoli e la lotta tra spagnoli e turchi nel Mediterraneo (Naples,
1987), vol. 2, doc. 46, p. 383.
128 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (972/1564–1565), 2 vols. (Ankara, 1995), no. 126 (Safer, 972/
September–October 1564); no. 305 (23 Rebiülevvel 972/29 October 1564); no. 311 (26 Rebiülevvel
972/1 November 1564); no. 399 (? Rebiülahır 972/November–December 1564); no. 773 (28 Receb
972/1 March 1565); 7 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (975–976/1567–1569), 3 vols. (Ankara, 1998), no.
1113 (22 Ramazan 975/21 March 1568); no. 1120, pp. 534–5 (Ramazan 975/February–March
1568); no. 1515 (3 Zilhicce 975/30 May 1568); no. 1621 (2 Muharrem 976/27 June 1568); Nicolas
de Nicolay, Dans l’empire de Soliman le Magniique, ed. Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud and
Stéphane Yérasimos (Paris, 1989), pp. 58–9; Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein, ‘Trois docu-
ments signés du Şehzâde Mustafā B. Süleymān conservés au monastère de Patmos’, Σύμμεικτα
12 (1998), 237–69, doc. 3 (19–28 March 1541), pp. 265–7. Attacks were not always by corsairs: for
a complaint about sipahi İbrahim attacking and plundering ships of zimmi merchants from
the reaya of Lef kas, see 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 498 (Cemaziülevvel 972/December–January
1564–1565).
129 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 1211 (gurre-i Zilkade 972/31 May 1565), no. 1287 (20 Zilkade 972/19
June 1565), no. 1302 (21 Zilkade 972/20 June 1565), no. 1428 (24 Zilhicce, 972/23 July 1565);
7 Mühimme Defteri, no. 1431 (6 Zilhicce 975/2 June 1568), no. 1588 (Zilhicce 975/May–June
1568).
130 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 126 (Safer 972/September–October 1564), no. 399 (Rebiülahır 972/
November–December 1564), no. 773 (Receb 972/February–March 1565); 7 Mühimme Defteri,
no. 1120 (Ramazan 975/February–March 1568).
131 Perikles Zerlentes, Γράμματα των τελευταίων Φράγκων Δουκών του Αιγαίου πελάγους 1438–1565,
Ιωσήφ Νάκης Ιουδαίος Δούξ του Αιγαίου πελάγους 1566–1579, Το Σαντζάκ των νήσων Νάξου, Άνδρου,
Πάρου, Σαντορήνης, Μήλου, Σύρας 1579–1621 (Ermoupolis, 1924), p. 80.
132 7 Mühimme Defteri, no. 2320 (29 Rebiülahır 976/21 October 1568).
156
the Ottomans used the corsairs “like doctors do poisonous things, that is in
little quantity and accompanied by all the rest of the navy”.133
However, the knowledge of the corsairs was invaluable, their ships being
“the backbone of the entire leet”,134 for which they also acted as an advance
guard and gathered intelligence.135 Hayreddin’s appointment underlined the
importance of the corsairs to the Ottoman navy. Katip Çelebi, writing in the
irst half of the following century, advised that “if a kapudan [admiral] is not
himself a corsair, let him take advice from and listen to corsairs on maritime
matters and naval warfare”,136 while for Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, only a corsair
should be a kapudan.137 Selaniki frequently referred to the skill and talent of
the corsairs and their great expertise in the art of seamanship,138 relating on
one occasion how corsairs had saved the imperial leet when it was caught
in a severe gale near Gelibolu.139 That Süleyman certainly had great faith in
at least some of the corsairs is evident. In a ferman issued on 24 March 1555,
he instructed Piyale Paşa, who was to undertake a joint naval action with
the French, that he should consult and take advice from Turgud Reis, a man
who “knows all the conditions and work of the sea”.140 Süleyman was equally
impressed by Turgud’s knowledge of Malta, regarding him as knowing the
location of the fortiications there and how the island should be besieged, and
instructing his commanders that they were without fail to take his advice on
the strategy to be adopted in the campaign.141
Apart from corsairs, there was another component of the Ottoman navy
which also showed the l uidity of loyalties. As in the past, the Venetian sub-
jects in this period, too, worked, apparently in signiicant numbers, in the
Ottoman marine. For many Venetians, Istanbul, far from being the lair of
inidel corruption, was a very attractive job market for master builders in the
shipyards, captains in the navy, and oarsmen on the corsair ships, all of whom
133 Relazione di Marino Cavalli, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 295.

134 Relazione di Antonio Barbarigo, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 153. See also Relazione di Antonio Erizzo,
in ibid., vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 129; Relazione di Domenico Trevisano, in ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 141; Relazione
di Alvise Renier, in Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni, p. 80.
135 7 Mühimme Defteri, no. 630, (6 Receb 975); Relazione di Antonio Barbarigo, p. 153; Selaniki
Mustafa, Tarih-i Selânikî, ed. Mehmet İpşirli, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1989), vol. 2, p. 776.
136 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l- Kibar, p. 372 (facsimile), p. 191.
137 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Alî ve Mevâ‘ıdü’n-Nefāis fî-Kavâ‘ıdi’l-Mecâlis, ed.
Mehmet Şeker (Ankara, 1997), p. 228; Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Mevâıdü’n-Nefāis fî-Kavâıdil-
Mecâlis (Istanbul, 1956), p. 57.
138 Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 6, 91, 294.
139 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 637 (11 Rebiülevvel 1005/2 November 1596).
140 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 295 (facsimile), p. 92.
141 Ibid., p. 302 (facsimile), p. 101; 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 562 (Cemaziülevvel 972/December
1564–January 1565).
157
K ate Fl e et
had received their training on the galleys of the Serenissima.142 The number
of Venetians crewing Ottoman ships was so great that in 1562, at least accord-
ing to the bailo Marcantonio Donini, the Ottomans could it out 15 galleys
almost entirely with Venetian subjects.143 Many of these Venetian subjects,
called marioti, came from Crete, Zakynthos, Cephalonia and Corfu.144 What
attracted Venetians, and other Christians, to work in the Ottoman navy, apart
from escaping Venetian justice in the case of bandits, was money, for they
were able to earn in four months working for the Ottomans what it would
take them with great diiculty an entire year to earn on a Venetian galley.145
Very well paid and well treated,146 those already in Ottoman service sent for
their relatives and friends, who then also came to work in Istanbul.147 The
problem of Venetian subjects leaving Venetian service and moving over to
the Ottomans was suiciently serious for the bailo Domenico Trevisano to
suggest in 1554 various ways to combat it.148
Serving in the navy was apparently attractive to many, Marcantonio
Donini reporting that people in Istanbul shut up their stalls in order to serve
on the galleys.149 When the Malta campaign was announced in the markets
of the capital in order to attract volunteers,150 many people “from every
class with eagerness and delight” joined up.151 Successful campaigns brought
riches, Donini noting that many of those who went to Jerba “did not have
a shirt on their back which was their own, but now they ind themselves
owners of 15, 20 or 25 slaves, as well as money and goods, earned in this
enterprise”.152
142 Relazione di Marcantonio Donini, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 3, pp. 191, 192–3, 194.
143 Ibid., p. 192.
144 Ibid., pp. 192–3; Relazione di Antonio Barbarigo, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 152; Relazione di Antonio
Erizzo, ibid., p. 129; Relazioni di Bernardo Navagero, ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 67–8.
145 Relazione di Marcantonio Donini, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 192; Relazione di Domenico Trevisano,
ibid., p. 147.
146 Relazione di Antonio Barbarigo, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 152.
147 Relazione di Marcantonio Donini, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 192.
148 Relazione di Domenico Trevisano, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 147. Colin Imber notes that Ottoman
sources are silent about the number of Europeans in the navy and also points to the European
eagerness to stress European contribution as the reason for any Ottoman success. See Colin
Imber, ‘The Navy of Suleyman the Magniicent’, Archivum Ottomanicum, 6 (1980), 211–82 at
p. 255, reprinted in Colin Imber, Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Istanbul, 1996), pp. 1–69.
While this is undoubtedly true, Ottoman sources may well be silent for the simple reason that
the origin of those working in the marine was of no interest, while it is clear that the Venetians
at least were concerned about the movement of their own subjects into Ottoman service.
149 Relazione di Marcantonio Donini, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 193.
150 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 597 (Cemaziülevvel, 972/December–January 1564–5).
152 Relazione di Marcantonio Donini, in Albèri, Relazioni, p. 193. Service in the Ottoman marine
was not, however, popular with all. See Imber, ‘Navy’, p. 221.
158
The Ottoman navy which now sailed out under Hayreddin, the dangerous
and “evil natured” enemy of the Spanish,153 was to become a serious con-
tender in the Mediterranean, even apparently gaining a reputation for being
unbeatable, for Antonio Doria was to claim in his report of 1572 that the les-
son to be drawn from the battle of Lepanto was that the Ottoman navy was
not in fact invincible.154
Ottoman policy in the Mediterranean over the following decades was dom-
inated by the conl ict with the Habsburgs, whose capture of Tunis in 1535
was both a considerable irritation for the Ottomans and a prestigious victory
for Charles V. Allied by their shared hostility to the Habsburgs, the French
king François I and Süleyman signed the irst of a series of Ottoman–French
alliances in February 1536. For the Ottomans, although under no illusions
over the sincerity of French commitment, an alliance with the French would
secure useful support in their war with Spain and ofered the prospect of the
use of French ports, while for the French such an arrangement gave them
Ottoman naval support against the naval forces of Spain, Genoa and Naples,
all under Habsburg control, as well as, at least from the French point of view,
assisting in their ambitions of territorial conquest in Italy.
In June 1537, the Ottoman navy appeared of the Italian coast, causing great
consternation to Pope Paul III, who wrote to Charles V about the Ottoman
armada “which you know is very large”, adding anxiously, “may it not be that
by the time your Majesty reads this letter we are getting the news that it has
set sail and landed in Italy”,155 which indeed it did and raided Apulia. This was
followed by an Ottoman attack on Corfu, “the right eye of Venice” (the left
being Modon) according to Kemal Reis, who several times urged Süleyman
to take it because of its strategic location.156 According to Lüti Paşa, who was
in command of the expedition in 1537, he and Hayreddin Paşa were ordered
to attack Corfu because the Venetians, “that abject crowd of inidels cease-
lessly employed in commerce, amassing wealth, and pursuing proit through
cheating and treachery”,157 had broken their agreement with the sultan and
joined the Spanish inidel, “committing many abominable acts and causing
much trouble at sea”.158 The war with Venice was to continue until 1540. The
153 Letter from Lope de Soria to Charles V (1533), quoted in Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra,
‘Charles V and the Ottoman War’, Eurasian Studies 1, 2 (2002), 161–82 at p. 177.
154 Relazione di Antonio Doria, in Coniglio, Viceregno, vol. 2, doc. 44, p. 356.
155 Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 3: The Sixteenth Century to the
Reign of Julius III (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 431.
156 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 237 (facsimile), p. 20; Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye, p. 330.
158 Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 279; Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 362.
159
K ate Fl e et
following year, Hayreddin captured the Venetian islands of Naxos, Andros,

Paros and Santorini, prompting the formation of the Holy League consisting
of Venice, Pope Paul III, Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain)
and his brother Ferdinand of Austria. Exhibiting great naval skill, Hayreddin
scored a major naval victory over the leet of the Holy League under the
command of Andrea Doria at the Gulf of Prevesa in a hard-fought battle
during which cannon smoke was so thick that neither side could see the
other.159 The war with Venice ended two years later, with Venice agreeing to
pay a hefty indemnity, handing over Monemvasia and Nafplio and ceding the
Aegean islands already taken by Hayreddin, an outcome hardly satisfactory
for Venice, which was several years later contemplating the re-conquest of
Mykonos.160
It was not just the Venetians who were perturbed by the Ottoman pres-
ence in the Mediterranean. Ottoman possession of the North African coast
was threatening for the Habsburgs, for it was close to the Spanish kingdom
of Naples and Sicily, also under Spanish control, as well as Spain itself. The
Moriscos, the Muslim population of Granada, looked to the Ottomans for
help, apparently, at least at one point, with the support of the müftü, who in
1570 was to tell the sultan that if he abandoned those believers, his population
would have just cause for complaint against him. Orations were also made in
all the mosques of Istanbul about the Muslims of Granada.161
Having captured Tunis in 1535, the Habsburgs moved against Algiers,
Charles V launching an attack in late 1541. This attack, however, met with
disaster when a violent storm, which raged for three days, destroyed most
of the Spanish leet. This Habsburg reversal encouraged the French, who
renewed their alliance with the Ottomans in 1543. In this year, Hayreddin
raided Sicily and southern Italy and anchored of Ostia, an appearance which
“left all Rome . . . topsy-turvy” according to one contemporary.162 Hayreddin
next took part in the joint French–Ottoman attack on Nice, then under the
duke of Savoy, who was allied to Charles V, and the Ottoman navy wintered
at Toulon in 1543–4. This access to a winter base for their naval forces in the
western Mediterranean, plus the support of the French in the region, was
a major advantage for the Ottomans, as the Spanish well knew.163 Leaving
159 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 281 (facsimile), p.74; Lüti Paşa, Tevârih, p. 282; Lüti Paşa,
Tevârih, p. 368.
160 Lamansky, Sécrets, doc. 42, pp. 58–9 (7 February 1544, Venetian dating).
161 Relazione di Alvize Buonrizzo, in Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni, p. 137.
163 Coniglio, Viceregno, vol. 2, p. 372 (30 May 1574).
160
Toulon in May 1544, Hayreddin raided southern Italy on his way home to
Istanbul.
This period of cooperation ended shortly afterwards, with the signing in
September 1544 of the peace of Crépy between Charles V and François I,
followed soon afterwards by a Habsburg–Ottoman peace of 1545, renewed
in 1547. Neither of these arrangements, however, was to prove long-lasting,
for in 1550 Andrea Doria attacked Mahdia and Monastır, the strongholds of
the corsair Turgud Reis, attacking Jerba the following year, almost seizing
Turgud himself and prompting an unsuccessful Ottoman ofensive against
Malta. Seeking to justify the assault on Mahdia and Monastır, Charles V
claimed that it was a legitimate response to corsair activity and thus not in
contravention of the 1547 agreement.164 While the Ottomans demanded the
cities back, a request rejected by Charles V, who assured the sultan in a letter
of 8 March 1551 that both would remain in Habsburg hands,165 they were not
immediately anxious to enter into hostilities with the Spanish over the issue.
The French ambassador, d’Aramon, however, perceived a break in Ottoman–
Spanish relations as being to French advantage and thus covertly worked to
bring one about.166 As ambassador to Istanbul from 1547 to 1551, d’Aramon
had been an active proponent of a new Ottoman–French alliance in pursuit
of “the common enemy”.167
While demanding the return of Mahdia and Monastır, the Ottomans
attacked and took Tripoli in 1551, held since 1530 by the Hospitallers, whose
constant aggression, as Sinan Paşa explained to the French ambassador dur-
ing the siege, was irritating the sultan,168 who was determined to take it.169 It
was, as d’Aramon noted in a letter to Henri II written from Malta in August
1551, a very good conquest for the Ottomans, who he felt sure would be quite
content to have Tripoli rather than Mahdia, for Tripoli was the best location
in the Maghreb, a port which could accommodate “the largest army that the
sultan could construct”.170 In d’Aramon’s estimation, its fall was likely to be
164 K. Lanz, Correspondenz des Kaisers Karl V. (Leipzig, 1864), vol. 2, p. 9 (31 October 1550), pp. 55–7
(8 March 1551).
165 Ernest Charrière, Négociations de la France dans le Levant, 4 vols. (Paris, 1848–60), vol. 2,
p. 139.
166 Nicolay, Soliman, p. 14 (introduction); Guillaume Ribier, Lettres et memoires d’estat, des roys,
princes, ambassadeurs, & autres ministres, sous les regnes de François premier, Henry II. &
François II, 2 vols. (Paris, 1677), vol. 2, p. 296, letter from d’Aramon to Henri II (7 April 1551).
167 Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, p. 13, letter from d’Aramon to François I (4 May 1547).
168 Nicolay, Soliman, p. 80.
169 Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, p. 160, letter from d’Aramon in Malta to Henri II (26 August
1551).
170 Ibid., p. 162 (26 August 1551).
161
K ate Fl e et
of great advantage to the sultan and very damaging to the Habsburgs, in

particular since the “nest of corsairs” which would presumably be established
there would represent a constant problem for Sicily, the kingdom of Naples
and indeed for the rest of Italy.171 While the fall of Tripoli was a source of con-
sternation to the Hospitallers, it was an outcome not entirely unsatisfactory
to the French, who could see distinct advantages in an Ottoman rather than a
Hospitaller stronghold on the North African coast. Rumours abounded about
French involvement in the afair, fuelled by the fact that the Hospitaller com-
mander who had surrendered Tripoli was in fact French. Some Hospitallers
accused the French ambassador, when he arrived in Malta on his way to
Istanbul from Tripoli after the fall, of being in league with the Ottomans, in
Malta merely to spy out the land and hand the island over to the sultan.172
In the same year as the fall of Tripoli, the French king, now Henri II, made
another alliance with Süleyman, both rulers being “one and the same” for
Pope Paul IV, a similarity which did not apparently disturb him, as Setton
points out,173 the pope also referring to them as having “a very good mutual
understanding together”.174 In July 1552, the Ottoman leet appeared of Naples,
having done much damage to Venetian possessions en route, and in August
Ottoman ships attacked Andrea Doria, taking seven of his galleys. They then
landed at Gaeta and ravaged the area around the city.175 In 1555, a joint French–
Ottoman naval force descended on Naples, Pietro Pacheco, archbishop of
Siguenza, writing to Giovanna, princess of Portugal, in March 1555 that every-
one thought that the Ottoman leet would without doubt attack that year.176
Citizens of Naples complained to Philip II in February of the same year that
the Ottoman leet had over the past years sacked much of the kingdom’s ter-
ritory and abducted a great number of the population.177 Indeed, in August
1551, d’Aramon had reported that Turgud Reis and others were about to set
out corsairing with the intention of destroying as much as possible in Sicily,
Calabria and Apulia.178 Pope Julius III was also clearly concerned in this period
171 Ibid.
172 Nicolay, Soliman, p. 93; Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, p. 161, letter from Henri II to the grand
master of the Hospitallers (30 September 1551).
173 Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 4: The Sixteenth Century from
Julius III to Pius V (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 679.
174 Rawdon Brown (ed.), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Afairs
Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, vol. 6,
pt. 2: 1556–1557 (London, 1881), p. 981, no. 838, letter from Navagero to Doge and Senate (20
March 1557).
176 Coniglio, Viceregno, vol. 1, doc. 4, p. 83 (2 March 1555)
177 Ibid., doc. 2, p. 43 (February 1555).
178 Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, p. 162, Aramon to Henri II (26 August 1551).
162
at the pressing Ottoman danger to Italian coastal regions.179 At the beginning

of 1559, Philip issued instructions about the necessity of guarding the coasts
and keeping well informed about Ottoman movements in the waters of the
Levant, the Ottoman leet being very familiar with the seas of Italy.180 The
Ottomans, too, adopted a similar approach to Spanish shipping.181
Not merely active against the Spanish in southern Italy, the Ottomans were
also busy in North Africa, taking the Spanish fortress of Wahran (Oran),
west of Algiers, in 1556 and Bizerta, near Tunis, in 1557. The French were at
this point most anxious to secure Ottoman naval assistance in their struggle
with Spain. The French ambassador, the “blunt and overbearing”182 Jean de
la Vigne, tackled Rüstem Paşa, who remained unmoved. The pope was, he
said, “a tyrant and a fool”, and it was better to leave him, Philip and Henri to
“exhaust and consume each other”.183 Despite all his eforts, de la Vigne was
unable to extract Ottoman naval support, leaving him to exclaim in exaspera-
tion that the sultan was “barbarously opinionated”.184
In 1558, an Ottoman leet sacked Sorrento, seizing a large number of cap-
tives and in general “amusing themselves”.185 The Ottomans then plundered
Ciudadela on Minorca, prompting the Spanish to take Jerba, temporarily,
for Piyale Paşa re-occupied it in 1560. The arrival of the victorious Ottoman
leet in Istanbul, replete with prisoners and spoils and captured ships in tow,
was “a sight as joyful to the Turks as it was mournful and deplorable to us
Christians”, according to the Habsburg ambassador Busbecq, who also suf-
fered the attentions of the happy crowds who “congregated . . . round my
door and mockingly asked my people whether they had a brother or relation
179 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 4, p. 581. In December 1556, the Ferrarese ambassador
was instructed to inform him that the Ottoman leet would ravage the kingdom of Naples,
a task which he did not look forward to, for he “knew not how to make the announcement
from fear lest it might cause displeasure”. It certainly did, for the ambassador “having mut-
tered something to the efect, the Pope replied, “Ah, dogs” [i.e., the imperialists] they compel
us to let even Sultan Soliman come”, at which point the ambassador informed him that the
French king had requested this. See letter from Bernardo Navagero to the Doge and Senate,
26 December 1556, in Brown, Calendar of State Papers, vol. 6, pt. 2, no. 774, p. 885.
180 Coniglio, Viceregno, vol. 1, doc. 7, pp. 104–5 (1 January 1559).
181 7 Mühimme Defteri, no. 51 (Safer 975/August–September 1567), no. 653 (6 Receb 975/6 January
1568), no. 1431 (6 Zilhicce 975/2 June 1568).
182 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 4, p. 692. For Busbecq’s impression of de la Vigne and
his encounters with Rüstem Paşa, see Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier
Ghiselin de Busbecq, trans. Edward Seymour Forster (Oxford, 1927), pp. 200–1.
183 Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, pp. 386–7.
184 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 4, p. 693; Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, p. 387, letter
from de la Vigne to Henri II (22 April 1557).
185 Charrière, Négociations, vol. 2, p. 476, letter from the bishop of Acqs to de la Vigne (8 and 28
June 1558).
163
K ate Fl e et
or friend in the Spanish leet; for, if so, they would have the pleasure of seeing
them shortly”.186 By this time, the Spanish had a freer hand in dealing with the
Ottomans, for in 1559 they had signed the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with
France and the period of Ottoman–French political alliance was over.
The next major Ottoman campaign was not in North Africa, for in 1565
the Ottomans attacked Malta. Held by the Hospitallers since 1530, the island
was situated in the narrowest stretch between the northern and southern
shores of the Mediterranean and dominated the passage between east and
west. Its strategic location, as well as its occupants, made an Ottoman assault
inevitable. The siege was ultimately unsuccessful, the result apparently of a
dispute among the leadership. Strategy was decided upon without the input
of Turgud Reis, in direction contravention of the sultan’s wishes, and there
was a division between Mustafa Paşa, who mistreated his troops, and Piyale
Paşa, who ignored the corsairs.187 All these diiculties were well known to
the defenders on Malta, who were kept informed by deserters who reported
on the divisions in the Ottoman leadership and discontent in the army and
navy.188 According to Balbi da Correggio, it was Piyale’s opposition to Mustafa
Paşa’s plan to attack simultaneously Mdina (Città Vecchia), Birgu (Vittoriosa)
and San Michele that led to the decision to attack San Elmo. If Mustafa’s plan
had been put into operation, then Malta would have been lost, “But God
almighty did not wish for our defeat and through his will the two Paşas, jeal-
ous of each other, were not in agreement; the result of their errors is evi-
dent and, for us, so favourable”.189 Although San Elmo was taken, it was at
great cost, many “drink[ing] the sherbet of martyrdom”,190 and the remain-
ing soldiers left exhausted. Turgud was killed, an event which gave “great
happiness” to all the defenders on Malta,191 and much gunpowder and other
equipment was used up.192 Piyale Paşa and Mustafa Paşa blamed each other
for the failure of the enterprise,193 the soldiers blamed the serdar (commander)
186 Busbecq, Letters, pp. 173, 171.

187 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 302 (facsimile), pp. 101–2.
188 Francesco Balbi da Correggio, Diario dell’assedio all’isola di Malta (Genoa, 1995), pp. 67–8, 78,
185, 191–2, 208–9.
189 Ibid., p.72.
191 Balbi da Correggio, Diario, p. 103.
192 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 302 (facsimile), pp. 101–2. Balbi da Correggio also noted that
Turgud was not happy about the bombarding of San Elmo, and he had not failed to give
suggestions “all naturally to our disadvantage given the great experience of such a famous
corsair”. See Balbi da Correggio, Diario, pp. 85–6, 102.
193 Balbi da Correggio, Diario, p. 208.
164
and the serdar blamed the vezirs.194 “Burning with shame”, they returned to
Istanbul blaming each other.195
The failure at Malta was perhaps somewhat made up for by the easy cap-
ture of the Genoese island of Chios in 1566, taken “without the striking of
a sword”196 in an attack in which, according to one contemporary Genoese
account, Piyale Paşa took great care not to harm the local population.197
The ofensive was launched, according to Katip Çelebi, because of the
Chiotes’ attacks on Muslim vessels and their good relations with the Franks,
to whom they constantly gave information on the movement and makeup
of the imperial leet.198 Such information was apparently not limited to the
Ottoman leet, for according to one Genoese source they “rendered great
services . . . by afectionately and carefully keeping our princes informed of
every event, every intrigue, and every movement that occurred amongst
the Turks in their neighbourhood”.199 According to Gieronimo Giustiniani,
the son of the last podestà of Chios, Piyale Paşa accused the Maonesi of
maintaining spies who dressed in “Turkish costume” and, pretending to
be Muslims, iniltrated government circles and spied on the movements
and actions of the sultan, their ears ever open to receive the secrets of the
state.200 A further source of considerable irritation was the assistance they
gave to runaway slaves, to the extent of maintaining an “uicio de’schiavi”,
a clearinghouse for slaves,201 a complaint reiterated by Piyale Paşa.202 The
Ottomans also complained of the arrears in tribute paid by the Chiots,203
and of their constant support of corsairs, those “thieves and assassins” who
descended on the lands of the sultan, sacking and pillaging.204 The Genoese
government regarded the French as being behind the Ottoman attack on
Chios,205 while for some the hostility of the new grand vezir Mehmed Paşa

195 Ibid.
196 Philip P. Argenti, Chius Vincta (Cambridge, 1941), doc. 55, p. 138, letter from Adamus di Franchi
to Maximillian II, sent from Edirne, 17 May 1566.
197 Ibid., doc. 48, pp. 120–1, letter dated 1566.
199 Argenti, Chius Vincta, p. cxix.
200 Gieronimo Giustiniani, Hieronimo Giustiniani’s History of Chios, ed. Philip P. Argenti
(Cambridge, 1943), pp. 223–4.
201 Argenti, Chius Vincta, doc. 48, p. 124, letter dated 1566.
202 Giustiniani, History, pp. 223–4.
203 Ibid., pp. 224; Michael Heberer, Osmanlıda Bir Köle : Brettenli Michael Heberer’in Anıları, 1585–
1588, trans. Türkis Noyan (Istanbul, 2003), pp. 224–5. Heberer was captured by the Ottomans
in 1585 and spent three years as an Ottoman galley slave.
204 Giustiniani, History, p. 224.
205 Argenti, Chius Vincta, p. xcv.
165
K ate Fl e et
was also a factor, Mehmed Paşa having announced at one point that he
wished to reduce all the houses in Chios to rubble.206
With Chios captured, the Ottomans had total domination of the Aegean,
and only two major islands in the eastern Mediterranean remained out of
Ottoman hands: Crete and Cyprus. The Ottomans now turned their atten-
tion to the Venetian island of Cyprus. While the two states might have been
at peace, there were always tensions, the Venetians complaining of Ottoman
corsair attacks against their subjects and commercial shipping,207 or of attacks
by Ottoman state oicials,208 and the Ottomans accusing the Venetians of
being in league with the Uskoks, the rising pirate force based in the Adriatic,
who were to become an increasing problem for the Ottomans.209 There were,
however, occasions of cooperation, such as that in 1552 when a group of
Ottoman merchants thanked a Venetian captain, Nicolò Balbi, for rescuing
them from Uskoks.210 Venice, however, was by no means well intentioned. For
example, in 1568, the Senate issued instructions to the commander of the leet
in the Adriatic that, while making a great public display of good treatment,
he was very secretly to arrange for the murder of the captain of an Ottoman
fusta whom he had captured. This should be done in such a way that his death
should appear natural, the result of a head wound he had earlier received or
due to some other accident.211
For Venice, Cyprus was a strategically vital location for its trade in the east-
ern Mediterranean. It was its location, apart from any economic consider-
ations, which made it a prime target for the Ottomans. Situated on the route
between Egypt and Istanbul, its survival was dependent on Ottoman calcula-
tion, the Venetian bailo Pietro Zen noting as early as 1524 that the Ottomans
were not at that moment contemplating attacks on either Crete or Cyprus,
however attractive as targets, because of the expense in maintaining control
there.212 Now, irritated by attacks on pilgrims and merchant shipping which
emanated from Cyprus, an accusation vehemently denied by Venice, which
maintained that such attacks came from Malta and Messina, and particularly
206 Ibid., doc. 48, p. 124, letter dated 1566.

207 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 1425 (17 Zilhicce 972/16 July 1565); 7 Mühimme Defteri, no. 907 (22 Şaban
975/25 March 1565), no. 2226 (Rebiülahır 976/September–October 1568).
208 6 Mühimme Defteri, no. 498 (? Cemaziülevvel 972/December–January 1564–1565).
209 Relazione di Alvise Renier, in Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni, pp. 50, 52, 54; 7 Mühimme Defteri, no.
2768 (21 Şaban 976/8 February 1569).
210 İdris Bostan, Adriyatik’te Korsanlık: Osmanlılar, Uskoklar, Venedikliler, 1575–1620 (Istanbul,
2009), doc. 2, pp. 129–30 (5 September 1552). See also doc. 4, pp. 133–4 (19–28 February 1578).
211 Lamansky, Sécrets, doc. 53, pp. 76–7 (12 May 1568).
212 Relazione di Pietro Zen, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 96.
166
incensed by the seizure and plunder of the ship of the defterdar of Egypt,
the sultan turned to the şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi for a fetva justifying the
attack and the consequent breaking of the treaty with Venice. Accepting the
argument that Cyprus had once been Muslim territory, thus necessitating its
recapture, Ebussuud’s fetva stated in essence that such treaties were only to
be observed so long as they served Muslim interests. Once they ceased to do
so, it was imperative to break them.213 The sultan then informed Venice that
he wanted the island handed over, the grand vezir responding to the protesta-
tions of the Venetian bailo Alvise Buonrizzo by asking “what do you want
with that island so far away [from Venice] which is no use to you and is the
cause of such discord? Leave it to us, because it will be much better in our
hands. . . . In any case, the Signor [the sultan] is resolute about wanting it”.214
Although not all the vezirs were in agreement, and despite Venetian pro-
testations that Cyprus did not give refuge to corsairs nor had it ever been a
Muslim possession,215 the attack on Cyprus was launched in 1570. Nicosia fell
in September, the Ottomans taking more booty and captives “than had ever
been seen or heard of in history”.216 Famagusta, after a long and diicult siege
during which Mustafa Paşa sent an urgent request for naval assistance,217 fell
in 1571.
One of the reasons the grand vezir Sokollu Mehmed Paşa had opposed the
campaign had been fear that it would provoke a united European response.
This was indeed what happened, the Holy League emerging as a result of the
Ottoman attack on the island. In October 1571, the leet of the Holy League
under Don Juan of Austria met the Ottoman leet of Lepanto. The Ottoman
decision to ight was taken on the insistence of the kapudan paşa Ali Paşa, who
apparently regarded the enemy as contemptible.218 His decision faced strong
opposition from Uluç Ali Paşa, who argued that the ships, having been at sea
for six months, were not it for battle, and from Pertev Paşa, concerned over
the deiciencies in crew numbers. This latter objection was swept aside by Ali
Paşa, who considered the shortage of ive or ten men per ship of no matter.
213 İbrahim Peçevi, Peçevi Tarihi, ed. and transcription Bekir Sıtkı Baykal (Ankara, 1982), vol. 1, p.
344; Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, felibolulu Mustafa Âlî ve Künhü’l- Ahbârinda II.Selim, III. Murat ve III.
Mehmet Devirleri, ed. Faris Serci, 3 vols. (Kayseri, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 66–7; Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-
Kibâr, p. 308, p. 302 (facsimile), pp. 108–9.
214 Relazione di Alvise Buonrizzo, in Pedani-Fabris, Relazioni, p. 145.
215 Ibid., pp. 141, 145–6.
217 12 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (978–979/1570–1572), 2 vols. (Ankara, 1996), no. 186 (19 Şevval
978/16 March 1571).
167
K ate Fl e et
Uluç Ali’s suggestions over tactics were similarly dismissed, and Pertev Paşa,
a man by nature suspicious and fearful,219 gave way.220
The ensuing battle was a disaster for the Ottomans, indeed so great for
some Ottomans that no such catastrophe at sea had occurred since Noah’s
lood.221 For Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, this defeat was inevitable given that the
kapudan paşa, a man “useful and assiduous” but with “no experience of sea
battles and ignorant of the art of corsairing”,222 sufered from misplaced
boldness, the ships had insuicient rowers and the crews were made up of
press-ganged poor and men with no experience, shackled to prevent them
from escaping.223 Katip Çelebi’s summation was that commanders should
not rush headlong into battle and that, even if suicient force were avail-
able, peace where possible was always preferable. It was, he noted, a skill to
withdraw as soon as it became apparent that there was no hope of victory,
and he cautioned that commanders should not think of sea battles as land
battles but should learn the rules of engagement from the works written by
the wise.224
Although a shattering defeat, Lepanto was not the crushing blow the
Europeans initially took it to be, for it was “a battle without strategic con-
sequences”.225 A new dockyard was built and a large, new leet constructed,
perhaps greater than before.226 This was an achievement which startled the
Europeans, and even perhaps Uluç Ali himself, now kapudan paşa with the
new lakab of Kılıç, for he had pointed out to Mehmed Paşa that while “it is
easy to make vessels, it is diicult to complete 500–600 anchors and ropes,
sails and other necessary things for 200 ships”. The grand vezir had famously
replied that the power of the state was such that were the sultan to com-
mand that the anchors for the entire leet be made from silver, the ropes from
silk and the sails from satin, it would be done.227 By 1573, the Venetian bailo
Costantino Garzoni reported that Uluç Ali had put the navy back on its feet
219 Peçevi, Tarihi, vol. 1, p. 350. This opinion was echoed by Gerolamo Diedo, who said that
Pertev Paşa gave in either because he was persuaded to or because he was afraid. See Onorato
Caetani, Gerolamo Diedo. La bataglia di Lepanto (1571), ed. Salvatore Mazzarella (Palermo,
1995), p. 192.
220 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 314 (facsimile), p. 115; Peçevi, Tarihi, vol. 1, p. 350; Gelibolulu
Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l-Ahbar, vol. 2, p. 82.
221 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l-Ahbâr, vol. 2, p. 82; Peçevi, Tarihi, vol. 1, p. 352.
223 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l-Ahbar, vol. 2, pp. 82–3.
225 Imber, Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, p. 63.
226 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 316 (facsimile), pp. 117–18.
227 Peçevi, Tarihi, vol. 1, p. 352; Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, p. 316 (facsimile), p. 118.
168
after Lepanto,228 and it was a result of his great experience and skill, according
to the Venetian bailo Paolo Contarini, that the Ottoman navy was extremely
well organised.229
Only one year after Lepanto, Antonio Doria wrote in his report urging
the necessity of maintaining the Holy League and pursuing the war in the
Levant that if the Ottomans were allowed to regain their power at sea, the
Venetians would inevitably lose their islands and fortresses in Dalmatia, while
Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Maiorca, Minorca and Ibiza would be prey to the
enemy, involving a crushing burden of expense for their protection.230 Venice
in this period was openly encouraging Venetian subjects to engage in corsair-
ing against the Ottomans, even issuing instructions to the captain of the gulf
to hand over captured Ottoman vessels to any who wished to arm them, at
their own expense, for such corsairing operations.231
In 1573, Venice once more sued for peace, apologising for its past behav-
iour, according to the Ottomans. The sultan, for the sake of the population,
chose to “consign the past to the past” and, regarding peace as auspicious,
agreed. Ottoman forces, he announced, should now expend their energies on
attacking and destroying Spanish territory.232 For Venice, the war had been an
expensive enterprise, for as Giovanni Francesco Morosini, Venetian ambassa-
dor to France, pointed out to the English ambassador in November 1574, the
Republic had “spent fourteen millions in gold and wasted its people”.233 The
Republic now paid a hefty indemnity, an increased tribute for Zante, and lost
Cyprus.
In 1574, in response to Don Juan’s re-conquest of Tunis in 1573, the grand
vezir Mehmed Paşa “tucked his skirts into his waist”234 and itted out a leet
which, setting sail for North Africa, took La Goletta and Tunis that sum-
mer. Much of the North African coast to the east of Wahran was now under
Ottoman control, and the position of the Spanish increasingly threatened. In
October, Don Juan wrote to the duca di Terranova in Sicily advising in detail
on the measures necessary to protect the island against the Ottoman leet in
228 Relazione di Costantino Garzoni, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 384.
229 Relazione di Paolo Contarini, in Albèri, Relazioni, vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 221.
230 Relazione di Antonio Doria, in Coniglio, Viceregno, vol. 2, doc. 44, p. 355.
231 January 1571 [1572] and 29 January 1571 [1572] from ASV, Senato Mar, register 40, in K. D.
Mertzios, “Νέαι ειδήσεις περι Κρητων εκ των αρχείων της Βενετίας”, Κρητικά Χρονικά 2 (1948),
141–51 at pp. 148, 151.
232 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr, pp. 319–18 (facsimile), p. 119.
233 Rawdon Brown and G. Cavendish Bentinck (eds.), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts
Relating to English Afairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries
of Northern Italy, vol. 7: 1558–1560 (London, 1890), no. 609, p. 521, Giovanni Francesco Morosini
to the Doge and Senate, 2 November 1574.
169
K ate Fl e et
the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of La Goletta and Tunis, a victory by

the Ottoman navy which had increased the “haughtiness” of the sultan.235
The post-1574 Mediterranean

Ottoman arrogance might have been boosted by the victory in North Africa,
but Ottoman pragmatism remained unafected. The period from 1574 marked
a shift in Ottoman strategy in the Mediterranean from aggression to defence,
necessitated by the more immediate pressure of the land wars with Hungary
and Iran and the increasing economic diiculties of the state, which clearly
had an impact on the provisioning of the navy. According to Katip Çelebi,
from the taking of Tunis in 1574 until the beginning of the Crete campaign
in 1645, the imperial leet was not despatched on major voyages of conquest
or employed in major sea battles but was active in the Mediterranean mainly
for defensive purposes.236 Gerlach noted in 1578 that the Ottomans had under-
taken to send their leets into the archipelago with defensive, not aggressive,
aims, a policy adopted also by the Spanish, who, occupied with their enemies
in northern Europe, were by now wanting peace and who signed a truce with
the Ottomans in 1580, renewed in 1581.237
Such a shift in strategy and any downsizing of ambitions and activities
in the western Mediterranean did not, of course, mean the total abandon-
ment of maritime aggression. Although charged with “the defence of the
sea” in the words of Selaniki, Çigalazade Sinan Paşa, for example, returned in
1002/1593–4 from a tour of sea protection complete with booty that included
seven ships which, contrary to the agreement with Venice, were transporting
war materials and Spanish soldiers, “behaviour contrary to the peace [which]
these accursed polytheists were constantly adopting”.238 The Venetians com-
plained that their ships coming and going from Alexandria, İskenderun
(Alexandretta) and Cyprus were seized by Ottomans when they called at
Rhodes on the pretext that they were “thieves and corsairs”239 and of the dan-
ger of corsairs sufered by the merchants of Crete.240 That defence could also
235 Coniglio, Viceregno, vol. 2, doc. 47, p. 390 (28 October 1574).
237 Gerlach, Türkiye Günlüğ ü, vol. 2, p. 863.
239 Georgios Ploumides, ‘Εμποροι και ναυτικοί του 17ου αιώνα. Τέσσερεις περιπτώσεις’, in Ροδωνιά
τιμή στον Μ. Ι. Μανούσακα, vol. 2 (Rethimno, 1994), doc. 1 (26 September 1607), pp. 473–82 at p.
479.
240 Katerina Zaridi-Vasileiou, ‘Λόγος του βίκτωρα Μεσέρη προς τιμή του Δούκα της Κρήτης
Marcantonio Venier (1596)’, Κρητολογία 10–11 (1980), 257–69 at p. 268 (16 April 1597).
170
mean attack is clear from the fate of the Trablusgarb beylerbeyi Cafer Paşa,
who was imprisoned in Yedi Kule in 995/1586–7 for failing to attack French
and Maltese ships, claiming that his job was defence of the homeland.241
Two issues remained essential for the Ottomans in the Mediterranean,
one, the protection of commercial shipping and ensuring food supplies, in
particular to Istanbul, and the other, highly related to the irst, piracy. Vessels
transporting grain were a favoured target, the Ottomans seizing enemy grain
ships242 and punishing those who attacked Ottoman ships carrying cargos of
grain.243 Ottoman corsairs, Selaniki’s renowned ighters in the gaza against
the inidel in the Mediterranean,244 were as ever active, and corsairs operat-
ing from the North African coast regularly attacked Calabria.245 The Uskoks
were a major menace to all, preying on shipping, ports and people from their
bases in the Adriatic.246 Maltese, Florentine, Genoese, Venetian, French and
Spanish ships cruised the waters of the Mediterranean, harrying the Aegean
coast and attacking the pilgrim and merchant ships from Egypt.247 Michael
Heberer, who wrote an account of his experience as an Ottoman galley slave,
was himself captured in an encounter between Ottoman and Maltese ships
of Alexandria in mid-1585 during which he and his fellow ighters, having
boarded an Ottoman ship, were abandoned to their fate, the Hospitallers
sailing away as a rescue party of Ottoman ships appeared.248 It was the
Hospitallers, too, who in June 1597 seized Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi while
he was sailing to take up his appointment as kadı of Paphos in Cyprus. As
a result of the encounter, the French captain, St. Aubin, took 12 vessels and
283 captives back to Malta, where Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi was to stay
until January 1599.249 Among the other captives he found there was another
kadı from Cyprus, who had been captured in June 1591.250 While irritating, the
Hospitaller attacks were perhaps not of such great signiicance, for Henry
Blount was to report at the beginning of the next century that the Ottomans
regarded the Hospitallers as being “like little barking Dogs about a Lyon”

242 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 392; vol. 2, p. 792.
243 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 294.
244 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 619.
245 Heberer, Osmanlıda Bir Köle, pp. 5, 242.
246 Bostan, Adriyatik’te Korsanlık, doc. 7, p. 143 (5 February 1586); Gerlach, Türkiye Günlüğ ü, vol. 1,
pp. 314, 316.
247 Heberer, Osmanlıda Bir Köle, pp. 63, 66, 178; Selaniki, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 190, 406; vol. 2, pp.
805–6.
248 Heberer, Osmanlıda Bir Köle, p. 73.
249 Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi, Malta Esirleri. Ser-Güzeşt-i Esîrî-i Malta, ed. Cemil Çiftçi
(Istanbul, 1996), pp. 22–3.
250 Ibid., p. 23.
171
K ate Fl e et
who might keep him awake or sometimes nip but this “did but rouze him,
without any hurt of importance”.251
Piracy was by no means a new problem, and was certainly one that afected
all states operating in the Mediterranean, leading, for example, to Ottoman–
Venetian cooperation against the Uskoks.252 What was new apparently was
the level, at least according to Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, who noted that the
current level of piracy would not have been possible under Süleyman, when
control over the sea was much more efective.253 Although the Ottomans did
attempt to control piracy and the corsairs, their own included, settling people
on Samos in an apparently successful bid to curb corsair activity in the region,
for example,254 they were unable to impose efective authority. This was pre-
sumably related to Ottoman internal economic problems and their shifted
focus onto Iran and Hungary, a shift relected in the report of the Venetian
ambassador in early 1592 that the Ottomans had “abandoned all idea of opera-
tions, either by sea or land”, this not being the time “to think of fresh under-
takings, but rather to observe the action of the Persians”. In consequence,
there was no activity in the arsenal.255
A further factor which distinguished the late sixteenth century from the
earlier period was the emergence of major new players in the waters of
the Mediterranean, the Dutch and the English. The Ottoman moment in
the Mediterranean was not quite over, however, for in 1669 Mehmed IV took
Crete from Venice after a long war which had begun in 1645 with the conquest
of Chania (Hanya).
251 Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant (London, 1636), p. 73.
252 Bostan, Adriyatik’te Korsanlık, doc. 8, pp. 145–7 (10–19 May 1586).
253 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Mevâ‘ıdü’n-Nefāis, p. 228; Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Mevâıdü’n-Nefāis, p.
57.
254 Heberer, Osmanlıda Bir Köle, p. 179.
255 Horatio F. Brown (ed.), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Afairs
Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, vol.
IX: 1592–1675 (London, 1897), p. 2, Lorenzo Bembo to the doge and senate (11 January 1591,
Venetian dating).
172
6
Ottoman expansion in the Red Sea
SAL I ? H Ö Z BA RAN
The defeat of the Mamluk army by Ottoman forces in 1516 and 1517, a defeat
due in particular to the Ottoman use of irearms, resulted, on the one hand, in
the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over the region of Syria and Egypt
and, on the other, presented the Ottomans with the opportunity of wielding
inl uence over the Red Sea. Gaining possession of the economic resources
of Egypt, and having before them the prospect of southward expansion
and dominance of the Red Sea, Arabian coastlines, Yemen and the shores
of north-east Africa, the Ottomans also gained a religious signiicance with
the occupation of the şerilik (a position belonging to the descendants of the
prophet Muhammad) of Mecca, which thus made the sultan the “protector
of Mecca and Medina”. The Ottomans’ success, both in gaining efective con-
trol in a region which formed one of the important pilgrimage routes and in
securing dominance of the Red Sea route, one of the trade routes linking the
eastern Mediterranean with the Indian world on which were situated key cit-
ies such as Aden, Mocha, Jeddah, Yanbu, Hodaida, Massawa and Suez, meant
that they were now in a position to present themselves as a strong Islamic and
imperial force against the sea empire of the Portuguese, which was attempt-
ing to prevent Ottoman encroachment in the region.
The reasons for the Ottomans turning their attention to the Mamluks,
whom they had initially failed to defeat in the reign of Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512),
cannot be suiciently explained by linking the attack to the hostility of the
Mamluks as allies of the Safavids, whom Selim I (r. 1512–20) had successfully
attacked in order to eliminate the Shi’i danger. Even if it is diicult to talk of
the existence of a plan prepared in the capital to take possession of the Red
Sea route which united the Indian Ocean and the eastern Mediterranean, or
to point to the existence of a calculated and documented project as support
for the argument of some historians for whom the Ottomans were aware of
the Portuguese Empire’s activities directed towards the Red Sea, it is known
that the Ottomans were interested in the life of the holy lands of Islam and
173
Sa li? h öz bar an
had for many years sent assistance, known as sürre, to the Hijaz. Economic
relations had begun many years earlier: in the last quarter of the ifteenth
century, commercial links existed, in particular between Bursa and the Arab
regions and the Red Sea.1 Further, the Ottomans wished, and planned, to
strengthen the Mamluk navy against the common enemy, Christendom.
Aware of the Portuguese threat both in Arabia and in the Indian Ocean in
this period, they assisted the Mamluks with weapons such as cannonballs,
guns and arrows, and with munitions including oars, copper and gunpowder;
and they sent commanders such as Emir Hüseyin and Selman Reis to serve
the Mamluk state. A force of 6,000 made up of Mamluks, Turks, Turcomans,
Maghribis and Arabs attempted the conquest of Yemen, and it is known that
this force took Zabid. In this period before the conquest of Egypt, it is impor-
tant to keep in mind the environment created by the adventure-seeking sala-
ried Ottoman soldiers, who were widespread in the Islamic world and were
known as Rumi both in the Red Sea world and in India, and who knew in par-
ticular how to use irearms.2 In answer, thus, to Fernand Braudel’s question
“how could anyone have foreseen the victories of Turks against the sultans of
Cairo in 1516 and 1517?”, one can refer to the remark of Halil İnalcık, for whom
“the conditions in Arab lands were ripe for the acceptance of Ottoman rule”,
an interpretation which relects the historical, if not ethical, reality.3
In the year before the Ottoman Empire’s armies invaded Egypt, and before
an artillery force and a Mamluk leet under the leadership of Selman Reis
protected Jeddah against a Portuguese leet, the position in the Red Sea can
be summarised as follows. Mamluk state control was not restricted to the
1 Halil İnalcık, ‘Bursa and the Commerce of the Levant’, Journal of Economic and Social History
of the Orient 3, 2 (1960), 131–47.
2 Halil İnalcık, ‘Socio-political Efects of the Dif usion of Fire-arms in the Middle East’, in War,
Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (Oxford, 1975), pp.
195–217, particularly pp. 202–11; Salih Özbaran, The Ottoman Response to European Expansion
(Istanbul, 1994), pp. 61–6.
3 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S.
Reynolds (London, 1972), vol. 1, p. 389; H. İnalcık, ‘The Rise of the Ottoman Empire’, in The
Cambridge History of Islam, ed. P. Holt, A. Lambton and B. Lewis (Cambridge, 1970), vol. 1, p.
318. I content myself here with giving a few examples from the literature related to the con-
quest of Egypt and Syria, which transformed the Ottomans into an expansive empire, and to
their Red Sea ambitions. See Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the
Beginning of the Sixteenth-Century World War’, International Journal of Middle East Studies
4 (1973), 55–76; Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, vol. 1: 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 315–25; Özbaran, Ottoman
Response, pp. 89–93; Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age
of Discovery (New York, 1994); Michael Winter, ‘The Ottoman Occupation’, in The Cambridge
History of Egypt, vol. 1: Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, ed. Carl F. Petry (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 490–516;
Benjamin Lellouch, Les Ottomans en Égypte: Historiens et conquérants au XVIe siècle (Paris and
Louvain, 2006).
174
Hijaz region but extended to Suakin on the African coast and to Aswan on the
Nile, and beneited from the advantages of the traditional trade route. While
Cairo, a location of great commercial activity frequented by merchants from
many diferent “nations”, represented its wealth, Mamluk culture, as it did
in Egypt and Syria, made its presence felt, too, in Mecca and Medina. Yemen
was divided into two: while in the north San’a and its dependencies were tied
to the Shi’i Zaidi dynasty and, with ports such as Luhaiyah, Hodeida, Zabid
and Mocha, opened onto the Red Sea, the south was centred on Ta’izz and,
with Aden as a very important entrepôt, opened onto the Indian Ocean. On
the African coast, there was the kingdom of Ethiopia, which ruled in partic-
ular over the more inland and upland areas, and the Muslim emirates, which
were sometimes under its inl uence; the location of Massawa and the Dahlak
islands close to it linked the Red Sea opening into the Indian Ocean with the
African continent.
Chronology
When a Portuguese leet of 37 ships under the command of Lopo Soarez was
driven back in 1517 by Selman Reis, who was engaged in protecting Jeddah, an
ocean-going force with Atlantic characteristics confronted a naval force pro-
duced by a Mediterranean system and commanded by an Ottoman seaman
working in Mamluk service. This historic event, constituting an example of
Red Sea defensive tactics for Ottoman naval forces, was in later years to pro-
vide an example for the application of a seamanship which, consisting of a
strategy involving land forces and artillery, could not be put into action in
the open seas of the Indian Ocean.4 It was, of course, to be expected that the
Ottoman forces would be inl uenced by the conditions prevalent in the lands
and seas they took over from the Mamluks. Climatic and geographical condi-
tions, together with the strategies followed by the Ottomans, which were for
the most part insuicient, were to characterise the historical landscape of the
Red Sea, in particular that of Yemen and the Indian Ocean.
4 There is a considerable variety of sources for the Jeddah event of 1517 and information related
to seamanship. See, for example, Şehabeddin Tekindağ, ‘Süveyş’te Türkler ve Selman Reis’in
Arîzası’, Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi 9 (1968), 77–80; Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Anne
Kroell, Mamlouks, Ottomans et Portugais en Mer Rouge: L’Afaire de Djedda en 1517 (Cairo, 1988);
J. Francis Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare
at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 7–15; Muhammad Yakub Mughul, Kanuni
Devri Osmanlıların Hint Okyanusu Politikası ve Osmanlı-Hint Müslümanları Münasebetleri, 1517–
1538 (Istanbul, 1974), pp. 76–80; Denison Ross, ‘The Portuguese in India and Arabia, 1517–38’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1922), 1–18.
175
Sa li? h öz bar an
Without doubt the greatest diiculty that faced the Ottomans was the
activities of the Portuguese naval forces which aimed to take control of the
entrance to and exit from the Red Sea and, by blocking the movement of
Muslim merchant ships transporting goods from India and the Far East into
and out of the eastern Mediterranean ports, to direct trade along the oce-
anic route around South Africa. The blow struck by the Portuguese forces to
the Mamluk economy, in particular the pepper and spice trade, was indeed a
serious threat for the Ottomans. In 1518, for example, a Red Sea leet (armada
do Estreito) composed of ten ships under the Portuguese captain António de
Saldanha set ire to rich Muslim ships loaded with spices trading between
the Red Sea and the Indian coast. Two years later, the Portuguese governor-
general Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, who commanded a naval force of 24 ships
carrying around 3,000 soldiers and possessing efective irepower, entered the
Red Sea but was unable to realise his plan to destroy the ships at Jeddah. The
Portuguese commander, however, called at Massawa on the African coast and
from there sent an embassy to the Christian emperor Prester John (Preste
João) and established relations with him and, at the same time, captured
Muslim merchant ships sailing to the Red Sea and burnt the city of Dahlak.5
This kind of attack by the Portuguese leet is also to be seen in the events
which occurred in 1523 when a Portuguese naval force seized ive Muslim
merchant ships in the region of Guardafui and burnt four of them in the port
of Aden. Portuguese forces, which had destroyed the town of Shihr, went as
far as Massawa and on their return set ire to Zufar on the Omani coast.6
In the years during which the Ottoman Empire was expanding its suzer-
ainty over the Red Sea, it thus came face to face with the activities of a rival
Christian empire. The results of the Portuguese blockade – even if some mer-
chant ships managed to conduct commercial voyages – dealt a perceptible
blow to Levantine trade. The drop in the volume of commercial goods, in
particular pepper, spices and, to a lesser extent, silk, coming from the East
to trade centres such as Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut, combined with the
fact that some such commodities never reached these markets, forced the
5 Fernão L. De Castanheda, História do Descobrimento e Conquesta da Índia pelos Portugueses

(Lisbon, 1833), livro IV, capitulos XXXII and XXXVI; Gaspar Correia, Lendas da India (Lisbon,
1858–61), vol. 2, p. 583; L. O. Schuman, Political History of the Yemen at the Beginning of the 16th
Century: Abu Makrama’s Account of the Years 906–927 (1500–1521) with Annotations (Amsterdam,
1960), pp. 25–6; R. B. Serjeant, The Portuguese of the South Arabian Coast: Hadramī Chronicles,
with Yemeni and European Accounts of Dutch Pirates of Mocha in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford,
1963), pp. 51–2; Charles F. Beckingham and George W. B. Huntingford (eds.), The Prester John of
the Indies, a True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1961).
6 Serjeant, The Portuguese, pp. 52–3; V. Magalhães Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a Economia
Mundial, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1963–5), vol. 2, p. 146.
176
Ottomans to establish a naval force in the Red Sea, which opened into the
Indian Ocean, analogous with their activities in the Mediterranean. The Suez
shipyard therefore became pivotal in Ottoman activities directed towards the
Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and even the Persian Gulf.
In 1519, Selman Reis went to Istanbul, according to the Diarii of Marino
Sanudo, an important source for the period, and was employed to prepare
a sea force of 30 galleys at Suez to counter the Portuguese threat in the Red
Sea. Again according to the same source, 12 ships, 3,000 ighters, timber, ship
construction materials and cannon were brought to Alexandria for the con-
struction of this leet.7 A report dated 2 June 1525 from the Topkapı Palace
Archives in Istanbul, which is thought to have been Selman Reis’s and to have
been presented to the grand vezir İbrahim Paşa, is an important source for
the naval force which the Ottoman Empire prepared in the Red Sea in this
period. Such a report, even if it bears the characteristics of a personal enter-
prise and even if it was not prepared within the framework of an imperial
expansion plan, is important as an indication of the tax resources and the stra-
tegic points which were to be taken in later conquests and because it serves
as a guide for our understanding of Ottoman strategy. The document shows
the numbers of the sea forces which the empire took over on the conquest
of Egypt and which were prepared at Suez, of the ships and cannon and the
great quantity of war materials and men at Jeddah: six bastards, eight galleys,
three galliots, one boat (caique); seven large siege guns (basilisk), 13 medium
and 57 small guns, 29 guns mounted on warships (şaykas), 95 iron guns, 97
cannon employed in the leet (falconets); about 18 tons of gunpowder, 430
basilik cannonballs, 900 copper falconet cannonballs; about 25 tons of pitch,
nine tons of white lead, nine tons of cable i bre, 6,800 metres of sailcloth,
20 pairs of top-gallant yards, nine tons of linseed oil, 500 oars; 50 caulkers, 20
carpenters, two ironsmiths, two workbenches, two sawyers, 20 artillery men
and 1,000 sailors.8
These igures, when compared with the Ottoman naval force in the
Mediterranean, are not large and cannot be said to show a navy possessing
the attributes and capacity necessary to put out to sea in the Indian Ocean.
The preparation of a more powerful leet would be undertaken in later years.
But the Ottomans, the Rumi in Arab and Portuguese sources, began to have
7 Godinho, Os Descobrimentos, vol. 2, p. 154.

8 Topkapı Palace Museum Archives, Istanbul, E. 6455; Salih Özbaran, ‘A Turkish Report on the
Red Sea and the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean (1525)’, in Özbaran, Ottoman Response, pp.
100–1; Michel Lesure, ‘Un document ottoman de 1525 sur l’Inde portugaise et les pays de la
Mer Rouge’, Mare Luso-Indicum 3 (1976), 137–60 at pp. 152–4.
177
Sa li? h öz bar an
an impact in a closed sea like the Red Sea and represented a signiicant attempt
to prevent the Portuguese “bloqueia” leet from gaining complete control of
it. In December 1524, when news was received that the Ottomans were pre-
paring a leet of 20 ships and that some of these vessels were in Jeddah, a
Portuguese leet under the command of António de Mirando was able to sail
as far as the island of Kamaran, but after taking in water there was forced
to return to India.9 Selman and Emir Hüseyin (Rumi) defeated Mustafa Bey,
who had established hegemony in Yemen, and in 1526 took Zabid and Aden
and, by establishing a military base on the island of Kamaran, succeeded in
taking control of the Red Sea. Among the information reaching Venice from
Alexandria two years later was the news that Selman’s forces had defeated
seven Portuguese ships of Aden and had sunk four of them:10 the Ottomans
were thus now on the ofensive. It is important to note that the endeavours
of the Ottomans in the Red Sea were the result more of personal endeavour
and competition than central planning, and it is evident that the administra-
tion of those places which were very far from the centre lacked strict order
and control. Thus the killing of Selman Reis by Hayreddin Bey, who had ear-
lier been appointed as commander of the army, disrupted the running of the
Ottoman southern policy, and such an event was seized on as an opportunity
by the Portuguese. At the same time, a Muslim leet of 20 ships, including
a large Ottoman galley, working between the Red Sea and India was cap-
tured by the Portuguese, a great deal of plunder was taken, and Zayla, on
the African coast, was set on ire.11 Among news reaching Egypt was that the
Portuguese had either taken a trade vessel or had destroyed an Islamic town.
While the Tarikh al-Shihri, an Arabic chronicle from Hadramut, registered a
Portuguese ship coming to Shihr in 1529 and seizing a loaded ship there, the
contemporary Portuguese historian Fernão Lopes de Castanheda wrote that
they had taken nine ships wishing to bring spices from India to the Red Sea
and had burnt four of them.12 The ruler of Aden’s ofer of payment to the
Portuguese of 100,000 xeraim in return for Portuguese protection of the city
against the Ottomans13 and, further, Aden’s ofer of recognition of freedom
of movement for the Portuguese, together with the desire of the Portuguese
to build fortiications on Zayla and Massawa, must have worried the Ottoman
9 Correia, Lendas, vol. 2, p. 852.

10 Barros, Da Ásia, década IV, livro I, capitulo VIII; Kutbeddin Nahravali/Ali, Ahbarü’l-Yemanî,
İstanbul Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, nu. 886, fol. 27v.
11 Correia, Lendas, vol. 2, p. 272; Castanheda, História, livro VII, capitulos LXVIII– LXIX.
12 Castanheda, História, livro VII, capitulo XCVI; Serjeant, The Portuguese, p. 54.
13 Xeraim was an Indo-European coin with a value of 300 reis (one reis was about 1/400 of a
gold cruzado, or 1/400 of an Ottoman sultani).
178
administration.14 If a letter written to the king by the Portuguese ambassador

in Venice, Pero Caraldo, is to be believed, the Venetian ships expected in Beirut
and Alexandria in 1531 were unable to transport spices to Venice. The efect of
the Portuguese naval forces in the Indian Ocean is thus clear. Such a position
must have been a disappointment for Istanbul.15 The Ottomans had, how-
ever, taken control of the Red Sea and were determined to enter the waters
of the Indian Ocean.16 Further, if one can believe the information given by
Godhinho, relying on Marino Sanudo, the Ottomans were even planning at
that date to open a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, work on which
was going on in 1532, although the project was never completed.17 In that year,
the Ottomans were unable to function efectively in the Indian Ocean, either
in response to the request for help from the Gujarati sultanate or to counter
the Portuguese, activities which the Ottomans saw as essential. The Ottoman
Empire was prevented from pursuing its policy in the Indian Ocean by the
need to transport equipment and cannon from Egypt to the Mediterranean
to counter the ambitions of the Spanish king Carlos V in North Africa, an
event followed by the departure of the beylerbeyi of Egypt, Süleyman Paşa,
together with his treasury, to join the sultan on the Irakeyn campaign.
It was not until 1538 that the Ottomans were once more in action in the
region. In that year, a naval force of possibly 72 or 74 ships, among which were
many baştarde, galleys and munitions ships carrying, among other cargo, up
to 20,000 men, including 6,500 soldiers, and large cannon, set out from Suez
on campaign to Diu in India.18 In reality, the Ottoman Diu campaign was not
a great success, but on its way back the leet was to play a very important
role in Ottoman dominance in the Red Sea and was to set up the basis for the
eyalet of Yemen which would establish the connection between the Red Sea
and the Indian Ocean. Amr ibn Davud, who was the ruler in the Aden region,
and Nahuda Ahmed, who held Zabid, having been killed, Mustafa Bey, who
had created the naiblik (the oice of deputy judge) of Gaza, was appointed
14 Antonio da Silva Rego and T. William Baxter (eds.), Documentos sobre os Portugueses em
Moçambique e na Africa Central, 1497–1840 (Lisbon, 1962–89), vol. 4, p. 294; Godinho, Os
Descobrimentos, vol. 2, p. 147.
15 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Gaveta 20, Maço 7, Documento 15.
16 Ş. Turan, ‘Süleyman Paşa’, in İslâm Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul, 1970), vol. 11, p. 194.
17 Godinho, Os Descobrimentos, vol. 2, p. 154.
18 According to Barros (Da Asia, década IV, livro X, capitulo II), among the ships were 15
baştarda with 33 benches and 25 galleys with 30 benches. The leet carried forces including
1,500 janissaries and 2,000 bowmen and brought carpenters, caulkers and artillery men who
had been taken from Venetian ships. For an anonymous eye-witness account of this military
campaign, see Robert Kerr (ed.), A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, 18
vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1824), vol. 6, pp. 257–87.
179
Sa li? h öz bar an
“vali ve hâkim-i Yemen” (governor and judge of Yemen). About 1,500 janis-
saries were settled at Aden in Yemen, which was then raised to the status of
“mir-i miranlık” (beylerbeylik), several galleys from the leet were left in the
harbour at Aden and the fortiications of Zabid were strengthened.19 In real-
ity, these forces were neither suicient to stop a Portuguese leet nor to bring
the Arab tribes under control. However, with the conquest of various strate-
gic and important towns, Ottoman inl uence now became more pronounced
in Yemen, and the empire secured, through the land taxes and the revenues
of the port, at least a contribution towards the pay of the soldiers. This eyalet,
which was to be the graveyard of many thousands of Ottomans during its
history as an Ottoman province, was to be remembered in bitter folksongs
about the tragic loss of those who went to Yemen never to return and whose
fate remained unknown to those at home.
The attention of Portuguese naval forces remained irmly ixed on the Red
Sea. When in 1540–1 a Portuguese ship, passing through the waters of Aden,
took 300 people prisoner from various trading vessels it encountered and seized
a large quantity of goods, it proved impossible to ofer any resistance from
Aden and Zabid. The Portuguese king, regarding the Ottoman leet at Suez
and the Ottoman presence in the Indian Ocean as a grave danger to Indian
trade, ordered the burning of such a competitive leet and the destruction
of this threat.20 In 1541, a leet under the command of the governor-general
of India, D. Garcia de Noronha, made up of 70 fusta (oared ships), eight gal-
leys, two carracks (nao), one caravel and three kalyate (warships) and carrying
2,300 soldiers, entered the Red Sea. Calling at Massawa, it then went on to
Suakin. Upon learning that this rich commercial centre had paid a tax of 70,000
Venetian ducats (venezeanos) to the Ottoman sultan, it promptly destroyed the
island, killing 50 Ottomans who were there for trade, and destroyed Qusayr.
The leet next appeared before Tur and then Suez, its main objective. The cam-
paign, however, did not bring the results the Portuguese wanted. The Ottoman
artillery successfully protected the shipyards and ships from Portuguese attack,
while the Portuguese were also hampered by natural hazards, disease, violent
heat and famine.21 The Ottomans had not, therefore, lost momentum.
19 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Corpo Cronológico, Parte 1, Maço 24, Documento
35; Nahravali/Âlî, Ahbarü’l-Yemani, Hamidiye Kütüphanesi, Nu. 886, fol. 44v–45v; Dejanirah
Couto, ‘No rasto de Hādım Suleimão Pacha: alguns aspectos do comércio do Mar Vermelho
nos anos de 1538–1540’, in A Carreira da Índia e As Rotas dos Estreitos, ed. A. T. de Matos and
Luis Filipe F. R. Thomaz (Angra do Heroísmo, 1998), pp. 483–508.
20 Serjeant, The Portuguese, p. 98; Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Corpo Cronológico,
Parte 1, Maço 66, Documento 40 and 75.
21 E. Sanceau, ‘Uma Narrativa de Expedição Portuguesa de 1541 ao Mar Roxo’, Studia 9 (1962),
199–234 at p. 209; D. João de Castro, ‘Roteiro que Fez Dom Joao de Castro da Viajem que
180
While the Ottoman leet dropped anchor in the shipyard of Suez and gal-
leys began to appear in various harbours of the Red Sea, organisation of the
beylerbeylik of Yemen was taken in hand, and in 1542 assistance was given from
Yemen to the Muslim emirate which had declared cihad on the Ethiopian
kingdom on the African continent and which had its centre at Harar,22 help
that ensured victory for the Islamic emirate. At this time, an Ottoman force
of 900 artillery men and ten cannoners played an efective role in the Red Sea,
as Portuguese sources noted. According to the information given by Gaspar
Correia, relying on eye-witnesses, Ottoman galleys and fustas attempted to
take control of the entrance to and exit from the Red Sea and were able to
sail as far as Malindi. This Portuguese historian, talking of events in 1544 and
relying again on an eye-witness account, speaks of the Ottomans at that date
having an amil (faitor, agent) employed to collect the tax at Massawa and of
a group of 25 merchants engaged in trade there. Describing later events,
he speaks of four Ottoman kalyate in 1546 going irst to Kishn (in southern
Arabia, on the coast of the Indian Ocean) and, after bombarding the town,
sailing on to Zufar, where the Ottoman forces built a castle and which they
took under Ottoman control. From there the leet went as far as Malindi,
where it engaged in plundering. In the same period, eight Ottoman kalyate
and a catur (fast, light boat) were cruising around the Maseira islands. The
Tarikh al-Shihri, talking of the events of 951 (1544–5), records that Ottoman
galleys captured a Portuguese galley loaded with goods in the sea of Shihr.23
It was apparently at this point that things began to unravel for the
Ottomans. Ottoman assistance to various local rulers and attacks on others
led them into a more aggressive stance against their European rivals. At the
same time as this heightening of competition, however, the 1540s saw peace
overtures and diplomatic manoeuvrings designed to keep the Red Sea and
Persian Gulf trade routes open. There was thus a diplomatic correspondence
between the Ottoman sultan, who had his eyes irmly ixed on the Red Sea,
and the Portuguese king, who was determined not to allow shipping into this
route. At the same time, Ottoman advance in the Red Sea and encroachment
Fezeram os Portugueses desde India atee Soez’, in Obras Completas de D. João de Castro, ed.
A. Cortesão and Luis de Albuquerque, 3 vols. (Coimbra, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 171–399; T. J. Coates,
‘D. João de Castro’s 1541 Red Sea Voyage in the Greater Context of Sixteenth-Century
Portuguese Ottoman Red Sea Rivalry’, in Decision Making in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Caesar
Farah (Kirksville, Mo., 1993), pp. 263–85.
22 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunun Güney Siyaseti: Habeş Eyaleti (Istanbul, 1974), pp.
22–30.
23 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Corpo Cronológico, Parte 1, Maço 71, Documento 17;
Correia, Lendas, vol. 4, pp. 268–9, 423, 427–8, 525; E. D’Almeida, História de Aethiopia (Rome,
1907), livro III, capitulo X; Serjeant, The Portuguese, p. 106.
181
Sa li? h öz bar an
in the Indian Ocean zone continued with the conquest of Basra in 1546 and
the establishment of the beylerbeylik of Basra, and the expansion into Lahsa
(al-Hasa) in eastern Arabia. Thanks to the eforts of Özdemir Paşa in 1547,
Ottoman sovereignty was extended into the inland areas of Yemen. Various
settlements, including San’a, were taken, castles conquered and Aden re-con-
quered in 1549, the Ottomans having lost it in 1546. In 1550, Ottoman forces
plundered Kalhat. In the same period, a Portuguese leet under the command
of Captain Luiz Figueira, which had carried of 40 galleys in the seas of Ras
al-Hadd, was defeated, and Figueira killed, in an encounter with ive Ottoman
kalyate commanded by Sefer Reis.24 In 1552, a leet made up of 25 galleys, four
galleons and one other ship carrying 850 soldiers was assembled in Suez and
set out on a campaign in which the famous seaman and geographical scholar
Piri Reis plundered Maskat and then besieged Hurmuz, which controlled the
entrance and exit to and from the Persian Gulf.25 Despite this victory, how-
ever, this leet, as a result of inadequate political strategy and a lack of mas-
tery of the technology of warfare, once more demonstrated the weakness of
the Ottoman naval forces in the Indian Ocean. After the death of Piri Reis and
the failure of Murad Reis’s plans to bring the ships remaining at Basra to Suez,
Seydi Ali Reis’s adventurous voyage was to end in disaster, as this leet, which
had remained in the Persian Gulf, thus leaving the Red Sea unprotected, van-
ished in the ocean. The second, and inal, major Ottoman exodus from the
Red Sea thus ended in failure.
After these unsuccessful activities in the waters of the Indian Ocean,
Ottoman policy reverted to protection of the frontiers and, in particular,
exploitation of the advantages which the customs taxes, taken from the mer-
chants from Gujarat and other Muslim regions, and especially the land taxes
(harac-ı arazi), brought them. Having conquered some parts of Ethiopia in
1554–5, the Ottomans were keen to beneit from the trade, in particular the
gold trade, of this region, situated on the shores of the Red Sea and the Indian
Ocean. Cengiz Orhonlu, known for his work on the Ottoman presence in
Ethiopia, described this conquest and the subsequent establishment of a new
eyalet there as “one of the most important phases of the Ottoman Empire’s
southern policy” and noted that “This was a movement which put much pres-
sure on the economic realities [of the empire]”.26 The eyalet of Ethiopia was
24 Nahravali/Âlî, Ahbarü-l-Yemanî, fols. 47r–50r; Diogo de Couto, Da Ásia, década VI (Lisbon,

1781), livro VI, capitulo III–V; livro VIII, capitulo XII; livro IX, capitulo III.
25 Cengiz Orhonlu, ‘Hint Kaptanlığı ve Piri Reîs’, Belleten 134 (1970), 235–54 at pp. 235–6; Salih
Özbaran, Yemen’den Basra’ya Sınırdaki Osmanlı (Istanbul, 2004), pp. 153–61.
26 Orhonlu, Habeş Eyaleti, p. 31.
182
oicially established in 1555 with the transfer from Suez to Suakin of 3,000
Ottoman soldiers, whose salaries were to be paid from the treasury of the
eyalet of Egypt, and all types of ammunition and provisions, and the estab-
lishment of Ottoman suzerainty over the ports on the African coast, together
with the island of Dahlak, opposite Massawa, which lay farther south. In 1557,
irst Massawa, followed by Arkiko and then Zayla came under Ottoman suzer-
ainty, and with the conquest of important towns near the Red Sea such as
Debarwa, Ibrim, Derr and Say, Ottoman inluence was extended into the inte-
rior of Ethiopia. However, Ottoman documents show that this sovereignty
was not efective beyond Suakin on the shores of the Red Sea or the frontiers
of Funj control in the regions of the Upper Nile, Upper Egypt and Nubia.
Geographical factors and insuicient military strength made it diicult for the
Ottomans to establish themselves irmly in areas distant from the shores of the
Red Sea.27 After the years of conl ict with the Portuguese Empire, which were
characterised by large naval clashes and displays of power at sea, the Ottomans
reinforced their policy of defending the regions where they had sovereignty
and of stamping out rebellions by local populations, as they adopted the defen-
sive imperial policy of an empire which had over-reached its territorial limits.
The Ottoman existence in Yemen is one of the clearest examples of this.
Ottoman administration of Yemen in the years following the conquest
in 1547 of Ta’izz, which had a signiicant Zaydi inluence in the uplands of
southern Yemen, and of San’a, which was the base of the Zaydi imam, was
not without negative features, as is clear from the misuse made of his posi-
tion for personal gain by Mahmud Paşa, the beylerbeyi of Yemen in 1560, or
from the excessive taxation imposed by his successor, Ridvan Paşa, in order to
increase his own income. The reaction of al-Mutahhar and his supporters to
the oppression of the people living in the Shi’i Zaydi regions is a further exam-
ple. In 1568, the Ottomans lost suzerainty over San’a and Aden, and the inlu-
ence of the empire receded to the shores of the Red Sea. The Ottomans were
not slow to counter this irst attempt made by the Zaydis to rescue Yemen
from Ottoman occupation,28 for the eyalet controlled the entrance to and exit
27 Ibid., pp. 37–42. For a view contrary to that of some historians that important ports on
the Red Sea, such as Suakin and Massawa, passed under Ottoman control in the time of
Sultan Selim I, see P. M. Holt, ‘Sultan Selim I and the Sudan’, Journal of African History 8,
1 (1967), 19–23; V. L. Ménage, ‘The Ottomans and Nubia in the Sixteenth Century’, Annales
Islamologiques 24 (1988), 137–53.
28 J. R. Blackburn, ‘The Collapse of Ottoman Authority in Yemen, 968/1560–976/1568’, Die
Welt des Islams 19, 1–4 (1980), 119–76; R. B. Serjeant and R. Lewcock (eds.), San’ā: An Arabian
Islamic City (London, 1983), pp. 69–71; Hulûsi Yavuz, Kâbe ve Haremeyn için Yemen’de Osmanlı
Hâkimiyeti (1517–1571) (Istanbul, 1984), pp. 74–88.
183
Sa li? h öz bar an
from the Red Sea and was an important source of tax income. The beylerbeyi
of Egypt, Sinan Paşa, was appointed serasker (commander-in-chief ) for the re-
conquest of Yemen. Setting in place the preparation of new galleys and gal-
leons in Suez and amassing ammunition and munitions, Sinan Paşa set out for
Yemen overland with a force of 3,000 men. This campaign, which is depicted in
the miniatures of the work of Rumizi and which is known by historians as the
second conquest of Yemen, took place in the years 1569–71 and was conducted
under very diicult conditions due to internal disorder and the geography of
the region, but it was never possible to conquer the whole region.29
Under the administration of Murad Paşa (1576–80), certain taxes were
decreased, and Yemen experienced a more just rule. In later years, beauti-
ful buildings, including the Muradiye (Muradiyyah) and Bekiriye (Bakiriyyah)
mosques, were erected, and innovations in infrastructure such as water facil-
ities were constructed in San’a.30
Turning to the developments in the eyalet of Ethiopia, here the situation
was maintained with the help of soldiers who came always from the eyalets
of Egypt and Yemen and whose numbers were generally insuicient. In 1561,
Özdemiroğlu Osman Paşa, who was appointed beylerbeyi of Ethiopia in that
year, an oice he was to remain in until 1568, and who had gained a good
understanding of the strategic position of the region during the period of
his father’s administration, followed a policy of expansion, using the advan-
tage of irepower, and in 1562 defeated the army of the Ethiopian king Minas.
But the revolt of Imam Mutahhar in Yemen, referred to earlier, had drawn
Ottoman attention away from Ethiopia and undermined the adoption of
measures necessary for the development of this eyalet. With the Ottoman
position once more established in Yemen, the transfer of troops and guns
from Yemen and Egypt continued. Ottoman relations with the king of
Ethiopia were not smooth, and diplomatic relations went through various
ups and downs. Beneiting from the superior guns which he had obtained, the
Ethiopian king, Sarsta Dengel, gained a victory over the Ottomans at the bat-
tle of Addi Quarro, thought to have occurred in 1579, at which Ahmed Paşa,
the beylerbeyi of Ethiopia, and very many Ottoman ağas (senior oicers) were
killed. The Ottomans were, however, successful in re-capturing Arkiko and,
after a battle in Debarwa in 1582, taking possession once more of the Tigre
region.31
29 Yavuz, Kâbe ve Haremeyn, pp. 91–112; Caesar E. Farah, ‘Yemeni Fortiication and the Second
Ottoman Conquest’, Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 1–2 (1990), 83–9.
30 Serjeant and Lewcock, San’ā, p. 72.
31 Orhonlu, Habeş Eyaleti, pp. 52–68.
184
At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth,
the Red Sea was the setting for commerce based in particular on the export of
cofee. In the Indian Ocean, Portuguese inl uence began to decline, but with
the organisation of Dutch and English commercial companies supported by
the state, the Levant route, while remaining deprived of spices, was again to
prove proitable thanks to customs charged on Yemeni cofee, and the port
of Mocha, close to the area of cofee production and well protected, would
become the desired destination of many merchants trading in the Red Sea
region.32
Political, economic and military structure

In the sixteenth century, the majority of the Arab regions, which were
absorbed into the Ottoman state structure and whose conquest represented
a considerable extension of the empire’s frontiers, which now lay far distant
from the centre, were of necessity tax farmed, a system adopted earlier in
much of Anatolia and Rumeli. The leet in these regions was independent
of the kapudan paşalık (the oice of grand admiral), as indicated by a ferman
in a mühimme defteri (drafts of sultanic decrees) dated 1560 which refers to
the need for an independent kapudan for Suez.33 There is no question that
Egypt occupied a very important position in Ottoman Red Sea naval activi-
ties from a political, strategic and economic, in particular commercial, point
of view. Egypt was thus a pivotal point for the Ottoman takeover of control
in the Red Sea and the Hijaz from the Mamluks, and in their strategy of
maintaining dominance there. It was from here that military campaigns set
of for Yemen and Ethiopia, and when the resources of these eyalets proved
insuicient, which was often the case, the military contingents there were
augmented by troops from Egypt and provisions and munitions provided. It
was a very important transit centre in the trade link between the Red Sea and
the Mediterranean, and it created a model for beylerbeyliks which were set up
in several Arab regions.
32 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Cofee and Spices: Oicial Ottoman Reactions to Egyptian Trade in the
Later Sixteenth Century’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 76 (1986), 87–93;
C. G. Brouwer, ‘A Stockless Anchor and an Unsaddled Horse: Ottoman Letters Addressed to
the Dutch in Yemen, First Quarter of the 17th Century’, Turcica 20 (1988), 173–242.
33 Salih Özbaran, ‘Ottoman Naval Power in the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century’, in The
Kapudan Pasha: His Oice and His Domain, ed. Elizabeth Zachariadou (Rethymnon, 2002),
pp. 109–17 at pp. 112–13: “an independent kapudan for Suez was necessary, and Sefer, then
the kapudan of Yemen, should be appointed” (müstakil kapudan lazımdur deyu Süveyş
kapudanlığ ın Yemen kapudanı Sefer’e olması).
185
Sa li? h öz bar an
In contrast to the administrative structure based on timarlı sipahi (timariot

cavalry, who held a military ief (timar) in the provinces in return for military
service), the regime established in the eyalets of Egypt, Yemen and Ethiopia
was one in which tax farming of revenue in cash was adopted, due to the
impossibility of collecting tax in kind, a system which facilitated the payment
of the soldiers.34 For this type of eyalet, the sultan appointed one governor
(vali, beylerbeyi), one inancial oicial (defterdar, nazır-ı emval) and one legal
oicial (kadı). The salaries (aylık, salyane) of the high-ranking oicers, and the
pay (mevacib) of the military forces of the eyalets, including in particular the
janissary garrisons, the gönüllü, azep and merdan, were paid from the income
collected there. Similar diferences also existed in the naval organisation.
Naval operations in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean were under the direct
control of the centre, with orders issued and appointments made directly
by Istanbul, rather than being incorporated into the kapudan paşalık struc-
ture, which was responsible for the direction and development of Ottoman
naval force elsewhere in the empire.35 The organisation of the relations of the
Ottoman administration with the Red Sea, and thus with the wider world,
was an important part of the job of the beylerbeyis of Egypt, who were gen-
erally given the rank of vezir. The eyalet of Egypt held prime place in the
Ottoman administration of the region, and it was from here that forces were
transferred to the eyalets of Yemen and Ethiopia and from where Ottoman
sovereignty was directed.
The beylerbeylik of Egypt and the Hijaz

Stanford Shaw, who conducted research on Ottoman Egypt, stressed, while
explaining the basic structure in the eyalet of Egypt, that the main economic
asset of that region was the richness of its soil and that for this reason the land
was seen as the fundamental source of income of the Ottoman treasury. He
argued, therefore, that under the Ottoman rule production in the region was
encouraged and was structured with the aim of obtaining suicient income.36
As Shaw noted, the beylerbeylik of Egypt, as was the case also with the other
beylerbeyliks in the Red Sea region, was divided into revenue-producing units
(mukataa, literally meaning cutting of ) whose exploitation was conducted by
agents. There were essentially two types of mukataa: the tax farm (iltizam),
34 Özbaran, Ottoman Response, pp. 27–9, 33–6.

35 Özbaran, ‘Ottoman Naval Power’, p. 109.
36 Stanford Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman
Egypt, 1517–1798 (Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 26.
186
in which a tax farmer (mültezim), who collected the revenue for the treasury,
was granted a percentage of the mukataa revenue for his services; and the
emanet (stewardship), in which revenue was collected by an agent (emin), who
received a salary from the treasury.37 For Michael Winter, who has recently
published research on, in particular, the social history of Ottoman Egypt,
it was the askeri, the administrative class, a group which believed in mak-
ing itself rich by both legal and illegal means, which was responsible for the
Ottoman administration conducted in the regions of the Red Sea. The gover-
nor, the head of the Ottoman administration, saw to it that Istanbul’s interests
were protected and its strategic interests in the region safeguarded. He was
responsible for law and order, revenue collection and, most importantly, the
organisation and protection of the pilgrimage caravan to Mecca, and for the
provisioning of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina with grain from Egypt.
Mirroring the administrative structure of the sultan and the divan (council of
state) in Istanbul, the governor presided over a divan which met four times a
week and which formulated policy.38
The annual income of the beylerbeyi of Egypt, who held the title of paşa
and who appears as mirmiran in some documents, was around 2 million pare,
and the sancaks, which were established on both banks of the Nile, were
under his authority. In efect, the standard sancak and sancakbeyliği structure,
which was used in regions in which the empire operated the timar system,
was not used in Egypt. Administrators who held the important administra-
tive/military roles were seen in the same way as they had been in Mamluk
times. Thus, the eyalet of Egypt was not divided into sancaks, typical of the
Ottoman administrative structure, but was generally separated into vilay-
ets. But in strategic regions, for the purpose of defence, places such as Raşit,
Dimyat, Suez, Jeddah, Asyut and İbrim were organised as sancaks. Only Asyut,
to the south of Cairo, appears as a sancak (liva) in a central budget document
which was prepared for the period 1527–8. In the Ottoman Egyptian kanun-
name (law code) which was drawn up in 1525, 14 vilayets were counted as units
of administration, and their administration was run by kaşif s (agents of gov-
ernment), who were responsible for the tax income of the region, controlling
the watering systems and ensuring order.39 Here it is necessary to highlight
two important issues which concern the Red Sea and which formed part of
37 Stanford Shaw, The Budget of Egypt, 1005–1006/1596–1597 (The Hague, 1968), pp. 2–3.
38 Michael Winter, Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798 (London and New York,
1992), p. 32. For a doctoral thesis on sixteenth-century Egypt which makes extensive use of
defter s and documents in the Ottoman archives, see S. Muhammed es-Seyyid Mahmud, XVI.
Asırda Mısır Eyaleti (Istanbul, 1990).
39 Mahmud, XVI. Asırda Mısır Eyaleti, pp. 153 and 157f.; Winter, Egyptian Society, p. 16.
187
Sa li? h öz bar an
the duties of the beylerbeyis: the conducting of relations with the Hijaz, which
carried great prestige for the empire and great importance for the sultan, who
from time to time used the title “servitor of Mecca and Medina” (Hadimü’l-
Haremeyn-i Şerifeyn), and, a matter of equal importance, the order of the hac
(pilgrimage) and protecting of the hac route.
It is clear from research done using documents found in the Ottoman
archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) in Istanbul, and in particular the Divan-ı
Hümayum Mühimme Defterleri,40 that the emir/şerif of Mecca usually referred
to the beylerbeyi of Egypt over any problems in his region or concerning work
that was required to be undertaken in the Haremeyn, and matters were for-
warded to Istanbul from Egypt on the authority of the beylerbeyi. All expenses
and needs, building and repairs were met from the Egyptian treasury and
from the income of Jeddah. Moreover, the beylerbeylik of Egypt ensured the
continuity of the assistance made for the poor of the Haremeyn on behalf of
the empire and of the vakıf s set up there. To give but two examples, fermans
from 1560 show the eforts of the kadı of Mecca to counter the problems
of water scarcity and of ilth around the well of Zemzem, which were par-
ticularly prominent in the pilgrimage season, and similarly, various fermans
from the year 1577 show the need to control the excessive spending on the
gold embroidery of the cover of the Qa’ba. The performance of the obliga-
tion of the hac, which carried a unifying role from the point of view of the
empire and a legitimising one from the point of view of the sultan, and the
revitalising of the Hijaz region were considered very important duties of
the beylerbeyis of Egypt.
Grain was sent to the Hijaz by vakıf s, the majority of which were estab-
lished in Egypt to assist the poor, and the system of grain transportation has
been described by Suraiya Faroqhi. It was shipped down the Nile from Upper
Egypt to, probably, Bulak, and from there transported overland by camel to
Suez. From there, grain for Medina was shipped to Yanbu, where it was once
more loaded onto camels under the supervision of a member of the Şerif
40 Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517–1683 (London and
New York, 1994); Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Trade Controls, Provisioning Policies, and Donations:
The Egypt-Hijaz Connection during the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’, in
Süleyman the Second and His Time, ed. Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul, 1993), pp.
131–43; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Ottoman Documents Concerning the Hajj during the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries’, in La vie sociale dans les provinces arabes à l’époque ottomane,
ed. A. Temimi (Zaghouan, 1988), pp. 153–63; S. N. Göyünç, ‘Some Documents Concerning
the Ka’ba in the Sixteenth Century’, in Sources for the History of Arabia, ed. A. M. Abdalla,
S. Al-Sakkar and R. T. Mortel (Riyad, 1979), vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 177–81; Mahmud, XVI. Asırda
Mısır Eyaleti, pp. 266–8; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Mekke-i Mükerreme Emirleri (Ankara,
1972).
188
family resident there. Grain for Mecca was shipped to Jeddah, from where it
was transported by camel caravan to Mecca.41
When looked at from the economic point of view, Egypt represented a
great asset to the Ottomans. The income from the mukataas, both rural and
urban, the mal-ı haraj-i arazi (land tax), the kuşiiye (annual payment by the
principal oice-holders), the ihtisab (urban taxes) and the sea and river cus-
toms together formed the irad (revenues). The salaries of the beylerbeyis, the
kapı halkları (entourages of bodyguards, slaves and domestic servants of local
elites and grandees), the army commander and the soldiers, and the expenses
of the sea campaigns, the pilgrimage and the activities in the Hijaz, were
secured from these sources. Further, an annual 16 million – at the end of the
century 20 million – para42 were sent to Istanbul as irsaliye (remittance to the
treasury).
An important aspect which must be stressed here from the point of view
of the Red Sea is the port and shipyard of Suez, which linked the Red Sea
with Egypt. Even if initially limited, the tax yield taken from the customs on
merchandise, including products such as pepper and spices and, in the seven-
teenth century, cofee, formed a substantial part of the Egyptian budget. The
income of Suez was obtained through tax farming (iltizam), and after tax was
collected as “mukataa-yi uşûr-i esnaf-ı bahar” (farm of tithes on commod-
ities), it was transferred to Cairo.43 Suez, whose importance is indicated by
many travellers, eye-witnesses and seamen, was described by Duarte Barbosa,
who knew the world of the Indian Ocean in the irst half of the sixteenth
century:
There is a sea port which is called Çues, whither the Mors were wont to bring all the
spices, drugs and other rich wares from Juda, the port of Meca, which came thither
from India. These they carried from Juda in very small craft, and then loaded them
on camels, and carried them by land to Cayro, whence other traders took them to
Alexandria.44
Another important aspect of Suez’s position in the Red Sea is without doubt
its military signiicance. In the years of Ottoman rule, and in particular during
the preparations for the 1538 Diu and the 1552 Hormuz campaigns, Suez acted
as an important military base. Its activities were under the command of the
41 Faroqhi, ‘Trade Controls’, p. 137.

42 Para was the money in circulation in Ottoman Egypt and in the region of the Red Sea, and
was valued at 1/40 of a gold coin. For the income and the budget of Egypt, see Shaw, The
Budget of Egypt.
43 Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, p. 104.
44 The Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans. M. L. Dames, 2 vols. (London, 1918), vol. 1, p. 43.
189
Sa li? h öz bar an
Egyptian (İskenderiye) kapudanlık, for the appointment of an independent

kapudan for Suez, something which the sultan regarded as necessary, was only
able to be put in place in 1560.45 It is very interesting that such an appointment
occurred in the period in which the empire was abandoning its attempt to
move with a powerful leet into the open waters of the Indian Ocean.
While the military organisation of the Egyptian beylerbeylik – as was the
case in other aspects of the administration – represented a model for the orga-
nisation and the formation in the beylerbeyliks of Yemen and Ethiopia, and a
source for the material and military needs of these areas, the shipyard in Suez
ensured the activities of the Ottomans in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Initially, this organisation, which was set out in the 1525 Egyptian kanunname
and which was shaped more clearly during the expansion which was to occur
in the following years, was aimed at protecting in particular the eyalet cen-
tre, the kazas (administrative/judicial districts) and nahiyes (administrative
districts of a liva, sanjak) tied to the sancaks, the hac routes and the ports,
and at building an Ottoman leet in the shipyard at Suez which would enter
the Indian Ocean and would protect the ports on the Red Sea. The Ottoman
forces in Egypt, which numbered only 10,000, were divided into odas (military
units) and bölüks (small military units), headed by an ağa (master, supervis-
ing a bölük), and their pay was distributed every three months (mevacib). The
soldiers were divided into the following units: the müteferrikıyan, used mostly
for ceremonial occasions and whose numbers were around 450; the çavuşan,
used in government and in communications; the 2,000-strong gönüllüyan,
who were cavalrymen used for protection and public order in the centre and
in the provinces and who also when necessary collected tax and undertook
secretarial work; the tüfenkçiyan, who used light irearms and whose numbers
were 1,400; the çerakise, a cavalry unit created from Mamluk soldiers, whose
numbers were restricted to 1,000 men; the mustahfızan (janissaries), infantry
who were employed as defence troops in castles and in the towns of the eyalet
and in the benders (commercial seaports), and were organised into cemaats
(military units) such as cebeci, topçu and arabacı; and the 1,000-strong azeban,
whose job it was to defend the castles, police the towns, defend the hac cara-
van and go on campaign.46
45 In the words of the sultan’s ferman, “an independent kapudan for Suez was necessary, and
Sefer, then the kapudan of Yemen, should be appointed” (müstakil kapudan lazımdur deyu
Süveyş kapudanlığ ın Yemen kapudanı Sefer’e olması). See Özbaran, ‘Ottoman Naval Power’,
pp. 112–3; Colin Imber, ‘The Navy of Süleyman the Magniicent’, Archivum Ottomanicum 6
(1980), 211–82 at p. 270; İdris Bostan, Osmanlı Bahriye Teşkilatı: XVII. Yüzyılda Tersâne-i Âmire
(Ankara, 1992), pp. 20–1.
46 Mahmud, XVI. Asırda Mısır Eyaleti, pp. 173–225.
190
The beylerbeylik of Yemen

The beylerbeylik of Yemen at the most southerly point of the Arabian pen-
insula, centred on San’a, was an eyalet of the Ottoman Empire situated on
the south-east coast of the Red Sea which also had ports on the shores of the
Indian Ocean. This eyalet, which was very far from the centre of the empire,
was usually tied inancially and militarily to the beylerbeylik of Egypt, which
extended authority over it. Its administration, generally accepted as being
more diicult than its conquest, was based on a type of system similar to
that adopted in Egypt. In other words, it was an eyalet in which the tax was
collected in cash as mukataa (tax farm) and was transferred to the budget of
the beylerbeylik.
We do not have detailed information about the irst organisation of the
Yemen beylerbeylik, which can be taken as having been founded in 1540 after the
conquest of several port towns during Hadım Süleyman Paşa’s Diu campaign.
But, thanks to mühimme and maliye registers for the later years and to chroni-
cles and various local and foreign archive material related to the region, we are
able to form a better understanding of the political, economic and social struc-
ture of the eyalet in the subsequent period. According to Richard Blackburn,
who researched the development of Yemen in the period after the Ottoman
conquest using local, Ottoman and Western sources, Ottoman domination in
Yemen in the 30 years after the conquest “passed through perceptible stages of
expansion, consolidation and contraction”.47 This deinition is relevant not only
for the initial decades of Ottoman control of Yemen but also for the last decade
of the century and for the centuries that followed. The judgement of Caesar
Farah, referring to Ottoman entry into Yemen in 1569 under the leadership of
Sinan Paşa and the second conquest so beautifully portrayed in Ottoman min-
iature art, that “The Yemeni system of fortiication played the decisive role in
preventing the Ottomans now as in the nineteenth century, from ever achieving
full control of the land” cannot be regarded as exaggerated.48
According to a defter which covers the years 968–9 (1560–2) and which can
be described as a budget, Zabid, Ta’izz, San’a and Sa’da formed the four san-
caks (vilayets) of the beylerbeylik of Yemen, while coastal cities such as Jeddah,
Jazan, Hodeida, Salif, Kamaran, Mocha, Aden and Shihr were made into
important ports.49 According to a sultanic ferman of 1565, the region – even
47 Blackburn, ‘The Collapse of Ottoman Authority’, p. 119.

48 Caesar Farah, ‘Yemeni Fortiication’, p. 89.
49 Özbaran, Ottoman Response, p. 52.
191
Sa li? h öz bar an
if only temporarily – was divided into two, the vilayet of Yemen (vilayet-i
Yemen) and the vilayet of San’a (vilayet-i San’a), with Yemen having 12 and
San’a 17 sancaks.50 Kazas and nahiyes were also listed under vilayet. Vilayet thus
was not a clear geographical and political unit. This is clearly shown in the
budget defters from the last years of the sixteenth century. According to the
budget (accounts register) which covers the inancial year 1008 (1599–1600),
there were four main vilayets (sancaks) collecting land tax; there were seven
vilayets (kazas and nahiyes) in Zabid, 12 in Ta’izz and 30 in Sa’da and San’a, and
12 ports ( Jazan, Hudeyda, Luhayya, Ferasan, Salif, Kamaran, Mocha, Aden,
Lahij, Shihr, Hadramaut and Hud), for which income was listed in separate
sections.51
We can follow the inancial and military structure in the beylerbeylik of
Yemen better in Ottoman sources from the second half of the sixteenth cen-
tury. From the contents of the budget defters prepared at the end of the inan-
cial year, which gave the income from the previous year assigned to that year,
and the expenses made, we can understand clearly how an eyalet like this,
which did not employ a timar system, worked. These budgets have come
down to us in the form of summary (icmal) and detailed (muhasebe) registers
and contain sections giving the total income (asl-ı mal) from which expenses
were made and expenditure (vuzı’a zalike), el-baki if in the black and ez-ziyade
ani’l-asıl if in the red. The inances of this eyalet, far from the centre of the
empire, were administered by a newly appointed defterdar (nazır-ı emval), and
the pare or sikke-i hasene was used as the unit of account.
The main tax returns were collected from the four large vilayets of Zabid,
Ta’izz, San’a and Sa’da. In the period 1561–2, 5,795,080 pare were collected
from Zabid and its regions (together with 1,405,403 pare remaining from the
previous year), and of this 4,657,665 pare came from harac-ı arazi and 1,137,415
pare from mukataat. A total of 6,633,523 pare were collected from Ta’izz and
its surroundings. In the same budget defter, the yield from the port of the
eyalet was 4,273,806 pare, and of this 1,765,274 pare was the remainder from
earlier years. A basic calculation shows us that the income from the ports
of Ottoman Yemen opening onto the Indian Ocean remained far below the
income from land. In other words, the Ottoman administration in Yemen
collected far more from the land taxes which were collected through the ilt-
izam system operating in the region than from the income which they tried
50 Yavuz, Kâbe ve Haremeyn, pp. 50–1; J. R. Blackburn, ‘Two Documents on the Division of
Ottoman Yemen into Two Beglerbeiliks’, Turcica 27 (1995), 223–36.
51 Halil Sahillioğlu, ‘Yemen’in 1599–1600 Yılı Bütçesi’, in Yusuf Hikmet Bayur’a Armağan (Ankara,
1985), pp. 287–319 at 292–4.
192
to secure from the oceanic trade. According to the budget for 984 (1576), the
largest income was obtained from the agricultural sector: from 17,896,315 pare,
the total irad, 10,332,325 pare came from land taxes and 1,903,354 pare from the
ports. In the 1599–1600 budget, the total income was 16,424,056 pare, and of
this 7,994,966 pare (48 per cent) was collected from land and 4,845,951 pare
(29 per cent) from the ports.52 This income was not suicient to cover the
expenses of the high-ranking oicials and soldiers employed in the eyalet, and
the beylerbeylik of Egypt was always the centre for assistance for Yemen as it
was for the beylerbeylik of Ethiopia.
Turning to the expenses of Yemen, 17 high-ranking askeri appear in a
12-month budget defter for the period 1561–2, and salary payments for them
(including the beylerbeyi) amounted to 3,834,564 pare. The income of the bey-
lerbeyi alone came to 1,667,925 pare. Apart from him, 18,479,035 pare were paid
to the bölük ağaları, müteferrikalar, çavuşlar, gönüllüler, tüfenkçiler, nevbetçiler,
mustahfızlar, cebeciler, topçular, arabacılar, azebler, reisler, şegalin and other
soldiers. When it is recalled that the asl-ı mal was 31,730,951 pare, it will be
seen that 70 per cent of the total income was spent on the beys and soldiers.
A similar situation also appears in later budgets. Further, as was the case in
the 1599–1600 budget, military expenses came to 15,639,609 pare out of a total
income of 16,425,056 pare, with the result that the income was completely
consumed and there was a budget deicit. No irsaliye, or trade goods, as a sub-
stitute could be sent to Istanbul.53
The largest part of the expenditure on the beys and the defensive forces
was assigned to the aylık of the cemaat and divisions which were stationed
in the castles in Yemen. Apart from these soldiers, the number of oicers of
the naval forces, excluding those in the major campaigns in the Indian Ocean,
who were either permanently located on the coasts of Yemen or at Suez, and
of the rüesa (captains), azeban (mariners) and alatçıyan (riggers), were limited,
and the expenses for their aylık represented only 3 per cent of the general
expenses.54
The beylerbeylik of Ethiopia

The foundation of the beylerbeylik of Ethiopia in 1555 was made possible by
the payment from the treasury of the eyalet of Egypt of both the yearly
52 Sahillioğlu, ‘Yemen’in 1599–1600 Yılı Bütçesi’, p. 301; Özbaran, Ottoman Response, pp. 55–60.
53 Özbaran, Ottoman Response, p. 53.
54 Özbaran, ‘Ottoman Naval Power’, p. 116.
193
Sa li? h öz bar an
allowance (salyane) of Özdemir Paşa, known to have been 1,400,000 akçe,

the yıllıks of the high-ranking administrators appointed there, and the aylıks
(mevacib) of the soldiers. In later years, the yıllık in some of the beylerbey-
liks were reduced because of the ever-present inancial diiculties: Hüseyin
Paşa was appointed with 1,000,000 akçe in 1567 and Rıdvan Paşa in 1573 with
1,200,000 akçe. It is important to stress that the treasury of Ethiopia was most
of the time in inancial diiculty, and application was often made to the bey-
lerbeylik of Egypt for payment, apart from the beylerbeyis, of beys and sol-
diers and for other needs of the eyalet. There were times when money was
even borrowed for the military mevacib from pearl ishers of the region. The
beylerbeyis appointed to this eyalet had generally served in Egypt or Yemen
and were chosen from people who knew the region, such as Hızır Bey, who
had seen service in Yemen and was appointed to the beylerbeylik of Ethiopia
in 1579, or Mustafa Bey, who had been sancak beyi in Egypt in 1582. The island
town of Suakin, which was originally part of the beylerbeylik of Egypt, was
included in the new beylerbeylik and made the administrative centre of the
eyalet. Kadı Abdülvehhab Efendi, who was appointed in the same year, and
the nazır-ı emval Ahmed Bey, who was charged with the inancial adminis-
tration, began their careers here. Towns like Massawa, Suakin and Beylül,
important locations in the eyalet, were ports which levied customs taxes. Our
information about the sancak division of the region is very limited. A sancak
could be created by combining several small units or recently conquered
places, for example that which was created in the time of Ahmed Paşa in
1574 from various places, including Sam’a, Akala (Guzay), Dabbe (Daber)
and Korbariya (Coiberia), or from Bor (Bur), Matrer (Matara) and Hindiye
(Hindibe). Akik (Aquico), which was to the south of Suakin, appears for the
irst time as a sancak in a Ruus defteri of 1580. Sarave (Sarawa) appears, too,
with the status of sancak. In 1573, the sancak of Ibrim, which had been part
of the beylerbeylik of Egypt and was an important settlement on the Nile,
was incorporated into the eyalet of Ethiopia because it was thought that
the income of this sancak would ease the inancial situation of the eyalet of
Ethiopia.55
The eyalet of Ethiopia was not a place based on agricultural income, like
Egypt or Yemen. What brought the eyalet’s largest income was the port cus-
toms, the leading source of income being the pepper and spice trade. The
navlun bedelleri (freight duties), which ships loaded with spice calling at the
Ethiopian ports were forced to pay, was an important source, especially for
55 Orhonlu, Habeş Eyaleti, pp. 107–9; Ménage, ‘The Ottomans and Nubia’.
194
the soldiers’ mevacib. Thus, as is recorded in the mühimme registers, the rüsüm
(taxes) which were taken from spices coming from Yemen in 1580 were used
for the pay of the troops.56 Among other important sources of income of the
administration of the eyalet were the taxes taken on gold dust which Indian
merchants bought in Suakin and on the sale of ivory, the Sudanese gold
sources which can be regarded as important for the Egyptian treasury, and,
in particular, the income from the sale of slaves who were brought by land
routes from the interior.
Turning to the military organisation of the eyalet, this relied on troops
whose numbers were on occasion strengthened and who were always trans-
ferred from Egypt and sometimes from Yemen. The diiculty in setting up the
structure of the eyalet is matched by the diiculty, due to the lack of historical
evidence, of shedding light on the military organisation that was established.
Using the information given by Cengiz Orhonlu on the eyalet of Ethiopia57
and the work of Victor Ménage related to Ottoman existence in Nubia,58 it
is, however, possible to conclude that the Red Sea coast of the beylerbeylik of
Ethiopia was protected by the forces to be found on the galleys.
International trade
As Suraiya Faroqhi has pointed out, there is very little numerical data available
on Red Sea trade.59 Indeed, when one compares the historiography concern-
ing the Portuguese, who aimed to dominate the trade routes in the Red Sea
and the Indian Ocean, the number of ships working on the Indian–Red Sea
route and, in particular, the quantities and values of pepper and spices,60 with
the literature related to the commerce in the centres where the Ottomans
engaged in trade activity such as Aden, Mocha, Jeddah, Suez and Cairo, and
even Suakin and Massawa, one inds that the latter is so small as to be non-
existent. We know about sixteenth-century Indian–Red Sea trade, which was
fairly active before the arrival of the Portuguese in India, from the works
of A. H. Lybyer, F. C. Lane, F. Braudel, M. Godinho, C. R. Boxer and M.
A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, who concern themselves mainly with the Portuguese
Empire and with the Mediterranean states such as Venice. Such work
56 Orhonlu, Habeş Eyaleti, p. 98.

57 Ibid., pp. 116–28.
58 Ménage, ‘The Ottomans and Nubia’; M. Hinds and V. L. Ménage, Qasr Ibrim in the Ottoman
Period: Turkish and Further Arabic Documents (London, 1991), pp. 76–111.
59 Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans, p. 162.
60 Charles H. Wake, ‘The Changing Pattern of Europe’s Pepper and Spice Imports, ca. 1400–
1700’, The Journal of European Economic History 8, 1 (1979), 361–403.
195
Sa li? h öz bar an
is augmented by the research of historians such as R. B. Serjeant, Cengiz

Orhonlu and Halil İnalcık, who use local histories and sources.
By the end of the period of Portuguese expansion at the end of the if-
teenth century, under the leadership of Vasco da Gama, and at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had taken over control of the
shores of western India and Hurmuz and disrupted the trade to the Red Sea.
Routing eastern goods around South Africa to the markets of Europe, the
Portuguese drove the Mamluk state into inancial diiculty and damaged the
economy of the Mediterranean region, in particular that of Venice. This sit-
uation negatively afected the commercial prospects of the Ottomans, who
had taken the region from the Mamluks. However, this situation was of com-
paratively short duration, and, in any case, the Portuguese did not completely
cut relations between the Red Sea ports and India. In the second half of the
sixteenth century, or even by the end of its second quarter, the Red Sea, com-
peting with the Atlantic route, again became a lively commercial zone, with
especially pepper and spice trading conducted in its ports and in Cairo. With
the arrival of the Dutch and the English at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the pepper and spice trade was much reduced or even dried up alto-
gether and was replaced by commerce in cofee.61
Even if we cautiously accept Barendse’s recent conclusion that, “What we
can discern in the sixteenth century in the trade with a whole array of prod-
ucts and routes is continuity rather than any sharp break”,62 this does not
remove the need for substantial supporting numerical data, as has been noted
by others. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has stressed, the views of certain his-
torians whom I have mentioned previously concerning the pepper and spice
trade in the Red Sea, and their theories on the periodisation of Portuguese
hegemony beginning in 1500–30, developing from 1530 and peaking after 1570,
particularly with the activity of the Achenese and Gujarati traders, need
quantitative data. In this connection, Subrahmanyam believes in the neces-
sity of keeping before one’s eyes the statistical data produced by C. H. Wake,
which echoes the results in the European countries,63 an approach which
encourages us to work comparatively. The Portuguese documents for this
period which have been published and analysed by Luís Felipe Thomaz, who
61 Faroqhi, ‘Cofee and Spices’, pp. 87–93; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and the Civilisation in the
Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 63–118.
62 René J. Barendse, ‘Trade and State in the Arabian Seas: A Survey from the Fifteenth to the
Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History 11, 2 (2000), 173–225 at p. 223.
63 S. Subrahmanyam, ‘The Trading World of the Western Indian Ocean, 1546–1565: A Political
Interpretation’, in de Matos and Thomaz, A Carreira da Índia, pp. 207–27 at p. 211.
196
has produced one of the most recent and most detailed works on the pep-
per trade of the middle of the sixteenth century, and the research conducted
on the Diu campaign of Süleyman Paşa by Dejanirah Couto, are signiicant
guides for research, both present and future, for throwing light on sixteenth-
century Red Sea trade and ofer an excellent example for future work which
will allow clariication of the current approaches that proceed from the pre-
mise that the Red Sea trade was unafected by the commercial disturbances
at the beginning of the century or those that attribute too great an impor-
tance to Indian Ocean–European trade.64 While acknowledging the lack of
investigative work based on numerical data and accepting the lack of a pool
of extant numerical data, it is nevertheless essential to use what material is
available, both by using what we have and by discovering new sources, and by
contextualising such data spatially and chronologically to develop a picture of
the historical development of trade in this region and this period.
Ottoman sources are fairly scarce for the irst half of the sixteenth century,
and those that do exist are silent from the point of view of trade. However,
it is useful to give some igures which can be established relying in particular
on European sources, which can be testiied to for the aforementioned half
century. Firstly, the statistical data which the Portuguese historian Magalhães
Godinho prepared, relying on Marino Sanudo and Girolamo Priuli, who
are considered important sources of the period, and which he collected for
the early period of Ottoman hegemony in Egypt and the Red Sea, give an
idea about the spices which were brought by the Venetians in the port of
Alexandria and about prices in Cairo.65
In order to make a basic comparison and establish the diferences between
these igures, it is necessary for us to know the quantity of pepper and spice in
these igures which reached Portugal from the Indian Ocean. On average, the
quantities reaching Portugal for the years between 1503 and 1506 were a total
of 21,368 quintals, made up of 18,825 pepper and 2,543 spice, and for the years
1526–31, a total of 20,600 quintals, made up of 18,102 pepper and 2,498 spice.66
Fernand Braudel, in assessing the trade which was conducted between
the Mediterranean world and the Indian Ocean, supports the conclusion of
Godinho and stresses that the situation in the spice trade became favour-
able for the Venetians and various other Mediterranean countries. Relying
64 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘A questão da pimenta em meados do seculo XVI’, in de Matos and
Thomaz, A Carreira da Índia, pp. 37–206; Couto, ‘No rasto de Hādım Suleimão Pacha’, pp.
483f.
65 Godinho, Os Descobrimentos, vol. 2, pp. 115–21, 146.
66 Wake, ‘Changing Pattern’, p. 377.
197
Sa li? h öz bar an
on customs registers from Marseilles, he states that pepper was sent in 1543
to Lyon and Toulouse and that the Persian Gulf routes had even begun to
compete with the spice shipped around South Africa. For Braudel, “What is
quite clear is that the Mediterranean had recaptured a large portion of the
pepper trade, indeed the lion’s share. Trade with the Levant was lourishing,
supplied by numerous caravans, some from the Persian Gulf, others from the
Red Sea.”67
The ideas of Halil İnalcık, too, are in line with those of these two histo-
rians. İnalcık stressed the importance of spices in this trade, together with
that of reined cotton and cloth dyes, particularly indigo. This trade from the
Red Sea and the Persian Gulf was not conined to the Mediterranean but also
reached Anatolia, particularly Bursa and Istanbul. Pointing to the policy of
expansion which was initiated by the Ottomans, in particular by the vali of
Egypt, Süleyman Paşa, the establishment of hegemony in Yemen (in particu-
lar against the Portuguese), the taking of Aden, an important port city with
a key role as a link to the Indian Ocean, and the ties which were established
with Muslim regions such as Gujarat and Acheh, İnalcık shows the liveliness
which the Ottomans brought to the Red Sea trade.68 Charles Boxer, relying in
particular on Diogo do Couto, taken as a well-informed contemporary wit-
ness of the period, argues that the Red Sea spice trade developed in the middle
of the sixteenth century and dates Atjehnese activity in this trade to the 1530s
and early 1540s, not the 1560s as is usually accepted. For Boxer, “Atjehnese
participation in the Red Sea spice-trade was undeniably in full swing by the
mid-sixteenth century”.69
Dejanirah Couto, while discussing the 1538 Diu campaign, refers to the
Ottoman gains in Yemen, the Ottoman–Portuguese political relations and the
peace between them which was attempted and points to the use by some his-
torians of exaggerated igures in relation to the Red Sea trade and to the reli-
ance on, in particular, random igures for Venetian goods bought in the ports
of Alexandria and Beirut. Dejanirah Couto argues that historians should take
Ottoman existence in the region into account, and indeed this should encour-
age researchers to use Ottoman and local sources together with the numer-
ical data found in Portuguese, Venetian and other European archives and in
the chronicles.
67 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S.
Reynolds, 2 vols. (London, 1972–3), vol. 1, p. 548.
68 İnalcık, An Economic and Social History, pp. 327–31.
69 C. R. Boxer, ‘A Note on Portuguese Reactions to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and
the Rise of Acheh, 1540–1600’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, 3 (1969), 415–28 at p. 417.
198
In the light of Portuguese documents from 1545 (even though they lack
numerical data), the majority of which were sent from Goa and which were
published by Luis Felipe Thomaz,70 we can talk of the panic which the pep-
per and spices coming to the Red Sea from the Far East created in that period
among the Portuguese administrators. In the years under discussion, it is
thought that the trade ships working the Red Sea route were of a considerable
number. In later years, it appears that the volume of trade was maintained.
Commendador-mor D. Afonso, in a report sent from Rome to the Portuguese
queen on 10 December 1558, informed her that a great quantity of pepper had
reached the Red Sea, a quantity so great that her majesty would not want to
hear it. The following year, reports based on news which Lourenço Pires, the
Portuguese representative at the papal court, had received from Cairo cor-
roborate these high numbers and record that in the middle of the year 40,000
quintals – perhaps a slightly exaggerated igure – reached Alexandria.71
In the 1540s, the quantity of pepper of a saleable condition reaching Lisbon
was on average 22,000 quintals; the average for the 1550s and 1560s fell to 17,000
quintals, and in the 1570s and 1580s it increased to an average of between
19,500 and 20,800 quintals. In the 1590s, there was a complete collapse.72 In
response to this, according to the igures which Niels Steensgaard established
(and which some historians ind exaggerated), while 40,000–50,000 quintals
of pepper and spices came to Jeddah from Gujarat and Acheh in the 1570s and
1580s, 40,000 quintals reached Cairo in 1593 and 1601.73
Throughout the century, the Red Sea was very important for the Gujaratis,
and the majority of Acheh pepper was transported there by these sailors.
Several of the Gujarati ships carried very valuable cargoes; in 1582, one of
the ships of the Mughal ruler Akbar returned from the Red Sea with great
quantities of highly valuable gold and silver.74 Willem Lodewijcks, one of the
Dutch pioneers who visited Acheh and stressed the importance of the trade
with that region, noted on his map dated 1598 that “they have great store of
pepper, which the ships from Suratte and Cambaye come yearly to fetch and
take to the Red Sea”.75
70 Thomaz, ‘A questão da pimento’, pp. 124–8.

71 Özbaran, Yemen’den, p. 177: “… a muito cantidade de pimenta que he vinda aquelas partes de
Meca e asy tudo ho mays que quiser saber”.
72 Wake, ‘Changing Pattern’, pp. 382–3.
73 Ibid., p. 384; N. Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans and Companies: The Structural Crises in the
European-Asian Trade in the Early 17th Century (Odense, 1973), pp. 163–4.
74 M. N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth
Century (Berkeley, 1976), p. 101.
75 Boxer, ‘A Note on Portuguese Reactions’, pp. 426–7.
199
Sa li? h öz bar an
It is possible to give some igures, of which there is a need in order to throw

light on the history of this trade route, from the accounts kept for the customs
of various Ottoman ports of the Malabar–Red Sea trade (from the mahsul-i
iskeleha which were registered in defters showing the incoming and outgoing
accounts known as ruznamçe). In the Yemen budget for 969 (1561–2) which I
referred to earlier, the taxes which were taken from the ports in the eyalet of
Yemen only came to 13 per cent of the entire income for the eyalet.76
While it is possible to compare the numerical data relating to approxi-
mately the irst 30 years of the century with various budget igures from the
last years of the century, it does not at present seem possible to ill in the years
in between with the same sort of data. But we can gather some information,
bringing together various scattered igures.
In a summary budget account book covering the period 1576–7, it is seen
that only 16 per cent of the income of the eyalet of Yemen was obtained from
the mahsulat taken from the ports. A few surviving budget igures from the
end of the sixteenth century relect other igures we have, and, as will be
understood from these igures, the average of 19 to 21 per cent of the income
of the Ottoman ports in all the budgets was slightly higher in comparison
with earlier years but still in essence low.77
A reasonable estimate of the volume of pepper and spices and other goods
reaching either the Mediterranean ports or Ottoman territory via the Red
Sea route can be arrived at from the data we have in hand, although it must
be said that such igures are much smaller that those for “A Carreira da Índia
sailing around South Africa”. But the statement that “the Levantine trade was
always marginal to the trade of the Portuguese and could lourish only when,
and insofar as, Portuguese imports were afected by losses at sea”78 is too
strong. As was made clear earlier, the statistical information we have for the
sixteenth century is insuicient and the information for the Red Sea ports
is extremely limited, so it is necessary to keep in mind that historians have
not considered goods which were consumed at least in the Red Sea region
and the areas linked to it which were not imported into Europe. While some
historians have focused on the non-Mediterranean aspect of Red Sea trade
(Faroqhi, for example, in her work on cofee and spices, which I referred to
earlier, looking at the local-scale trade, and İnalcık arguing that a signiicant
76 Salih Özbaran, ‘Ottomans and the India Trade in the Sixteenth Century: Some New Data
and Reconsiderations’, in The Ottomans and Trade, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, Oriente
Moderno 25, 1 (2006), 173–9 at p. 176.
77 Salih Özbaran, ‘Ottomans and the India Trade’, p. 177.
78 Wake, ‘The Changing Pattern’, p. 395.
200
part of the spices which were unloaded in Jeddah reached Bursa overland
by the Mecca to Damascus route79), it is important that we do not make the
mistake alluded to by Barendse of relying only on the prices and quantities
of pepper and spices leaving Alexandria or reaching the Mediterranean ports
of Europe.80
79 İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History, p. 345.

80 Barendse, ‘Trade and State’, pp. 192–3.
201
part ii
*
GOVERNM ENT, ECONO MI C LI FE

AND SOCIET Y
7
Government, administration and law
Co lin Imb er
The functions of Ottoman government were, in essence, to raise revenue

with which to support the sultan’s army and court, to conduct war and rela-
tions with foreign powers, to uphold law and order, and to support what the
ruling elite regarded as the right religion. Most day-to-day public functions –
for example, the construction and maintenance of mosques, education, wel-
fare of the poor, the provision of a water supply in towns and the upkeep of
bridges and cemeteries – were the responsibility of vakıf s (endowments of
land or other sources of income used for the charitable purpose deined by
the founder), established through the private beneicence of individuals. The
founders of the greatest vakıf s were, it is true, the sultans and their ministers,
and their foundations – notably the imperial mosques in Istanbul – served
to project the grandeur and muniicence of the dynasty. Nonetheless, they
were legally autonomous institutions and, strictly speaking, outside the realm
of government. The scope of Ottoman government was therefore limited
but in this respect no diferent from the governments of other pre-modern
states. Furthermore, while the problems which the Ottoman government
faced between 1453 and 1603 may have grown in scale and complexity, the
basic functions of government remained unchanged. Equally, the institutions
and oices that were in place during the reign of Mehmed II (r. 1451–81) were
still in place and, in appearance, largely unchanged in the reign of his descen-
dant Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603).
Nonetheless, between 1453 and 1603, the Ottoman Empire underwent a
transformation and, despite its apparent conservatism, Ottoman govern-
ment adapted to the change. In 1453, the Ottomans were a regional power
with lands in the Balkan peninsula and in Anatolia. By 1550, the empire was
a major international power whose territories encompassed most of south-
eastern Europe south of the Danube and Sava rivers, Anatolia, Iraq, Greater
Syria and Egypt. To the north of the Danube, the central portion of the
old kingdom of Hungary was a directly ruled Ottoman province, while the
205
Co l in i mb e r
realms to the east – Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia and the hanate of

the Crimea – were tributaries of the sultan. In North Africa, Algeria and,
from 1551, Tripoli were semi-autonomous Ottoman enclaves. Campaigns
in the early 1570s added Cyprus and Tunis to the empire, and the long war
with Iran between 1578 and 1590 added territories in the Caucasus and west-
ern Iran, all of which the Safavid shah ‘Abbas I was to re-conquer between
1603 and 1606. After the mid-sixteenth century, the nature of Ottoman cam-
paigns changed. Between 1453 and about 1540, Ottoman armies had made
their conquests usually within the space of a single campaigning season
between April and October, and often under the leadership of the sultan
in person. After about 1540, the age of large-scale conquests within a sin-
gle season’s campaigning was past. This was a change which the Habsburg
ambassador Busbecq was to observe when in the early 1560s he compared
Süleyman I’s rapid conquest of Hungary in the Belgrade and Mohács cam-
paigns of 1521 and 1526 with his subsequent failure to advance his territories
in central Europe.1 Campaigns against the Safavids on the eastern front par-
alleled this pattern. Between 1514 and 1516, Selim I (r. 1512–20) followed his
victory at Çaldıran over the Safavid shah Isma‘il with the conquest of much
of south-eastern Anatolia. His successor, Süleyman I (r. 1520–66), seized
Baghdad from the Safavids in 1534, together with more territory in eastern
Anatolia. However, Süleyman’s later campaigns against Safavid Iran, like his
campaigns against the Habsburgs in Hungary, were – set against his earlier
conquests – failures. The war with Iran from 1578 ended with large-scale,
if short-lived, conquest, but only after 12 years of continuous warfare. The
war against the Habsburgs in Hungary was to last 13 years, from 1593, and
produce no signiicant gains for either side. The changing pace of conquest
and the prolongation of campaigns were factors inl uencing the Ottoman
practice of government.
So, too, was the changing nature of the enemy. For much of the ifteenth
century, the Ottoman Empire had grown at the expense of local Anatolian
and Balkan dynasties and of the Italian maritime colonies. From the 1520s,
however, the empire faced the power of the Habsburgs in central Europe and
the Mediterranean and of the Safavids along its eastern border. The rivalry
with the Habsburgs had, in terms of practical politics, the efect of draw-
ing the Ottomans into international alliances and so into the political system
of western Europe. The rivalry with the Safavids likewise drew them into
1 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, trans. Edward
Seymour Forster (Oxford, 1927), pp. 240–1.
206
contact with the Shaibanids, who threatened the Safavids on their eastern
border, and so into the politics of Central Asia.
In brief, therefore, between 1453 and about 1540, the Ottoman government
faced problems attendant on conquest, and in particular the questions of
how to overcome resistance from supporters of the displaced regimes and
the incorporation of the new territories within the political structure of the
empire. From the mid-sixteenth century, the problems were rather those of
how to maintain intact vastly expanded territories within stable borders and
how to manage periods of prolonged and no longer proitable warfare.
The authority of the sultan

In his famous and perceptive comparison of the French and Ottoman mon-
archies, Niccolò Machiavelli noted that while a hereditary aristocracy limited
the power of the French king, “the entire monarchy of the Turk is governed
by one lord. The others are his servants and, dividing his kingdom into san-
caks, he sends these diferent administrators, and shifts and changes them as
he chooses”.2 What Machiavelli was describing in 1513 was a system of govern-
ment where the sultan made all appointments to oice from among men who
had grown up in his household and were completely dependent upon him for
patronage and promotion, with no hereditary oice-holders to challenge his
absolute rule. This was certainly the ideal model of Ottoman government,
but it was one that was never fully realised since there were always restraints
on the sultan’s authority and direct challenges to his rule. These came both
from within the imperial family and ruling establishment and from local pow-
ers in provinces often far from the capital. In either case, the sultans had to
confront the dangers either with violence or, where this was impractical, with
political arrangements which compromised their own authority.
The most obvious threat that any sultan faced was from dynastic rivals.
In the period up to the end of the sixteenth century, there were two laws
governing eligibility for the throne. The irst was that females were inel-
igible. The second was that descent was patrilineal. The son of a sultan’s
sister, for example, could not inherit, although Süleyman I threatened, dur-
ing the dispute between his sons Selim and Bayezid in 1558, to break with
tradition and ix the succession on his sister’s son, Osmanşah.3 In practice,
however, between 1450 and 1595, the succession always went from father
2 Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe (Milan, 1994), p. 19.

3 Şerafettin Turan, Kanuni’nin Oğlu Şehzade Bayezid Vak’ası (Ankara, 1961), p. 52.
207
Co l in i mb e r
to son, and it was civil war and fratricide that decided which son was to
inherit. If any son survived his brother’s accession, he was a potential chal-
lenger for the throne. Mehmed II in 1451 had only one surviving brother,
an infant whom his irst act as sultan was to execute. His son Bayezid II,
by contrast, reached the capital before his adult brother Cem and claimed
the sultanate, only to face a civil war and, when Cem escaped to Rhodes
into the captivity of the Knights of St. John in 1483, the constant threat that
his captors would release him as a claimant to the Ottoman throne. It was
only after he had executed Cem’s sons, and after Cem’s death in Naples in
1495 and public burial in Bursa,4 that Bayezid felt that his throne was secure.
In the end, it was not his brother but his son Selim I who deposed him,
in 1512, the competition for succession having broken out already during
his lifetime. It culminated in Selim’s victory and the execution not only
of his brothers Korkud and Ahmed but also of Ahmed’s sons, apart from
one, Prince Murad, who escaped to Iran.5 Having no brothers, Selim’s son
Süleyman I succeeded to the throne without bloodshed, but the succession
of his own son, Selim II, was more troubled. As had happened in the reign
of his grandfather, the succession struggle began before Süleyman’s death,
the competition between Selim and Bayezid leading to civil war and the vic-
tory – with the support of Süleyman himself and the vezir Sokollu Mehmed
Paşa – of Selim over Bayezid at the battle of Konya in May 1559. Prince
Bayezid’s subsequent l ight to Iran threatened Süleyman in the same way as
the l ight of Cem had threatened Bayezid II, by putting a pretender to the
Ottoman throne in the hands of an enemy. It was not until the Safavid shah
Tahmasb had extracted payment and a favourable treaty from Süleyman
that he allowed the Ottoman sultan to send executioners to Iran to dispose
of the captive prince and his entourage.
It was the succession of the last two sultans of the sixteenth century that –
more or less – put an end to the practice of fratricide. At his death in 1574,
Selim II left only one adult son, who succeeded him as Murad III. On assum-
ing the throne, custom obliged Murad – apparently reluctantly – to execute
his four brothers, who were still in their childhood. Murad, too, left only one
adult son, who succeeded him in 1595 as Mehmed III and whose reign opened
with the execution of his 19 infant brothers. There are hints in some chroni-
cles that the practice of fratricide always displeased the sultan’s subjects, but
4 Nicolas Vatin, ‘Macabre traic: la destinée post-mortem du prince Djem’, in Mélanges oferts à
Louis Bazin, ed. J. L. Bacqué-Grammont and R. Dor (Paris, 1992), pp. 231–9.
5 Çağatay Uluçay, ‘Yavuz Sultan Selim Nasıl Padişah Oldu’, Tarih Dergisi 6, 9 (1954), 53–90; 7, 10
(1954), 117–42; 8 (1955), 185–200.
208
now the murder of innocent children caused a public outrage. The famous
“fratricide clause” in the “Law Book of Mehmed II”, “For the good order of
the world it is licit for the sultan to kill his brothers. The majority of ulema
are agreed on this”, was probably no more than an attempt to appease pub-
lic opinion. The Law Book itself is a confection,6 dating apparently from the
early seventeenth century, and the clause justifying fratricide most probably
served to legitimise the execution of Mehmed III’s brothers. More impor-
tantly, however, it seems to have been public revulsion at the slaughter of
princes that put an end to the custom of fratricide and to have initiated the
practice of secluding princes so that they could not present a danger to the
reigning sultan.7
It was not only brothers whom sultans might see as a threat to their author-
ity. Suspicion could also fall upon sons. It was fear of a plot to replace him on
the throne that persuaded Süleyman I to execute his son Mustafa, together
with two members of his entourage, in 1553.8 This, too, caused public out-
rage, but not to the extent that it deterred Mehmed III from executing his son
Mahmud when he suspected him of plotting to seize the throne.9
The sultans therefore used execution as the way to meet challenges to their
occupation of the throne. Such a threat, however, could come only from
within the royal family, and in practice only from a brother or a son. No one
from the governing elite ever contested the sultan’s right to rule. Nonetheless,
sultans might also grow suspicious of over-mighty subjects, and in these
cases, too, execution was the means of asserting their authority. The careers
of Mahmud Paşa and İbrahim Paşa exemplify the practice. Mahmud Paşa
occupied the grand vezirate for long periods between 1455 and 1474, exercising
such power that the chronicler Neşri commented that it was “as though the
sultan had abdicated”.10 It was presumably, at least in part, fear of Mahmud’s
independent authority that persuaded Mehmed II to order his execution in
1474.11 İbrahim Paşa enjoyed a similar career. Süleyman I had appointed him
grand vezir in 1523, adding the title serasker (army commander), and with it
6 Konrad Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des osmanischen Hofzeremoniells im 15. und 16.
Jahrhundert (Munich, 1967); Colin Imber, ‘“An Illiberal Descent”: Kemalism and Ottoman
Law’, Eurasian Studies 4, 2 (2005), 215–43.
7 Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein, Le Sérail ébranlé: Essai sur les morts, dépositions et avène-
ments des sultans Ottomans, XIVe–XIXe siècles (Paris, 2003), chap. 2.
8 Ibid., pp. 177–8.
9 Ibid., p. 171.
10 Neşri, Kitâb-i Cihânnümâ, ed. Faik Resit Unat and Mehmed A. Köymen (Ankara, 1957), vol. 2,
p. 743.
11 Theoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir
Mahmud Pasha Angelovic (1453–1474) (Leiden, 2001), pp. 341–9.
209
Co l in i mb e r
a substantial increase of income, in 1529.12 In 1536, at the end of the cam-

paign that had seen the capture of Baghdad, the sultan ordered his execution.
The nişancı (chancellor, responsible for the drafting of documents and over-
sight of the sultan’s chancellery) Celalzade justiies the sultan’s decision on
the grounds that during the Baghdad campaign İbrahim had “associated with
the ignorant” and as a result made serious errors of judgement.13 One of his
successors as grand vezir, Lüti Paşa, explains his fate and that of the defter-
dar (inance oicer, with oversight of the sultan’s treasury) İskender Çelebi,
whom the sultan had also executed during the course of the Baghdad cam-
paign, by commenting that the two men had become “thorns in the eye”.14
The reality is – most probably – that the sultan had begun to fear İbrahim as
a rival to his own authority. Sometimes the reasons for execution were more
speciic. Bayezid II put the powerful grand vezir Gedik Ahmed Paşa to death
in 1482, clearly because he suspected him of supporting his brother Cem. In
1598, Mehmed III ordered the execution of the grand vezir Satırcı Mehmed
Paşa because of his failures in the war in Hungary.
However much the sultans regarded executions such as these primarily as
a way to rid themselves of those whom they regarded as a threat to their rule
or to punish those whom they saw as failures, they also served as an edifying
spectacle. They warned against disloyalty but, above all, reminded onlook-
ers that ultimate power rested with the sultan. Furthermore, it was not only
at the level of government that the sultan exercised his powers of life and
death. Exemplary executions also functioned as a means of enforcing – or
attempting to enforce – public order. Celalzade, for example, records how, in
1528, a gang of unidentiied men plundered a house in Istanbul, killing all the
residents. Since the perpetrators were unknown, enforcers from the palace
rounded up and executed 800 “unemployed ruians from the markets, wine-
taverns and boza (a beer brewed from millet) shops”. Celalzade justiies this
apparent injustice on the grounds that the terrifying spectacle helped to quell
such crimes by serving as an example to the populace.15
A more benign method than terror of securing the loyalty of the sultan’s
ministers was marriage. From 1450, the practice of making marriage alliances
with foreign dynasties came to an end, and it became the custom instead
to marry Ottoman princesses to senior statesmen. This was occasionally the
12 Celalzade Mustafa, Geschichte Sultan Süleymān Kānūnīs, ed. Petra Kappert (Wiesbaden, 1981),
fols. 178b–179a.
13 Ibid., fols. 277a–277b.
14 Lüti Paşa, Das Asafname des Luti Pascha, ed. R. Tschudi (Leipzig, 1910), p. 37.
15 Celalzade, Geschichte, fols. 175b–176a.
210
practice before 1450. After this date, it became the norm, with the marriages
of Bayezid II’s daughter Hundi Hatun to the ive-time grand vezir Hersekzade
Ahmed Paşa, of Selim I’s daughter Şahi Hatun to the grand vezir (1539–41)
Lüti Paşa, of Süleyman I’s daughter Mihrimah to the grand vezir Rüstem
Paşa (1549–53; 1555–62) and of Selim II’s daughter to the grand vezir Sokollu
Mehmed Paşa (1566–78) as the outstanding examples. This practice tied the
vezirs to the imperial dynasty and so rendered rebellion unthinkable, even if it
did sometimes subject their careers to the whims of internal dynastic politics.
Lüti Paşa apparently sufered permanent dismissal from the vezirate follow-
ing a quarrel with his Ottoman wife, and a probably well-founded rumour
implicates Rüstem Paşa in the plot to kill Prince Mustafa in 1553. His wife
Mihrimah was daughter of Süleyman I’s spouse Hürrem, and there was a
suspicion that he had plotted with the two women to secure the succession
for one of Hürrem’s two sons, Bayezid or Selim, by engineering Mustafa’s
execution.16 The rumour, whether true or not, was strong enough to make
Rüstem Paşa suiciently unpopular at the court, among the soldiery and,
apparently, among the wider public to force his dismissal from oice. That
the sultan himself was reluctant to let him go is apparent from his re-appoint-
ment of Rüstem to the grand vezirate two years later.
The fear of execution and the constraints of royal marriages were two
ways by which the sultan ensured the loyalty of his ministers. However, the
power of the sultan was untrammelled only in his own palace. Even here,
however, there were constraints, and in particular limitations on whom he
could appoint as governors and vezirs. This was especially true of the period
between the mid-ifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when, as a result of
conquest, the empire absorbed large chunks of new territory. The process
of incorporation was not easy, requiring the sultans to secure the loyalties
of the old elites and dynasties which they had displaced. The diiculty of
fully absorbing the conquests of Selim I into the structure of the empire
exempliies the problem in its most acute form. On his succession in 1520,
Selim’s son Süleyman I immediately faced a revolt in Syria, where Janbirdi
al-Ghazali, a former Mamluk governor who had defected to the Ottomans
at the time of conquest, declared his independence.17 A series of rebellions
in Egypt, between 1522 and 1524, followed the defeat of Janbirdi, requiring a
military campaign and careful negotiations under the aegis of İbrahim Paşa
and Oxford, 1993), chap. 3.
17 Celalzade, Geschichte, fols. 28b–40b.
211
Co l in i mb e r
to suppress.18 The Ottoman government was able to overcome a series of

millenarian rebellions in south-eastern Anatolia between 1526 and 1528 only
after İbrahim Paşa had negotiated terms with an important section of the
rebels. These were the ief-holders from the formerly independent emirate
of Dulgadir, who had lost their iefs when the Ottomans inally annexed the
principality in 1522. It was by promising these men the return of their iefs
that İbrahim was able to detach them from the main body of the rebels and
suppress the insurrection.19
Similar problems, if on a smaller scale, followed every conquest. In order
to secure the territory, the sultans had to come to an accommodation with
pre-existing powers. One way to deal with members of the local elite, if
they did not lee the conquest, was to award them an appanage in a district
removed from their home territory. In 1460, for example, following Mehmed
II’s annexation of the lands in the Peloponnese belonging to two scions
of the Byzantine imperial dynasty, Thomas and Demetrios Palaiologos,
Thomas led to Venice, ending his days in poverty in Rome, while the sultan
awarded Demetrios lands in Thrace. Similarly, following the defeat of the
İsfendiyar ruler of Sinop on the Black Sea coast, Mehmed removed its last
independent ruler but compensated him with lands in western Anatolia.
The same practice continued into the sixteenth century. Celalzade, for
example, reports that in the 1520s İnal Bey, a member of the ruling stratum
of Circassian Mamluks in Egypt, held a large ief in Rumeli.20 However,
not all inl uential members of former regimes were displaced. For exam-
ple, the 1518 land and tax register of Amid in the south-eastern Anatolian
province of Diyarbakır (Diyarbekir) records a number of ief-holders as
Akkoyunlus – that is, as members of the clan that had ruled the area until
the early years of the sixteenth century. The same register, however, records
that it was a man “from Rumeli” who held the largest ief in the district,21
his presence evidently intended to counterbalance the inl uence of the men
with local roots and inl uence.
The need to absorb locally powerful dynasties and clans into the ruling
establishment is also evident at the centre of power. Between the 1370s and
1453, a single family, the Çandarlıs, had enjoyed a quasi-monopoly of the
vezirate. After the execution of Çandarlı Halil in 1453, only one member of
the family, İbrahim Çandarlı, was to serve as grand vezir, in 1498–9. Instead,
18 Ibid., fols. 121a–130a.

19 Ibid., fols. 157b–172a.
20 Ibid., fol. 197b.
21 M. Mehdi İlhan, Amid (Diyarbakır): 1518 Tarihli Defter-i Mufassal (Ankara, 2000), pp. 41–3.
212
the pattern of appointments to the vezirate and provincial governorships came,

in part at least, to relect the enlargement of the empire and the assimilation
of the pre-Ottoman elite. Of the grand vezirs who held oice between the
conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the accession of Süleyman I in 1520,
Mahmud Paşa (1455–66, 1472–3) was a scion of an important Graeco-Serbian
family. His rival Rum (“the Greek”) Mehmed Paşa (grand vezir 1466–9) was
presumably of Byzantine origin. Mesih Paşa (grand vezir 1499–1501) and the
governor-general of Rumeli, Hass Murad Paşa, who lost his life in the war
with the Akkoyunlus in 1473, were members of the Byzantine imperial fam-
ily. Hersekzade (“son of the Duke”) Ahmed Paşa (grand vezir 1497–8, 1503–6,
1511–12, 1512–14, 1516) was a descendant of the ducal family of Herzegovina.
Dukakinzade (“son of Dukagjin”) Ahmed Paşa (grand vezir 1514–15) was a
member of the powerful north Albanian Dukagjin clan. For these men
and for others like them who occupied lower-ranking oices and also had
Christian backgrounds, the irst requirement for entry into Ottoman service
was conversion to Islam. This was not diicult in a society where identity was
l uid and boundaries between religions not always clear-cut, and where social
status took precedence over religious ailiation. Ideally, too, they would have
had an education and served in the sultan’s palace: the name Hass Murad, for
example, implies that before his elevation he had served in the sultan’s privy
(hass) chamber.22
For the sultans, the practice of co-opting members of the pre-conquest
elites had the advantages irst of forestalling resistance to Ottoman rule and
second of giving the sultans access to networks of power in newly conquered
territories. The policy of assimilation rather than eradication was remarkably
successful. The case of İskender Bey – Scanderbeg – who in 1444 had re-estab-
lished himself as an independent ruler of his family’s hereditary territory in
Albania and, until 1466, resisted Ottoman and Venetian attempts to dislodge
him, is exceptional. The local lords and dynasts who joined Ottoman ser-
vice probably enjoyed more personal power than they or their forebears had
in pre-conquest days. Nonetheless, their position now depended ultimately
on the patronage and goodwill of the sultan. Events such as the dismissal
from oice of Mesih Paşa following his failure as commander at the siege of
Rhodes in 1481, or more spectacularly the executions of Mahmud Paşa and
Dukakinzade Ahmed Paşa, emphasised the fragility of their positions. In this
sense, their careers in Ottoman service followed the pattern that Machiavelli
had laid out.
22 Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (New York, 2003), chap. 7.
213
Co l in i mb e r
However, in some instances, local resistance to Ottoman rule rendered

the policy of assimilation impractical. This was the case with the former
emirate of Karaman. A brutal campaign inally subjugated the emirate to
Ottoman rule in 1469, with the Karamanid capital of Konya becoming the
seat of governorship of Mehmed II’s son Mustafa and of later princes of
the dynasty down to the mid-sixteenth century. Nonetheless, members of
the deposed dynasty attempted to reclaim their lost territory by allying them-
selves in the early 1470s with the Akkoyunlu ruler, Uzun Hasan, and with
the Venetians, and there were further rebellions on behalf of the dynasty
into the early 1500s.23 In other areas where local dynasties were impossi-
ble to eradicate, the sultans made no attempts to do so but rather reached
an accommodation. In Rumeli, the families of the marcher lords who had
become established in the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries – in particular
the Evrenosoğlus, with lands in Macedonia; the Turahanoğlus, with lands in
Thessaly; and the Mihaloğlus of Vidin – continued to exercise local inl uence
and to receive from the sultan, as of right, governorships in Rumeli. In these
cases, however, the loyalty of the old marcher families never seems to have
been in doubt.
The situation on the eastern and southern borderlands of the empire was
diferent. In 1516, for example, Selim I gained the allegiance of the Kurdish
tribal chiefs in the mountains between Ottoman Anatolia and Safavid
Azerbaijan by sending as his envoy İdris of Bitlis, a scholar in Ottoman
service who was a native of the area. İdris had with him “white Noble
Commands” – that is, blank sheets of paper bearing the sultan’s cipher, on
which he was to write the terms agreed with each chieftain to secure his
loyalty.24 The sultan was in efect negotiating a treaty with the head of each
tribe, who would remain loyal so long as it was in his interest to do so. That
the allegiance of the Kurds was not guaranteed became especially evident in
the early seventeenth century, when the tribal leaders, hitherto loyal to the
Ottomans, deserted to Shah ‘Abbas before the battle of Suiyan in 1605, lead-
ing the Safavid chronicler Eskandar Monshi to comment on “their blame-
worthy habit of keeping in with both sides”.25 Equally uncertain were the
loyalties of the Arab tribes in the marshlands of southern Iraq and the desert
fringes of the northern Gulf, where the sultans resorted to the expedient of
23 Şerafettin Turan, ‘Fatih-Uzun Hasan Mücadelesi ve Venedik’, Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 3,

4–5 (1965), 65–138.
24 Sa‘deddin, Tācü’t-Tevārīh (Istanbul, 1280/1863–4), vol. 2, p. 311.
25 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah Abbas the Great, trans. R. M. Savory, 2 vols. (Boulder,
Colo., 1978), vol. 2, p. 860.
214
granting local chiefs Ottoman titles of governorship in an attempt to secure

their allegiance. Thus, for example, Ibn ‘Ulayyan, who had led a successful
anti-Ottoman rebellion from the marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates delta
and defeated several attempts to oust him, received the Ottoman title of
sancak beyi in 1567.26 Nor was it only in frontier regions that local dynasties
survived. In northern Syria, for example, the sultans recognised members of
the Canbulad clan as hereditary governors of Kilis.27 In some places, how-
ever, eforts to co-opt local chiefs into the Ottoman system evidently failed.
In his survey of the resources of the empire made in 1609, the clerk Aynı Ali
has no more to say about the mountainous areas of the Lebanon than the
bald statement “There are non-Muslim lords in the mountains”.28 In such
areas, the sultan’s authority was non-existent.
Nonetheless and despite its hyperbole, Machiavelli’s description of Ottoman
governors as the sultan’s “servants” is essentially true, and the Ottoman term
kul – literally slave – used to designate men, from the grand vezir downwards,
who received a salary from the sultan relects this fact. From the second
decade of the sixteenth century, the practice of selecting vezirs and provincial
governors from the scions of the pre-Ottoman elites came to an end. From
the appointment of İbrahim Paşa as grand vezir in 1523 until the end of the
sixteenth century, the vezirate and, as far as was politically practical, provincial
governorships were usually the preserve of men, mostly of humble back-
ground, who had entered the sultan’s palace in their early teens, received an
education in one of the palace schools and served in one of the service corps
within the palace that attended to the sultan’s needs before receiving a gov-
ernment oice. Lacking powerful family connections, and in a society with-
out autonomous institutions, such men relied for protection and patronage
entirely on the sultan or factions of their peers, who in turn were dependent
on the sultan.
There were normally two routes into the palace schools. The irst was
through capture and presentation to the sultan. It was famously as a prisoner-
of-war taken captive at Jerba in 1560 that Cigalazade Sinan Paşa began his
career in the sultan’s service. A scion of the Genoese family of Cicala, he
entered the palace school following his captivity, serving in the palace and
later as governor-general (beylerbeyi) of Van and Erzurum, admiral of the
Mediterranean leet (kapudan paşa) and vezir, briely becoming grand vezir
26 Nazmizade, Gülşen-i Hülefā (Istanbul, 1143/1731), p. 63.

27 P. Rouault, ‘Djānbūlāt’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden,
1965), vol. 2, pp. 443–4.
28 Aynı Ali, Kavānīn-i Āl-i Osmān (Istanbul, 1280/1863–4), p. 25.
215
Co l in i mb e r
in 1596.29 Captivity, however, was not the usual route into the palace. The
majority of recruits came through the devşirme, the levy of non-Muslim boys
made from within the sultan’s own territories, predominantly from the west-
ern parts of the Balkan peninsula but also from other areas of the Balkans
and Anatolia.
The devşirme took place every three to seven years, according to need. A
commission from the capital would visit the area where the levy was to be
made, visiting the villages and towns within a pre-determined itinerary. At
each stop, the local authorities would assemble the non-Muslim lads from the
district, aged usually between 12 and 14 years, and from these the visiting com-
mission would pick one. The number of boys selected from each district was
relatively small. For example, in 1495 the levy raised 163 boys from the island
of Evvoia from a total of 26,026 tax-paying households.30 The boys so chosen
had then to march, in groups of about a hundred, from their homeland to
Istanbul, where they underwent conversion and circumcision. A second selec-
tion followed, using the science of physiognomy, which separated the lads
into two groups, with the majority group destined for a training which led to
service in the janissaries.31
The janissaries formed a standing infantry corps, numbering about 12,000
in the mid-sixteenth century,32 which drew its recruits from among prison-
ers-of-war and the devşirme levies and received salaries directly from the
treasury. As a group of “foreigners” – in this case men with a non-Muslim
background – in the personal service of the monarch it resembled some of
the military corps in the service of contemporary European princes. One of
the functions of the janissaries was undoubtedly as a support to the personal
power of the sultan, who was both their paymaster and sole patron, and as
such they had an important position in the political structure of the empire.
No sultan could ascend the throne without their backing. In 1481, in order to
gain their allegiance against his brother Cem, Bayezid II paid the janissaries
an accession bonus, and henceforth no sultan could come to power without
paying this bonus, whatever the state of the treasury. In 1566, when Selim II
tried to dispense with the gratuity on the grounds that since he had no rival
to the throne he did not need the janissaries’ backing, a janissary rebellion
29 M. Şakiroğlu, ‘Ciğalazâde Sinan Paşa’, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, ed. Ahmed
Topaloğlu et al. (Istanbul, 1993), vol. 7, pp. 525–6.
30 Hedda Reindl-Kiel, ‘16. Asırda Galatasaray’lı Olmak’, Sultani 26 (2006), pp. 28–9.
31 V. L. Ménage, ‘Devshirme’, in Gibb et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 2, pp.
210–13.
32 Gábor Ágoston, ‘Habsburgs and Ottomans: Defence, Military Changes and Shifts in Power’,
Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 22, 1 (1998), 126–41.
216
forced him to comply with the custom. In 1512, Bayezid II had no choice but to
abdicate when the janissaries transferred their allegiance to his son Selim [I].33
The janissaries were unswervingly loyal to the Ottoman dynasty, but never
blindly obedient to an individual sultan. The constant possibility of a janissary
rebellion was a permanent check on the sultan’s freedom of action.
The devşirme levies who entered the palace schools were the minority
who had before them the possibility of occupying the highest political oices
in the empire. The oldest of the schools, which pre-dated the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453, was in the old palace in Edirne. Mehmed II established
a second school in the old palace in Istanbul, whose construction he began
immediately after the conquest. The new palace – the present-day Topkapı
Palace – completed in the 1470s, housed two schools, the Great Chamber and
the Small Chamber. To these, Bayezid II added Galatasarayı, a school in the
largely Christian enclave of Pera, in 1481, while Süleyman I, following the
execution of İbrahim Paşa in 1536, converted the latter’s mansion on
the Hippodrome to a school.34 The irst requirement for the new recruits
to the schools was to learn Turkish. This was the lingua franca of the pal-
ace and of the administration, although within the palace it was the native
tongue only of the sultan and his family and of some religious functionaries.
The education which followed under the ierce discipline of the eunuchs of
the inner palace was both physical, involving, for example, horsemanship
and the use of weapons, and intellectual, involving in particular training in
Arabic, Persian and the Islamic sciences. The treatises on various problems in
Islamic jurisprudence, which the former grand vezir, the Albanian-born Lüti
Paşa (1539–41), was to compose in his retirement, are a product of this aspect
of palace education.
On the completion of their education, the careers of the graduates
diverged. Perhaps the majority left the palace for service in one of the six elite
cavalry corps, probably with a girl from the imperial harem as wife. Like her
husband, she, too, would be a slave of non-Muslim origin. In the sixteenth
century, these corps each comprised about 2,000–3,000 men and were, like the
janissaries, in the personal service of the sultan. In addition to their military
and ceremonial role, many of their members also pursued lucrative careers
as tax gatherers and tax farmers. The graduates who remained in the palace
would become members of one of the service groups – for example, the
larder, the treasury, the gatekeepers – attending to the upkeep of the palace
33 Vatin and Veinstein, Le Sérail, chap. 2.

34 Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
217
Co l in i mb e r
but, in particular, attending to the sultan’s personal needs, both in the palace
itself and on campaign. The most privileged group, the pages of the privy
chamber, waited on the sultan in his private apartment in the inner court of
the palace and followed him in processions, carrying his weapons, garments,
water and other items. It was on completion of service in one or more of
these groups that a graduate of the palace schools would receive an outside
appointment, usually an oice in the service of a provincial governor. Success
and appropriate patronage could lead to appointments as sancak governor,
governor-general, and inally as vezir, serving on the sultan’s imperial divan
(the imperial council, meeting under the presidency of the grand vezir).35
The function of this system of education is clear. The recruits came from
humble or, in the case of prisoners-of-war, foreign backgrounds. Consequently
they could call on no powerful networks outside the palace. The personal and
often menial service rendered in the palace gave them privileged access to the
sultan, while also reminding them of their status as his servants. Furthermore,
the shared education within the close conines of the palace created a shared
culture and an esprit de corps which set them apart from the mass of the sul-
tan’s subjects, and an outlook which identiied their own interests with those
of the dynasty. It was these men whom Machiavelli identiied as the “servants”
of the sultan, whom “he shifts and changes as he chooses”.
The processes of government

The role of the sultan
Conquest was the primary justiication for the rule of the Ottoman dynasty,
and leadership in war the primal role of the Ottoman sultan. It is this virtue
as a warrior that the poet Baki (d. 1600) celebrates in the inal hemistich of
his elegy on Sultan Süleyman, where he praises the late sultan – who had
died while besieging the Hungarian fortress of Szigetvár – as “both gazi and
şahid ”; that is, both as a warrior and as a martyr. Until the death of Süleyman
I, the ideal of the sultan as military leader was also a reality: sultans had not
only been present on the battleield in many campaigns but had also directed
strategy in person. Mehmed II and Selim I were clearly active military com-
manders. So, too, was Süleyman I. In his irst campaign, in 1521, for example,
which culminated in the conquest of Belgrade, the eccentric approach of the
army via Šabac seems to have been at the insistence of the sultan and against
35 Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Basingstoke, 2002), chap. 4.
218
the advice of the grand vezir, Piri Paşa.36 In March 1529, he delegated military
command, with the title serasker, to the grand vezir İbrahim Paşa, with the
stipulation that his orders were to be accepted “as commands from the tongue
of the sultan”37 and, until his execution in 1536, it seems to have been İbrahim
who was in efective command of military campaigns. Nonetheless, the del-
egation of command did not pre-suppose the absence of the sultan: both
sultan and serasker were present on the campaigns to Hungary and Vienna in
1529, to Hungary in 1532, and against the Safavids in 1533–6, and after İbrahim’s
death Süleyman continued to accompany and command campaigns in person
and to participate, whether directly or in writing,38 in tactical decisions.
After the death of Süleyman I, the sultans no longer accompanied mili-
tary campaigns. Neither Süleyman’s son Selim II (1566–74) nor his successors
Murad III (1574–95) and Mehmed III (1595–1603) seem to have had a taste for
warfare. Nor was it any longer practical for the sultan to lead his army in
person. From the second half of the sixteenth century, frontiers were distant
and warfare prolonged, often requiring the troops to over-winter in the ield.
Not only was it unthinkable to subject the sultan to the harsh conditions of
the new style of warfare, it would also have rendered the government of the
empire impossible. In the earlier epoch, the sultan and his ministers were
able, when on campaign, to conduct much of the routine business of gov-
ernment – for example, making appointments to oice or receiving ambas-
sadors – from the army camp. This was possible when campaigns lasted for
months, but not when they lasted for years on end and on frontiers remote
from the capital.
Nonetheless, despite the reluctance of sultans after 1566 to move from the
capital to the battlefront, and the evident impracticality of such a move, the
notion of the warrior-sultan persisted. It was not that the sultan was neces-
sarily seen as a commander. He was essentially a talisman whose presence on
the battleield ensured victory. Already in the late ifteenth century, the reluc-
tance of Mehmed II’s successor, Bayezid II (1481–1512), to lead his armies in
person, in particular in the unsuccessful war of 1485–91 against the Mamluks,
had evidently led to criticism of his rule, which the chronicler Tursun Bey
felt obliged to rebut.39 This view of the sultan as a talisman who procures
victory persisted even in the changed conditions of the late sixteenth century
36 Gyula Kaldy-Nagy, ‘Süleimans Angrif auf Europa’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae 28 (1974), 163–212.
37 Celalzade, Geschichte, fol. 178b.
38 Selaniki Mustafa, Tarih-i Selânikî, ed. Mehmet İpşirli, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1989), vol. 1, p. 30.
219
Co l in i mb e r
and beyond. In seeking to reverse the disasters sufered in the war against the
Habsburgs, the vezirs in 1596 found the solution in persuading the reluctant
Mehmed III to accompany the army to the front in Hungary. The role of the
sultan, who played no part in planning the campaign or in the ighting, was
simply to bring good luck, and it was to his presence that the Ottomans attrib-
uted their conquest of Eger and the unexpected victory at Mező-Keresztes.
The Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi remarks that had the sultan remained
in the ield, the victorious army would have proceeded to capture Vienna.40
For the sultan, however, one campaign was enough. He refused to return to
Hungary.
Between the reigns of Mehmed II and Mehmed III, therefore, the Ottoman
sultans had withdrawn from the role of active leaders in war, even though
their subjects clearly continued to believe that their symbolic presence in the
army was a guarantee of good fortune in battle.
After 1566, therefore, the sultan relinquished his role as de facto com-
mander of the army. It is, however, diicult to assess the degree of his de
facto authority in other areas of rulership. Although Ottoman government
was in principle wholly dependent on his will, this had never been entirely
true, and the increasing size and complexity of the empire between 1453 and
1603 must have increasingly diminished his ability to intervene directly in all
aspects of government. It remains, however, diicult to assess how far the
sultans involved themselves in afairs of state and political decision-making.
All decrees and letters of appointment emanating from the government use
the formula “I have commanded that …”, as though coming from the sultan
himself, masking the reality that many, if not most of them, would have been
issued without the sultan’s knowledge. Occasionally drafts of decrees – which
become available in large numbers only from 1560 – bear the note “with the
imperial rescript”, indicating that the decree embodies the written command
of the sultan, but these are infrequent. When they occur, however, they indi-
cate the personal interest of the sultan in the matter at hand. They make
clear, for example, that Süleyman I involved himself closely in the efort to
stop his rebel son Bayezid from escaping to Iran in 1559. In general, however,
the role of the sultan remains hidden from view.
One reason for this, apart from the formulaic language of decrees, is that
the most important political decisions rarely left written records: surviving
decrees concern the implementation of decisions rather than their formula-
tion. While major policy resolutions must always have required the consent
40 İbrahim Peçevi, Tarîh-i Peçevî, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1283/1866–7), vol. 2, p. 202.
220
of the sultan, some were clearly also his personal decisions. The contempo-
rary chronicler Tursun Bey’s comment that no one but the sultan knew the
destination of Mehmed II’s inal campaign in 1481 is undoubtedly an exagger-
ation, but also an indication that it was Mehmed himself who had planned the
expedition.41 A note in Bayezid II’s own hand to a certain İskender, informing
the recipient that he has executed Gedik Ahmed Paşa and ordering him to kill
Prince Cem’s sons, shows that the executions were at the private, probably
secret, command of the sultan.42 Bayezid also conducted personal negotiations
with the Knights of St. John concerning Cem’s captivity, bypassing his vezirs.43
Bayezid’s son and grandson, Selim I and Süleyman I, respectively, must also
have played important roles in the formulation of policies and decisions. It
was clearly Süleyman himself who, at the urging of the müftü (a jurisconsult)
Çivizade, in 1539 ordered the abolition of vakıf s, which derived their income
from interest paid on loans, and rescinded the order shortly afterwards, when
the kadıasker of Rumeli Ebussuud convinced him of its impracticality.44 It
was probably Süleyman, too, who was personally responsible for a decree for-
bidding Ottoman kadıs from applying Shai‘i law in a small number of cases
where Hanai law did not provide a remedy,45 a restriction that was entirely
unhelpful to practising jurists. The three successors of Süleyman probably
had less personal involvement in government, both as a matter of tempera-
ment and as a result of the increasing complexity of the task. It appears, in
particular, that Süleyman’s son Selim II (r. 1566–74) was happy to delegate his
role to his grand vezir and son-in-law Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, who held oice
throughout his reign. However, assessments of the sultan’s personal role in
government can never be more then speculative.
The same is true of the vezirs and other members of the governing elite,
although one or two accounts do survive of informal conclaves where they
argued, sometimes in the sultan’s presence, over momentous decisions of
state. In the debate over whether to attack the Venetian island of Cyprus,
the grand vezir Sokollu Mehmed apparently opposed the plan, while the
vezir Lala Mustafa Paşa and the vezir and former admiral Piyale Paşa advo-
cated it, probably with the sultan’s backing. In discussions over whether to
attack Austria in 1593, the grand vezir Koca Sinan Paşa – probably with an eye
41 Tursun Bey, Târîh-i, p. 181.

42 Vatin and Veinstein, Le Sérail, p. 153.
43 Nicolas Vatin, L’Ordre de St. Jean de Jérusalem, l’empire ottoman et al Méditerranée orientale
entre les deux sièges de Rhodes (1480–1522) (Louvain and Paris, 1994), p. 173.
44 Jon E. Mandaville, ‘Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the Ottoman Empire’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979), 289–308.
45 Paul Horster, Zur Anwendung des Islamischen Rechts im 16. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1935), p. 31.
221
Co l in i mb e r
to personal aggrandisement – led the case for war against the pleading of
the vezir Ferhad Paşa, the victor in the inal stages of the recent war against
the Safavids, who was aware that the exhaustion of the troops and treasury
made further warfare inadvisable.46 However, aperçus such as these into the
higher decision-making in the empire are rare. A few decisions, once made,
required the religious sanction of the chief müftü or other religious author-
ity, whether or not he had played a role in their formulation. Famously, in
1514 Selim I sought a fetva (a legal opinion issued by a competent authority)
from Hamza Saru Görez47 to sanction his campaign against the Safavids and
execution of Safavid followers within his realms, the problem being that the
Safavids were not technically “inidels”, against whom it would be licit to
wage war. Ebussuud was to amplify and reine Hamza’s arguments in his
fetvas justifying Süleyman I’s Iranian campaign in 1549. It was Ebussuud, too,
who sanctioned Süleyman’s execution of his rebel son Bayezid and the attack
on Cyprus in 1570 while a ten-year truce with Venice was still in force. These
religious sanctions for policy were, however, a formality, and were always
forthcoming. The müftü Zenbilli Ali’s refusal to sanction Selim I’s command
to execute a hundred clerks accused of corruption48 remains an exception.
The institutions of government

If decisions on war and peace and other momentous issues in the life of the
empire emerged from the will of the sultan or from private and informal
discussions, the process of implementing these decisions and dealing with
day-to-day problems was the business of formal bodies. The most important
of these was the divan-ı hümayun, or Imperial Council.
From the time of the completion of the new palace in the 1470s, the divan
met in the second, semi-public courtyard of the palace. Before the mid-
sixteenth century, its members would also accompany the sultan and grand
vezir when they were on campaign and meet at intervals during the army’s
journey to and from the battlefront. Assembling under the presidency of the
grand vezir, its membership comprised the senior members of each branch
of government. The vezirs stood at the head of the political-military estab-
lishment, serving both as the sultan’s ministers and as military command-
ers in times of war. Until the 1540s, there were normally three vezirs on the
divan. This rose to four and then, in 1566, ive. From 1570 until the end of
46 Peçevi, Tarîh, vol. 2, p. 133.

47 Richard C. Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned
Hierarchy (London, 1986), pp. 218–20.
48 Ibid., p. 211.
222
the century, there were normally seven. Representing the judiciary were the
kadıaskers. Until late in the reign of Mehmed II there was, we are told, only one
kadıasker. From this time onwards, there were two. The kadıasker of Rumeli
dealt with the legal afairs of the European province, while the kadıasker of
Anatolia dealt with the Asiatic territories. Representing the inancial branch
were the defterdars. Their numbers increased from – probably – one in the
ifteenth century to two in 1526, three in 1539 and four in 1587, the increasing
numbers relecting the growing importance of inancial matters, particularly
towards the end of the sixteenth century, when both expenditures and deicits
mounted.49 The other member of the divan was the nişancı, or tevkii, whose
title is an indication of his symbolic function of aixing the sultan’s cipher –
nişan or tevki – to imperial decrees as a guarantee of their authenticity. It was
the nişancı who had the inal responsibility for each decree or other document
that the divan issued, ensuring that it conformed to standard.
These were the executive members of the imperial divan. A larger number
of clerks serviced their administrative needs, receiving and iling incoming
correspondence, preparing materials for discussion, and preparing the drafts
and inal copies of decrees and other documents. A scribal service had clearly
existed in the ifteenth century, but it is only in the sixteenth that any details
of its organisation emerge. At its head stood the chief clerk (the reisülküt-
tab), a post whose creation late sources dubiously attribute to Süleyman I
and which could be a stepping stone to an appointment as nişancı. The most
famous of nişancıs, Celalzade Mustafa, served as reisülküttab before his eleva-
tion to nişancı in 1534. Below the reisülküttab, at least in the sixteenth century,
was the tezkereci, whose function most probably was to summarise incoming
letters and petitions for presentation to the divan, reducing them to the form
in which they appear in the documents which the divan issued in response.
A second group of clerks worked under the aegis of the defterdars. The dis-
tinction was necessary since these required not only a knowledge of accoun-
tancy but also expertise in drawing up treasury documents, which used a
specialised – and, to the uninitiated, impenetrable – language, script and way
of writing numerals. The number of clerks servicing the divan grew as the
sixteenth century progressed, the increase probably relecting the expanding
volume of business rather than simple bureaucratic inlation. In 1527, there
were 11 clerks “in the following of the nişancı” and 7 “in the following of
the defterdars”. In 1561, there were 25 and 9, respectively. By the end of the
49 Klaus Röhrborn, ‘Die Emanzipation der Finanzbürokratie im osmanischen Reich (Ende

16.Jahrhundert)’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 122 (1972), 118–39.
223
Co l in i mb e r
century, there were over 50 altogether. The clerks of the divan were not, how-
ever, the only clerks in the service of the central government. Others served
in the defterhane, the oice of the land registry, responsible in particular for
recording the allocation of ief holdings, and in the treasury. In 1531, there
were seven clerks in the defterhane and 33 clerks and 17 apprentices in the
employment of the treasury.50
The imperial divan customarily met on four days of the week, from
Saturday to Tuesday, with the clerks attending in rotation. The sultan himself
was not present. According to Ottoman tradition, Mehmed II abandoned the
practice of attending meetings of the divan in person, and later sultans usu-
ally followed his example. Instead they adopted formal and informal means
of following discussions and approving or vetoing decisions. Following meet-
ings, the grand vezir reported on the proceedings in private discussions with
the sultan. In other reports, the entire divan met the sultan in the petition
chamber at the entrance to the third court of the palace, and its members in
turn reported on those matters that lay within their competence. It is proba-
ble that both procedures were followed at diferent times and under diferent
sultans. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, as the sultans grew more
reclusive, it seems to have become the common practice for the grand vezir
to communicate with the sultan via written notes.51 The sultan could also at
any time convey messages to the divan from his residence in the third court,
the “Law Book of Mehmed II” laying out a procedure for this. He also had
another means of following proceedings. Above the council chamber there
was a window with a connection to the inner palace, from where he could
watch the meetings of the divan unobserved, the ever-present possibility of
his witnessing what was discussed acting as a disincentive to the grand vezir
to misreport or to conceal information.
The divan had more than one function. It dealt with important afairs of
state, overseeing, for example, the preparation of war materials and the call-
up of troops before major campaigns, or drawing up correspondence with
foreign rulers, usually following private meetings between the grand vezir and
the ambassador. Much of its time, however, was spent responding to letters
and petitions from provincial governors, dealing with a vast range of issues
50 J. Matuz, Das Kanzleiwesen Süleymans des Prächtigen (Wiesbaden, 1994); Christine Woodhead,
‘Research on the Ottoman Scribal Service’, in Festgabe an Joseph Matuz, ed. Christa Fragner
and Klaus Schwarz (Berlin, 1992), pp. 311–28; Cornell Fleischer, ‘Realities of Scribal Life in
the Sixteenth Century’, in Studies in Ottoman History in Honour of Professor V. L. Ménage, ed.
Colin Heywood and Colin Imber (Istanbul, 1994), pp. 45–63.
51 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Das Grosswesir-telhis: eine aktenkundliche Studie’, Der Islam 45 (1969),
96–110; Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı Tarihine Ait Belgeler: Telhisler (Istanbul, 1970).
224
from the pursuit of brigands to the construction of aqueducts. However, it

was not only holders of public oices that had access to the divan. On certain
days, individuals had the right to present their claims in person either to the
full council or to the grand vezir in his residence after the full divan had retired.
It was disguised as a petitioner that an assassin gained access to and murdered
the grand vezir Sokollu Mehmed in 1578. An individual from outside the capi-
tal could also present a grievance to the local kadı, who would then forward it
to the divan for redress. In addition, the divan acted as a court. It seems to have
been Bayezid II who decreed that the ordinary courts should no longer hear
cases against his servants – that is, those who drew salaries from the treasury
or received iefs from the sultan.52 Instead, it was the divan that passed judge-
ment on these and some other cases. In all matters, however, it acted in the
name of the sultan. All decrees and letters of appointment emanating from
the divan, whether he was aware of them or not, were in his name.
The vezirs on the divan would normally have reached the position after a
period serving in provincial governorships. Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, for exam-
ple, graduated from the palace in 1549 and, between that date and 1555, when
he became third vezir, occupied the posts of sancak governor (sancak beyi) of
Gelibolu (Gallipoli) and of governor-general (beylerbeyi) of Rumeli. Records
of provincial government are, however, too scarce to provide any very clear
idea of how it functioned.
In 1453, there were three provinces in the empire: Rumeli, comprising all
Ottoman territory in Europe;53 Anatolia, comprising Ottoman territory in
western Asia Minor to the west of Ankara; and Rum, comprising Ottoman
territory in central and north-eastern Asia Minor. The conquest of the emir-
ate of Karaman in 1468–9 added a fourth. Throughout the period 1453–1603,
Rumeli had the “senior” status among the provinces, with its beylerbeyi gain-
ing the ex oicio right to attend meetings of the Imperial divan.54 The con-
quests of Selim I between 1516 and 1518 added the two formerly Mamluk
provinces of Syria and Egypt and the formerly Safavid provinces of Diyarbakır
(Diyarbekir) and Kurdistan, although the latter was not to survive as a recog-
nised administrative area. The reign of his son, Süleyman, saw the creation
of more provinces: Dulgadir, following the annexation of that principality,
52 Theodore Spandounes, On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, trans. Donald Nicol
(Cambridge, 1997), p. 137.
53 Rossitsa Gradeva, ‘Administrative System and Provincial Government in the Central Balkan
Territories of the Ottoman Empire, 15th Century’, in Rossitsa Gradeva, Rumeli under the
Ottomans, 15th–18th Centuries: Institutions and Communities (Istanbul, 2004), pp. 23–53.
54 Feridun Bey, Münşe’āt-i Selātīn, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1274/1857), vol. 1, p. 595.
225
Co l in i mb e r
and Baghdad, Şehrizol, Van and Erzurum, following the campaign against the
Safavids in 1533–6 and 1548–9. The creation of the provinces of Basra and of
al-Hasa on the shores of the Persian Gulf followed the extension of Ottoman
power into southern Iraq after 1536. The formation of these provinces
followed the acquisition of new territory through conquest. Other creations
followed a diferent logic. In 1533, the sultan appointed Hayreddin Barbarossa,
the conqueror and governor of Algiers, admiral of the Mediterranean leet.
Hitherto admirals had held this position together with the oice of sancak
beyi of Gelibolu. Considering this rank too lowly for Hayreddin, the sultan
appointed him with the rank of beylerbeyi of the Archipelago. This was a
new province created by detaching existing sancaks from the littoral of the
existing provinces of Anatolia and Rumeli. It was an ad hominem creation
that disappeared after Hayreddin’s death in 1546, to be revived again in 1551
with the appointment as admiral of Sinan Paşa – brother of the grand vezir
Rüstem Paşa. His successor, Piyale, received the admiralty with the rank of
sancak beyi of Gelibolu but, from the time of his promotion to beylerbeyi of
the Archipelago in 1558, the province had a continuous existence.55 Other
provinces came into existence for reasons of defence. After the defeat of King
Lajos of Hungary in 1526, Süleyman maintained his elected successor, János
Szapolyai, in power as king. However, in 1541, after Szapolyai’s death, central
Hungary became a directly ruled Ottoman province, serving as a military
frontier against Habsburg Austria. The detachment of Bosnia, previously a
sancak in the province of Rumeli, to become an independent province in 1580
presumably had a similar aim. The same defensive logic saw the creation of
the small province of Kanizsa in south-western Hungary in 1600, following its
capture from the Habsburgs that year.56
Most provinces outside southern Iraq, Egypt and North Africa were sub-
divided into smaller units. These were the sancaks, each under the governor-
ship of a sancak beyi and often taking its name from the chief town in the
district. By the sixteenth century, most of the beylerbeyis and sancak beyis had
risen to the position from service in the palace. However, some sancaks were
hereditary, and some families, notably the Evrenosoğlu, Turahanoğlu and
Mihaloğlu families in Rumeli, enjoyed a hereditary right to appointment as
sancak beyis. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, when inancial afairs
became pressing, it became more common for defterdars to cross into political
55 Colin Imber, ‘The Navy of Süleyman the Magniicent’, in Colin Imber, Studies in Ottoman
History and Law (Istanbul, 1996), pp. 1–69 at pp. 35–6.
56 Géza Dávid, ‘Ottoman Administrative Strategies in Western Hungary’, in Heywood and
Imber, Studies, pp. 31–43.
226
service as provincial governors. Posts of sancak beyi were also open to sons of
vezirs and other oice-holders, and to members of the dynasty in the female
line. These groups, however, could rise no higher in the government hierar-
chy, a prohibition which clearly aimed to prevent the formation of veziral or
other powerful dynasties. The practice, too, of moving beylerbeyis and sancak
beyis, apparently every two to three years, prevented the non-hereditary pro-
vincial governors from forming local power bases.
Beylerbeyis and sancak beyis, like the vezirs and the sultan himself, had
both civil and military functions. The two functions were in fact intertwined.
Although it is possible to deine a sancak as a unit of territory, the reality was
rather more complex. A sancak consisted of the aggregate of military iefs
(timars and zeamets) that came under the administration of the sancak beyi.
The borders between sancaks could in places be ill deined as iefs were re-
allocated, enlarged or diminished. Furthermore, certain timars – the so-called
free timars – fell outside the sancak beyi ’s jurisdiction, as did areas within the
sancak that might be allocated to royal revenues, vakıf s or other purposes. The
sancak beyi therefore was in command of the timar-holders that fell under his
authority as well as the lands which their timars encompassed.57
The major non-military function of the sancak beyi was the maintenance
of order within his sancak and the pursuit and punishment of wrongdoers.
It was the sancak beyis, too, who pocketed ines levied on miscreants. The
judicial powers of the sancak beyi were not, however, unlimited. In principle,
he and his men (the ehl-i ‘örf ) executed the sentences imposed by a judge
(the kadı), in whose appointment the sancak beyi played no part. In practice,
the separation of powers was probably never so clear-cut. The number of
orders forbidding the commutation of the death penalty for a ine58 suggests
an ever-present temptation for sancak beyis to act independently. In wartime,
if he did not receive a command to remain behind and maintain order in his
district, the sancak beyi commanded the timar-holders in his sancak, being
responsible for their mustering at the point speciied in a command from the
divan and commanding them on the battleield. Sancak beyis in frontier dis-
tricts had the additional task of defending the frontier against enemy incur-
sions or for themselves organising raids into enemy territory. For example,
in the ifteenth century and later, the Mihaloğlus of Vidin had the task of
mounting annual raids across the Danube into Wallachia and Hungary. The
57 Klaus Röhrborn, Untersuchungen zur osmanischen Verwaltungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1973); İ.

Metin Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government,
1550–1650 (New York, 1983).
58 Ömer Lüti Barkan, Kanunlar (Istanbul, 1943), p. 180.
227
Co l in i mb e r
sancak beyi was not responsible for the initial appointment of timar-holders
but nonetheless had the authority to petition for their promotion – efectively
for an enlargement of their timar – normally citing bravery on the battleield
as the grounds.
If the sancak beyis commanded the timar-holding troops in their sancak,
they themselves came under the direct command of the beylerbeyi in whose
province their sancak was situated, serving under his standard whether against
foreign enemies or internal disorders, as, for example, in the campaigns
against Kızılbaş rebels in central and south-eastern Anatolia between 1526 and
1529.59 The beylerbeyi himself was the most powerful and wealthiest person
in a province, deriving his income from speciied parcels of revenue – nota-
bly from urban taxes – within his province. Sancak beyis similarly received an
income from the revenues assigned to them from within their sancaks. The
revenues of a beylerbeyi supported a large household mirroring on a smaller
scale the sultan’s household in the capital. Nonetheless, in the absence of sur-
viving documents, it remains diicult to deine his administrative functions.
Like the sancak beyis, he had a role in the administration of justice, probably
in fact holding a court which, like the divan in Istanbul, could pronounce and
execute sentences. He had responsibility for the inances of the province, and
above all he was responsible for the oversight of timars, holding copies of
the detailed land-and-tax registers of the sancaks in his province. He did not,
however, have an unrestricted right to award timars. Instead, this involved
a lengthy process whereby a beylerbeyi or a sancak beyi forwarded a list of
candidates to the grand vezir, who in turn would forward to each candidate
a decree documenting his eligibility. When a timar became vacant – perhaps
after a campaign where a large number of timar-holders had lost their lives –
he could present the decree to the beylerbeyi of the province, who could then
award a timar. That was not, however, the end of the matter. If the timar was
below a certain value – 6,000 akçe in Rumeli, 5,000 akçe in Anatolia and 3,000
akçe elsewhere – the beylerbeyi could award the timar on his own authority.
Above this value, however, the candidate had to take his memorandum of
appointment to the land registry in Istanbul,60 which would check his claim
against the register and, if satisied, issue a warrant of appointment. The
system thus gave the beylerbeyi the overall surveillance of the timars in his
province but no absolute authority. During the ifteenth century, the proce-
dures for appointment had most probably been less formal, in particular in
59 Celalzade, Geschichte, fols. 157b–172a.

60 Douglas A. Howard, ‘The Historical Development of the Ottoman Imperial Registry
(Defter-i Hakanî)’, Archivum Ottomanicum 11 (1986), 213–30.
228
the areas where powerful families, such as the Evrenosoğlus in Macedonia or

the Turahanoğlus in Thessaly, exercised their inl uence. In the late sixteenth
century, too, the long absences of armies and their commanders at the front
increased the need to make immediate appointments to re-allocate the timars
of the fallen and of deserters without reference to Istanbul, bringing about
confusion in the system.61
Between 1453 and 1603, therefore, timar s were the basis of provincial orga-
nisation. A sancak was in essence a conglomeration of timar s in a particular
district, while a province was a conglomeration of sancaks. A timar itself
was a parcel of revenues allocated as income to a cavalryman (a sipahi) in
exchange for military service or, less commonly, to an oicial such as a clerk
in the sultan’s service or to a princess or other member of the imperial fam-
ily. In principle, any revenue source could be assigned as a timar but, in prac-
tice, since the Ottoman economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, so, too,
were the taxes assigned to timar s. Typically, the revenues which constituted
a timar came from a village or villages in the countryside and its associated
ields and pastures. The timar-holder had a right to these revenues so long as
he continued to perform his military service, but he would forfeit them if he
failed to present himself when summoned to war. He also exercised some
authority over the land from which he drew his income. He had a policing
function, sometimes sharing with the sancak beyi half the ines for crimes
committed on his timar-holding. He oversaw the inheritance and allocation
of peasant-holdings, having the entitlement to an entry ine from newcom-
ers settling on the land. He also had access to a plot for his own cultivation.
Nonetheless, he did not own the land and enjoyed its revenues only at the
sultan’s discretion. Nor, before a decree of 1585 permitted the practice,62 did
timar s pass from father to son, this prohibition on inheritance serving to
prevent timar-holders from coming to form a local landed class. What was
inherited was instead status as a member of the military class, which carried
with it the entitlement to a timar but not to any timar in particular. When
timar s fell vacant, sons of sipahis would compete among themselves and, to
a lesser degree, with former janissaries, palace servants and others on the
sultan’s payroll who were also entitled to receive timar s. Competition was
evidently ierce. Two decrees of 1531 and 1536 specify precisely how many
61 Röhrborn, Untersuchungen, chaps. 2 and 3; Douglas A. Howard, ‘Ottoman Administration

and the Timar-System: Kanunname-yi Osmani Bera-yi Timar Daden’, Journal of Turkish
Studies 20 (1996), 46–125.
62 Pál Fodor, The Last Major Taxation Surveys of the Empire: Farewell to the tahrīr System, type-
script. My thanks to Pál Fodor for allowing me access to this work-in-progress.
229
Co l in i mb e r
sons of an existing sipahi inherit the right to a timar and the value of the
timar to which each son is entitled.63 These rules were evidently as much
an efort to restrict entry to timar s as they were to rationalise the system.
The same decrees also forbade the allocation of timar s to “outsiders”, a rule
which, if strictly applied, would have the efect of making timar-holding the
monopoly of a closed caste.
In principle, and probably to a large degree in practice, each timar had a
central, indivisible core, known as a “sword” (kılıç). It was possible, however,
for a sipahi to increase his income through the addition of revenues – per-
haps from an adjoining village – to his basic kılıç. The award of extra timar
income through the re-allocation of revenues that did not form part of a kılıç
was made typically on the petition of a sancak beyi, and typically following a
campaign, when the deaths of sipahis in battle left many timars vacant. There
were, as a result of this process, considerable disparities of income among
sipahis. An increased income, however, brought with it increased responsibili-
ties. The law required sipahis to bring with them to war men-at-arms, horses,
tents, weapons and armour, with the level of their income determining the
scale of their obligations. The maximum value of a timar was, notionally,
9,999 akçe per annum, this exact igure probably losing any real signiicance
in the period of high inlation in the last two decades of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Each sancak also contained a number of iefs, designated as zeamets or,
in the older terminology, subaşılıks, with a notional yield of between 10,000
and 100,000 akçe. Their holders had greater responsibilities within their dis-
tricts than ordinary sipahis – the zaims or subaşıs seem to have had particular
responsibilities for policing urban areas – and acted as military oicers when
on campaign. The largest iefs in a sancak, of 100,000 akçe and over, designated
as hass, were the preserve of the beylerbeyis and sancak beyis, or else formed
part of the imperial domains, with revenues going to the sultan personally or
to the treasury. Sources of revenue which did not form part of hasses, zeamets
or timars came under the control of salaried oicials (emins) or, more often,
tax farmers, with a speciied annual sum going directly to the treasury or to
service a local need, such as the upkeep of a fortress or garrison.
The responsibility for collecting taxes lay with the ief-holder himself or –
especially in the case of larger iefs – with his agent. In principle, however, he
had no discretion over which taxes he could collect or at what rate but had
the right only to those taxes assigned to him in the land and tax survey of
63 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Kanuni Sultan Süleyman’a Ait Tımar ve Zeamet Tevcihi ile İlgili
Fermanları’, Tarih Dergisi 17 (1967–8), 35–48.
230
the sancak and at the rate speciied. Only the sultan had the right to collect
in times when normal treasury income did not suice. Since they had few
resources, timar-holders in particular faced a number of problems in collect-
ing dues. First, throughout this period, peasants frequently paid the taxes due
on crops in kind rather than in cash, forcing the timar-holder to arrange for
the transport of his share of the produce to a town market to sell for cash.64
Second, taxes on crops and extra dues (avarız) usually fell due in the late sum-
mer or autumn when the sipahi might be absent on campaign, requiring an
agent to collect what was owing. This problem became more acute towards
the end of the sixteenth century, when prolonged campaigns often required
troops to over-winter at the front.65 Third, the nominal rates of taxes to which
ief-holders were entitled did not increase during the period of high inlation
in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, greatly reducing the value of
those dues which they collected in cash.
The government, for its part, faced the problem of how to enforce the
rules governing the appointment to timars and the inheritance of military sta-
tus and to ensure that timar-holders, most of them based far from the capital,
met their contractual obligations. The essential instruments in achieving con-
trol were the land and tax registers. From the late fourteenth century down
to about 1600, the government at regular intervals compiled detailed registers
of each sancak, recording all timars and other ief holdings, the name of each
ief-holder, the names of heads of household in each village, the amounts
and types of taxes due and other information. The ifteenth-century regis-
ters append “men and tent notes” to each timar entry, recording the level of
each sipahi ’s obligations to bring retainers, tents and weapons on campaign.66
A copy of each register was available in the register oice (defterhane) in
Istanbul and at the provincial centre, and served as an authoritative source
of reference. During its period of currency, clerks in the registry oice could
check each new application for a timar and note changes in the margins until
such time as the sultan ordered a new survey. The detailed registers were also
the source for shorter timar registers, from which the registry clerks compiled
muster registers, which allowed army commanders on campaign to take roll
calls of the sipahis arriving from each sancak. Timars were subject, therefore,
64 Barkan, Kanunlar, p. 131.

65 G. Veinstein, ‘L’hivernage en campagne, talon d’Achille du système militaire ottoman clas-
sique’, Studia Islamica 58 (1983), 109–48.
66 Tim Stanley, ‘Men-at-Arms, Hauberks and Bards’, in The Balance of Truth: Essays in Honour
of Professor Geof rey Lewis, ed. Çiğdem Balım-Harding and Colin Imber (Istanbul, 2000), pp.
331–63.
231
Co l in i mb e r
to close administrative surveillance, which kept the system under efective

control until near the end of the sixteenth century, when inlation, desertion,
and disorder in registration procedures and their eventual abandonment,
together with new forms of warfare, created confusion in the old system and
heralded the radical changes of the succeeding century.
Law and the legal system

The Ottoman legal system relected the multi-confessional nature of the
empire. Each religious community enjoyed a degree of legal autonomy in
internal matters,67 allowing, for example, Greek Orthodox, Armenian or
Jewish subjects to settle intra-communal afairs in their own courts. However,
the empire was an Islamic polity, and Islamic courts took precedence. In every
town, there was an Islamic court which heard all cases where either one or
both of the parties was Muslim. Furthermore, whereas Christian and Jewish
courts were open only to members of those communities, the Islamic courts
were open to all, the records showing that it was fairly common for non-Mus-
lims to bring cases for settlement in the Islamic courts. In some cases, it was
advantageous for them to do so. Jewish women, for example, could receive a
larger share of an inheritance under Islamic than under Jewish law.68
A judge (kadı) presided over each court, usually with the assistance of
a deputy (naib). A group of “witnesses to the case” (the şühudülhal) also
attended sessions of the court. Their function was evidently to ensure that
the proceedings were in order and also, presumably, to act as a communal
memory, to mediate between plaintifs and defendants and to provide advice
to people bringing their cases before the court. The kadı’s role was not sim-
ply to adjudicate in contested cases but also to serve as a notary, recording,
for example, sales of property, marriages and other contracts, or dividing
inheritances among heirs. In addition to these legal functions, he acted as
an administrator, registering decrees from the divan and fulilling a multi-
tude of tasks, including such matters as negotiating levels of taxation, levying
oarsmen for the leet or buying and amassing provisions for the army along
its line of march. The range of tasks which they performed made the kadıs
the most important igures in maintaining the empire’s administrative and
67 Eugenia Kermeli, ‘The Right to Choice: Ottoman Justice vis-à-vis Ecclesiastical and
Communal Justice in the Balkans’, in Studies in Islamic Law, Journal of Semitic Studies, ed. A.
Christmann and R. Gleave (Oxford, 2007), pp. 165–210.
68 Aryeh Shmuelevitz, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
(Leiden, 1964), p. 66.
232
legal stability. They also acted as a check on local powers of the beylerbeyis,
sancak beyis and subaşıs. Although the kadıs were usually resident in towns,
their judicial districts (kazas) extended into the countryside, covering, in prin-
ciple, all settlements within the empire. The boundaries of kazas did not
correspond with the boundaries of sancaks, and since the kadıs derived their
authority directly from the sultan, their tenure of oice was independent of
the beylerbeyis or sancak beyis. They did, however, cooperate with them in
matters of crime and public order. The apprehension, investigation and pun-
ishment of criminals was a function of the sancak beyis and subaşıs and their
men (the ehl-i ‘örf ), but the passing of sentence was, in principle if not always
in practice, the prerogative of the kadı.69
The century and a half between 1453 and 1603 saw the development of a
hierarchy of kadıs. Most received appointments in small towns, and it was
as small-town kadıs that they made their careers, changing locations every
two to three years. Appointments were in the gift of the kadıaskers. At the
beginning of his career, a graduate from a college (medrese) had normally to
choose between a career as a teacher (müderris) in a college or as a kadı. If
he chose the latter path, he required a sponsor, whether an oice-holder or a
well-placed member of his own family, and then, before his appointment or
between appointments, had to spend a period in the capital “in attendance”
on one of the kadıaskers in expectation of a post. The kadıaskers of Rumeli
and Anatolia controlled the posts in the European and Asiatic provinces,
respectively. During his period as kadıasker of Rumeli, Ebussuud rationalised
the system of appointment, ixing a quota for the number of nominees an
oice-holder might make and a time interval between each batch of nomina-
tions, and requiring the kadıaskers to keep enrolment registers.70
During the sixteenth and probably also the ifteenth centuries, the kadıs of
Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne occupied a higher rank than the small-town kadıs
and provided the candidates for promotion to kadıasker. With the expansion
of the empire in the sixteenth century, Damascus, Cairo and then Baghdad
also became the seats of senior kadıs, and in the late sixteenth century, when
competition for prestigious kadı-ships evidently became ierce, a way to sat-
isfy frustrated aspirants to oice was to designate otherwise insigniicant
towns as “great molla-ships” for the duration of the candidate’s appoint-
ment. Appointment to a “great molla-ship” followed a diferent pattern from
69 Ronald Jennings, ‘Limitations of the Judicial Powers of the Kadi’, Studia Islamica 50
(1979), 151–84; Repp, The Müfti, chap. 2; Rossitsa Gradeva, ‘On the Kadis of Soia, 16th–17th
Centuries’, Journal of Turkish Studies 26, 1 (2002), 265–92.
70 Repp, The Müfti, pp. 52–4.
233
Co l in i mb e r
appointment as a small-town kadı. The former went not to existing kadıs but
to men who had followed a career as müderris, and normally to those occu-
pying a post in one of the Eight Medreses of Mehmed II, the most prestigious
teaching institutions in the empire before the completion of the medreses
attached to the Süleymaniye mosque in 1557. Furthermore, occupants of the
higher grades in the legal and teaching professions came almost always from
a very limited number of families, who competed iercely for oice.71
While the kadıasker of Rumeli occupied the top rung in the hierarchy of
kadıs, his was not the highest post in the legal profession. During the course of
the sixteenth century, the müftü of Istanbul or, to use the title which became
habitual from the second half of the sixteenth century, the şeyhülislam,
emerged as the senior legal igure in the empire. Almost invariably, in fact,
holders of this oice had previously served as kadıasker. The function of a
müftü is to issue fetvas (that is, authoritative opinions on any legal or other
issues that are set before him). A fetva is not, however, binding and to be
put into efect has to be embodied in the decree of a kadı or of a political
authority. As a müftü, therefore, the şeyhülislam was not a member of the
divan and had no executive powers. Nonetheless, his authority was immense.
Within the formal intellectual structure of Islamic law, he occupies a position
above the kadı. Unlike the kadı, he is independent of the secular authority,
acting as an intermediary between God’s will, as expressed in the law, and the
daily afairs of the Muslim community.72 Although his fetvas have no execu-
tive force, they have a permanent validity, unlike the rulings of a kadı that are
valid only for the case at hand. It is this lofty conception of the müftü ’s role
that in part explains the rise of the müftü of Istanbul from apparent obscurity
in the ifteenth century to the pinnacle of the Ottoman legal establishment.
Another factor in his rise must also have been the authority and personal pres-
tige of the two greatest şeyhülislams of the sixteenth century, Kemalpaşazade
(1525–34) and Ebussuud (1545–74). Nonetheless, despite the theoretical inde-
pendence of müftüs, the şeyhülislams rarely acted independently of the will
of the sultan. Unlike the şeyhülislams, the müftüs in provincial towns did not
enjoy a high status. They remain among the most obscure igures in the legal
and learned hierarchy.
Ottoman kadıs – apart perhaps from a few which served Muslim popula-
tions that followed a diferent branch of Sunni Islam – gave judgements accord-
ing to the Hanai school of Islamic law, as did the şeyhülislam in his fetvas.
71 Ibid., pp. 44–9.

72 Norman Calder, ‘Nawawī’s Typology of Muftīs, and Its Signiicance for a General Theory of
Islamic Law’, Islamic Law and Society 3 (1996), 137–64.
234
Necessarily, therefore, Hanai iqh formed an essential part of an Ottoman

medrese education, and three of what were to become standard works of
Hanai law – the Durar al-Hukkam of Molla Hüsrev (d. 1480), the Multaqa’l-
Abhur of Ibrahim Halabi (d. 1549) and the Tanwir al-Absar of Timirtashi (d.
1595) – were produced under Ottoman auspices, the last two being abridged
compendia of law and so particularly useful for teaching. Juristic texts were
extraordinarily conservative, the function of the jurist being primarily to pass
down the inherited tradition, in summary or in expanded form, to his own
and succeeding generations. In this, Ottoman jurists were no diferent from
their predecessors. The law was nonetheless remarkably lexible, and both
kadıs and müftüs were highly skilled in adapting the tradition to provide the
materials for a practical legal system suitable for their own times. It was also
a tradition that put a severe restraint on the authority of the ruler, neither the
Ottoman sultan nor any other Islamic monarch having any powers to alter
the law.
However, in two areas in particular, Ottoman practice was at variance with
Hanai theory. In the ield of criminal justice, Hanai law does not provide a
coherent set of workable rules. Furthermore, since it was only with extreme
reluctance that Hanai jurists recognised the legality of money ines, the
Hanai system was at odds with Ottoman reality, where money ines were
the norm and an ingredient in governors’ incomes. A curious compilation of
statutes, attributed in its heading to Mehmed II but dating from after 1488,
contains a tarif of strokes and ines for speciied ofences whose original text
dates quite probably from the irst half of the ifteenth century. This doc-
ument was to be incorporated, with some modiication, into the law book
which Bayezid II promulgated in about 1500, and thereafter provided a stan-
dard code for the punishment of crime.73 It is evident from some sections of
the code, notably in its treatment of sexual ofences74 and its tarif of punish-
ments for inl icting head wounds, that its compilers were aware of Hanai
law in these areas. The resemblances are, however, supericial. Ottoman crim-
inal law, in common with the criminal law of other Muslim polities, was sec-
ular rather than Islamic.
The second area where Hanai law did not apply was in the law of land
and taxation. The Hanai jurists treat land as private property, its tax status
depending on what happened to it at the time of the Islamic conquest. If it
became the property of one of the conquerors, it paid only a tithe (‘ushr)
73 Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. V. L. Ménage (Oxford, 1973), pp.
95–131.
74 Colin Imber, ‘Zinā in Ottoman Law’, in Imber, Studies, pp. 217–52.
235
Co l in i mb e r
on the crops. If, however, it remained in the hands of its pre-Islamic owners,
it was subject to two taxes, classiied as kharaj muwazzaf, a ixed annual tax
on the land itself, and kharaj muqasama, a tax levied as a proportion of the
crops. The land retained its tax status in perpetuity whoever owned it after
the conquest. Land and taxation in the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere in the
Islamic world, did not conform to this theoretical scheme. In the irst place,
very little land was held as private property. Since this would entail division
among the heirs on the death of the owner, it was more advantageous for a
landowner to convert his property to vakıf, nominating himself and his heirs
as beneiciaries in perpetuity. Furthermore, it was local practice and local eco-
nomic activities rather than Hanai theory that determined the forms and
rates of taxation on the land.
Most land, however, was neither private property nor vakıf, but miri. The
term itself means simply “relating to the ruler”, and miri land was land at
the disposal of the sultan and therefore available to him for distribution as a
timar or other type of land grant. In principle, therefore, miri land could not
be bought and sold. However, in practice, peasant cultivators did buy and sell
plots, and it was in order to legitimise this practice that legal texts in the early
sixteenth century begin to refer to these transactions not as sales of land but
as sales of the “right of residence” (hakk-i karar),75 which the purchaser could
acquire only with the permission of the sipahi and the payment to him of
the tax due from each new entrant to the land. While miri land itself was not
subject to ownership, anything above the land – efectively, houses and other
buildings, trees and vines – was private property and could be bought, sold
or rented out.
The basic peasant holding was a çift (yoke), notionally the area of land
which a family could cultivate with a yoke of oxen: the land and tax regis-
ters recorded villagers as holding a çift or half a çift, or as a bennak (small-
holder), caba bennak (landless) or bachelor (mücerred), and registered their
taxes accordingly. To gain title (tapu) to a piece of land, a peasant paid tapu
tax to the ief-holder and thereafter, provided he did not leave the land fallow
for more than three years and continued to pay his taxes, he had security of
tenure. On his death, the land passed to his son without payment of an entry
ine. If he had several sons, they could share the çift, which would be regis-
tered in the name of one of them. The others would be registered as bennak
or caba bennak, and they could divide their tax liability as they wished. The
75 For example, in the kanun-i liva-yi Aydın of 1528, in Barkan, Kanunlar, p. 7; Colin Imber, ‘The
Law of the Land’, in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (Abingdon, NewYork,
2012), pp. 41–56.
236
taxes due from cultivators of the land varied according to local economies
and local practices, many of which were inherited from pre-Ottoman times.76
However, in all agricultural areas, the basic taxes were the çift tax, an annual
rent payable on each çift, tithes on crops levied usually at rates of one-tenth,
one-eighth or one-ifth, and incidental taxes, notably ines and bride tax, pay-
able on weddings.
Already in the reign of Mehmed II, the land and tax registers recorded the
types and rates of taxes due to each ief-holder in each sancak. In the reign
of his successor, Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), it became customary to append to
each register a law book setting out the taxes due in that sancak, together
with the time and manner of collection and other rules governing relations
between ief-holders and taxpayers. The earliest such law book (kanunname)
was for the sancak of Hüdavendigar (Bursa) and dated 1487. Thereafter, it was
customary to append a kanunname to each register and to amend it as nec-
essary with each new survey of the sancak.77 The reign of Bayezid also saw
the compilation of a “general kanunname” which aimed to codify and, as far
as possible, to standardise the laws governing relations between the military
class and taxpayers, above all between timar-holding sipahis and the peasant
cultivators. Bayezid’s code underwent several recensions between about 1500
and the 1540s.78 The body of law which emerged from this period of codii-
cation came to be known as kanun. Although iscal regulations remained the
most important part of kanun – the word itself may derive directly from the
Greek kanōn, the shortened version of dēmosios kanōn, the basic Byzantine
land tax – the term was to acquire a general sense of Ottoman secular law as
distinct from the shari‘a.
While the kanunnames lay out detailed regulations concerning taxation and
tenure on miri land, they are not wholly systematic and tend to concentrate
on problematic cases. What they do not do is to lay out general principles.
These were known through custom and practice rather than through written
codes or entries in the land and tax registers. However, the conversion of cen-
tral Hungary to an Ottoman province in 1541 created the need for an account
of the general rules of Ottoman land tenure, and the task of providing one
fell to the kadıasker of Rumeli, Ebussuud. The statement that he provided,
together with an extended version that he wrote in connection with a land
76 Bistra Cvetkova, ‘L’inl uence exercée par certaines institutions de Byzance du moyen-âge sur
le système feudal ottoman’, Byzantinobulgarica 1 (1952), 237–57.
77 Heath Lowry, ‘The Ottoman Liva Kanunnames Contained in the Defter-i Hakani’, Osmanlı
Araştırmaları 2 (1981), 43–74.
78 Heyd, Studies, chap.1.
237
Co l in i mb e r
and tax survey of Macedonia in 1568–9, was to gain acceptance as the basic
account of the tenure and taxation of miri land until the end of the empire.
The systematisation of the rules is Ebussuud’s most important achievement,
but he went further than this and provided Ottoman land law with an Islamic
gloss. In order to explain why miri land was not in private ownership, he
adopts the iction that, at the time of the conquest, the treasury – which is
nominally the joint property of the Muslim community – took it into own-
ership in order to prevent its excessive fragmentation through inheritance.
More importantly, he re-deines the two basic Ottoman taxes, the çift tax and
the tithe on crops, in Hanai terms as kharaj muwazzaf and kharaj muqasama,
respectively. This allowed him to rebut objections from taxpayers that they
should not be paying the tithe at a rate higher than one-tenth on the grounds
that the Ottoman tithe was not the ‘ushr of Hanai law but rather kharaj
muqasama, which the ruler could levy at a rate of up to 50 percent. An efect,
therefore, of Ebussuud’s “reconciliation” of Ottoman kanun with Hanai law
was not simply to present the Ottoman law of land and taxation as Islamic but
also to increase, or at least to conirm, the tax-raising powers of the sultan.79
Conclusion
From the 1580s, Ottoman writers began to comment unfavourably on the
changes in the structure and efectiveness of Ottoman government, the loss
of Ottoman supremacy on the battleield and the unrest and rebellion in the
provinces, seeing a return to the virtues of the age of Süleyman I as a solution
to the problems of their own times. They were, however, over-optimistic in
their view of the Süleymanic age, and certainly misguided in the view that
the military and political institutions of that era could be restored. Troubles
in the provinces were endemic throughout the sixteenth century: the ease
with which the rebel prince Bayezid could raise an army in 1558 suggests that
discontent was widespread, even when there was no open revolt, as there had
been in 1511 and 1519 in Anatolia, between 1520 and 1524 in Syria and Egypt,
and in 1527–8 in Anatolia. Furthermore, from the mid-sixteenth century, the
empire’s extended frontiers, geographical barriers and the prolongation of
military campaigns ensured that there would be no more conquests on the
scale of those of Selim I, or of Süleyman I in the irst 20 years of his reign.
These conquests had added vast territories to the empire and with them an
increase in the revenues lowing to the treasury. By contrast, the wars against
79 Colin Imber, Ebu’s-su‘ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997), chap. 5.
238
the Safavids between 1578 and 1590 and the Habsburgs between 1593 and 1606
were the major cause of a chronic iscal deicit. It was to plug this deicit
that the government resorted to the debasement of the currency and such
practices as the sale of oices, which Ottoman commentators saw as a major
cause of decay in the institutions of government. However, the most urgent
reform that the commentators wished to see was a restoration of the timar
system, as it was this that had provided the cavalry forces which they saw
as the key to Ottoman victories in the past. This, too, was wishful thinking.
It was, in fact, largely as a response to Ottoman cavalry that the Habsburg
armies in the war of 1593–1606 developed successful defensive tactics based
on the use of infantry, forcing the Ottomans to follow suit. As infantry came
to predominate on the battleield, there was a consequent decline in the num-
ber of cavalry, and with it an inevitable reduction in the number of timars
needed to support cavalrymen. These iscal and military changes were prob-
lems which Ottoman governments had not had to confront before the 1580s,
and which made it impossible to return to the earlier patterns of government
and, in particular, impractical to resuscitate the timar system.
However, the nostalgic view of the sixteenth century, or rather the tenth
century of the Muslim era, was not entirely misplaced. The empire was a
monarchy which required a commanding igure – if not the sultan himself,
then an efective grand vezir – at the centre of government. By providing both
political and military leadership, the sultans themselves between the time of
Mehmed II and Süleyman I conformed to the pattern of the ideal ruler and
projected an image which later sultans were unable to match. Furthermore,
the reigns of Süleyman I and Selim II (r. 1566–74) in particular saw a succession
of vezirs and other royal servants whose commanding presence and length of
time in oice gave an impression of stability, which stood in sharp contrast to
the decades between the 1580s and the mid-seventeenth century, when ierce
competition for oice and the treasury’s need for the cash demanded from
new appointees led to a rapid succession of appointments and dismissals.
The long-serving grand vezirs İbrahim Paşa (1523–36), Rüstem Paşa (1549–53,
1555–61) and Sokollu Mehmed Paşa (1565–78) dominated the politics of their
era. In the longer term, however, the legacy of the administrative and legal
igures of the late ifteenth and sixteenth centuries was more signiicant. The
sultan Bayezid II oversaw the irst systematic eforts to codify Ottoman iscal,
land and criminal law which regulated relations between tax-paying peasants
and the holder of timars and other iefs on whose land they worked, the irst
empire-wide code appearing in about 1499. The sixteenth century saw further
reinements. In 1516, the ive-time grand vezir Hersekzade Ahmed Paşa issued
239
Co l in i mb e r
an important set of regulations governing peasant tenure, and during the

reign of Süleyman, the long-serving nişancı Celalzade Mustafa (1534–57, 1567)
oversaw a new recension of Bayezid’s code. The most important legal igure
of the era, and perhaps in the history of the empire, was, however, Ebussuud
(kadıasker of Rumeli, 1537–45; chief müftü, 1545–74). It was he who, for the
irst time, formulated a general statement on the principles of Ottoman land
law, ampliied by fetvas and other rulings, which remained efective until the
nineteenth century. He regularised the system of appointing kadıs and, by
composing an anthology of specimen documents, improved the formulation
of court records. By opposing the abolition of cash vakıf s and other demands
of fundamentalist ulema, such as the destruction of church buildings in the
capital, he maintained the social harmony of a multi-confessional society. He
established the rules of orthography for use in Turkish fetvas and other docu-
ments and organised the chief müftü ’s oice as an institution which was able
to issue hundreds of fetvas of a uniformly high standard in the course of a
single day. It was these unspectacular administrative and legal innovations
that provided the solid foundation to Ottoman government which allowed
the empire irst to absorb and stabilise the territories conquered during the if-
teenth and sixteenth centuries and later to survive the multiple political, iscal
and social crises which were to beset it in the decades after the 1580s.
240
8
The Ottoman government and economic life:
Taxation, public inance and trade controls
M u r at Ç i̇za k ç a
Introduction
From the conquest of Constantinople (1453) to the treaty of Zitvatorok (1606),
the Ottoman Empire was a world power, capable of directly challenging both
the Austrian Habsburgs in central Europe and their Spanish relatives in the
western Mediterranean. We will here use 1606 as our cut-of point because
the end of the Long War with the Habsburgs of Vienna (1593–1606) had much
greater inancial and economic importance than the death of Mehmed III in
1603, which otherwise serves as a period limit for this volume. Among the
enemies of Habsburg Spain, we ind the newly emerging Protestant nations
of England and the Netherlands as well as Catholic France. In addition to this
involvement with the Western powers, the sultans also projected their power
towards the East, across the Indian Ocean all the way to Sumatra, where they
aided the Muslims of that region against the Portuguese.
Ultimately, the ierce rivalry between the Ottomans and the Spanish and
Austrian Habsburgs originated in the conquest of Constantinople. Mehmed
II (the Conqueror) and his entourage considered the acquisition of this once
magniicent city, which had been the capital of the Roman Empire for a period
of 1123 years (11 May 330 to 29 May 1453), as the rebirth of the dominion of the
Caesars. The young sultan oicially used the title Kayser-i Rum, “Caesar of the
Romans”. Calling their new emperor “Sultan Basileus”, the Orthodox people
of Constantinople accepted this claim, combining his two attributes, Muslim
and imperial, in a single title. In 1466, the philosopher Georgios Trapezuntios
legitimised this acceptance as follows: “No one should doubt that you are
the Emperor of the Romans. The person, who legally holds the capital city
While the author is grateful to professors Elena Brambilla, Mehmet Genç, Hans Georg Majer, Abbas
Mirakhor, Erol Özvar, Şevket Pamuk and John Spaul for their comments and suggestions, he alone is
responsible for any mistakes. Special thanks are due to Genç and Pamuk for their permission to refer
to what were at the time of writing as-yet unpublished articles.
241
Mur at çi̇zakç a
of the Empire, is the Emperor and the capital city of the Roman Empire
is Constantinople”.1 Not only Greek, Italian and Austrian but also Arab and
Persian authors considered the new empire as the continuation of its Roman
predecessor. For these people, the Ottoman Turks were the Romans of mod-
ern times.2 Even in Sumatra, Malacca and the Indonesian archipelago, the
sultan was known as the “Raja Rum”, the Roman Raja.3
Acceptance as the successor of the Byzantine emperor also gave the sul-
tan a unique religiously based legitimacy among his Orthodox subjects, for
shortly after Constantine had established his capital in Byzantium, when cel-
ebrating the thirteenth year of the emperor’s reign, the noted church histo-
rian Eusebius had declared (in 335 a.d.): “The empire of Constantine is the
earthly relection of the Kingdom of Heaven. As there is but one God, so
there is but one emperor.”4 With so much emphasis on continuity, it was inev-
itable that the Byzantine political doctrine of a worldwide empire ruled by a
single emperor would also ind acceptance among the Ottomans. Moreover,
on the legal plane, this claim served as a legitimisation for Mehmed II’s con-
quests, as the sultan planned to revive the Roman Empire under his own rule
and restore to it all the territories that once had belonged to the empire of
Justinian. Since, as the conqueror of its capital, Mehmed II saw himself as the
legal inheritor of the Roman Empire, the existence of another such empire
in the West was totally unacceptable to him. This refusal became even more
pronounced as the western empire gained strength and in the sixteenth cen-
tury under Charles V (1500–58) began to emerge as another global power. This
time the ambitions of the Habsburg Empire collided with those of Süleyman
the Magniicent. Accordingly, the Venetian resident at the Porte in 1537 wrote
to the doge: “Sultan Sulaiman always calls Rome, Rome. He talks about the
Emperor and his title of Emperor with hatred. He desires himself to be called
the Emperor.”5
In short, during the sixteenth century, two neo-Roman empires, the west-
ern one Christian and the eastern one Muslim, were on a collision course.
Much of the sixteenth century is the history of the epic struggle between
1 Halil İnalcık and Günsel Renda (eds.), Ottoman Civilization, 2 vols. (Ankara, 2002), vol. 1, p. 83.
2 Halil İnalcık, ‘Rûmi’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden, 1995), vol.
8, p. 612; Hans Sturmberger, ‘Das Problem der Vorbildhaftigkeit des türkischen Staatswesens
im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert und sein Einl uss auf den europaeischen Absolutismus’ in Rapports
IV, Methodologie et Histoire Contemporaine, Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of
Historical Sciences, August 29th–September 5th, 1965 (Vienna, 1965), pp. 201–9 at p. 204.
3 Salih Özbaran, Bir Osmanlı Kimliği (Istanbul, 2004), p. 25.
4 Donald M. Nicol, ‘Byzantine Political Thought’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought, ed. James H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 51–79 at p. 52.
5 İnalcık and Renda, Ottoman Civilization, vol. 1, p. 113.
242
The Ottoman government and economic life
these polities, and out of this conl ict there emerged the future leaders of
Europe: England, France and the Netherlands. These “emerging nation-
states” could protect themselves from the ambitious western emperor’s
designs only by obtaining the support of his eastern rival. Indeed, as the king
of France, François I, explained to the Venetian ambassador, in his opinion
the Ottoman state was the only force that could guarantee the survival of
the European states against the Habsburg emperor.6 Ottoman support was
equally signiicant for the Dutch, who oicially since 1568 but in actuality even
earlier were ighting for their independence from Spain. In 1565, the prince of
Orange wrote to his brother: “The Turks are very threatening, which means
that we will not be visited by the [Spanish] King this summer”.7 A century
later, this support was still crucial. At least one scholar has considered the fail-
ure of the English king Charles I (1600–49) to obtain Ottoman aid as one of
the reasons for his demise.8
Halfway across the world, in the Indian Ocean, we encounter a simi-
lar pattern. It was a primary aim of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean to
deprive the Mamluk sultans and later the Ottomans of the Mediterranean
spice trade by diverting it to the new route they had discovered. Once estab-
lished in Egypt, the borderlands of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Basra, the
Ottomans reacted quickly. They formed alliances with the Muslim rulers in
Gujerat and Acheh, and these three Muslim polities, occasionally supported
by Malay, Javanese and even some non-Muslim Indian rulers, launched an
efective defence against the Portuguese.9 The Ottoman sultan legitimised his
leadership of this alliance by means of a novel interpretation of the caliphate,
in which the most powerful sultan, able to defend all Muslims, rightfully pos-
sessed the caliphate regardless of his descent. Thus, as legitimate caliphs of
the Islamic world, the Ottoman sultans considered it their duty to protect the
Muslims of the Indian Ocean from the Portuguese.
In 1513, 1537, 1539, 1547, 1551, 1568, 1573, 1574, 1575 and 1587, the forces of Acheh,
Johor or Japara repeatedly attacked the Portuguese stronghold in Malacca.10
6 İnalcık and Renda, Ottoman Civilization, vol. 1, p. 112.

7 Geofrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands (Short Hills, N.J., 1979), pp. 28–33.
8 Halil İnalcık, ‘Akdeniz ve Türkler’, Doğu-Batı 9, 34, (2005–6), 133–71 at p. 157; Parker, Spain
and the Netherlands, pp. 28–33; Daniel Gofman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire (Seattle, 1998),
p. 98.
9 Halil İnalcık, ‘Introduction: Empire and Population’, in An Economic and Social History of
the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1994), vol. 1,
pp. 11–43 at p. 20; Halil İnalcık, ‘The India Trade’, in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 315–63 at p. 328.
10 David K. Bassett, ‘European Inl uence in the Malay Peninsula, 1511–1786’, Journal of the
Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 33, 3 (1961), reprinted in British Malaya, 1824–67,
ed. L. A. Mills (Selangor, 2003), pp. 9–35 at pp. 11–13.
243
Mur at çi̇zakç a
Moreover, when the Portuguese conquered strategically important places

like Goa, Malacca, Socotra and Ormuz, Muslim merchants, and together
with them much of the spice trade, simply moved on to other ports like
Acheh, Bantam and Brunei, thereby enriching these cities and depriving the
Portuguese exchequer in Malacca of much revenue. By 1530, the Portuguese
were on the defensive, after the Sultan of Acheh had repulsed their attacks on
Sumatra.11 Recent research moreover has revealed that the Ottomans inanced
their support for the sultanates of South-East Asia by means of the spice trade;
usually the sultan provided cannon, musketeers and cannon founders.12 This
policy is analogous to a modern super-power exporting military technology
to its allies and receiving payment in raw materials. Exporting technology and
materials had the added advantage that it enabled the Ottomans to curb the
illegal export of precious metals to South Asia, a perennial tendency going
back to Roman times.13 By 1566, the alliance had acquired a new dimension,
when the sultan of Acheh informed the Ottoman ruler that he himself as
well as the Muslims of the Maldive Islands and India recognised him as their
suzerain and protector.14 Enjoying Ottoman support in the form of military
technology, Muslim rulers of South-East Asia, particularly Acheh, constituted
a formidable challenge to the Portuguese during the second half of the 1500s
and on until 1640.15
To sum up, the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century was a
world power perfectly capable of challenging its chief rivals, the Spanish and
Austrian Habsburgs, not only in the western Mediterranean and south-east-
ern Europe but also at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean; after all, Portugal
had become part of the Spanish world empire after the demise of its royal
dynasty in 1580.
As for the Ottoman impact on European politics, it appears to have been a
complex matter. On the one hand, the sultans’ powerful and huge army, sup-
ported by artillery, forced the Habsburgs also to raise very large armies, thus
pushing them towards a military-bureaucratic absolutism. On the other hand,
Ottoman support for the anti-Habsburg powers, namely France, England
and the Dutch Republic, had both military and more importantly economic
11 Ibid., p. 14.
12 Giancarlo Casale, ‘The Ottoman Administration of the Spice Trade in the Sixteenth Century
Red Sea and Persian Gulf ’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, 2 (2006),
170–98; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010).
13 Casale, ‘Spice Trade’, pp. 193–4.
14 İnalcık, ‘The India Trade’, in İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social History, vol. 1,
p. 328.
15 Bassett, ‘European Inl uence’, in Mills, British Malaya, 1824–67, p. 14.
244
aspects: constant Ottoman pressure upon the Spanish armies forced the latter
to repeatedly withdraw from Holland, allowing the Dutch to recuperate and
extend the revolt. The diiculties of the Spanish Habsburgs resulted in the
formation of the Dutch Republic, internationally recognised in 1648. Where
France was concerned, the Ottoman alliance with François I (1494–1547) made
it easier for the latter to sustain his rivalry against Charles V; and, perhaps
more signiicantly, the capitulations inally granted to King Charles IX of
France (r. 1560–74) in 1569 obliged all non-Venetians from the western lands to
trade under the French lag. But about ten years later, in 1580, Sultan Murad III
(r. 1574–95) granted capitulations to the English as well, which permitted the
latter to begin a proitable trade in Iranian silk, much of it exported through
Ottoman territory; the English also had sought political support in their war
with Spain, which, however, did not materialise.
For over a hundred years, from the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s, the Ottoman
armies were superior to their European and Safavid competitors, and while by
the end of our period unquestioned superiority had come to be a thing of the
past, the Ottoman military enjoyed a supply system that was far superior to
that of their rivals.16 Only a century later, after 1688, did the ministers of Louis
XIV (1638–1715) organise a system of comparable eiciency in a European
kingdom. With cash, the sultans’ oicials purchased essential foodstufs from
the peasantry living near the main army routes and stored them at a series
of stopping points separated by a day’s march. When the sultan planned a
campaign, his vezirs issued orders to transport supplies to the appointed loca-
tions and sell them to the armies on the march; the term sürsat denoted this
arrangement. Sürsat orders clearly stated the government’s intention to pro-
vide for the troops and at the same time allow the producers to make a proit;
whether this latter intention materialised depended on the sale prices decreed
by the central administration.17 If the state-determined prices were close to
market prices, the peasants must have indeed made a proit; yet if the oppo-
site was true, such deliveries were a burden for the producers. However, dur-
ing the period under consideration, the system worked reasonably well, and
the government’s means of coercion in outlying villages were, after all, lim-
ited. Thus there may well have been price incentives encouraging producers
to fulil their quotas.
1593–1606 (Vienna, 1988); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (London, 1999).
17 Lüti Güçer, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Hububat Meselesi ve Hububattan Alınan Vergiler
(Istanbul, 1964), p. 93.
245
Mur at çi̇zakç a
These observations lead us to ask what kind of an economic system

was behind the Ottomans’ military might and how these operations were
inanced. It is to these questions that we will now turn.
The Empire’s “budgets”: Ottoman imperial

revenues and expenditures
Numerous scholars have attempted to conceptualise the Ottoman economy.
With the exception of the Asian Mode of Production, based primarily on
Marxist ideas, which is basically deductive, all of the relevant models are
inductive; in other words, they attempt to generalise on the basis of historical
observations. We will now focus on the known facts about the Ottoman econ-
omy in its political context and refer to these models whenever pertinent.
Beginning with Ömer Lüti Barkan, several scholars have published and
analysed Ottoman annual account books, for which in our ield the term
“budgets” has become customary; some of these accounts may refer to peri-
ods shorter or longer than a single year. Most recently, Mehmet Genç and
Erol Özvar have summarised earlier studies and expanded them through their
own work on Ottoman budgets.18 As a result, we now possess a reasonably
good idea about the size and other characteristics of Ottoman imperial rev-
enues and, albeit indirectly, of the economy that produced them.
Estimates by contemporary European observers are a good starting point.
A comparison with Ottoman budget data indicates that the revenue igures
given by these outside observers were remarkably accurate; typically they dif-
fered from the oicial accounts by no more than a 10 per cent margin. But the
estimates of expenses were not nearly so accurate. It was as if the Ottoman
rulers wanted European observers to know about their revenues, probably to
impress them, but kept the expenditure data secret. Throughout the sixteenth
century, both revenues and expenditures apparently increased the former
more rapidly than the latter. Only after the 1560s did expenditures begin to
exhibit a faster rate of growth; yet total expenditures did not exceed revenues
until the very late 1500s, in the middle of an exhausting war (1593–1606). Put
diferently, throughout most of the sixteenth century we do not observe sig-
niicant deicits, which only appear in the budgets of 1592–3 and 1597–8. For
most of the sixteenth century, revenues l uctuated around an annual average
of 132 tons of pure silver and expenditures around 118 tons. In Venetian ducats,
18 Mehmet Genç and Erol Özvar (eds.), Osmanlı Maliyesi, Kurumlar ve Bütçeler, 2 vols. (Istanbul,
2006), vol. 1.
246
these sums are equivalent to 3,000,000 and 2,680,000 ducats, respectively. If we

take into consideration not only the central treasury but also extra-treasury
revenues from sultanic pious foundations (vakıf ) and military tax assignments
(timar, zeamet), from 1461 to 1560 total revenues ranged between 11 million and
15 million ducats. From the beginning to the middle of the sixteenth century,
the Ottoman treasury succeeded in doubling its revenues in real terms. By
contrast, expenditures increased only by about half as much.19
On their own, these igures do not mean very much, and we must compare
them with the inances of other European powers. Thus the annual average
expenditure of the Ottoman central treasury, about 118 tons of silver, was
dwarfed by Spanish and French expenditures. Towards the end of the sixteenth
century, the Spanish exchequer spent 500 tons and its French counterpart 440
tons.20 On the other hand, the Ottoman annual average expenditure of 118
tons was about twice as large as that of Venice. Considering that the Ottoman
Empire was able to project its power from the western Mediterranean all the
way to Sumatra and at the same time aid France, England and the Netherlands
against the Habsburgs, there is a crying need to account for the paradox that
these comparative budget data represent.
One explanation lies in the fact that the Ottoman central treasury data do
not relect timar and vakıf revenues collected and spent locally. However, the
1527 budget does allow us to incorporate these revenues and expenditures
and thereby calculate totals.21 Accordingly, in the year 1527, the total expendi-
tures of the Ottoman Empire, paid out by the central treasury as well as by
local authorities, amounted to 306 tons of pure silver.22 This igure brings the
Ottoman Empire closer to France (440 tons) but still falls short to a signiicant
extent; the diference is even more marked in the case of Spain (500 tons).
Therefore we still have some explaining to do.
A comparative analysis of tax-collection systems is helpful as well. We have
noted that the Ottoman treasury enjoyed budget surpluses for most of the
sixteenth century. Thus sultans, vezirs and inance directors were more than
capable of inancing the aggregate government expenditure of this period.
In this relatively comfortable position, they hardly needed to reform their
public inance system. Indeed, sixteenth-century Ottoman public inance was
19 Erol Özvar, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nin Bütçe Harcamaları, 1509–1788’, in Genç and Özvar, Osmanlı
Maliyesi: Kurumlar ve Bütçeler, vol. 1, pp. 197–239 at pp. 201–8, table 47.
20 Ibid., p. 210, table 50.
21 Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘H. 933–934 Tarihli Bütçe Cetveli ve Ekleri’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat
Fakültesi Mecmuası 15, 1–4 (1953–4), 280–329.
22 Özvar, ‘Bütçe Harcamaları’, in Genç and Özvar, Osmanlı Maliyesi, p. 211.
247
Mur at çi̇zakç a
basically the same as it had been in previous centuries; on the one hand, tax
farmers (mültezim) collected urban indirect taxes, while, on the other, timar-
holders beneited from rural taxes and converted them on the spot into mil-
itary services, as they stafed the cavalry forces known as the sipahi. As is
well known, major reforms in public inance usually occur in response to
military or political crises. It is possible that, unlike western Europe, where
more or less similar decentralised political systems were in ierce competition
and could not easily expand at one another’s expense, the absolutist Ottoman
state could do so with relative ease against the feudal Balkans and even the
kingdom of Hungary.
Political factors promoting Ottoman expansion

Apart from purely military and inancial considerations, we thus need to pay
special attention to political factors, especially Ottoman absolutism. As the
sultan concentrated overwhelming power in his person, he gained an efective-
ness that was much admired in sixteenth-century Europe. Alexander Rüstow,
a well-known political scientist who taught in Turkey for some years, consid-
ered the Ottoman Empire the most modern and advanced absolutist state of
its time. He emphasised that Ottoman absolutism at the time of Süleyman the
Magniicent had a two-hundred-year head start over its European rivals and
thus provided a model for the latter to emulate.23 More speciically, sixteenth-
century observers such as Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1520–92) admired the
absence of an estate of noblemen in the Ottoman Empire: members of the
sultan’s governing elite could neither inherit position from their ancestors nor
pass it on to their ofspring.24 When arriving at this latter judgement, how-
ever, European observers only had a limited social group in mind, namely the
sultan’s servitors (kul), as merchants and scholar-oicials (ulema) could and
did inherit. As for the kul, they received their wealth entirely because of their
successes and enjoyed great vertical mobility. Foreign observers also noted
that Ottoman Greeks, in spite of their religious diference, might advance to
very high positions in tax farming. It was therefore not surprising that in some
regions the Balkan peasantry received the Ottoman armies with enthusiasm.
Sixteenth-century writers on political afairs, including Giovanni Botero (ca.
1544–1617) and Busbecq, considered the Ottomans as the Romans of modern
times. Machiavelli recognised the advantages the absolutist Ottoman sultan
23 Sturmberger, ‘Das Problem der Vorbildhaftigkeit’, p. 203.

24 Augerius Gislenius Busbequius, Legationis turcicae epistolae quatuor, ed. Zweder von Martels,
Dutch trans. Michel Goldsteen (Hilversum, 1994), p. 103.
248
enjoyed vis-à-vis Western feudal lords and considered him the prototype of
the French kings of his time; this notion survived into the late 1600s, when
Louis XIV was considered the “new Soliman”. Martin Luther clearly referred
to a similar admiration, Türkenbewunderung, current in the political thought
of his time when he urged Germans to respect the emperor as the Turks
respected theirs. Diplomats and travellers well informed about Ottoman
afairs reported that a decision which took weeks of negotiations and compro-
mises between various kings and princes in the Holy Roman Empire would
be taken by the Ottoman sultan in a single session of his council (divan).25
In short, for a while, the absolutism of the Ottoman rulers allowed them to
expand into decentralised Europe with considerable ease.
In addition, the Ottoman policy known as istimalet, or accommodation,
also facilitated expansion. After all, the Qur’an ordains Muslims to respect
Moses and Jesus Christ as well as their books.26 Accordingly, the Ottomans
granted religious freedom to Christians and Jews. Martin Luther con-
irmed this much discussed religious tolerance when he observed that the
Turks granted religious freedom to all, while the pope did not.27 Moreover,
the Ottomans successfully exploited inter-Christian rivalry, for instance in
the Balkans, where Venice and Hungary also had expansionary schemes. If
among these three competing powers the Ottomans were the winners, they
owed this major success to their policy of accommodation. To Orthodox
Christians, both Hungarian and Venetian expansion would have meant domi-
nation by Catholics, who regarded them as schismatics. Ottoman sultans and
vezirs, by contrast, protected the Orthodox Church. Consequently, whereas
the Balkan Christians resisted the Hungarians and Venetians, they cooper-
ated with the Ottomans, an attitude which explains the repeated failures of
Venetian condottieri and Hungarian crusaders to dislodge the Ottomans from
the Balkans.28 Moreover, when in the late 1500s the Habsburgs tried to initiate
a Counterreformation in Transylvania, a revolt erupted and the principality
returned to the Ottoman orbit.29 Since Protestantism not only was tolerated
25 Sturmberger, ‘Das Problem der Vorbildhaftigkeit’, pp. 202–8.

26 Qur’an, III: 3.
27 Halil İnalcık, ‘Ottoman Methods of Conquest’, Studia Islamica 2 (1951), 103–29; Heath Lowry,
Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos
(Istanbul, 2002); Sturmberger, ‘Das Problem der Vorbildhaftigkeit’, p. 206.
28 İnalcık, ‘Empire and Population’, in İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social History, vol. 1,
p. 15.
29 Meinolf Arens, Habsburg und Siebenbürgen 1600–1605, Gewaltsame Eingliederungsversuche
eines ostmitteleuropäischen Fürstentums in einen frühabsolutistischen Reichsverband (Cologne,
Weimar and Vienna, 2001); Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It
(London, 2004), p. 102.
249
Mur at çi̇zakç a
but also expanded under Ottoman rule, Reinhold Lubenau of Kaliningrad/

Königsberg considered it a miracle that all the Christians sufering under the
pope’s yoke did not immigrate into the Ottoman lands.30
But, as a matter of fact, Christians did immigrate in large numbers, and
not only because of religious tolerance but also to escape serfdom. When
the Hungarian peasantry armed by the nobility to ight the Turks turned
against their masters in 1515, a terrible civil war ensued, which resulted in
the permanent enserfment of the Hungarian peasantry. In Hungary as well
as in the frontier province of Bosnia, squeezed between the two neo-Roman
empires, the Ottomans competed successfully with their Austrian rivals for
the favour of the peasantry. As part of this policy, they at least during the
early decades of the sixteenth century abolished the corvée and other feudal
obligations.31 Indeed, in 1551 the Hungarian magnates felt compelled to ask
King Ferdinand to emancipate the peasantry since the Turks had declared
their peasants free and many Hungarians and Croatians had already led in
that direction. In 1556, some 70,000 more peasants left the Habsburg terri-
tories for Ottoman Bosnia. Not that human traic was always one way: as
the Ottoman armies advanced, some Hungarian peasants also vacated their
villages and disappeared; and as a result about 20 per cent of the villages of
the Simontornya district became pastureland. An analysis of abandoned vil-
lages has revealed, however, that the Ottoman advance in comparison to the
destruction of medieval warfare was decidedly less brutal. Moreover, once
Ottoman rule was irmly established, the ratio of abandoned villages to the
total number of settlements declined to a mere 3.5 per cent, for newcomers
eventually re-settled many villages abandoned before the advancing armies.32
Almost a century later, Habsburg authorities were still concerned about the
l ight of serfs to Ottoman territories. In 1645, the commander of the Austrian
forces had to admit that the peasants among his troops did greater harm to
his war efort than the enemy.33 Even so, however, Royal Hungary in the 1500s
had twice the population of the Ottoman sector – a puzzle which needs to be
addressed by specialists in Hungarian history.34

31 Halil İnalcık, ‘Empire and Population’, in İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social History,
vol. 1, pp. 16, 24.
32 Fikret Adanır, ‘The Ottoman Peasantries, 1360–1860’, in The Peasantries of Europe from the
Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (London and New York, 1998), pp. 269–
310 at p. 287; Géza Dávid, 16. Yüzyılda Simontornya Sancağ ı (Istanbul, 1999), pp. 81–2.
33 Ferenc Szakaly, ‘Das Bauerntum und die Kaempfe gegen die Türken bzw. gegen Habsburg in
Ungarn im 16. – 17. Jahrhundert’, in Aus der Geschichte der ostmitteleuropaeischen Bauernbewegungen
im 16.-17. Jahrhundert, ed. Gusztáv Heckenast (Budapest, 1977), pp. 251–66 at p. 258.
34 Géza Dávid, ‘Ottoman armies and warfare, 1453–1603’, Chapter 9, this volume, p. 300.
250
Thus, not only the inherent eiciency of absolutism, with its concentra-
tion of overwhelming power in the hands of a single ruler and a superb mil-
itary organisation, but also religious tolerance and relative freedom for the
peasantry facilitated the Ottoman advance in the Balkans.35 To these factors
we must add the well-known devşirme, which provided certain elements of
the Christian population with opportunities for vertical mobility; the term
devşirme denoted the practice by which a certain proportion of boys in the
conquered territories were recruited for the service of the sultans. With skill
and good fortune, some of these people had brilliant careers.
At least in the 1400s, sultans and vezirs encouraged not only the peasantry
but also the petty nobility of the Balkans and the Orthodox Church to accept
Ottoman rule. Halil İnalcık has shown that at this stage, depending upon
the region, the administration assigned anywhere from 3.5 to 50 per cent of
all timars to the Christian nobility and Orthodox ecclesiastical institutions.
During the sixteenth century, however, the sultans apparently abandoned this
arrangement; perhaps the istimalet policy ground to a halt after the conquest
of Syria and Egypt, when Islamic scholar oicials from these regions vocally
expressed their dissatisfaction.36
To sum up, these socio-political factors made the Ottoman advance into
the vast Balkan territories relatively easy, and, as a result, the sultans of the
1400s and 1500s continuously expanded their tax base. In fact, when the latter
faced iscal problems, rather than reforming their tax-collection system, the
Ottoman rulers may well have chosen the easier option of simply continuing
to advance in Europe in order to increase their revenues.37
But among the rulers and populations of Catholic and Protestant Europe,
the inevitable reaction was not long in coming. First of all, we have already
noted that while the sultans of the sixteenth century continued to protect the
rights of their non-Muslim subjects, the istimalet policy slowly came to an
end. Enthusiasm for the Ottoman advance should have dwindled as a result.38
Secondly, Ottoman absolutism became the model for central European
dynasts to follow.39 Indeed, the closer the Ottoman armies approached the
Habsburg heartlands, the greater was the threat and also the urge to emulate
35 Murphey, Ottoman Warfare; Finkel, The Administration of Warfare.

36 Halil İnalcık, ‘Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’na’, in Halil İnalcık, Fatih Devri
Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar (Ankara, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 137–84 at p. 168; Lowry, Fifteenth
Century Ottoman Realities, p. 175.
37 I owe this point to Mehmet Genç.
38 Lowry, Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities, p. 175.
39 Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and
Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1992), p. 11.
251
Mur at çi̇zakç a
them. To establish a uniied front against the sultans, many princes on the
territory of the Holy Roman Empire (Landesfürsten) pushed for and obtained
a considerable degree of centralisation and concentration of power. As for
the Habsburgs of Vienna, in 1556 they established a permanent War Council
(Hof kriegsrat), which from the start irmly focused on the eastern front against
the Ottoman rulers. It has been claimed that “without the Turkish threat a
Habsburg Monarchy would not have become a reality”.40
The Ottoman revenue administration: Missing out

on the “inancial revolution”
There were other and perhaps more important impediments to a fur-
ther Ottoman advance, for as a result of the so-called inancial revolution,
European cities, principalities and kingdoms could borrow huge funds from
their respective publics at very low cost. This western European system of
domestic borrowing actually had started way back during the thirteenth cen-
tury in the cities of northern France, Flanders and Tuscany, and the “emergent
nation-states” later on successfully adopted this “permanently funded national
debt”.41 The debt was “public” because it was the responsibility of the govern-
ment itself. Secondly, in order to escape the ierce medieval usury prohibition,
the debt was based not upon loans but upon the sale of perpetual annuities.
This condition of perpetuity made the debt “permanent”. Finally, the latter
was “funded” because governments had a legal obligation to earmark speciic
taxes for the annuity payments contracted for.42
Thanks to these arrangements, European governments began to borrow
ever larger amounts at constantly declining rates of interest. While during
the eleventh century in France certain mortgage payments involved 100 per
cent interest, in 1152 Genoa borrowed at 40 per cent and managed to reduce
the rate to 8 per cent by 1259. In 1171, Venice began to borrow at 5 per cent,
and this low rate became the norm in 1262. Most remarkably, these mod-
est rates of interest prevailed in the very long run. The Genoese public debt
was increased to 6,440,000 ducats in 1509, with an interest rate of just 2.8 per
cent. In 1624, the yield was reduced to 1.03 per cent, a world record that still
stands. Investors regarded the Genoese public debt as so safe that although

41 John Munro, ‘The Usury Doctrine and Urban Public Finances in Late Medieval Flanders’,
paper submitted at the XXXIX Settimana di Studi, Fiscal Systems in the European Economy,
Prato, 22–25 April 2007.
42 Munro, ‘The Usury Doctrine’.
252
nominally it was less than the city’s total gross national product (GNP), the
market valued it at more than double the national income. Charles V, the
Holy Roman Emperor and archrival of the Ottomans, was also able to bor-
row, in Castile among other places. The juros, as the Castilian annuities were
called, represented perpetual indebtedness rather than indebtedness for life.
They produced yields that started out at around 10 per cent and then after 1530
declined to 5 per cent.43
In short, successful European governments were able to borrow up to twice
as much as the GNPs of their respective realms at very low rates of interest.
Moreover, when we compare the Genoese public debt with the total revenue
of the Ottoman central treasury, we make a striking observation: measured
in Venetian ducats, in 1509 the Genoese public debt of 6,440,000 ducats was
about ive times as high as the revenue of the Ottoman central treasury for
the same year, which stood at 1,326,144 Venetian ducats.44 Put diferently, by
paying just 2.8 per cent interest, the Genoese government could borrow a
sum of money amounting to more than ive times the annual revenue of the
Ottoman central treasury – it was only in 1785 that the Ottoman authorities
were able to borrow up to half the annual revenue of their own central trea-
sury, but at a cost of 15 to 19 per cent.45 Moreover, from Genoa to Lübeck and
Hamburg public borrowing was widespread all over western Europe.46 City-
states, princes, kings and even emperors inanced their enterprises by this
means. Obviously not all polities managed their public debt prudently, and
failure to do so led to royal bankruptcies, particularly in Spain and France.
This achievement of the European inancial revolution made many things
possible, above all raising armies; in fact, domestic borrowing became the cru-
cial component of European warfare. By contrast, the Ottomans lacked access
to funds of this magnitude, and already by the early 1500s sultans and vezirs
faced a formidable if disguised inancial power on their western frontiers.
43 All the igures in this paragraph are from James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The
Financial Roots of Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 2006), pp. 77, 97, 100, 123.
44 Peter Spuford, ‘Coinage and Currency’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol.
3: Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages, ed. Michael M. Postan, Edwin E.
Rich and Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 576–602 at p. 590; Şevket Pamuk, Osmanlı
İmparatorluğu’nda Paranın Tarihi (Istanbul, 1999), p. 65; Doug Prather, ‘The Ducat’, World
Internet Numismatic Society Newsletter 3, 13 (2004); Erol Özvar, ‘Bütçe Harcamaları’, in Genç
and Özvar, Osmanlı Maliyesi, p. 204, table 48.
45 Mehmet Genç, ‘Esham’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, ed. Tahir Altıkulaç
et al. (Ankara, 1995), vol. 11, pp. 376–80 at pp. 378–9.
46 Hans-Peter Baum, ‘Annuities in Late Medieval Hanse Towns’, Business History Review 59, 1
(spring 1985), 24–48; Marc Boone, K. Davids and P. Janssens (eds.), Urban Public Debts: Urban
Governments and the Market for Annuities in Western Europe (14th-18th Centuries) (Turnhout,
2003).
253
Mur at çi̇zakç a
A long-term perspective: Increasing collection costs and

the inancial administration’s attempts to cope
To complete this comparison, we will take a closer look at Ottoman meth-
ods of public inance, but to explicate the problems involved we will have to
go beyond the time limit of 1606 speciied at the beginning of this chapter.
During the sixteenth century, the dominant mode of Ottoman public inance
was the traditional tax farming, known as iltizam. This procedure was not
really domestic borrowing in the European sense but rather privatised tax col-
lection, the inancial administration holding a public auction and delegating
the right to collect the taxes in question to the highest bidder, an entrepre-
neur called a mültezim. While tax farmers received their appointments for an
indeinite period, the administration could at any time transfer the privilege
to a rival who promised to pay a higher amount. If the current tax farmer
increased his payment to match the new bid, he could continue in oice. If
not, the treasury calculated the money due according to the number of days
the tax farmer had collected his dues (kıst el-yevm). After the outgoing mül-
tezim had settled his accounts, the new holder took over the tax farm.47
It is very diicult to calculate what it cost the sultan’s treasury to collect
taxes by this system. But in general we can say that the more competitive the
auctions, the greater the amounts the treasury could collect. Yet towards the
end of the sixteenth century we observe a tendency in the opposite direction:
now many tax-farm yields began to “freeze”. During the early 1600s, these
“frozen” tax farms continued to increase in number, and by mid-century
roughly 31 per cent of all tax farms were in this position.48
A probable explanation for the anomaly just described is the risk aversion
of the Ottoman inancial administration, beginning with the often tumultu-
ous 1580s, for competitive auctions generally relect economic conjuncture.
When the economy expands, prospective tax farmers compete and promise
to pay ever higher amounts. But, in times of depression, the reverse occurs
and the treasury receives lower bids. With irm annual commitments to the
military corps, the sultans’ administration must have felt extremely uncom-
fortable with these l uctuations. Consequently, inancial oicials may have
come to an agreement with certain members of the military and, in return
for ixed annual payments, allowed these men to collect the revenues from
47 Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu, Osmanlılarda Narh Müessesesi ve 1640 Tarihli Narh Defteri (Istanbul,
1983), p. 22.
48 Murat Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution of Business Partnerships: The Islamic World and Europe
(Leiden, 1996), p. 143.
254
certain tax sources speciically assigned to them. In other words, after having
paid the treasury a ixed amount, these military men cum tax collectors were
free to demand whatever they wanted, subject of course, at least in principle,
to the tax rates ixed by the sultan’s law. When tax farmers exceeded these
rates, Ottoman subjects could and did complain to their ruler, but we do not
know how often they obtained redress.49 Nor do we know what percentage
of the taxes collected actually reached the central treasury and what percent-
age was retained by the mültezims. As a result, we cannot calculate the exact
cost of Ottoman tax collection in this period. But obviously the treasury lost
money when the number of “frozen” tax farms was constantly on the rise.50
However, for a somewhat later period, we can approximately calculate the
cost of tax collection in the form of “revenue forgone”, and given the lack of
earlier data, these igures may at least provide an order of magnitude. After
1695, the treasury introduced the lifetime tax farm (malikâne).51 In the fol-
lowing years, out of 100 gruş collected from the public, only 24 gruş actually
reached the treasury. Thus the cost of taxation was approximately 75 per cent,
a major loss not only to the exchequer but also to the taxpayers, for in many
cases the latter would have had to make up the shortfall in the form of further
dues.52 In western and southern Europe, however, contemporary domestic
borrowing rates for kings and princes were as low as 3 per cent. Indeed, if
we consider the cost of taxation in the form of “taxes forgone” as a rough
approximation of the rate of interest paid by a Western ruler for domestic
borrowing, we will conclude that the Ottomans borrowed at extremely high
and disadvantageous rates.
To place these developments into perspective, a brief glance at the 1700s
is unavoidable. After another disastrous war (1768–74), the Ottoman govern-
ment attempted a major inancial reorganisation to reduce the amount of
“taxes forgone”. In this context (in 1775), the inancial administration inally
introduced tax-farm shares (esham); this novel arrangement implied selling to
the public shares in the revenues of certain speciied tax farms, thus tapping
into the savings of small investors who could not have bid for an iltizam or
malikâne on their own. By this device, the Ottoman government was able to
signiicantly reduce its cost of borrowing.53
49 Hans Georg Majer (ed.), Das osmanische “Registerbuch der Beschwerden” (Şikayet Defteri) vom
Jahre 1675 (Vienna, 1984); Suraiya Faroqhi, Coping with the State (Istanbul, 1995).
50 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, pp. 140–5.
51 Mehmet Genç, ‘Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi’, in Mehmet Genç, Devlet ve Ekonomi
(Istanbul, 2000), pp. 99–153.
52 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, p. 166.
53 Genç, ‘Esham’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, p. 376.
255
Mur at çi̇zakç a
Of the three tax-collection systems considered so far iltizam, malikâne and

esham, the last was the most similar to European forms of domestic borrow-
ing. Indeed, the original tax-farm shares, issued with special appointment
documents (berats) and registered to a speciic person, came closest to the
Flemish lijfrenten, annuities paid for life. But when the treasury issued esham
without a document referring to a speciic person, in other words without
the berat, the tax-farm share became a de facto bearer’s share. This peculiarity
made it very similar to the Flemish erfelijk renten, payable in perpetuity. The
transition from esham “for the life of the investor” to esham “without berat ”,
meaning for several lives, made this instrument very popular and at the same
time reduced the cost of borrowing to the Ottoman exchequer from 18–19
per cent to merely 8 per cent.54
To sum up, in the ield of public inance, the Ottoman Empire struggled
with a very signiicant disadvantage: compared to sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century European polities, the exchequer’s cost of borrowing was huge.
More precisely, with the iltizam system, which was prevalent in the 1500s, the
Ottoman administration was not even borrowing but merely delegating the
right to collect taxes to private enterprise. True public borrowing, as we have
seen, only began in 1775 with the introduction of the esham system, almost
two hundred years after the end of the period treated here and about half a
millennium later than in western Europe.
The reasons for iscal ineiciency

We now need to answer the question of why the inancial administration of
the 1500s did not adopt the solutions that its successors of the 1600s and 1700s
were to devise when under severe pressure due to long and diicult wars. The
answer that comes to mind irst is that the Ottoman elite and more speciically
the ulema may have considered tax-farm shares as usurious. If so, it would
have been all but impossible for the administration of, for instance, Süleyman
the Magniicent, who placed such a high emphasis on upholding Islamic reli-
gious law, to even consider the introduction of tax-farm shares into inancial
administration. To ind out more, we need to look at just what exactly consti-
tutes riba, usury or interest, from the perspective of Islamic law.
First of all, religious scholars deine riba as a pre-determined surplus over
and above the loan at issue. Moreover, the following three conditions must be
54 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, p. 186; Munro, ‘Usury Doctrine’; Genç, ‘Esham’, in Türkiye
Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, p. 379.
256
jointly fulilled for a transaction to constitute riba: (1) excess or surplus over
and above the loan capital to be returned to the lender; (2) determination
of this surplus in relation to time; (3) stipulation of this surplus in the loan
agreement.55 Now, as the lifespan of the person purchasing a tax-farm share is
unknown, there can be no certainty of a surplus occurring; in itself this fact
nulliies all three conditions. In addition, the lack of any stipulation oblig-
ing the exchequer as the borrower to redeem the esham eliminates the basic
characteristic of the loan and also violates the irst and third conditions. Put
diferently, the government could but was in no way obliged to redeem the
revenue shares. Therefore the latter were not loans, and according to Islamic
law, where there is no loan there is also no usury.56 In short, since esham are
not usurious, interest prohibition cannot have been an impediment for the
introduction of domestic borrowing into the Ottoman economy.
A second explanation for the late introduction of domestic borrowing may
be the simple fact that the Ottomans did not really see any need for it. We have
already referred to their ability to advance with relative ease into the Balkans
of the late 1400s and early 1500s and thus expand their tax base through con-
quest. Foreign observers have pointed out that it was much cheaper for the
Ottomans to wage war than for their European rivals.57 Indeed, a Venetian
diplomat observed as late as 1640 that the sultan could put into the ield a
force of 200,000 horsemen without spending a penny from his treasury.58
A third possible explanation is related to attitude. Since absolutist rulers
tend to consider all assets on the territory that they govern more or less as
their own, why indeed should they consider borrowing from their subjects?59
This mentality problem is worthy of serious consideration. If we concede
this point, Ottoman absolutism – and its corollary the absolutist mentality –
so admired in the West during the 1500s, actually appears to have carried in
itself the seeds of its own destruction, for in the long and very long runs,
history has demonstrated that states with wider political participation tend
to win out over the absolutist ones. Governed by the rule of law, regimes
that allow a larger group of people to participate in political decision-making
are in a better position when it comes to borrowing from their own public,
and this fact has played a very important role in their success.60 Flemish or
55 Abd al Mun’im Mahmud al Qusi, ‘Riba, Islamic Law and Interest’, Ph.D. dissertation
(Philadelphia: Temple University, 1981–2), p. 122.
56 Genç, ‘Esham’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, pp. 377–9; Al Qusi, ‘Riba’, p. 122.
57 Faroqhi, Ottoman Empire and World around It, p. 108.
58 Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, p. 36.
59 Macdonald, Free Nation, pp. 6–7.
60 Ibid.
257
Mur at çi̇zakç a
Italian medieval city-states and the Crown in England in the late seventeenth
century all needed to persuade merchant guilds or else Parliament of their
credit-worthiness, leading to the recognition of the subjects’ property rights
and also to sensitivity on the part of the public inance administrations to the
needs and concerns of the lenders, usually merchants.
Indeed, when the state borrows from its citizens and wishes to do so time
and again, a convergence of interests emerges, a situation which makes gov-
ernment responsive to the needs of its creditors. In the Ottoman Empire by
contrast, we only occasionally observe any sensitivity to the needs of the
mercantile community. If commercial interests were not a priority for the
Ottoman government, then what was? What were the foundation stones
upon which the sultans’ economic policy rested?
Ottoman economic policy “in the long run”

A major specialist on these issues, Mehmet Genç, has described the foundations
of Ottoman oicial policy as “provisionism, iscalism and traditionalism”.61 By
“provisionism” the author means an overwhelming concern with the needs
of army and navy in addition to the sultan’s court and the inhabitants of the
Ottoman capital. In this context, it is the administration’s principal aim to
ensure that the people involved in the sultan’s service and also the inhabit-
ants of Istanbul receive the necessary supplies, the government often securing
goods at prices way below market level. “Fiscalism” stands for a dominant
concern with maximising revenues in the short term, neglecting the longer-
term view that may recommend forgoing certain types of income in order to
increase production or trade, which may generate much higher revenues in
the future. As for “traditionalism”, by this term Genç refers to the Ottoman
administration’s often expressed belief that past practice had a legitimacy of
its own, while deviating from it was always problematic. After all, past prac-
tice had ensured the balance of social groups within the Ottoman enterprise,
which “novelties” might endanger.
In what way was this approach “typically Ottoman”? In responding to his
critics, Genç has argued that although various cities and empires at various
times may indeed have applied similar policies, Ottoman practice was unique
in the sense that it remained consistent over three hundred years, from the
mid-sixteenth century all the way to the 1850s. Such a consistent devotion to
61 Mehmet Genç, ‘Osmanlı İktisadi Dünya Görüşünün İlkeleri’, in Genç, Devlet ve Ekonomi,
pp. 43–53.
258
“provisionism”, for instance, meant that the Ottoman authorities generally

impeded exportation but allowed and even encouraged importation.
As striking new research has shown, this concern was so long-lived that
to place our sixteenth-century indings into perspective we once again must
look beyond 1606. In a recent study, Murat Metinsoy has explained that the
economic policies applied by the Turkish republican government during the
Second World War were remarkably similar to the provisionist and iscalist
policies typical of the classical age of the Ottoman Empire with which we are
presently concerned.62 If this was indeed so, we are confronted with a remark-
able continuity in economic policies within the Mediterranean world, from
Roman antiquity all the way to the Second World War, and the consistency
that Genç has referred to apparently lasted for much longer even than the
three hundred years envisaged by this author. Most recently, Şevket Pamuk
has uncovered further evidence conirming this hypothesis, observing that, in
comparison with the average of 12 Western European countries, income per
capita in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey has declined consistently ever since the
seventeenth century, with the trend being reversed only after the 1980s.63
Such a continuous decline in relative income most probably occurred in
response to the Ottoman and later the Turkish governments’ consistently
applied economic policies, for a long-term lack of sensitivity to the plight of
producers and domestic merchants must have made for economic stagnation.
After all, these people were mostly unable to expand their markets by ind-
ing outlets beyond the Ottoman borders. This is because exportation meant
a withdrawal of goods from local markets, so the elite discouraged and at
times altogether prohibited this kind of enterprise. Importation, by contrast,
meant an injection of goods into the markets, and hence the government
encouraged it. This – in our perspective – paradoxical attitude was due to
the fact that, as we have observed, the Ottoman administration considered
the provisioning of its armed forces, the sultan’s court and Istanbul to be of
overriding importance.64
62 Murat Metinsoy, İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Türkiye (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 150–75.
63 Ibid; Şevket Pamuk, Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Standards of Living’ in Cambridge Economic
History of Modern Europe, vol. 1, 1700–1870, ed. S. Broadberry and Kevin O’Rourke (Cambridge,
2010), pp. 217–24.
64 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD
300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 87–91; Murat Çizakça, ‘Mehmet Genç ile Beraber İktisat
Tarihi Araştırmalarında Geçen Bir Otuzbeş Yıl’, in Türk Tarihçiliğinde Dört Sima: H. İnalcık,
H. Sahillioğlu, M. Genç and İ. Ortaylı, ed. Alper Çeker and Erol Özvar (Istanbul, 2006), pp.
102–7; Halil İnalcık, ‘The Çifthane System: The Organization of Ottoman Rural Society’, in
İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social History, vol. 1, pp. 143–54.
259
Mur at çi̇zakç a
Furthermore, the Ottoman government’s policy made the markets of its

realm very important for the newly emerging European powers – put dif-
ferently, the Ottomans provided crucial market diversiication to a Europe
choked by protectionist policies. In a mercantilist continent where all the bor-
ders were rigidly controlled and imports limited to an absolute minimum, the
signiicance of the vast, open Ottoman markets should not escape attention.
Historians of Ottoman economic thought have long known that sultans and
vezirs tended towards neither free-market liberalism nor mercantilism. This
was not for lack of information: Mustafa Naima, a well-known Ottoman his-
torian of the 1600s and 1700s, was well informed about mercantilism and even
promoted it; however, without any impact.65 Whereas mercantilists aimed
at maximising the amount of bullion in the economy, the Ottoman govern-
ment aimed at maximising the aggregate supply of necessities.66 Economic
policies difered substantially as a result: whereas European rulers convinced
by the ideas of the mercantilists promoted exports and impeded imports in
order to minimise the outlow of bullion, the Ottomans impeded exports and
promoted imports in order to maximise the supply of goods available in their
markets. Thus the export-promoting European mercantilism was matched
perfectly by an import-promoting Ottoman system! This is the reason why, as
İnalcık argues, obtaining capitulations from the sultans had become a condi-
tio sine qua non for the newly emerging mercantilist states of Europe. While
those governments that adhered to mercantilism tried to minimise imports
from one another, the Ottomans in their vast markets, extending from Algeria
to Constantinople, had no such concerns.67
For these claims, England may serve as a cogent example. Even in the 1660s,
48 per cent of total exports from London still went to the Mediterranean, 43
per cent to all other European ports and only 9 per cent to North America.68
Thus, during the seventeenth century, the Mediterranean was more important
to English traders than the whole of northern and western Europe combined.
Unfortunately, we do not know what percentage of the Mediterranean-
bound English goods went to the Ottoman realm. But even so, it is probable
that the Ottoman markets were a major factor in English trade during the
late seventeenth century, when the local economy irst took of. Because of
65 Ahmed Güner Sayar, Osmanlı İktisat Dü şüncesinin Çağdaşlaşması (Istanbul, 2000), p. 114.
66 I owe this point to Mehmet Genç.
67 İnalcık and Quataert, ‘General Introduction’, in İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social
History, vol. 1, pp. 1–6 at p. 3.
68 Richard T. Rapp, ‘The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade Hegemony’, The Journal of
Economic History 35, 3 (1975), 499–525 at p. 502.
260
this importance of Ottoman trade for the well-being of London merchants,

appointing a British ambassador to Constantinople was crucial for the rival
parties of the English Civil War.69
Moreover, not only were the Ottoman ports open markets, but European
merchants were also protected by the capitulations (ahidnames) granted by
the sultans. Once in possession of these precious documents, foreign traders,
at least in principle, could freely enter into the Ottoman interior. Due to these
advantages, France, England and the Netherlands all were keen to obtain
capitulations from the Porte, which allowed their merchants safe access to
the markets of the sultan’s territory.
We can fully appreciate the importance of this relatively free access when
we compare it with the prevailing situation in the West. Apart from the “porti
franchi ” (“open ports”) such as Venice, Ancona, Livorno (Leghorn) and per-
haps Bari, sixteenth-century Italy was closed to Muslim merchants. Of these
ports, Venice was probably the most important. At the end of 1570, some
75 Muslim merchants were active there, and the city apparently continued
to attract many Ottoman merchants until the 1620s.70 Although in the “porti
franchi ” all merchants could trade regardless of their faith, if Muslims were
caught in the interior of Catholic Italy, they faced prosecution as inidels. Not
being baptised, they were considered by governments and populations as
non-persons without civil rights.
If, by contrast, Muslim merchants could visit the “porti franchi ”, this was
due to special legislation constituting an exceptional space; thus Livorno
became accessible as a result of the “Constitution Livornina” promulgated by
the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand I in 1587.71 Apparently, two opposing
forces were at work: while the Catholic Church imposed regulations prohib-
iting Muslim and Jewish merchants, secular governments passed legislation
to welcome them. Yet even in Venice the population was so hostile and the
harassment of Muslim merchants reached such proportions that the author-
ities of the republic had to intervene. In August 1594, they declared that who-
ever harmed the “Turkish” merchants was liable to heavy penalties and could
69 Ralph Davis, ‘English Imports from the Middle East’, in Studies in the Economic History of the
Middle East, ed. Michael A. Cook (Oxford, 1970), pp. 193–206 at p. 199; Gofman, Britons. See
also Pamuk, ‘Estimating GDP per capita’.
70 Cemal Kafadar, ‘A Death in Venice: Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trading in the Serenissima’,
Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986), has also appeared as Raiyyet Rüsumu: Essays Presented to
Halil İnalcık, ed. Bernard Lewis et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 191–218 at pp. 200, 203.
71 Correspondence with Professor Elena Brambilla dated 17 and 22 March 2007; Mouradgea
d’Ohsson, Allgemeine Schilderung des Othomanischen Reiches, abridged trans. Christian
Daniel Beck, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1788–93), p. 301; Kafadar, ‘A Death in Venice’, p. 196.
261
Mur at çi̇zakç a
be exiled, imprisoned or even executed by hanging.72 When in 1555–6 Pope

Paul IV in his port of Ancona imposed measures against baptised Jews who
had reverted to their original faith (Marranos) and had these people perse-
cuted, a universal Jewish boycott of the city followed. Meanwhile the town
of Pesaro tried to beneit from the decline of Ancona by passing legislation
welcoming Levantine merchants, not only Jews but also Turks, Greeks and
Armenians.73
Capital formation in the Ottoman polity

As in most societies, in the Ottoman Empire the mercantile class had the
greatest potential for capital formation and enrichment; however, due to the
political setup, traders were efectively prevented from realising this poten-
tial. Indeed I would argue that the Ottoman Empire’s political economy was
“proto-pseudo-socialist”: I would advocate the term “proto-socialist” because
this particular form of socialism emerged centuries before Karl Marx and
“pseudo-socialist” because, unlike Marxist socialism, it was not based on class
conl ict. On the contrary, the rulers of the Ottoman polity were supposed
to preserve the harmony between its diferent components, which for the
sake of convenience we will sometimes call “classes”. To preserve this har-
mony, the Ottoman government applied pressure upon the mercantile class
and ended up choking it. Thus, if not in theory at least in application, the
Ottoman system was “proto-pseudo-socialist”.
Some historians will fault me for using a term invented by Karl Marx dur-
ing the mid-1800s for the sixteenth-century Ottoman political economy. But I
simply wish to argue that just as there were capitalist or pseudo-capitalist sys-
tems before Adam Smith, so was there an Ottoman “proto-pseudo-socialism”
long before Marx. Actually this situation did not escape Ömer Lüti Barkan,
the pioneer of all studies on the Ottoman political economy, for almost 70
years ago he was probably the irst researcher to apply the term “socialism”
to the Ottoman system, describing it as “a type of war socialism” (Bir nevi
harp sosyalizmi).74 Recently, furthermore, to characterise the political and eco-
nomic system of the period between 1300 and 1800, Traian Stoianovich as well
72 Gad Gilbar, ‘Muslim Tujjar of the Middle East and Their Commercial Networks in the Long
Nineteenth Century’, paper submitted at the XIV International Economic History Congress,
Helsinki, 21–25 August 2006.
73 Kafadar, ‘A Death in Venice’, p. 198.
74 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, 1996, p. 210; Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Bazı Büyük Şehirlerde
Eşya ve Yiyecek Fiyatlarının Tesbit ve Teftişi Hususlarını Tanzim Eden Kanunlar’, Tarih
Vesikaları 1, 5 (1942), 326–40 at p. 327; 2, 7 (1942), 15–40; 2, 9 (1942), 168–77.
262
as Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert have used a closely related term, namely
“command economy”.75
In order to maintain harmony between diferent social groups and in con-
formity with the “traditionalism” referred to previously, the Ottoman gov-
ernment prevented not only the mercantile but even the military/ruling
class (askerî) from advancing too far. Politically speaking, this policy aimed
at preventing high oicials from turning into the sultan’s rivals, and given
the extraordinary longevity of the empire, from this point of view it was cer-
tainly successful. In legal terms, sultans and vezirs justiied the infringement
of the property and inheritance rights otherwise sanctioned by Islamic law
by decreeing that the servitors of the sultan were in a status of dependence
that – if not actually slavery – still was close enough to servile status to nul-
lify their rights to own property. While in power some members of the elite
could collect massive salaries and other revenues related to their positions.
But this income was theirs only as long as they remained in oice. Apart from
the specially privileged scholar-oicials (ulema), oice-holders who retired or
fell from favour had their income taken away or at least reduced to a small
fraction of what it previously had been.76 Under these circumstances, secure
property rights must have been most attractive for members of the Ottoman
military/ruling class. Halil İnalcık has found out that certain Ottoman pashas
purchased bonds issued by the French king Henry II in 1555; we may under-
stand their investment as an attempt to diversify their wealth and guard against
coniscation.77 It would of course be interesting to ind out what happened to
these bonds later on, as the kingdom of France in the sixteenth century was
not the safest place for investments.
Thus, by means of regular coniscations, the Ottoman sultans efectively
prevented the formation of a noble estate. Actually, even during active ser-
vice, most members of the military/ruling class could not become very rich
because they often had to bring many retainers with them to the army and
pay out large sums for projects devised by rulers and grand vezirs. Ömer
Lüti Barkan has produced what is still one of the most comprehensive
studies of post-mortem inventories (tereke defterleri); these documents refer
to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century members of the Ottoman
75 Traian Stoianovich, ‘Cities, Capital Accumulation and the Ottoman Balkan Command
Economy, 1500–1800’, in Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, ed. Charles Tilly and Wim
Blockmans (Boulder, Colo., 1994), pp. 60–99; İnalcık and Quataert, ‘General Introduction’, in
İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social History, vol. 1, p. 1.
76 Özvar, Malikâne Uygulaması, pp. 16–17.
77 Halil İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire’, The Journal of Economic History 29,
1 (March 1969), 97–140 at p. 123.
263
Mur at çi̇zakç a
military/ruling class, the askerî, who happened to be stationed in Edirne at

the time of their deaths.78 On the basis of this study, we ind that an average
askerî dying in this city left less than 300,000 akçe, askerî inheritances ranging
from 1,758 to 4,688 Venetian ducats.79 Of the 175 estates analysed, one-third
belonged to ruling class members who had died indebted and nothing was
owed to their estates, 10 per cent had no debts or credits outstanding and only
7 per cent were people without debts but who were owed money. As for the
remainder, they must have had both debts and money owed to them, or else
the documentation is incomplete. Moreover, Barkan also has demonstrated
that the land holdings which these individuals sometimes possessed were by
no means large.80
Certainly members of the military/ruling class collected most of the taxes
paid by their subjects and in addition got to spend most of the money involved.81
But typically these people were unable to hold onto their wealth, which ulti-
mately reached the sultan’s cofers through coniscations. Compared to the
capital of some partnerships established by Ottoman merchants involved in
international trade, the sums of money left by Edirne’s askerî likewise were
relatively modest, and after a comprehensive survey of the relevant sources,
Halil İnalcık has expressed the opinion that the wealth left by “ordinary”
members of the military/ruling class was “not so very impressive”.82
In addition, the Ottoman government targeted wealthy members of the
subject class, or at least those unlucky enough to live in the central provinces.
One way to tap their wealth was to appoint such people, usually merchants
or usurers, as celep or celepkeşan. These men had to serve as drovers, purchas-
ing large numbers of sheep in the Balkans at market prices and then selling
them in Istanbul at the prevailing administratively determined (narh) rates,
which usually did not even cover purchases.83 Consequently, appointment as
a celep or butcher almost always meant inancial ruin. The government con-
tinued this arrangement from the late ifteenth century to 1597, when instead
78 Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Edirne Askeri Kassamına Ait Tereke Defterleri, 1545–1659’, Belgeler 3,
5–6 (1966), 1–479 at p. 471.
79 Şevket Pamuk, Paranın Tarihi, p. 69, table 4.2, p. 67; Halil Sahillioğlu, ‘XVII Asrın İlk Yarısında
İstanbul’da Tedavüldeki Sikkelerin Râici’, Belgeler 1, 2 (1964), 227–33 at p. 233.
80 Barkan, ‘Edirne’, p. 458.
81 Özvar, Malikâne Uygulaması, chap. 2.
82 İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation’, pp. 110, 125.
83 Bistra Cvetkova, ‘Les celep et leur rôle dans la vie économique des Balkans à l’époque
ottomane (XVe–XVIe s.)’, in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, ed. Michael
A. Cook (Oxford, 1970), pp. 172–92; Antony Greenwood, ‘Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning: A
Study of the Celepkeşan System’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago (Chicago, 1988),
p. 279.
264
it began to impose a special tax called zarar-ı kassabiye, deined as 1 per cent
of the general customs levy. Obviously, as long as it lasted, namely for at least
a century, the practice of drafting wealthy men as drovers or butchers must
have impeded private capital accumulation signiicantly. Indeed, we can con-
sider recruiting celepkeşan and butchers in this fashion as a “proto-pseudo-
socialist” policy par excellence because it targeted the accumulated wealth of
the rich; however, these resources beneited the soldiery and the inhabitants
of Istanbul that already enjoyed signiicant privileges rather than the general-
ity of the labouring poor.
Members of the Ottoman military/ruling class tried to mitigate the efects
of the inevitable coniscations by accumulating wealth in the names of trusted
relatives.84 Another way of maintaining control over property after their ten-
ures had ended was to establish a family foundation, for from the perspective
of Islamic law, a vakıf was God’s own property and therefore the sultan could
not coniscate it. At least this principle applied if the founder had provided
legal evidence that he or she owned, as unencumbered private property, the
assets he or she had assigned to his or her pious foundation.85 In Egypt, where
such foundations had a long and illustrious history, the Ottoman central gov-
ernment encountered ierce resistance from among the local jurists when it
attempted to tax or even coniscate foundation properties.86
Thanks to their family foundations, some members of the military class
thus could more or less preserve their wealth for future generations, but
they deinitely were not in a position to continue accumulation, for as Timur
Kuran has correctly pointed out, a pious foundation entailed important run-
ning costs. Most family foundations did not merely beneit the founder’s
descendants but also provided substantial services to society, inanced out of
foundation income. For powerful individuals, providing such services was a
matter of noblesse oblige. Moreover, by failing to do so, the founder would
have provided the Ottoman administration with an excellent reason for con-
iscation. Thus the costs of sheltering wealth in the form of a pious founda-
tion were anything but negligible.87 Moreover, transforming private property
into a pious foundation was tantamount to transforming a dynamic kind of
wealth into a more stagnant one due to the stringent rule that the will of the
84 Özvar, Malikâne Uygulaması, pp. 64–6.

85 Murat Çizakça, A History of Philanthropic Foundations: Islamic World from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present (Istanbul, 2000), pp. 22–5.
86 Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent (London, 1988), pp. 82–92.
87 Timur Kuran, ‘The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact and
Limitations of the Waqf System’, Law and Society Review 35, 4 (2001), 841–97 at p. 858.
265
Mur at çi̇zakç a
founder as expressed in the foundation document was sacrosanct, in principle

for all time.88
Legitimised in this way, coniscations in the sixteenth century normally
afected only members of the military/ruling class. But once again we need
to look beyond 1606 to discern long-term trends, and taking these into con-
sideration permits us to view sixteenth-century conditions in a diferent light.
When by the late 1600s and throughout the 1700s the empire had to ight wars
on several fronts against European powers with vast inancial resources, to
say nothing of Iran, serious defeats began to occur. To secure extra revenue,
individuals not belonging to the military class became subject to coniscation
as well. Oicials legitimised these serious infringements of Islamic religious
law by claiming that major wealth could only have been accumulated by tax
farming, so that the deceased had become a member of the military/ruling
class and his wealth was forfeited after his death.89
From our perspective, the argument that substantial wealth could only
result from tax farming suggests that diferent rates of proit prevailed in dif-
ferent sectors of the Ottoman economy, public inance allowing gains vastly
superior to the proits available elsewhere. If so, Ottoman trade and produc-
tion should have sufered severe disadvantages, as apparently the state sector
sucked out most of the savings available for investment in the private realm
through tax farming, leaving little for other investments. This situation in
itself was very harmful for the economy because the more productive private
sector lost funds to the less productive public realm.
Under free-market conditions, this is the result we would expect. But is our
model appropriate, and did private sector savings indeed low into econom-
ically less productive public inance? Apparently, at least after the 1630s, in
actuality something rather diferent happened, for in its attempt to preserve
the traditional boundaries between the tax-paying (reaya) and tax-collecting
(askerî) sectors of society, the Ottoman administration evicted the former
from public inance. Thus the Jewish tax farmers, very active during the six-
teenth century and dominant between 1591 and 1630, came under serious
pressure. In the early 1600s, these Jewish tax farmers steadily diminished in
number and inl uence, and by the 1650s they had disappeared from Ottoman
public inance, replaced by members of the military/ruling class. Thus, by
the end of our period, the government no longer permitted the higher rates
88 Kuran, ‘The Provision’, p. 864.

89 Mehmet Genç, ‘Osmanlılar, İktisadî ve Ticarî Yapı’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vaki İslam
Ansiklopedisi, ed. Tahir Altıkulaç et al. (Ankara, 2007), vol. 33, pp. 525–32.
266
of proitability prevailing in tax farming to accrue to representatives of the

private sector. On the contrary, after the 1610s, the administration evicted
any private owners of capital that had managed to enter the ield.90 We may
wonder if perhaps this policy caused tax farmers to become less competitive;
put diferently, as private enterprise and especially the Jews disappeared from
tax farming and the military/ruling class increasingly controlled the system,
less cash arrived at the exchequer, and in turn this development may have
been one of the causes for the massive budget deicits we observe by mid-
century.91
Few occasions for private proit

When deploying these arguments, I have assumed the existence of diferen-
tial rates of proit prevailing in diferent sectors of the Ottoman economy. But
was this really the case? Based upon a decree dated 1501, Ömer Lüti Barkan
has shown that long ago, possibly from the mid-1400s but deinitively from
about 1500 to the later 1800s, the Ottoman administration controlled prices
and thereby proits. Artisans were normally not permitted to earn proits
of more than 10 per cent; in cases where they had to make special eforts,
legalised proits might rise to 20 per cent. To top it all of, over more than
three hundred years, the government continued to insist on these maximum
proit rates, and we can observe eforts in that direction in places as diverse as
Istanbul, Bursa, Salonika and Egypt. Thus it was a general Ottoman policy to
limit the proit rates of artisans, and albeit to a somewhat lesser degree those
of merchants as well; the authorities achieved this aim, to a greater or lesser
extent, by controlling prices. A law promulgated in the name of Mehmed IV
(r. 1648–87) most tellingly stated that there was no commodity upon which
the authorities could not impose maximum prices.92 Dated to 1680, this edict
essentially repeated the same proit rates promulgated in 1501. Such constantly
low proit margins imposed by the government over the long run conirm the
insensitivity of the latter to the needs of artisans and merchants as well as the
importance of “traditionalism” as stated by Mehmet Genç.93
Moreover, since the guilds organised all production, from the raw material
to the inal product, each guild tried to control not only the prices charged by
90 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, p. 154.

91 Özvar, ‘Bütçe Harcamaları’, in Genç and Özvar, Osmanlı Maliyesi, p. 219, table 52.
92 Osman Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-i Umûr-ı Belediyye, 9 vols. (Istanbul, 1995), vol. 1, s. 390; Barkan,
‘Bazı Büyük Şehirlerde’, p. 340.
93 Genç, ‘Osmanlı İktisadî Dünya Görüşünün İlkeleri’, pp. 48–50.
267
Mur at çi̇zakç a
its own members but also those of the goods that the latter needed as inputs.
Thus any given guild constantly concerned itself with the prices charged by
others, and this mutual supervision by means of the production nexus was
another factor that helped to enforce the maximum proit rates imposed by
the sultan’s government. The strictly guild- and narh-controlled production
process appears to have functioned as a zero-sum game, with any guild able
to increase its proit rate only at the expense of artisans representing a later
stage of the production process. To summarise, the guilds controlled each
other, both in terms of prices charged and proits earned. When in conl ict,
the contending parties appealed to a court, the latter always ruling accord-
ing to the rates and prices promulgated by law.94 Administratively controlled
prices continued, not only in Istanbul but also in the provincial cities, until the
middle of the nineteenth century.95 Despite these mechanisms, presumably
there was often a gap between oicial policy and what actually happened “on
the ground”, but supervision was particularly strict in times of crisis. Thus
the authorities seem to have been more vigilant after 1550 than they had been
in earlier times.
Under these conditions of limited proits and controlled prices, it is no
wonder that capital accumulation among Ottoman merchants and artisans
did not amount to much. We do not possess analyses of private fortunes for
the 1400s and 1500s, so we have to turn to the work of Haim Gerber on early
seventeenth-century Bursa; his data are just beyond our time limit but still
close enough to be meaningful. Between 1600 and 1630, the artisans of Bursa,
on average, left estates worth 66,163 akçe, not a high igure if we keep in mind
that Gerber considered 20,000 akçe as the borderline of poverty. The average
estate left by a merchant in the same period was worth 133,395 akçe, about 6.5
times the estate of a pauper, once again not a huge fortune. Moreover, 68
per cent of the merchants left estates below 100,000 akçe, and only 5 per cent
had serious capital, with estates worth between 500,000 and 1,000,000 akçe.96
Thus, in Bursa and probably elsewhere, even the richest guildsmen and trad-
ers did not possess large capital sums.
Proit controls imposed by the state did not constitute the only impedi-
ment to the accumulation of mercantile or artisan capital. Another factor of
equal importance was the relationship between proit rates and the prevailing
rate of interest. Adam Smith has argued that it is an important condition for
94 Genç, ‘Osmanlılar, İktisadî ve Ticarî Yapı’.

95 Kütükoğlu, Narh Müessesesi, pp. 8, 18.
96 Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 ( Jerusalem, 1988), pp.
21–9; İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation’, p. 135.
268
capital accumulation that the interest rate or marginal cost of capital be about
half as much as the “ordinary rate of clear proit”.97 In the Ottoman Empire,
roughly the reverse was true. Indeed, according to Adam Smith, for Ottoman
merchants to accumulate capital the interest rate would have needed to be
about 5 to 10 per cent, or half as much as the average rate of permitted proit.
But the prevailing rates of interest in the unoicial Ottoman capital markets
were between 15 and 25 per cent; only pious foundations with cash to lend
contented themselves with about 11 to 12 per cent.98 High interest and low
proit margins must have rendered investment diicult if not impossible.
Last but not least, there was the tax load to consider. Certain artisans had
to follow the army on campaign, and we have no way of knowing how many
managed to come back with a small proit or even to come back at all. It fell
to fellow guildsmen to inance the ventures of those who were drafted, an
additional drain on resources that were already quite small. Thus we can say
without too much exaggeration that Ottoman taxation practices punished
producers, particularly the large and eicient among them. This point was
obvious to an observer of the eighteenth-century scene, but perhaps to a
more limited extent it was valid for the 1500s as well.99
Restating our indings

In the context of recent debates on the exact nature of the Ottoman econ-
omy, Mehmet Genç has restated his tripod model comprising “provisionism,
iscalism and traditionalism”, while the present author has reined his argu-
ment concerning “proto-pseudo-socialism”; both of us agree on the “pseudo-
socialist” characteristics of the Ottoman economy. In emphasising the longue
durée both views have received support from Mübahat Kütükoğlu, who has
pointed out continuities with the teachings of the late eleventh-century
Siyāsatnāma by the Seljuk vezir Niẓām al-Mulk. Already this author had warned
his ruler that if the qadi, who determined administratively imposed prices, did
not receive support from the secular authorities, merchants would sell their
97 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York, 1937),
p. 97.
98 Genç, ‘Osmanlı İktisadî Dünya Görüşünün İlkeleri’, p. 51; Çizakça, Philanthropic Foundations,
p. 49; Randi Deguilhem, ‘Wakf in the Ottoman Empire to 1914’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia
of Islam, vol. 11, pp. 87–92 at p. 89; Süleyman Özmucur and Şevket Pamuk, ‘Real Wages and
Standards of Living in the Ottoman Empire, 1489–1914’, Journal of Economic History 62, 2
(2002), 293–321 at p. 297.
99 Mehmet Genç, ‘Osmanlı Ekonomisi ve Savaş’, Yapıt 49, 4 (1984), 52–61; 50, 5 (1984), 86–93;
French version: ‘L’économie ottomane et la guerre au XVIIIème siècle’, Turcica 27 (1995),
177–96.
269
Mur at çi̇zakç a
goods at whatever prices they preferred. But the proits from such transac-
tions would not be legitimate. Moreover, unless the government irmly con-
trolled merchants, people would be impoverished.100 Thus, possibly already in
the pre-Ottoman Turkish empires and deinitely in the Ottoman instance, the
authorities regarded mercantile proits with a jaundiced eye and assumed that
traders needed constant supervision. Consequently, they generally prevented
merchants from advancing their status by capital accumulation.
In pursuit of this aim, the Ottoman government used its power to limit
the proits of traders and artisans to a range between 2 and 10 per cent. As
for the prevailing interest rate, it was much higher than the legitimate rate of
proits, while the practice of drafting wealthy men as celepkeşan and butchers
radically re-distributed wealth from the merchants to the military and, to a
lesser extent, the ordinary inhabitants of Istanbul. Thus the mercantile class,
normally the group with the highest potential for capital accumulation, was
unable to realise its potential, and as a result the Ottoman economy sufered
from a serious lack of capital formation.
After all, this socio-political system permitted only ephemeral capital accu-
mulation in the hands of selected members of the askerî class. Merchants
and artisans, as well as landowners, were in no position to emulate them.101
Şevket Pamuk has conirmed this general lack of capital accumulation, calcu-
lating the sixteenth-century Ottoman income per capita at around 60 per cent
of the average observed in 12 contemporary Western European countries.102
Moreover, due to the notorious lack of capital accumulation, the exchequer
also was in trouble when it came to borrowing from the public.
Yet in the 1500s we also observe a trend in the opposite direction. Even
though not as privileged as merchants in the medieval city-states of Europe,
which borrowed heavily from their merchants and therefore needed to listen
to their grievances, certain members of the Ottoman mercantile class were for
a while able to make their voices heard as well. During most of the sixteenth
century, we observe certain parallels to the European situation, as at least
some traders were involved in competitive tax farming and advanced signii-
cant sums to the exchequer. As a result, sultans and vezirs were responsive to
their problems and interfered vigorously on their behalf if their business was
interrupted and they therefore failed to fulil their obligations to the treasury.
100 Genç, ‘Osmanlı İktisadî Dünya Görüşünün İlkeleri’, pp. 43–53; Çizakça, A Comparative
Evolution, p. 210; Kütükoğlu, Narh Müessesesi, p. 6.
101 İnalcık, ‘The Çifthane System’, in İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and Social History, pp.
143–55.
102 Pamuk, ‘Estimating GDP Per Capita’.
270
Thus, when the persecution of Marranos in Ancona by the Inquisition led to

the bankruptcy of the Jewish tax farmers of Istanbul and Salonika, who had
invested heavily in Ancona, the sultan came to their aid. In the sixteenth cen-
tury, we also ind sultans and vezirs protecting merchants whose goods and
money had been robbed by corsairs in the Adriatic.103
After the 1610s, however, we observe a turnabout, with the eviction of the
Jewish and Muslim merchants from tax farming and their gradual replace-
ment by the members of the Ottoman military/ruling class.104 After the end
of our period, in the 1600s, the Ottoman government must have become less
interested in the troubles of the merchants and more sensitive to the needs of
the military/ruling class,105 for when Ottoman merchants active in the inter-
national arena no longer provided capital to the sultan, their opinions and
problems no longer mattered.106 Now it was the military/ruling class which
lent crucial funds, usually by means of tax-farming contracts. As a result of
the merchants’ defeat, the Ottoman economy was shaped not by the interests
of the producers or merchants but by those of the dominant military/ruling
class.107
We should not underestimate the importance of these dynamics, not just
in the realm of public inance but also in the political arena. Recent research
has indicated that public borrowing in the long run determines the very struc-
ture of a political system. If these views are correct, then the concluding years
of our period and the immediate aftermath, in other words the 1610s to 1650s,
were of crucial importance for the Ottoman Empire. With international mer-
chants evicted from the tax-farming system and replaced by the military/
ruling class, the empire must have moved irrevocably towards increasing dom-
ination of the subject class. Moreover, tax farmers, particularly those con-
cerned with customs duties, also took on administrative positions involving
the control of merchants, and this situation must have increased the vulnera-
bility of the merchants. In certain cases, we can view these takeovers as sales
of public oice.108 Combining such sales with the increasing militarisation of
103 İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation’, pp. 121–2; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Bosnian Merchants in the Adriatic’,
in Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril, ed. Markus Koller and Kemal Karpat (Madison, Wis.,
2004), pp. 225–39, has also appeared in The International Journal of Turkish Studies 10, 1–2.
104 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, pp. 144, 158.
105 Gilbar, ‘Muslim Tujjar’, p. 12, fn. 4; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Ottoman Cotton Textiles, 1500s to 1800:
The Story of a Success That Did Not Last’, in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton
Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Prasannan Prasarathi and Giorgio Riello (Oxford, 2009), pp. 89–103.
106 Şevket Pamuk, Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2000), p. 10, fn. 35; p. 85.
107 Ibid., p. 10.
108 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Purchasing Guild- and Craft-based Oices in the Ottoman Central Lands’,
Turcica 39 (2007), 123–46.
271
Mur at çi̇zakç a
the tax-farming system, we can hypothesise that the latter development was
far more than a mere change in the social composition of the tax farmers:
increasingly it amounted to a subjugation of the economy to the rigorous
control of the military/ruling class. Apparently such subjugation occurred
not only in public inance but also in other sectors. The increasing involve-
ment and meddling of the military/ruling class in the afairs of merchants
and artisans is well known.109
Historians have argued that the Ottoman socio-political system was stag-
nant and that at least where economic mentalities were at issue the “classical
age” continued from the mid-ifteenth to the nineteenth century with hardly
any change in its main tenets.110 We can also observe stagnation in the realm
of business techniques: diferently from Western business partnerships and
also those Ottoman enterprises serving the exchequer through tax farming,
private business partnerships – in general – were hardly dynamic. This lack
of dynamism probably was due to the fact that the governmental appara-
tus tended to choke of all Ottoman private enterprises not involved in tax
farming.111 Eventually the system became self-defeating: insuicient capital
accumulation by merchants led to insuicient tax potential and insuicient
tax revenue to a weakening of the military. Thus the Ottoman political sys-
tem originally designed for military supremacy eventually ended up with a
weakened military.112
“Pockets” of economic vitality – in spite of all impediments

In my view, the observations presented so far conirm the “proto-pseudo-
socialist” character of the Ottoman political economy. But, if so, how can
we explain its longevity? While the Soviet socialism of the twentieth cen-
tury lasted for about 70 years, the Ottoman Empire held on for more than six
hundred.
Historians of Ottoman commerce and artisan production have provided
the keys to an explanation, although they mostly have posed their ques-
tions diferently from the present author. Clearly, within the “proto-pseudo-
socialist” framework described earlier, there existed important pockets
where the free market could operate. Halil İnalcik demonstrated long ago
109 André Raymond, Yeniçerilerin Kahiresi (Istanbul, 1999).

110 Genç, ‘Osmanlılar, İktisadî ve Ticarî Yapı’.
111 Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution, pp. 209–10.
112 Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, pp. 46–8.
272
that the proit restrictions discussed in this chapter, one of the most impor-
tant impediments for capital accumulation, did not apply to international
merchants and that as a result these traders could accumulate massive
wealth. Goods imported from distant markets were usually luxuries and
often exempt from administrative price controls. Because certain centres
of production, like the Bursa silk or the Ankara mohair industry supplying
these merchants, were in close connection to the market forces of interna-
tional supply and demand, they could become the sites for capitalist ven-
tures.113 Quite possibly the Ottoman government was willing to tolerate a
few capitalistic segments within the overall “proto-pseudo-socialist” sys-
tem because of the constant inlow of silver brought about by European
merchants. Of course, even in these cases, “provisionism” demanded that
exports did not deplete domestic markets.
Yet both Bursa and Edirne sufered from their proximity to Istanbul, their
geographical position making them vulnerable to the relentless “proto-
pseudo-socialist” pressures exercised by oicials in the capital. Merchants
from Bursa and Edirne, in addition to the Istanbul trading community, risked
getting appointed as celepkeşan or butchers. A list of celeps covering the years
between 1536 and 1597 survives, comprising 314 persons. This document indi-
cates that most of these unfortunate souls were from the heartlands of the
empire; in other words, from the Danubian provinces in the north to those
of Syria in the south. Not a single merchant in this list was from Egypt; thus,
if we can extrapolate from this source, we may explain why in the decades
before and after 1600 a great merchant like Ismail Abu Taqiyya could lour-
ish in Cairo without losing his entire wealth by appointment as a celep.114
Thus it appears that Ottoman intervention in economic life was not system-
atic but selective, and at least during the 1400s and 1500s sultans and vezirs
approached the economic lives of their subjects with a healthy dose of prag-
matism.115 When overriding military and political priorities were not at issue,
the Ottoman authorities were quite capable of a certain tolerance, not only
in political matters but also in economic ones.
113 İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation’, pp. 106, 116, 126–7; Faroqhi, Ottoman Empire and World around
It, p. 156; Murat Çizakça, ‘Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: A Study in Ottoman
Industrial Decline’, Journal of Economic History 40, 3 (1980), 533–51.
114 Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismail Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian
Merchant (Cairo and Syracuse, N.Y., 1998); Greenwood, The Celepkeşan System, pp. 272–7;
Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘At the Ottoman Empire’s Industrious Core: The Story of Bursa’, in The
City in the Islamic World, ed. Renata Holod et al., 2 vols. (Leiden, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 357–81.
115 Pamuk, Monetary History, pp. 14–15.
273
Mur at çi̇zakç a
Conclusion
While discussing economic life in the Ottoman Empire between 1453 and
1606, the present study has often moved beyond the prescribed boundaries.
After all, economic institutions and policies, which afect the lives of millions
of people, operate in the longue durée, and only when we are willing to look
at a period extending over several centuries will we be able to understand the
consequences of the decisions made by a given polity’s economically active
persons and also by the elites that ruled them. Such continuity is particularly
relevant for the Ottoman Empire, which inherited not only its territory but
also certain aspects of the dominant “economic ideology” from the Roman
and Byzantine as well as the pre-Ottoman Islamic empires.
Ottoman “proto-pseudo-socialism”, with its consistent and long-term
price and proit controls, tendencies towards growing gaps between admin-
istered and market prices, supply shortages and violations of property rights
through coniscations and the drafting of celepkeşan and butchers, developed
a self-sustaining economic system. This system aimed at inancing expansion-
ary wars, imperial longevity and class harmony. The Ottomans were so con-
vinced of the success of their system that they called their state devlet-i-ebed
müddet, the perpetual state.
New evidence has surfaced showing that there really was a remarkable
continuity about Ottoman “proto-pseudo-socialist” policies and institutions.
“Provisionism”, for instance, had been practised for centuries in the Roman
and Byzantine empires.116 From these earlier polities, the Ottomans may in
fact have inherited all three foundation stones of their economic thought:
“traditionalism”, “iscalism” and “provisionism”. Such continuity was also
apparent in rural life, where the Roman agricultural unit, the jugum, lived on
in the Ottoman çift, the family farm ploughed by a yoke of oxen.117
Moreover, whether expressed as “proto-pseudo-socialism” or as a tripod
of “provisionism”, “iscalism” and “traditionalism”, these characteristics of
Ottoman economic thinking appear to have continued well into the twentieth
century. As we have seen, the economic policies applied by Turkish repub-
lican governments during the Second World War were remarkably similar
to those in favour between 1450 and the early 1600s; in other words, during
the period that concerns us at present.118 If so, within the territories of the
116 McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, pp. 87–91.

117 Çizakça, ‘Mehmet Genç ile Beraber’, pp. 102–7; İnalcık, ‘The Çifthane System’, p. 146.
118 İnalcık and Quataert, ‘General Introduction,’ in İnalcık and Quataert, Economic and
Social History, pp. 1–7; Murat Çizakça, ‘Tax-farming and Financial Decentralization in the
274
Ottoman Empire, there must have been a striking continuity in economic

institutions and policies from late Roman antiquity all the way to the 1940s,
a consistency that apparently lasted not just for hundreds of years but for
almost two millennia.
For a few brief years in the sixteenth century, a change seemed possible.
Merchants involved in long-distance trade both within the empire and beyond
its borders became a source of inance to the central government, both as
tax farmers and as a source of customs revenues. As a result, in the mid-
1500s, Ottoman sultans and vezirs showed some responsiveness to the needs
of long-distance traders. But the magic moment did not last: by the end of
our period, military-administrative personnel had ousted the merchants from
tax-farming positions. In consequence, the Ottoman government no longer
viewed the mercantile class as a source of credit and, mindful of the interests
of the tax-farming elite, easily reverted to time-honoured controls.
Such continuity apparently had disastrous consequences, for ever since the
seventeenth century, income per capita in the Ottoman Empire, and later in
Turkey, declined consistently when compared with Western European coun-
tries. Such a long-term decline can only have been caused by a path depen-
dency over centuries, for which I have here suggested the term Ottoman
“proto-pseudo-socialism”. The trend was reversed only after the 1980s, when
the Özal government introduced modern capitalism.119 It seems that the
Ottoman political cum economic system has the dubious honour of being
the irst socialism that failed.
Ottoman Economy’, The Journal of European Economic History 22, 2 (1993), 219–50; Çizakça,
A Comparative Evolution, chap. 5; Nazif Öztürk, Türk Yenileşme Tarihi Çerçevesinde Vakıf
Müessesesi (Ankara, 1995); Çizakça, Philanthropic Foundations; Metinsoy, İkinci Dünya
Savaşı’nda Türkiye, pp. 150–75.
119 Pamuk, ‘Estimating GDP Per Capita’.
275
9
Ottoman armies and warfare, 1453–1603
G é za D á v id
Introduction
Between 1453 and 1566, the Ottoman Empire reached the apogee of its mili-
tary potential; during the later sixteenth century, sultans’ armies were still
formidable, but not as strong as they had been. Especially after 1580, former
glory started to fade away, as the long war in Hungary (1593–1606) ended with
the mutual exhaustion of both Ottomans and Habsburgs and without major
gains for the empire of the sultans. By contrast, the reigns of Mehmed II
(r. 1451–81), Selim I (r. 1512–20) and Süleyman I (r. 1520–66) featured splendid
territorial expansion, aspirations for world hegemony and an extraordinary
capability to match and overcome the adversaries’ war potential. Based on
accumulated wealth and power, after about 1530 the Ottomans for a while
seem to have aimed at universal political supremacy and for this purpose
developed a “grand strategy”, to use a currently fashionable term.1
When Mehmed II acceded to the throne, there was no enemy in the vicin-
ity who could have seriously contested his superiority. Byzantium was in a
desperate situation, reduced to a city-state which would fall very soon, on 29
May 1453. Nor was it diicult to subjugate the remaining Greek principalities,
partly because they were so eager to resort to Ottoman aid. Nor could the
Balkan states withstand the Ottoman advance. Only Hungary, though close
to the borders of the sultan’s realm, was in a somewhat stronger position:
Mehmed II had not succeeded in his attack against Belgrade in 1456, and King
Matthias (r. 1458–90) in 1463 had conquered the fortress town of Jajce. Thus,
from an Ottoman military viewpoint, the kingdom of Hungary remained a
somewhat remote target, but although in this period its ruler was quite a dan-
gerous rival to the sultan, he mostly focused on European matters.
1 Gábor Ágoston, ‘Information, Ideology, and Limits of Imperial Ideology: Ottoman Grand
Strategy in the Context of Ottoman–Habsburg Rivalry’, in The Early Modern Ottomans:
Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Gofman (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 75–103.
276
During Mehmed II’s rule, a signiicant tribal confederation, the Akkoyunlu,

gained control over eastern Anatolia and territories beyond. Yet in 1473 suc-
cessful military operations eliminated any threat to Ottoman dominance and
in the long run opened the way to further conquests in the east. In the if-
teenth century, the struggle with the Mamluks for supremacy in the Middle
East posed no threat to the Ottoman sultans either, although between 1485
and 1491 the two rulers were at war. In 1514, near Çaldıran, Selim I defeated
the forces of Shah Isma’il I (r. 1501–24), the founder of Safavid rule over Iran.2
From now on, Selim I was free to choose his next target, as in the later years
of his rule the shah was no longer a menace. As a result, Selim I concentrated
on the conquest of Syria and Egypt, while his son and successor, Süleyman,
added Iraq to the Ottoman domains.3
By the reign of Süleyman I, however, Safavid Iran had recovered as a mil-
itary power; moreover, after the battle of Mohács in 1526, the Ottomans had
become the neighbours and rivals of the Habsburgs. As Charles V (r. 1516–56)
and his son Philip II (r. 1556–98) had their own aspirations to world power,
the Ottoman–Habsburg ight for hegemony took place on both land and sea.
This rivalry dominated events on the Ottoman western and south-western
borders, and as a result the sultans were unable even to incorporate all of
Hungary into their realm. By the time of Selim II (r. 1566–74), the Russians
had also emerged as a dangerous enemy.
Historians have studied the Ottoman approach towards war, conquest
and peace, yet we understand only in part how sultans and vezirs justiied
wars against their co-religionists. One author has argued that “a violation
(ta‘addī) of the sharī ‘a by one Muslim state gave the right to another state to
enforce the sharī ‘a against the violator. A great Muslim power could attack
a small Muslim state under the pretext of violation of the sharī ‘a, regardless
of whether the alleged violation had actually occurred or whether its serious-
ness justiied an act of war.”4 A somewhat more detailed examination of this
issue reveals that the Ottomans gave special emphasis to the doctrine which
permitted holy war against Muslims if the confrontation was motivated by
theological concerns and not by sheer power conl icts. The legist İbn Kemal
justiied the subjugation of the Anatolian principalities by maintaining that
2 Rudi Matthee, ‘Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads: Firearms and Artillery in Safavid Iran’,
in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. Charles Melville (London
and New York, 1996), pp. 389–416.
3 Adel Allouche, The Origins and Development of the Ottoman–Safavid Conlict (906 –962/1500 –
1555) (Berlin, 1983), mainly pp. 104–30.
4 Shai Har-El, Strugle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman–Mamluk War, 1485–91
(Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1995), p. 11.
277
Gé za dávi d
with their permanent trouble-making they hindered the Ottomans’ holy war,
and what was worse they encouraged the inidels and collaborated with them
against the Ottomans, who wished to accomplish the Islamic prescription
of raiding the inidel (gaza). Consequently their elimination was even more
important than ighting against the unbelievers since the latter activity was
a collective obligation of the Muslim community; in other words, one ruler
could undertake this obligation on behalf of others. On the other hand, it
was the duty of each and every person to repress heresy.5 In other words, the
Ottomans declared their Muslim adversaries rebels, which entitled them – at
least in their own view – to subjugate these potentates without violating the
sacred law.
When elaborating their reasons for going to war against the Safavids, the
Ottoman rulers and their advisors went one step further. Although the shah
and his governing elite claimed adherence to Shi’ism during the sixteenth
century at least, in fact they had adopted a syncretistic religious practice, a
mixture of “popular Islam”, Shi’ism and sui mysticism. As the Ottomans per-
ceived it, these Iranian Shi’ites (Kızılbaş) not only rejected several basic ele-
ments of the sacred law but also falsiied the Qur’an, cursing venerable igures
of early Islamic history. Since in this perspective the Kızılbaş were out to ruin
Islam, the sultans and their servitors had the right to treat them as inidels,
godless folk and heretics. Once again, these people were worse than “real”
inidels and deserved eradication and annihilation.6 Admittedly, other major
opponents, such as the Mamluk sultans, were Sunnis, but in the early six-
teenth century they were allies of Shah Isma’il I, and therefore the Ottoman
authorities saw no problem in using the same argument against them.7
Though the expressed motivation for war against the Christian powers was
religious, sultans and vezirs occasionally formulated their claims according to
nomadic tradition. In this line of thinking, during the long negotiations with
Hieronymus Łaski, John Szapolyai’s (r. 1526–40) envoy to Süleyman I in 1528,
the second vezir, Mustafa Paşa, once declared: “[T]ell me, how did your lord
dare to enter the place which had been trodden by the hoofs of our emperor’s
5 İbn-i Kemal, Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman. I. Defter, ed. Şerafettin Turan (Ankara, 1991), text edition
pp. 25– 6; Feridun Emecen, ‘XV ve XVI. Asırlarda Osmanlı Devleti’nin Doğu ve Batı Siyaseti’,
XV ve XVI. Asırları Türk Asrı Yapan Değerler, ed. Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul, 1997), 125–41 at
pp. 130–1; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhidler (15.–17. Yüzyıllar)
(Istanbul, 1998), pp. 101–3.
6 Elke Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik gegen die Safawiden im 16. Jahrhundert nach arabischen
Handschriften (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1970).
7 On the Shi’i doctrine of jihad, see Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and
Practice (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2006), p. 125.
278
horse. . . . According to our law, the place where our ruler’s head has reposed
and into which his horse has stuck its head, by this legal title will eternally
belong to our ruler.” In 1530, a letter of the grand vezir İbrahim Paşa advanced
a similar idea: “[W]henever the feet of one of the horses of the padishah hon-
our and favour a country, it becomes his possession.”8
Some 30 years ago, Géza Perjés, a military historian, argued the rational-
ity of the sultans’ military politics, opposing the notion that the Ottomans
were motivated exclusively by religious zeal, a mindset which when waging
war allegedly made them oblivious of practical considerations.9 An immense
world empire could not have survived without strategic rationality, and in this
context the author emphasised the importance of the action radius; in other
words, the distance the imperial army could march forward and back within
a single season if it did not winter on or near the battleield. Like any other
generals, the Ottoman high command had to recognise and respect this prac-
tical necessity. On the basis of these considerations, Perjés developed the idea
that the Hungarian Kingdom, falling more or less outside the Ottoman radius
of action, could have survived as a vassal state had the royal government per-
mitted the sultans’ forces to march across its territory when attacking the
Habsburgs; he called this assumption “Süleyman’s ofer”.
Vienna, however, lies 250 kilometres to the west of Buda; therefore it would
have been even more diicult to launch spring–autumn campaigns against
and beyond this city. Moreover, when considering whether “Süleyman’s ofer”
was ever an option, we must keep in mind the “mentality of great powers”,
which has blinded the governments of almost all super-formations in world
history. In other words, the Ottomans knew no limits when setting their tar-
gets, as exempliied by the lexible notion of the kızıl elma (red/golden apple),
which designated the next signiicant place(s) to be conquered, such as Buda,
Vienna, Rome or even Cologne.10 On the other hand, however, sultans and
vezirs carefully prepared their campaigns and tenaciously kept their goals in
mind; thus, as so often happens in the world of politics, their behaviour was
at once rational and irrational.
8 Both quotations are from Pál Fodor, ‘Ungarn und Wien in der osmanischen
Eroberungsideologie (im Spiegel der Târîh-i Beç Krâlı, 17. Jahrhundert)’, Journal of Turkish
Studies – Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları 13 (1989), 81–98 at p. 91, reprinted in Pál Fodor, In Quest
of the Golden Apple: Imperial Ideology, Politics and Military Administration in the Ottoman
Empire (Istanbul, 2000), pp. 45–70 at pp. 56–7.
9 Géza Perjés, Az országút szélére vetett ország (Budapest, 1975); Géza Perjés, The Fall of the
Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohács 1526–Buda 1541, trans. Márió D. Fenyö (Boulder, Colo.,
1989).
10 Fodor, ‘Ungarn und Wien’, pp. 85–9, 92–3, 97–8.
279
Gé za dávi d
All in all, waging wars constituted the raison d’être of the empire.11 Warfare
determined the policies of the Ottoman elite, perhaps even more decisively
than was true of other polities of the Old World, where rulers also were rather
bellicose.12 Therefore it came as no surprise to their western contemporaries
that the Ottomans constantly re-appeared on their frontiers. Nevertheless, at
certain times the sultan and his advisors found themselves in a crisis of orien-
tation. Thus, in 1552 the Ottoman armies waged war in ive rather distant the-
atres, namely Hungary, the Mediterranean, Iraq, the Anatolian border region
near Iran and in addition the Persian Gulf, a situation which resulted in the
dispersion of military and inancial resources and in most cases a failure to
attain the sultans’ presumed original goals.13
The army
Historiography
Among older studies of the ifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman mili-
tary, İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı’s books contain useful general information and
many interesting details, often based on archival material that the author was
the irst to use.14 In 1977, Gyula K áldy-Nagy, in an excellent pioneering arti-
cle, surveyed the historical development of the various constituents of the
empire’s armed forces.15 Eleven years later, Caroline Finkel produced the irst
detailed monograph on Ottoman military logistics, discussing in great detail
the problem of campaign supplies, a subject which earlier on had interested
Lüti Güçer as well.16 Besides conceptual novelties, Finkel’s work abounded in
references to Ottoman documents. Rhoads Murphey also used ample archi-
val evidence for a more broadly based study on Ottoman warfare covering the
11 Pál Fodor, ‘Ottoman Policy towards Hungary’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae 45 (1991), 271–345 at pp. 281–3.
12 Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early-Modern Europe, 1495–1715 (London and New York,
1992), pp. 13–15.
13 Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, K. 888; cf. Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor,
‘Mühimme Defterlerine göre Osmanlıların 16. Yüzyıl Macaristan Politikası’, in Uluslararası
Türk Arşivleri Sempozyumu (Tebliğler–Tartı şmalar). 17–19 Kasım 2005 (Ankara, 2006), pp. 219–
28 at p. 225.
14 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilâtından Kapukulu Ocakları, 2nd ed., 2 vols.
(Ankara, 1984); İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Merkez ve Bahriye Teşkilâtı, 2nd
ed. (Ankara, 1984).
15 Gyula K áldy-Nagy, ‘The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organization’, Acta
Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 31 (1977), 147–83.
1593–1606 (Vienna, 1988); Lüti Güçer, XVI–XVII Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Hububat
Meselesi ve Hububattan Alınan Vergiler (Istanbul, 1964).
280
period between 1500 and 1700 and featuring a splendid characterisation of the
land forces in a “long-run” perspective.17 Though the period covered in this
study overlaps with our own but in part, several of his examples are highly
relevant since they concern unchangeable features of warfare.
More recently, Colin Imber has brought out a well-proportioned overall
description of the Ottoman military, focusing on the structure of sultanic
power.18 Moreover, due to continuities between the period before 1453 and
the following decades, we can learn a great deal from Pál Fodor’s detailed and
competent discussion in the irst volume of The Cambridge History of Turkey.
After all, as we will see, between the accession of Mehmed II in 1451 and the
reign of Süleyman the Magniicent, basically the same types of forces made
up the backbone of the imperial army. Fodor’s concluding remarks are valid
for most of our period as well; he leaves no doubt that “during a century
and a half the Ottomans developed one of the best militaries and warfare
of the age”.19 Among detailed specialist monographs, two recent works on
guns and the war industry particularly stand out.20 In addition, historians have
dedicated separate volumes to semi-military organizations like the voynuks,
yürüks or derbendcis.21
While for the ifteenth century sources are rather scarce and mostly narra-
tive in character, beginning with the period of Mehmed II archival documen-
tation increases and becomes richer in content. In spite of serious damages
that Ottoman records have sufered in wars and uprisings, and also due to
neglect and even intentional annihilation, they are so numerous and provide
such an immense amount of information that it will take two or three further
generations of scholars to fully explore them. Therefore, at the present stage
17 Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (London, 1999).

18 Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power, 2nd ed. (New York,
2009), pp. 262–323. For shorter general evaluations, see John F. Guilmartin, Jr., ‘The Wars
of the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1606’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1988), 721–47;
Virginia Aksan, ‘Ottoman War and Warfare, 1453–1812’, in War in the Early Modern World,
1450–1815, ed. Jeremy Black (Boulder, Colo., 1999), pp. 147–75; Gábor Ágoston, ‘Ottoman
Warfare in Europe, 1453–1826’, in European Warfare, 1453–1815, ed. Jeremy Black (London,
1999), pp. 120–63; Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans:
From Osman to Ataturk (Santa Barbara, Calif., Denver, Colo., and Oxford, 2009), pp. 31–79.
19 Pál Fodor, ‘Ottoman Warfare, 1300–1453’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium
to Turkey, 1071–1453, ed. Kate Fleet (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 192–226 at p. 226.
20 Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman
Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Salim Aydüz, XV ve XVI Yüzyılda Tophâne-i Âmire ve Top Döküm
Teknolojisi (Ankara, 2006).
21 Yavuz Ercan, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Bulgarlar ve Voynuklar (Ankara, 1986); Mehmet İnbaşı,
Rumeli Yörükleri (1544–1675) (Erzurum, 2000); Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda
Derbend Teşkilâtı (Istanbul, 1967); Aleksandar Stojanovski, Dervendžistvoto vo Makedonija
(Skopje, 1974).
281
Gé za dávi d
of our knowledge, several intriguing aspects of Ottoman warfare will remain

at least partly in the dark, and we will not be able to deal with all territories
in the same depth.
The land forces: Janissaries as salaried troops

of the court (kapıkulu ocakları)
We can characterise the Ottoman polity between 1453 and 1603 as a patrimo-
nial, redistributive system governed by three major status groups: men of the
sword (ehl-i seyf ), men of [religious] knowledge (ehl-i ilim) and men of the pen
(ehl-i kalem). All these categories featured as askeri, literally “military”, whose
members enjoyed certain prerogatives and thus distinguished themselves
from ordinary subjects (reaya). The decisive element within the imperial
household was the standing army, employed to defend the absolute monarch
and extend his territories. To characterise their status vis-à-vis the sovereign,
the term “servant” or even slave (kul) was in common usage.
Soldiers in receipt of stipends and subordinate to the sultan’s court func-
tioned as the essential constituents of the Ottoman land army. These contin-
gents were the irst and largest of their kind in Europe, where standing armies
of comparable size evolved only in the seventeenth century. The infantry or
janissaries and the six cavalry regiments directly serving the palace were for
a long time well trained and satisfactorily equipped; by the standards of the
sixteenth century, these soldiers also received regular pay.
In the reign of Bayezid II or Selim I, the Ottoman administration decided
to change the structure of the janissary corps, adding a third unit, the so-
called ağa bölükleri, to the previously existing two elements, known as the
cemaat and sekban bölükleri. The new division encompassed 61 basic units.
While the reasons for establishing the ağa bölükleri remain obscure, we may
surmise that the ağa of the janissaries had taken a hand in this matter. This
is because from the early sixteenth century onwards, this commander came
from a palace background, and when he emerged to take over the janissar-
ies, he needed a reliable retinue.22 The corps was elaborately articulated; its
members lived regulated and structured lives.
During the later period of Mehmed’s II rule, the janissaries amounted to
about ten thousand men in total. This number did not signiicantly change
during the next few decades; in 1514, the year of the Çaldıran victory, 10,156
janissaries received their pay from the sultan’s court. However, in 1527, only
7,886 janissaries appeared in the oicial budget; perhaps this elite corps had
22 Uzunçarşılı, Kapıkulu Ocakları, vol. 1, p. 168.
282
sufered serious losses during the Mohács campaign. However, in Istanbul

there were sizeable numbers of novices (acemi oğlan) waiting to be called up,
and prisoners of war and recruits drafted among the empire’s Christian pop-
ulation by means of the devşirme, or “levy of boys”, rapidly illed any vacan-
cies. Yet certain territories, including the Hungarian provinces, were exempt
from the “levy of boys”, and from the second half of the sixteenth century
onwards the number of devşirme recruits diminished as the sons of military
men increasingly succeeded to their fathers’ positions.23 In the 1530s, the corps
seems to have sufered attrition, as merely 6,362 janissaries participated in the
1541 campaign when the sultan inally conquered Buda (Budin).24 Two years
later, 8,166 of these soldiers participated in the next Ottoman enterprise in
Hungary, while a quarter of a century later 12,798 men received their pay
from the exchequer.25
Due to structural changes within the Ottoman army in response to
European challenges, when the military value of foot soldiers came to sur-
pass that of their mounted colleagues, the janissaries rapidly increased in
number. Some 35,000 men were on record in 1597, and a few years later the
total had reached 37,600. The source of this last igure was a scribe of the
imperial council who wrote in 1609 and occasionally used data from earlier
periods, but in this particular instance he probably relied on a document of
recent vintage.26 However, the practical value of the enlarged contingent was
not necessarily higher, since oicers took less care in selecting new recruits
and traditional janissary discipline weakened as a result of shorter and less
severe training.
Fairly large contingents served in fortresses in various parts of the empire,
especially in the borderlands, making it diicult to determine the mobilisa-
tion strength of the janissary corps. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards,
in other words shortly after the occupation of the key strongholds, janissary
garrison troops were on record in the Arab lands but also in Hungary. When
campaigning under the command of the sultan, it was the primary function
of the janissaries to defend the person of the ruler. In this respect, the last
23 Abdülkadir Özcan, ‘Devşirme’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, ed. Tahir
Altıkulaç et al. (Istanbul, 1994), vol. 9, pp. 254–7 at p. 257.
24 Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi, D 9619/2.
25 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Kepeci 1765, fol. 11r. Compare Mehmet İpçioğlu, ‘Kanunî
Süleyman’ın Estergon (Esztergom) Seferi 1543. Yeni bir Kaynak’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları – The
Journal of Ottoman Studies 10 (1999), 137–59 at p. 140; Ömer Lûti Barkan, ‘H. 974–975 (M.
1567–1568) Malî Yılına ait bir Osmanlı Bütçesi’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası
19 (1957–8), 277–332 at p. 305.
26 Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, p. 45, table 3.5.
283
Gé za dávi d
campaign of Süleyman the Magniicent, in 1566, marked a turning poin. It

was not until 30 years later, in October 1596, that an Ottoman ruler again
appeared on the battleield, when Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) participated in the
campaign culminating in the battle of Mezőkeresztes. It was another impor-
tant obligation of the elite infantry troops to ight in the irst lines during
decisive assaults. Lastly, when not in the ield, they were responsible for public
order in the capital.
During the 1500s, Ottoman army commanders slowly phased out the tra-
ditional weaponry of the janissaries and replaced it by handguns, possibly
matchlock harquebuses. In addition, the soldiers kept some of their lances
and bows or crossbows. It seems that by the second half of the sixteenth cen-
tury most of them used irearms, and during the reign of Murad III (r. 1574–95)
commanders introduced matchlock muskets, a more advanced type.27
Earlier research had maintained that Dutch theoreticians at the end of the
sixteenth century invented the volley or salvo ire. A recent article casts doubt
on this contention, arguing – on the basis of Ottoman narrative and miniature
evidence – that the janissaries must have applied an identical method more or
less contemporaneously or even somewhat earlier.28 Doubtless William Louis
(Willem Lodewijk) of Nassau did not learn this technique from the Ottomans;
he claimed to have been inspired by ancient Roman practices. While the tech-
nique of iring volleys conceivably may have travelled eastward, a simulta-
neous development in the Ottoman world and western Europe also seems
possible, as oicers everywhere came to realise the possibilities of handguns.29
Relying on the dominant irepower of the janissaries, the Ottomans were able
to gain the upper hand in several sixteenth-century battles. Yet by about 1600
the European infantries mostly were superior in this ield.
The land forces: Salaried horsemen (altı bölük halkı)

While the janissaries did not make much money, the six cavalry regiments
serving the sultan’s court were rather well paid. These mounted soldiers
were not very numerous: our records speak of about 5,000 men in the 1510s
and 1520s, and of 3,670 joining in the Buda campaign. When the Ottomans
27 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, pp. 88–90.

28 Günhan Börekçi, ‘A Contribution to the Military Revolution Debate: The Janissaries[’] Use
of Volley Fire during the Long Ottoman–Habsburg War of 1593–1606 and the Problem of
Origins’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59 (2006), 407–38.
29 Geofrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500 –
1800 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 19, illustration 5; Geofrey Parker, ‘The Limits to Revolutions in
Military Afairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy’, The
Journal of Military History 72, 2 (2007), 331–72 at pp. 359, 370.
284
marched against Esztergom (Estorgon), once again approximately 5,000 men

participated in the action. According to the budget of 1567, by that time the
number of cavalry soldiers had more than doubled in comparison with the
early sixteenth century and now stood at 11,251 men. As all our documents tell
us, the sipahis (cavalrymen) and silahtars (“bearers of arms”) were the largest
units within the corps. As for the four other divisions, the “salaried men of
the right and left” (ulufeciyan-i yemin and yesar) and the “strangers of the right
and left” (gureba-i yemin and yesar), they made up one-half or even less of the
total. It was the corps’ traditional role to accompany the ruler on his military
enterprises and shield him from the left and right during ield battles, and
this function did not change throughout the period under discussion. At the
same time, quite a few cavalry soldiers, especially among the sipahis, played
a signiicant role in tax collection. Other salaried groups included gunners
(topçu), gun carriage drivers (top arabacısı), armourers (cebeci), bombardiers
(humbaracı) and sappers (lağ ımcı).
For the ifteenth century, evidence on artillerymen and their assistants is
scarce. But as the Ottoman polity became a “gunpowder empire”, by the
time of Selim I these groups had turned into an indispensable element within
the army and remained so during the following decades. Between 1514 and
1598, the number of topçus multiplied eightfold, arriving at some 2,800 men
as the sixteenth century drew to a close. Figures for the top arabacısı corps
are less consistent, varying between 400 and 900 men. But – among other
things – these soldiers had an essential function, for they supplied vehicles
for the circles of war wagons (Wagenburgs) used by the Ottomans in several
ield battles.30 The importance of the cebecis also grew signiicantly because
their workload became heavier due to the increase in the larger stipendiary
regiments. As a result, their number rose from a starting value of 450 to 3,000
by 1598 and 5,730 by 1609.31 Yet compared to the other corps cebecis and topçus
were not numerous, even when taken together.
Sappers or miners belonged to the most efective military elements within
the Ottoman army, quite often more skilful than their European counter-
parts. Working in a sitting position, they performed their tasks eiciently and
rapidly, creating a complex system of partly inter-connected corridors.32 In
30 Emanuel Constantin Antoche, ‘Du tábor de Jan Žižka et de Jean Hunyadi au tabur çengi
des armées ottomanes : L’art militaire hussite en Europe orientale, au Proche et au Moyen
Orient (XVe–XVIIe siècles)’, Turcica 36 (2004), 91–124.
31 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, p. 30, table 2.2.
32 Ibid., pp. 39–40 (based on seventeenth-century information). See the illustrations in Luigi
Ferdinando Marsigli, Stato militare dell’Impèro Ottomanno, incremento e decremento del medes-
imo (The Hague and Amsterdam, 1732) pt. II, plates 38 and 39.
285
Gé za dávi d
these units, it was not necessary to be a Muslim, and especially Armenians

sometimes served in them.
With the development of gunpowder technology, military men invented
new sorts of explosive devices. We do not know when hand bombs irst
appeared; nor is there much information about the earliest bombs shot by
mortars. In the sixteenth century, the producers of such items formed part
of the cebecis, while those who projected them were topçus.33 It is also unclear
to what extent the sultan’s specialists imitated or independently constructed
other types of deadly incendiary and exploding mechanisms – the two func-
tions might be combined – used in Christian Europe mainly for the defence
of castles. During the siege of Eger in 1552, both the Hungarians and the sul-
tan’s troops employed such devices.34 Yet no further information is available
on the possible Ottoman varieties of ireballs (Feuerball), incendiary mugs
(Sturmkrüge), clubs (Sturmkolben), serpents/wreaths (Sturmkrantz, Feuerring)
and “tubes” (Röhrlein). Merely some of the less sophisticated seventeenth-cen-
tury devices of this kind feature in the work of the late seventeenth-century
Habsburg general Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, who devoted much attention to
his Ottoman opponents.35 However, these were not very complicated weap-
ons; therefore we may also imagine that they were in use temporarily and
later forgotten.
The land forces: Timar-holding sipahis

In the later ifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century, the preben-
dal cavalry was the second major component of the Ottoman armed forces.
These men formed part of the timar system, which played a vital role in sup-
porting the Ottoman establishment politically, economically and socially.
It was the sipahi ’s main duty to serve the sultan as a mounted soldier in
exchange for his holding, which mostly consisted of permission to collect
the taxes he had been assigned and use these resources to keep up his ight-
ing strength. In addition he was indispensable for the maintenance of the
Ottoman land system (miri topraklar) at the local level, as the sipahi controlled
the peasantry’s use of ploughlands, over which the sultan held eminent
domain. Quite often the timar-holder must have had a say in the selection of
crops as well; after all, he collected many peasant dues in kind and had them
33 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilâtından Kapukulu Ocakları, vol. 2, p. 117.

34 Sebestyén Tinódi, ‘Eger vár viadaljáról való ének’, in Sebestyén Tinódi, Krónika (Budapest,
1984), p. 266, lines 1171–86; p. 277, lines 1455–9 (originally published in Kolozsvár, 1554).
35 Marsigli, Stato militare dell’Impèro Ottomanno, pt. II, p. 35, plate 13.
286
sold on his behalf by the villagers. Finally, the sipahi secured public order
in the name of the ruler and performed police services in the countryside.
In the ifteenth century, some timars went to civilian oice-holders.36 But
during the 1500s such arrangements practically disappeared and only military
men were eligible.
In all newly conquered European provinces, the Ottoman authorities
introduced the timar system, but not in certain eastern territories, including
Egypt. As an interesting example of Ottoman pragmatism, in the Balkans
Christian petty aristocrats and other military men sometimes could preserve
their socio-political status by becoming sipahis; this practice continued until
the end of the ifteenth century.37 For instance, in 1467–8, some 60 per cent of
the timars in northern Serbia were in the hands of Christians, and in 1469, 82
per cent of all Bosnian timars had non-Muslim holders.38 With the passing of
time, however, these Christian sipahis disappeared as a result of dispossession
or conversion to Islam. Thus only a few Christian timariots are on record
in sixteenth-century Ottoman Hungary, partly because the custom had been
abandoned and partly due to the unwillingness of the local nobility to enter
the sultans’ service.
Christian sipahis also oiciated in the north-eastern Anatolian province of
Trabzon, which in 1461 Mehmed II had conquered from its Byzantine rulers.
Our records show that by 1486 two Christians from this sub-province held
timars on a hereditary basis, and in 1516 the number of such timars had risen
to 22. Remarkably, these cavalry soldiers appeared in the registers as martolos,
an expression commonly used in the Ottoman Balkans (Rumeli) for a difer-
ent kind of service but otherwise unknown in Anatolia.39 However, since this
term is a derivation of the Greek armatolos, it may well have emerged inde-
pendently from Rumelian usage in this previously Byzantine territory. The
survival of local landlords can be supposed in Georgia, too, although so far
only a single indirect reference supports this assumption.40
36 Nicoară Beldiceanu, Le timar dans l’État ottoman (début XIVe–début XVIe siècle) (Wiesbaden,
1980), pp. 38– 46.
37 Halil İnalcık, ‘Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı İmparatorluğuna: XV. Asırda Rumeli’de Hıristiyan
Sipahiler ve Menşeleri’, in Fuad Köprülü Armağanı / Mélanges Fuad Köprülü (Istanbul, 1953),
pp. 207–48.
38 Ernst Werner, Die Geburt einer Großmacht – Die Osmanen (1300–1481). Ein Beitrag zur Genesis
des türkischen Feudalismus, 4th ed. (Weimar, 1985), pp. 266– 7.
39 M. Fahrettin Kırzıoğlu, Osmanlılar’ın Kaf kas-elleri’ni Fethi (1451–1481) (Ankara, 1993), pp. 12,
49; Bilgehan Pamuk, ‘XV–XVI. Yüzyıllarda Trabzon Sancağı’nda Martoloslar’, OTAM 14
(2003), 185–216.
40 C‘isana Abulaje and Miheil Svanije, Č‘ildiris eialet‘is ˘ȷ aba davt‘ari 1694–1732 cc. (Tbilisi, 1979),
p. 278.
287
Gé za dávi d
Already in the ifteenth century, the Ottoman authorities sometimes

assigned timars to garrison soldiers instead of paying them in cash.41
Apparently this practice became more widespread in the 1500s. As for the
money involved, it might go not to individuals but collectively to groups of
military men. Even the prayer-leaders and other religious personnel oiciat-
ing in the fortresses might receive their pay in this fashion. In the early 1590s,
the inancial administration further modiied this system by introducing the
so-called ocaklık regime.42 When regular sources of income of one or more
settlements were given to a garrison as ocaklık, it became the responsibility of
the assignees to collect the dues and distribute them among the members of
the relevant unit; such arrangements typically were valid for a lengthy period
of time. Though this practice weakened the redistributive character of the
empire, it seemed expedient in a period of inancial crisis.
In principle, all timars contained an essential revenue element (the kılıç,
or “sword”) which theoretically had to remain intact even in the case of re-
assignment. In several instances, however, the grant was too small for a kılıç. A
comparison of ten sub-provinces (sancak, liva) located in Rumeli between 1533
and 1695 reveals that, over more than a century and a half, the number of kılıç
remained roughly constant; from the late 1500s, the Ottoman court seems to
have considered 40,000 kılıç an ideal igure for the empire as a whole.43 But in
an increasing number of cases the administration could not prevent prebends
from gradually turning into continuous possessions of their holders and even
becoming hereditary.44
We can best make these processes visible by analysing data from the so-
called timar ruznamçesis (or day-to-day prebend records). From the late 1580s
and 1590s onwards, short notes in a diferent hand typically appear above the
original entries, which narrate the later fate of the holdings.45 Or at least we
41 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 1, fols. 57v– 74v. There were more than
80 persons in four castles in the sancak of Vidin in 1483.
42 Nejat Göyünç, ‘Yurtluk-Ocaklık Deyimleri Hakkında’, in Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu’na Armağan
(Istanbul, 1991), pp. 269–77; Pál Fodor, Vállalkozásra kényszerítve. Az oszmán pénzügyigazgatás
és hatalmi elit változásai a 16–17. század fordulóján (Budapest, 2006), pp. 272–99.
43 Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, ‘Changes in the Structure and Strength of the Timariot Army
from the Early Sixteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century’, Eurasian Studies 4, 2 (2005
[2007]), 157–88 at p. 182.
44 Klaus Röhrborn, Untersuchungen zur osmanischen Verwaltungsgeschichte (Berlin and New
York, 1973), pp. 95–6; Avdo Sućeska, ‘Die Timar-Organisation im bosnischen Eyalet’, Wiener
Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 82 (1992), 335–48; Mario Grignaschi, ‘Das osmanis-
che tımar-Recht und der kanun Süleymans des Gesetzgebers’, in Armağan. Festschrift für
Andreas Tietze, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf and Suraiya Faroqhi with Rudolf Veselý (Prague, 1994),
pp. 123–36 at p. 136.
45 See, for example, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 15567, 16052; Kepeci
344; Ruznamçe 216, passim.
288
can observe this practice in the volumes concerning the Hungarian territo-
ries, where no such supplementary remarks had been customary in earlier
times. The additional note often bears a date 15 to 20 years later than the grant
itself, and since no new name appears, we can infer that in the meantime the
person collecting the revenues in question had not changed. In one instance,
the holder enjoyed the same allotment for 37 lunar years.46 Other examples,
however, show that after the death of a timariot his son inherited his holding;
often the oicial value of the deceased father’s grant and the composition of
his income passed to his son intact.47 Timars did not become hereditary from
one year to the next; however, the direction of change and its progressive
character are quite obvious.48
In the course of our period, the average income derived from timars seems
to have increased. But even in the late 1500s, many of them still remained
relatively modest and often provided no more than bare subsistence. For
instance, in 1485, 71 per cent of all grants located in the sub-province of Ordu
by the Black Sea brought in less than 1,000 akçe and 95 per cent less than
3,000 akçe, while not a single timar yielded more than 4,000 akçe per year.49
Eighty-three years later, in the district of Erzurum, 67 per cent of all allot-
ments remained below 3,000 akçe.50 Nor was the situation much diferent in
the sancak of Çorum: in 1575, 51 per cent of all timars produced an income
under 3,000 akçe and 81 per cent did not exceed 5,000 akçe.51 According to a
document dated to 1583, the situation was slightly more favourable in the liva
of Akşehir, near Konya, since here only 64 per cent of all timars produced less
than 5,000 akçe in revenue.52
However, the price increases of the late 1500s must have taken their toll:
in the sancak of Muş, to the west of Lake Van, in the irst years of the sev-
enteenth century, 38 per cent of all timars still did not reach 3,000 akçe, and
71 per cent remained below 5,000 akçe.53 Thus, throughout the period under
46 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Ruznamçe 656, p. 253.

47 See, for example, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 15567, pp. 107, 180;
ibid., Kepeci 405, passim.
48 Dávid and Fodor, ‘Changes in the Structure and Strength of the Timariot Army’, pp. 162–4,
166–7, 185.
49 Yılmaz Kurt, ‘Sis Sancağı (Kozan–Feke) Mufassal Tahrir Defteri Tanıtımı ve Değerlendirmesi
II: Ekonomik Yapı’, OTAM 2 (1991), 151–99 at pp. 165–6. In the district of Arvanid in Albania
some 50 years earlier (1431–2), 70 per cent of all timar s yielded less than 3,000 akçe. See Fodor,
‘Ottoman Warfare’, p. 201.
50 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 468, p. 3.
51 Üçler Bulduk, ‘16. Yüzyılda Çorum Sancağı-II (Dirlikler)’, OTAM 6 (1995), 39–50 at p. 49.
52 Mehmet Akif Erdoğru, ‘Akşehir Sancağındaki Dirliklerin III. Murad Devrindeki Durumu ve
1583/991 Tarihli Akşehir Sancağı İcmal Defteri’, OTAM 1 (1990), 127–61 at p. 133.
53 Orhan Kılıç, ‘Muş Sancağı Dirlikleri (1604–1605)’, OTAM 9 (1998), 241–62 at p. 252.
289
Gé za dávi d
consideration, the holders of small and very small timars must have been
quite poor. Although we cannot directly compare the available data with ear-
lier igures from the same regions, it seems likely that the living standard of
certain sipahis deteriorated in the course of the 1500s due to the very consid-
erable inlation which took place in the meantime and markedly in the last
quarter of the sixteenth century.54
The situation was not any better in Rumeli: during the 1530s, in 27 sancaks
located on this territory, 40 per cent of all timars remained below 3,000 akçe,
and 72 per cent did not produce 5,000 akçe in revenue.55 Only in the Hungarian
territories was there no such plethora of minor timar-holders; in the sancak of
Simontornya, for instance, only three timars were granted in 1552, all of them
above 5,000 akçe in value. In 1565, four grants out of 17, or less than 25 per cent,
fell below this limit; ive years later, in 1570, all 15 timars on record were worth
5,000 akçe and more.56 In the sancak of Buda, a mere 20 per cent of all ordinary
timars yielded less than 5,000 akçe.57
There was thus a signiicant diference between Anatolia and Rumeli on the
one hand and the Hungarian provinces on the other. However, this observa-
tion does not necessarily mean that the latter were richer in taxable resources,
for in the newly conquered areas the government perhaps intentionally kept
the number of timariots low. In Anatolia on the other hand, the Ottoman sul-
tans may well have hesitated to change arrangements that went back to ear-
lier centuries and thus had the sanction of tradition. Moreover, in the course
of time, certain timars may have been sub-divided between heirs, a practice
which the administration allowed at least to a limited extent at least from
the 1530s.58 We can also explain the higher timar revenues documented for
Hungary by the fact that the province was on the frontier. Possibly the gov-
ernment perceived that here the sipahis in return for living in constant peril
needed encouragement by more substantial grants, and timars located in the
borderlands quite often included revenues derived from places which were
not under complete Ottoman control. As a result, sipahis in these positions
54 Ömer Barkan, ‘Edirne ve Civarındaki Bazı İmaret Tesislerinin Yıllık Muhasebe Bilânçoları’,
Belgeler 2 (1964), 235–61; Şevket Pamuk, ‘Prices in the Ottoman Empire, 1469–1914’,
55 Ömer Lûti Barkan, ‘H. 933–934 (M. 1527–1528) Malî Yılına Ait bir Bütçe Örneği’, İstanbul
Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 15 (1953–4), 238–329, ilâve 1 between pp. 325 and 326.
56 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 1030, 353, 505, respectively.
57 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 329.
58 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Kanûnî Sultan Süleyman’ın Timar ve Zeamet Tevcihi ile İlgili
Fermanları’, Tarih Dergisi 17 (1968), 35–48 at pp. 39–40; Douglas A. Howard, ‘Ottoman
Administration and the Tîmâr System: Sûret-i kânûnnâme -i ‘Osmânî Berây-ı Tîmâr Dâden’,
Journal of Turkish Studies – Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları 20 (1996), 46–124 at pp. 69–71.
290
often could collect only a part of the revenues they had been assigned, and the
administration must have made allowance for this fact.59
Did the grantees really receive the sums to which they were entitled accord-
ing to their diplomas (berat)? Not necessarily, for often there were remarkable
diferences between the nominal and actual values of a given prebend. Some
timariots were so fortunate as to enjoy a somewhat higher income than that
oicially granted to them, for instance when the surplus revenue could not
easily be used for another purpose. At least this was the formula that the
scribes employed in such cases; in reality, other factors, especially good con-
tacts with the right people, were probably decisive. Sipahis who received just
the full amount granted to them also had reason for satisfaction, for many of
their colleagues were far worse of, being accorded signiicantly less yearly rev-
enue than their timars were worth “on paper”. Such situations occurred even
in the ifteenth century: thus a register from Vidin dated to 1483 shows that
within a sample of 129 timar grants, 98 (or 76 per cent) consisted of smaller
sums than scheduled. A mere 12 persons (9 per cent) were lucky enough to
get exactly what they were entitled to, while 19 sipahis (15 per cent) managed
to obtain somewhat more revenue than scheduled. But their gains were on
the whole minute.60
To our surprise, a similar inquiry concerning the sancak of Szigetvár
(Sigetvar) in 1582–3 has shown that the local sipahis did much better than their
colleagues in Vidin had done a century earlier. Resources at the disposal of
the exchequer made it possible to fully satisfy nearly half of the grantees (32
out of 67), and the missing sums also were a good deal lower.61 From a list
covering the sancak of Buda in 1584–5, it appears that in this sub-province
52 per cent of all timariots were “underpaid”. Even less favourable was the
situation in the sancak of Smederevo (Szendrő, Semendire), where during
the same period the administration fully satisied but 124 out of 282 persons;
as for the remaining 56 per cent, they had to make do with less than their
“paper” revenue.62
When it came to absorbing losses, the timariots were not equal. The size
of the original grant also made a diference. Presumably a zeamet-holder usu-
ally did not get into great inancial diiculties even if he received less than his
59 Klára Hegyi, ‘“Aranyásó szpáhik” a királyi Magyarországon’, in A tudomány szolgálatában.

Emlékkönyv Benda Kálmán 80. születésnapjára, ed. Ferenc Glatz (Budapest, 1993), pp. 103–11.
60 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 1, fols. 7v–56v, 57v–75r.
61 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 15283, pp. 301–42.
62 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 325, Buda: pp. 1–30, Smederevo: pp.
39–230.
291
Gé za dávi d
due. Those timariots, however, who collected 50 (!), 150 or 200 akçe instead
of 3,000 must have had serious trouble making ends meet: the amounts col-
lected would have covered their expenses only for a few days or weeks.63 To
make matters worse, many sipahis had to wait for years, sometimes more
than a decade, after having received the sultan’s order for a revenue grant. We
encounter cases of this kind mainly in the late sixteenth century, but presum-
ably they occurred in earlier periods as well.
Why did these people accept their prebends at all, and on what other
income could they count? Booty comes irst to mind, and some timariots
may have appropriated goods under various pretexts. “Underpaid” timariots
probably had additional ways of making money that as yet escape us. Even
so, it is clear that quite a few prebend-holders just barely managed to survive.
But many irregular warriors and garrison soldiers still were eager to join this
select group for reasons of prestige.
Revenues available to military men might diminish for all sorts of reasons,
but administrative practice was always a signiicant factor. Thus, besides the
developments discussed earlier, in the course of the sixteenth century the
Ottoman government tended to reward more and more highly privileged
individuals associated with the sultan’s court and the central administration
with so-called gedikli zeamets. In the 1580s and 1590s, the number of people
enjoying prebends of this kind was over six hundred.64 Scribes of the Imperial
Council, oicers (müteferrikas) of the court, commissaries (emins) and pur-
suivants (çavuşes) of the palace, and even the servants of high-ranking oi-
cials received fabulous sums, frequently far beyond the often-mentioned
upper limit of the zeamet category. Supposedly no such grant was to exceed
99,999 akçe, but this rule was frequently honoured in the breach.65 The “paper”
value of the zeamets allocated to these dignitaries reached 50 million akçe;
such revenue sources existed even in places remote from the capital such as
Syria, Georgia and Hungary. Direct comparisons are impossible, but it is still
worth noting that in 1530 the sum total of all zeamets and timars distributed
in the provinces of Anatolia, Rumeli, Rum, Karaman and the Arab territories
approximated 110 million akçe.66
63 In the sancaks of both Buda and Smederevo, we have located one timariot with an income
of 50 akçe.
64 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 687.
65 Géza Dávid, ‘Assigning a Ze‘amet in the 16th Century: Revenue-Limits and Oice-Holding’,
in Armağan: Festschrift für Andreas Tietze, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf and Suraiya Faroqhi with
Rudolf Veselý (Prague, 1994), pp. 47–57.
66 İsmet Binark et al. (eds.), 438 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Anadolu Ddefteri (937/1530): Dizin
ve Tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1993, 1994); İsmet Binark et al. (eds.), 166 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i
292
Admittedly, in practice these high-level dignitaries resident mostly in

Istanbul received only about 40 million akçe, but the original sum of 50 mil-
lion akçe still would have suiced for 10,000 timars with revenues of 5,000
akçe each. Almost 150 of these fortunate personages enjoyed nominal sums
of over 100,000 akçe per person, and the most highly privileged ones even
had “paper” revenues of 300,000 akçe. The average amounted to 80,000 akçe
or so, a substantial sum of money, indicating the high status of this group.
People beneiting from such grants normally received exemption from mil-
itary service, and typically they did not even live in the territory where their
prebends were situated.67 This privilege caused envy among their rivals, who
occasionally managed to induce the sultan’s court to coniscate some of these
holdings68 or persuaded the monarch to withdraw the prerogative of not par-
ticipating in war. Thus a certain oicer (müteferrika) lost his zeamet because he
had failed to join the “Hungarian campaign”.
Another list, from the year 1600, contains nearly 300 individuals enjoy-
ing the revenues of zeamets and timars belonging to the gedikli category.69
This register shows that at least in this year the grantees in question had to
appear at a muster similarly to ordinary timariots. In addition, the scribe also
mentioned the armed retainers (cebelis) these dignitaries needed to provide,
together with their arms. In a manner which perhaps was not completely sys-
tematic, the scribe also indicated if the man at issue was found to be “perfect”
(mükemmel); this remark must mean that the dignitary appeared with the pre-
scribed number of men-at-arms properly equipped.
In the late ifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century, the
administration did not spell out the exact rules of ielding cebelis as clearly
as had been the custom in the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror. Apparently,
the holders of timars smaller than 6,000 akçe were not expected to bring
retainers.70 On the other hand, timar-owners with an income between 10,000
Vilâyet-i Anadolu Defteri (937/1530): Dizin ve Tıpkıbasım (Ankara, 1995); İsmet Binark et al. (eds.),
387 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Karaman ve Rûm defteri (937/1530): Dizin ve Tıpkıbasım, 2 vols.
(Ankara, 1996, 1997); İsmet Binark et al. (eds.), 998 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Diyâr-i Bekr
ve ‘Arab ve Zü’l-Kâdiriyye Defteri (937/1530): Dizin ve Tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1998, 1999);
Yusuf Sarınay et al. (eds.), 370 numaralı muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm İli defteri (937/1530): Dizin ve
tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara, 2001, 2002); Yusuf Sarınay et al. (eds.), 167 numaralı muhâsebe-i
Vilâyet-i Rûm İli defteri (937/1530): Dizin ve tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara, 2003, 2004).
67 Géza Dávid, Osmanlı Macaristan’ında Toplum, Ekonomi ve Yönetim. 16. Yüzyılda Simontornya
Sancağ ı, pp. 105–6.
68 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Kepeci 344, p. 354.
69 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 691, pp. 121–83.
70 This can be inferred from the timar defteris of the vilayet of Temesvár. See Başbakanlık
Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 552, 1010.
293
Gé za dávi d
and 19,999 akçe uniformly needed to maintain three cebelis, while zaims had to
keep a man-at-arms for every 5,000 akçe they received – earlier on, this limit
had been 4,000 akçe. Supposedly these modiications dated to the late 1500s,
although Ayn Ali irst mentioned them only in 1607.71
Applying these principles to our case, which involves 1,379 retainers, it
appears that slightly less than half of all prebend-holders conformed to regu-
lations; it is a bit surprising that the registrar did not classify all these men as
“perfect”. As for the remaining grantees, some of them ielded more retain-
ers than prescribed. In some cases, the number of “extra” men-at-arms was
striking: a man who brought in four cebelis while enjoying a timar of 5,000
akçe turned out to be the recorder in person. Others by contrast did not ful-
il their quotas; interestingly enough, the scribes still labelled some of these
delinquents as “perfect”. The inal result suggests that 93 per cent of the cebe-
lis who theoretically should have been present actually put in an appearance;
even if we make allowance for the inconsistencies mentioned earlier, this
achievement is remarkable. Moreover, on average, every timariot brought in
4.7 warriors, once again a very high igure due to the special status of the
grantees; these men mostly possessed zeamets with a good or even elevated
income. On the other hand, on the basis of a list dated to 1583, we arrive at an
average of 1.4 cebelis for ordinary zeamet- and timar-holders.72 The resultant
discrepancy once again shows the huge diferences between the allotments
enjoyed by grant-holders at the centre of government and those assigned to
local timariots.
Surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the men-at-arms (82 per cent)
serving these high-ranking prebend-holders possessed a sword and nothing
else.73 Nine per cent of the cebelis appeared with a “pole” (sırık), and only 5
per cent of the total beneited from the protection of a shield in addition to
the “pole”.74 In our sample of 1,379 retainers, 32 had a handgun (tüfenk) and a
71 Ayn-i Ali Efendi, Kavânîn-i Âl-i Osman der Hülasa-i Mezâmin-i Defter-i Dîvân, preface by M.
Tayyib Gökbilgin (Istanbul, 1979), pp. 13, 39. Compare Sofyalı Ali Çavuş Kanunnâmesi, ed.
Midhat Sertoğlu (Istanbul, 1992), p. 21; Ahmed Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnâmeleri ve Hukûkî
Tahlilleri, 9 vols. (Istanbul, 1990–6), vol. 4, p. 464.
72 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Kepeci 320, pp. 114–16; Dávid and Fodor, ‘Changes in
the Structure and Strength of the Timariot Army’, p. 171.
73 The text has a ç below the names of the individuals concerned. Possible equivalents coming
to mind are kılıç (“sword”), çark (“crossbow”), mızrak (“lance, javelin”) and sırık (“pole”).
After some hesitation, I have decided on “sword” as the most likely weapon in the hands of
a retainer. As Colin Imber has remarked, “the timar-holding cavalrymen were adept in the
use of the short sword” (Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, p. 276).
74 The term sounds strange, but at least one contemporary chronicle refers to sırıklı cebelis:
Topçular Kâtibi ‘Abdülkādir (Kadrî) Efendi Tarihi (Metin ve tahlîl), ed. Ziya Yılmazer, 2 vols.
(Ankara, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 194, 258. It is also noteworthy that when a certain Yunus bey passed
294
few others a rile and another weapon, including tirkeş or sırık. Eight irregu-
lars (sekbans) also appeared along with their guns; after all, the army employed
these semi-military groups because they were able to handle muskets.75
All in all, due to the impoverishment of many sipahis, it was their com-
manders, namely the governors of sub-provinces and provinces, who needed
to shoulder the expenses of warfare. As a result, governors hired armed men
to serve in their households, and the sultan’s court came to rely on these
supplementary forces. Therefore we ind a plethora of new provinces and
sub-provinces instituted during the 1500s; their governors received so-called
has revenues – the same term was used for treasury lands – which were high
enough to allow them to hire more reliable and efective troops. While in the
early 1500s there had been 90 sancaks and 3–4 beylerbeyliks, by the century’s
end there were over 200 sub-provinces and more than 30 provinces. Territorial
expansion certainly was an important factor, but reorganisation within the
boundaries of the early 1500s also counted for something. Provincial gover-
nors received supplementary income when the exchequer allocated them the
has revenues of entire sancaks as arpalık (literally “fodder money”).76
It is diicult to determine the exact strength of the timariot army on an
empire-wide basis. Sources are scarce; in addition, there was constant l uctu-
ation as sipahis died or resigned and others received new grants, some of the
latter remaining inefective. We also know very little even about the number
of armed retainers demanded from timariots “on paper”, to say nothing of
the actual number, and this is a further source of doubts. Therefore estimates
vary from one author to the next, within a range of 50,000 to 90,000, although
all scholars base their igures on the same more or less reliable source, dated
to 1527 and covering timars, zeamets and hases within the empire.77 Yet given
the problems connected with the numerous small timars that we already have
discussed, it seems more realistic to assume that in the 1520s the sultan could
count on a maximum of 60,000 prebendal soldiers and retainers. Territorial
expansion during the 1500s resulted in signiicant increases, so that by the
end of the century the Ottoman high command could put together an army
away in 1572, he left 25 sırıks; Ömer [Lüti] Barkan, ‘Edirne Askerî Kassamı’na Âit Tereke
Defterleri, 1545–1659’, Belgeler 5–6 (1966), 1–440 at p. 147.
75 Halil İnalcık, ‘The Socio-Political Efects of the Dif usion of Fire-arms in the Middle East’, in
War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (London, 1975),
pp. 195–217 at pp. 200–1.
76 Dávid and Fodor, ‘Changes in the Structure and Strength of the Timariot Army’, p. 174.
77 K áldy-Nagy, ‘The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organization’, pp. 161–2, fol-
lowed by Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, p. 266; Ömer Lûti Barkan, ‘Timar’, in İslâm
Ansiklopedisi, vol. 12, 1 (Istanbul, 1974), pp. 286–333 at p. 287; Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, p. 39,
table 3.1.
295
Gé za dávi d
of perhaps 80,000–100,000 individuals.78 By this later date, however, a timar-

holder could avoid mobilisation by forgoing part of his yearly income; this
option could seriously inl uence the number of ighting men present at any
given muster.
The land forces: Auxiliaries

For a lengthy period after 1453, the organisation of the auxiliary forces did not
change substantively.79 But, in the long run, certain groups, like the azabs and
the martoloses, became regular, paid garrison soldiers or served on river lotil-
las and in the navy, while others, such as the yayas, müsellems and cerehors,
lost most of their military importance; they now laboured as transporters
and pioneers or else supplied the armies. By the later 1500s, the Ottoman gov-
ernment considered certain paramilitary units obsolete and dissolved them.
As a result, müsellems and yayas were disbanded irst in 1582 and once again
before 1609.80 As for the akıncıs and their special breed of horses, in the bat-
tle of Târgovişte (Tergovişte) in 1595, losses were so high that reorganisation
seemed unpromising; henceforth this corps became quite insigniicant.81 In its
place, the Ottoman commanders now relied on the nomadic light cavalry of
the Crimean hans, whose ferociousness and cruelty were a source of terror to
their victims but redoubtable even to the Ottomans themselves.82 Observers
often exaggerated the number of men provided by the hans; during the long
war, no more than 20,000–25,000 Tatars appeared when led by their ruler and
10,000 to 15,000 when a prince, such as the kalga or a mirza, commanded this
contingent.83
Sometime in the late ifteenth or early sixteenth century, Ottoman army
commanders on the Balkan Peninsula created a new corps, known as the
deli. Its members belonged to the households of the provincial and also the –
more prominent – sub-provincial governors, so that they do not igure in state
78 Barkan, ‘Timar’, p. 290, cetvel 2.

79 Fodor, ‘Ottoman Warfare, 1300–1453’, pp. 205, 211–17.
80 Gyula K áldy-Nagy, ‘The Conscription of the Müsellem and Yaya Corps in 1540’, in Hungaro –
Turcica: Studies in Honour of Julius Németh, ed. Gyula K áldy-Nagy (Budapest, 1976), pp. 275–81
at pp. 280–1.
81 Abdülkadir Özcan, ‘Akıncı’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, ed. Tahir Altıkulaç
et al. (Istanbul, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 249–50 at p. 250.
82 In an oicial Ottoman document sent to the voivode of Moldavia in 1552, the author claims
that the Tartars eat horse and human (!) lesh and are diicult to control. See Géza Dávid
and Pál Fodor, ‘Az ország ügye mindenek előtt való.’ A szultáni tanács Magyarországra vonatkozó
rendeletei (1544–1545, 1552). ‘Afairs of State Are Supreme’. The Orders of the Ottoman Imperial
Council Pertaining to Hungary (1544–1545, 1552) (Budapest, 2005), p. 229 (Turkish text).
83 Mária Ivanics, A Krími Kánság a tizenöt éves háborúban (Budapest, 1994), pp. 176–7.
296
documents but only in narrative material. Perhaps with a bit of exaggeration,

our sources describe them as unusually courageous and indeed fanatic, clad
in wild animals’ furs and carrying huge weapons to terrify their opponents;
their function was similar to that of the akıncıs’.84
In Anatolia, sarıcas, sekbans or levends had a status similar to that of the
delis in Rumeli.85 These young men left their homes in the countryside due
to the attractions of a military career and also to escape excessive taxation.
Those who were lucky found places in the households of governors and chief
oicers (ümera); others were only temporarily employed for the duration
of a given campaign, and when discharged they lived by robbery and ban-
ditry. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, military uprisings sometimes
involving huge armies broke out all over Anatolia; the ighting forces of these
so-called celali rebels were typically sarıcas, sekbans or levends.86
The land forces: Fortress garrisons

At the outset, pre-existing castles conquered by the Ottomans served to stabi-
lise the frontier; later on, sultans and commanders added their own fortiica-
tions when and where it seemed necessary. Given the territorial expansion
of the empire, new conquests transformed the front lines again and again.
Places that earlier on had been important lost their signiicance, while new
centres emerged crowded with garrison troops. As few scholars have studied
the changing Ottoman borders and the pertinent castles manned by frontier
troops, we also know little about the fortress garrisons.87 As a rare exception,
we possess a detailed monograph on Ottoman Hungary.88 Consequently, all
we can ofer here is a sketchy characterisation of the large Ottoman defence
network, which apart from new creations incorporated fortiications from
the Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk periods.
On an imperial level, an account book, often called a “budget” in the schol-
arly literature, lists the total number of fortress soldiers region by region, both
84 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi. II. İstanbul’un Fethinden Kanunî Sultan Süleyman’ın
Ölümüne Kadar, (reprint Ankara, 1975), pp. 573–4.
85 Mustafa Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler (Istanbul, 1965).
86 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Political Tensions in the Anatolian Countryside around 1600: An Attempt
at Interpretation’, in Suraiya Faroqhi, Coping with the State: Political Conlict and Crime in the
Ottoman Empire, 1550–1720 (Istanbul, 1995), pp. 85–98.
87 Palmira Brummett, ‘The Fortress: Deining and Mapping the Ottoman Frontier in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, ed. A. C. S.
Peacock (Oxford, 2009), pp. 31–55.
88 Klára Hegyi, A török hódoltság várai és várkatonasága, 3 vols. (Budapest, 2007). A less compre-
hensive work on Serbia is Olga Zirojević, Tursko vojno uredjenje u Srbiji (1459–1683) (Belgrade,
1974).
297
Gé za dávi d
those receiving pay in cash and those accorded timars. Dated to 1527–8, this
document tells us that some 58 per cent of all the garrison soldiers in ques-
tion, roughly 24,000 out of 41,000 persons, served in the Rumelian territories,
although these were much smaller than the Asian and African provinces of
the empire.89 This concentration of power along the Hungarian borderlines
signiies that western territories featured prominently in Sultan Süleyman’s
ield of vision and that in his perspective the Habsburg enemy was stronger
and more dangerous than Safavid Iran.
While this list provides only totals but no information on individual castles,
we can supplement the available data on the basis of a general survey of the
empire’s resources (muhasebe defteri) compiled around 1530, which we have
already used in another context as well. Moreover, we can derive further ig-
ures from more or less contemporary timar (or icmal) defteris.90 Certainly we
cannot vouch for the completeness of the relevant data. However, it appears
that a castle with over 500 defenders was a rare phenomenon in this period;
border areas aside, quite often the more or less symbolic presence of soldiers
in the provincial centres was enough to prevent local disturbances.
Slightly later, the Ottoman government began to favour considerably
larger garrisons in the newly conquered territories. Thus the vilayet of Buda,
whose provincial capital was the former royal seat, continued to expand until
1566. There emerged three castles with gigantic defence forces, namely Buda,
Esztergom and Székesfehérvár (İstolni Belgrad), which the Ottoman armies
had captured at an early stage of their advance. Due to their strategic impor-
tance against the Habsburgs, these three fortresses for a while gained an
exceptional position. Thus, in 1541–2, 3,000 soldiers garrisoned Buda, but this
number diminished later on: by 1543 there were about 2,500 soldiers, nearly
1,900 by 1549 and some 1,700 by 1557–8. With temporary ups and downs, the
garrison retained this latter size until 1591. Esztergom, which came to be of
special signiicance as the stronghold nearest to the Habsburg Empire, had a
“paper” contingent of some 3,300 men in 1543. However, at the muster under-
taken in the same year, merely some 2,200 soldiers were present since appar-
ently supplements were under way but had not yet arrived. Here, too, the
garrison contracted with the passage of time. Moreover, in 1549, the defenders
89 Barkan, ‘H. 933–934 (M. 1527–1528) Malî Yılına Ait bir Bütçe Örneği’, pp. 282, 284, 285, 292,
294.
90 Yusuf Sarınay et al. (eds.), 367 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm İli Defteri ile 114, 390 ve 101
Numaralı İcmâl Defterleri (920–937/1514–1530). Dizin, tıpkıbasım, vols. 1 and 2 (Ankara, 2007);
367 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm İli Defteri ile 94 ve 1078 Numaralı Avlonya Livâsı Tahrir
Defterleri (926–937/1520–1530) Dizin, Tıpkıbasım, vols. 3 and 4 (Ankara, 2008).
298
of Ciğerdelen, a fortress on the other side of the Danube, featured among the
approximately 1,800 men on active service in Esztergom. In 1554, 1,562 soldiers
were present, and by 1557–8 their number had further diminished to nearly
1,500. During the following decade, the number remained more or less stable,
but by 1591 it had dropped to 1,418. Székesfehérvár, the former coronation
town of the Hungarian kings, in 1543 had a nominal strength of over 3,000
soldiers, with only a hundred of them absent. Later evidence is somewhat
contradictory, but here as well the number of soldiers diminished; in 1591,
only some 1,300 men were left.91 Garrison troops in the “Big Three” decreased
between the 1540s and 1590s because the Ottoman military authorities had
instituted a system of smaller and medium-sized strongholds in the surround-
ing areas, which encompassed both pre-existing fortiications and newly built
palankas. As a result, huge contingents in the main fortresses were no longer
necessary.92
Around 1545, 13,000 men served in the defence of the province; except for
the withdrawal of more than 2,000 janissaries, this igure did not change sig-
niicantly during the following decade. By the 1570s, some 15,000 garrison
troops were on guard, aided by almost 1,000 janissaries. At the end of our
period in 1591, 14,000 soldiers were stationed in Hungarian fortresses; comple-
mented by 800 janissaries, they ensured the security of the frontier.93
Altogether there were approximately one hundred forts of various sizes in
the province after the Ottoman armies captured Szigetvár in 1566, just after
the death of Sultan Süleyman. Transdanubia and northern Hungary were
thickly dotted with castles, while the Great Plain contained but a few defence
works. Likewise, the right bank of the Danube was strategically more impor-
tant than the left bank or the river Tisza.
As regards the second Hungarian province, the vilayet of Temesvár (estab-
lished in 1552), we possess very few sources; taken together, the defenders
amounted to no more than 4,000–4,500 men in over 35 usually rather small
fortiications. Only 600 soldiers suiced for the provincial seat of Temesvár.94
After all, in the period under discussion, the Habsburgs were not in a position
to threaten this particular section of the Ottoman borderlands.
91 Hegyi, A török hódoltság várai, vol. 2, pp. 423–55, 686–732, 972–91.

92 Gyöngyi Kovács, ‘Ottoman Military Architecture in Hungary’, in Thirteenth International
Congress of Turkish Art: Proceedings, ed. Géza Dávid and Ibolya Gerelyes (Budapest, 2009),
pp. 375–92, and the contributions by Attila Gaál, Gyöngyi Kovács and László Vándor, Gábor
Hatházi, Sándor Papp, Márton Rózsás and Gábor Tomka in Archaeology of the Ottoman Period
in Hungary, ed. Ibolya Gerelyes and Gyöngyi Kovács (Budapest, 2003), pp. 105–53.
93 Hegyi, A török hódoltság várai, vol. 1, pp. 157, 161, 165, 166.
94 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 166; vol. 2, p. 1355.
299
Gé za dávi d
The territories south of the river Drava had been subject to the kingdom of
Hungary and after the Ottoman conquest irst formed part of the province of
Rumeli; in 1580, the Ottomans established Bosnia (Bosna) as an independent
province. Information on garrison troops here comes from an undated but
detailed list, probably compiled in the early 1600s. This date is highly proba-
ble, as the soldiers listed here received merely 70 per cent of their original pay,
a practice introduced at about this time.95 The text enumerates 10,304 paid
soldiers stationed in the sancaks of Požega (Pojega), Bosnia, Bihać (Bihke),
Začasna, Herzegovina (Hersek), Klis (Clissa, Kilis) and Krka (Kırka).96
Thus the defence capacities of the Ottoman border fortiications from the
Adriatic Sea to the Lower Danube amounted to 30,000 soldiers at the end
of the sixteenth century; of this rather signiicant force, the overwhelming
majority faced the troops of the “king of Vienna”.
On the Habsburg side in 1572, 128 strongholds contained some 20,000
soldiers, about 14,000 in Hungary in addition to 6,000 men in Croatia and
Slavonia, a threefold growth as compared to 1526. By 1593, there were 171 cas-
tles with about 22,700 registered soldiers: some 15,450 in Hungary and 7,250 in
the two other regions. Since some 1,800,000 people lived in Royal Hungary,
well over 1 per cent must have consisted of military men.97 This proportion
was, however, much higher in the Ottoman borderlands, as the Hungarian
territories under their rule were inhabited by 900,000 souls. To this igure
we should add an unknown number for Bosnia.98 Garrison forces ranging
between 20,000 and 30,000 soldiers thus should have made up between 2.2
and 3.3 per cent of the resident population and somewhat less if we include
Bosnia. Along the Mediterranean littoral of Ottoman Europe, the survey of
1530 indicates that Navarino (Navarin/Neokastro, in the vicinity of modern
Pylos, Anavarin) was probably the premier strategic point, with a minimum
of 650 frontier guards. Together with nearby Modon (Methoni, Moton),
with about 330 defenders, and Koron (Koroni), with at least 380, Navarin
was well able to resist any attack on the Peloponnese. By contrast, otherwise
95 Baki Çakır, Osmanlı Mukataa Sistemi (XVI–XVIII. Yüzyıl) (Istanbul, 2003), p. 94. Compare
Fodor, Vállalkozásra kényszerítve, p. 163.
96 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 5279, p. 349.
97 Géza Pálfy, The Kingdom of Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy in the Sixteenth Century
(Wayne, N.J., 2009), p. 113; Géza Pálfy, ‘The Origins and Development of the Border Defence
System against the Ottoman Empire in Hungary (Up to the Early Eighteenth Century)’, in
Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Conines in the Era of
Ottoman Conquest, ed. Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (Leiden, 2000), pp. 3–69 at 64–9.
98 Géza Dávid, ‘Die Bevölkerung Ungarns im 16.–17. Jahrhundert’, in Historische Demographie
Ungarns (896–1996), ed. Kristó Gyula, trans. Tibor Schäfer (Herne, 2007), pp. 135–80 at pp. 145,
146.
300
important cities, like Thessaloniki (Selanik), seem to have possessed only 150
paid soldiers. On the Black Sea coast, Kilia (Kilija) and Akkerman (Bilhorod
Dnjistrovskij) had the largest garrisons, with at least 500 men in the irst and
over 650 in the second; by comparison, Azov (Azak), with some 300 paid sol-
diers, and Kafa (Kefe), with fewer than 250, were of secondary importance.
Temporary successes on the Persian frontiers resulted in large garrisons
established in the newly conquered castles of Armenia and Georgia. Around
1585, in Yerevan (Revan) alone, 5,600 soldiers were to be stationed, perhaps
the highest igure attested so far for any fortiication within the empire. In
Dmanisi (Tumanis), there were about 2,400 garrison soldiers, and in Lori
nearly 1,900.99 However, in Azerbaijan, the Ottoman commanders seem-
ingly needed far fewer ighting men: in 1597–8, only 481 paid combatants and
19 repair workers were responsible for the defence of Tabriz, including the
newly built bastion.100 In the southern section of the Ottoman–Iranian fron-
tier, there were no mountains to separate the two empires. As a result, Basra
needed a garrison of respectable size: in 1599–1600, more than 1,700 persons
were in charge of its castle, among them 217 pursuivants of the divan, whose
combat value was probably limited.101
Egypt was a special case. As the authorities had never introduced the
timar system, a rather large paid contingent served here, mainly in Cairo
(Al-Kahira, Kahire/Mısır).102 We do not know the total number of gönüllüs,
mounted gunners and the so-called Circassians (Çerakise), the three units gen-
erally stationed in the centre of the province; nor do we have much infor-
mation on soldiers serving in provincial fortiications, some of which were
Ottoman constructions. An order dated to 1568 refers to 8,811 soldiers (kul) in
“Mısır”.103 Only 4,700 were present in the city, while the others served in var-
ious, not necessarily military, functions, mainly in the countryside.104 Among
their other duties they protected the pilgrims en route to Mecca and Medina
and also served in the Yemen.105 From the central government’s viewpoint,

100 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 668, pp. 297–481 at 274–80.
101 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri 6416.
102 Seyyid Muhammed es-Seyyid Mahmud, XVI. Asırda Mısır Eyâleti (Istanbul, 1990), pp.
173–225.
103 This term denotes both Egypt and Cairo. Since the text refers to Mısır as opposed to the
rest of the province, the scribe probably intended “Cairo”.
104 Hacı Osman Yıldırım et al. (eds.), 7 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (975–976/1567–1569). Özet-
Transkripsiyon-İndeks. Özet–Transkripsiyon–İndeks, 4 vols. (Ankara, 1999), vol. 2, p. 74, no.
1335. Compare Es-Seyyid Mahmud, XVI. Asırda Mısır Eyâleti, p. 218, note 183.
105 Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517–1683 (London and
New York, 1994), p. xii; Es-Seyyid Mahmud, XVI. Asırda Mısır Eyâleti, pp. 192, 195, note 99.
301
Gé za dávi d
the Abyssinian territories were an extension of Egypt, and the authorities did
not feel that they needed a large concentration of power so far to the south.
Some 500 or 600 soldiers, rarely more than one thousand, could manage the
defence of the coasts and frontiers.106 On the North African shoreline, Tunis
and La Goletta changed hands quite often; in 1534, 1570 and 1574, the city and
the fortress fell into Ottoman hands, the last conquest being the inal one.
We have only estimates concerning the numerical strength of the defenders;
supposedly some 8,000 soldiers served here both in Ottoman and Spanish
times.107
Once again, several of the values proposed earlier are minimums; in
Damascus, for instance, janissaries sent from the centre might signiicantly
augment the size of the local garrison. All in all, however, the igures referred
to previously probably characterise the relative military strengths of the indi-
vidual regions and fortiications with some accuracy.
A garrison normally held müstahfızes (hisar eri, merd-i kale), azabs and
martoloses, who were foot soldiers, cavalry men (faris, beşli, ulufeciyan-i
süvari) and gönüllüs, who also served on horseback, topçus as artillerymen
and non-combatant units, including craftsmen, musicians and gatekeepers.
Proportions could vary; certain contingents were frequently missing alto-
gether. Garrison commanders were known as dizdar s; they received better
pay than their subordinates but still much less than sancakbeyis. Usually a diz-
dar could count on 3,000 to 6,000 akçe per year; his pay rarely surpassed 8,000
akçe and but exceptionally exceeded 10,000 akçe.108 Commanders active in the
Tabriz region were the best paid of all; at least in 1597–8, 16,666 akçe were
on record in Sindiyan and 19,999 akçe in the provincial centre of Tabriz.109
An oicer who was probably the warden of Aleppo castle in the 1550s got 50
akçe daily, or 18,000 akçe per year.110 On the other hand, a district governor
pocketed at least 150,000–200,000 akçe every year. Admittedly, certain dizdar s
exploited their privileged positions and thus succeeded in accumulating a
certain amount of wealth.111
106 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun Güney Siyaseti, Habeş Eyaleti (Istanbul, 1974),
pp. 116–28.
107 Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African
Frontier (Chicago and London, 1978), pp. 73, 93.
108 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 22, position 56; Tapu defteri 58, p. 324.
109 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Tapu defteri 668, pp. 281, 297.
111 Nenad Moačanin, ‘Hacı Mehmed Ağa of Požega, God’s Special Protégé (ca. 1490–ca.
1580)’, in Hungarian–Ottoman Military and Diplomatic Relations in the Age of Süleyman the
Magniicent, ed. Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (Budapest, 1994), pp.171–81.
302
An example: Soldiers deployed in the 1543 campaign

Scholars often have discussed the total number of soldiers deployed in
Ottoman imperial campaigns. Several authors have opined that, including
irregulars and non-combatants, this igure could amount to a hundred thou-
sand or more. Thus Géza Perjés has proposed that in 1526 the Ottomans
entered Hungary with an army of 150,000 men, while Christopher Dufy has
postulated that 125,000 soldiers and others marched against Vienna in 1529.112
Comparing these igures with contemporary contingents deployed in the
European theatres of war, however, we can conclude that if the Ottomans
had managed to ield armies of even half the size attributed to them, it would
have been a great success.113
Concrete evidence from the 1543 campaign suggests that the number of
Ottoman soldiers involved could not have been much higher than 50,000
or 60,000. At the outset of operations, roughly 13,000–13,500 janissaries and
members of the six cavalry regiments of the sultan’s court received their
pay when under Siklós in southern Hungary. We should add nearly 1,500
armourers, artillerymen and gun carriage drivers and some 3,600 people of
the Seraglio, some of them surely non-combatants.114 The rest of the compu-
tation remains speculative: perhaps 20,000–27,000 timariots and their retain-
ers participated, equivalent to some 33–45 per cent of all sipahis in the empire,
along with their cebelis. But it is very hard to ind reliable data on the number
of timariots actually deployed, particularly as we cannot tell to what extent
cavalry soldiers from the more remote provinces actually showed up.115 If
this estimate is realistic, we arrive at about 40,000 or 45,000 “regulars”. In
addition, the army may have contained 10,000–15,000 irregular soldiers and
other auxiliary troops.116 In certain campaigns, we also have to reckon with
the contingents provided by vassal states, but in enterprises without the sul-
tan, when the commanders were vezir s or paşas, even fewer soldiers must
have participated.
112 Géza Perjés, Mohács (Budapest, 1979), pp. 54, 61; Christopher Dufy, Siege Warfare: The
Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 1996), p. 201.
113 Tallett, War and Society, p. 5, table 1.
114 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Kepeci 1765, fols. 11r–v, 12v; İpçioğlu, ‘Kanunî
Süleyman’ın Estergon (Esztergom) Seferi 1543’, pp. 140–2.
115 Dávid and Fodor, ‘Changes in the Structure and Strength of the Timariot Army’, p. 171.
116 For other computations concerning the strength of the Ottoman army in our period, see
Gyula K áldy-Nagy, ‘Suleimans Angrif auf Europa’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae 28 (1973), 163–212 at pp. 170–5; Halil İnalcık, ‘The Ottoman State: Economy and
Society, 1300–1600’, in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300 –1914, ed.
Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 9–409 at pp. 88–95, 98–100.
303
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The navy
Originally a continental and nomadic society, the Ottomans had a long way
to go before they became a “seaborne empire”.117 Mehmed II made certain
eforts in this direction and was successful against Venice on several occa-
sions, occupying islands and towns; albeit temporarily, in 1480 he even cap-
tured Otranto in southern Italy. But the real breakthrough occurred when in
1494 or 1495 Bayezid II pragmatically invited a pirate by the name of Kemal
Reis to lead the Ottoman leet.118 Kemal Reis efectively reorganised the navy,
building larger warships; as a result, in 1499 he was able to gain the irst great
naval victory near Lepanto (Navpaktos /İnebahtı). After Kemal’s death, per-
formance became less brilliant. Süleyman the Magniicent then took the
next momentous decision when in 1534 he decided to employ Barbarossa
Hayreddin, another well-known and charismatic corsair.119 From this time
on, the main Ottoman leet was under the command of the kapudan paşa
(kaptanpaşa, kapudan-ı derya), who was at the same time the beylerbeyi of the
Archipelago; the centre of this maritime province was located in Gallipoli
(Gelibolu). To counter Portuguese aspirations in the region, in 1525 the sultan
had a smaller naval base established on the Red Sea coast.120 Between 1538,
when the Ottoman navy won a major victory near Prevesa, and 1571, marking
its defeat at Lepanto, the sultans were the equals of or perhaps even superior
to the Venetian and Spanish Mediterranean navies.
A galley with 200–300 persons aboard could not move very far away from
the shore, as the crew needed to obtain fresh provisions and water daily or at
least every second day.121 Therefore admirals generally attacked the opposing
leets near a coastal supply base and not on the open sea; after all, the main
goal of such encounters was expansion on land.122
117 Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Evolution of the Ottoman Seaborne Empire in the Age of the
Oceanic Discoveries, 1453–1525’, American Historical Review 75, 7 (1970), 1892–919.
118 Uzunçarşılı, Merkez ve Bahriye Teşkilâtı, pp. 492–3, note 1; İdris Bostan, ‘Kemal Reis’, in Türkiye
Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi ed. Tahir Altıkulaç et al. (Ankara, 2002), vol. 25, p. 227.
119 Aldo Gal[l]otta, ‘Khayr al-Dīn (Khıdır) Pasha, Barbarossa’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam,
ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden, 1978), vol. 4, pp. 1155–8 at p. 1157; İdris Bostan, ‘The
Establishment of the Province of Cezayir-i Bahr-i Seid’, in The Kapudan Pasha: His Oice
and His Domain, ed. Elizabeth Zachariadou (Rethymnon, 2002), pp. 241–51.
120 See Fleet (Chapter 5) and Özbaran (Chapter 6) in the present volume.
121 Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Some Remarks upon the Ottoman Geo-Political Vision of the
Mediterranean in the Period of the Cyprus War (1570–1573)’, in Frontiers of Ottoman Studies:
State, Province, and the West, ed. Colin Imber, Keiko Kiyotaki and Rhoads Murphey, 2 vols.
(London and New York, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 23–35.
122 Molly Greene, ‘The Ottomans in the Mediterranean’, in The Early Modern Ottomans:
Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Gofman (Cambridge, 2007), pp.
104–16 at p. 105.
304
When constructing their dockyards and also several types of warships,

the Ottomans mainly followed the Venetian model and thus beneited from
a centuries-old tradition of warfare in the Adriatic. In addition to techniques,
they also imported many nautical terms. The earliest large dockyard (ter-
sane) was in Gelibolu, superseded in the beginning of the sixteenth century
by the shipyard in Istanbul. In the latter, there were two covered slipways
in each dock; taken together, Istanbul and Gelibolu had a construction and
maintenance capacity of 250 galleys.123 This remarkable potential must have
been very close to the combined capability of the arsenals in Venice and
Barcelona, and in case of urgency suiced for the construction of a large
number of ships in a very short period of time: after the crushing defeat at
Lepanto, a completely new Ottoman leet sailed out the following spring.124
Other docks functioned in Sinop, İznikmid/İzmit, Samsun and Rusçuk
(Ruse), where timber and other building materials were at hand, but due to
military necessities, naval construction also took place in Birecik, Basra and
even Suez (Süveyş).125
In the sixteenth century, vessels with oars and sails were the backbone
of the Ottoman navy and were complemented by sailing ships. The most
common warship was the galley, irst the lighter type known as the gal-
liot (Ottoman kalyata, Italian galeotta or fusta). Later Istanbul shipbuilders
favoured the heavier variety, called kadırga, the equivalent of the Venetian
galea. In the course of the 1500s, shipbuilders all over the Mediterranean
began to furnish an increasing number of galleys with cannon, also re-
arranging the oars so as to make the ships more eicient.126 Mavnas – and
the Venetian galeazzas – were the largest vessels of this type. On the basis
of Ottoman evidence, the galeazza seems to have appeared in the sultan’s
navy in 1572. On the other hand, an Italian author writing in 1565 maintained
that both galeazzas and mavnas (mahone) were present in Süleyman Paşa’s
leet as early as 1537.127 Among sailing ships, the kalyon (galeone) enjoyed spe-
cial prominence, being used mostly for transportation but later on also in
combat.128
123 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 301.

124 Similarly, in 1570, 100 galleys left the Venetian Arsenal in less than two months. See Robert
C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial
City (Baltimore and London, 1991), p. 80.
125 Bostan, Osmanlı Bahriye Teşkilâtı, pp. 17–24.
126 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 297.
127 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 298; Alfonso Ulloa, La vita dell’invitissimo e sacratissimo
imperatore Carlo quinto (Venice, 1575), p. 147b.
128 Further types of ships are described in İdris Bostan, Kürekli ve Yelkenli Osmanlı Gemileri
(Istanbul, 2005).
305
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It is diicult to estimate the total number of warships sailing under the

Ottoman lag, for example in the 1530s or the 1570s. Most available igures –
such as they are – come from the descriptions of major battles. Accordingly, in
1538 some 140 galliots fought the battle of Prevesa against some 130 Christian
galleys; in addition, the Red Sea leet had about 70 vessels. As a result, the
Ottoman navy should have possessed 210 large ships. Thirty-three years later,
the sultan’s admirals deployed 210 galleys, 64 galliots and 64 fustas against 201
galleys and 6 galeazzas – or perhaps even 236 Christian galleys – put to sea
by Philip II, the pope and Venice. This igure suggests that Ottoman naval
strength had increased by 50 per cent in the intervening years.129 However, in
1538, the admiral was Barbarossa Hayreddin, an experienced sailor of unques-
tionable authority; he thus could win with a weaker leet. On the other hand,
the 1571 commander Müezzinzade Ali Paşa, a former ağa of the janissaries, had
a much more modest competence in maritime warfare, and this fact partly
explains why the Ottomans lost in spite of a slight numerical superiority.
In the Ottoman Empire as elsewhere, building vessels and maintaining an
armada was extremely expensive. In Spain, the Ottomans’ chief naval oppo-
nent, expenditures trebled between 1529 and 1587, mainly due to increasing
biscuit prices, and the situation was not basically diferent in Venice.130 Interest
in large-scale naval confrontations therefore diminished during the 1570s.131 In
the case of the Ottomans, this newly found cost-consciousness meant that
after the capture of Tunis in 1574, a signiicant success against the Portuguese
in Morocco in 1578 and a truce with Spain signed in 1580, the sultans’ high
command tended to pay much less attention to the navy. When Murad III
changed his mind and decided to re-animate the leet in 1590, he had to face
a lack of adequate personnel, especially commanders. Financial resources
also were insuicient, a deiciency which induced the sultan to attempt a
concealed taxation of the ruling elite. Beylerbeyis, sancakbeyis and defterdars
were to pay the treasury, in cash, the sums of money needed to construct one
to eight galleys per oice-holder, depending on the revenues at his disposal.
Had this initiative been realised, the navy would have gained 148 galleys. As
129 John Francis Guilmartin, Jr., Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean
Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 242, 245; Giovanna Motta, ‘Da
Messina a Lepanto: Guerra ed economia nel Mediterraneo cinquecentesco’, in I turchi, il
Mediterraneo e l’Europa, ed. Giovanna Motta (Milan, 1998), pp. 78–102 at p. 89.
130 For the huge costs of maintaining the Spanish navy, see Felipe Ruiz Martin, ‘Las inanzas
de la Monarquía Hispánica y la Liga Santa’, in Il Mediterraneo nella seconda metà del ’500 alla
luce di Lepanto, ed. Gino Benzoni (Florence, 1974), pp. 325–70; Guilmartin, Gunpowder and
Galleys, pp. 270–1 and igs. 13 and 14 on pp. 224–5.
131 Greene, ‘The Ottomans in the Mediterranean’, pp. 110–11.
306
the authorities calculated the value of a ship at 300,000 akçe, total expenses,
including the share to be paid by the exchequer, would have amounted to
66,900,000 akçe. This sum corresponded to 23 to 35 per cent of the annual cen-
tral “budgets” of the later sixteenth century, once more indicating the costli-
ness of the navy.132
Most of the naval ighting crews were soldiers known as azabs, but the
military administration also regularly obliged certain timariots, generally
those with the least pay, to participate in campaigns aboard ship. Janissaries
and soldiers known as levends made up the remainder of the ighting men.133
Once again, numbers are diicult to estimate, but we can probably count on
25,000 Ottoman and 28,000 Christian soldiers participating in the battle of
Lepanto.134 Thus, compared to a campaign on land, about half as many ight-
ing men participated in a major sea battle.
Among the oarsmen propelling naval vessels, the majority probably were
young men levied from among the Balkan and Anatolian populations. As
so often when the administration recruited personnel, a certain number of
households needed to send one person to provide military or non-combatant
services, covering also his travel expenses.135 Secondly, it was common practice
to send criminals to the galleys. Ottoman law did not identify speciic crimes
to be punished in this fashion; rather, due to the pressing need for oarsmen,
the sultan occasionally demanded that as many ofenders as possible be made
to serve the navy in this fashion.136 Thirdly, as a cheap and easy method of
recruitment, on both the Ottoman and the Spanish Habsburg galleys, many
rowers were captives.137 By contrast, the Venetians were more cautious and
hesitated to utilise Ottoman slaves for this purpose.138 Survival rates were
low, especially among prisoners; if a galley sank, these unfortunate pariahs,
chained to the benches, went under. Some of the slaves, however, managed
to escape, due to mutiny, success of the other side in battle, an individual act
132 Pál Fodor, ‘Between Two Continental Wars: The Ottoman Naval Preparations in 1590–
1592’, in Armağan: Festschrift für Andreas Tietze, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf and Suraiya Faroqhi
with Rudolf Veselý (Prague, 1994), pp. 89–111.
133 Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler, pp. 170–88.
134 Motta, ‘Da Messina a Lepanto’, p. 89; Niccoló Capponi, Victory of the West: The Story of the
Battle of Lepanto (London, 2006).
135 Colin Imber, ‘The Navy of Süleyman the Magniicent’, in Colin Imber, Studies in Ottoman
History and Law (Istanbul, 1996), pp. 1–69 at p. 52; İdris Bostan, Osmanlı Bahriye Teşkilâtı:
XVII. Yüzyılda Tersâne-i Âmire (Ankara, 1992), p. 188.
136 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 314–15.
137 Maurice Aymard, ‘Chiourmes et galères dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle’, in Il
Mediterraneo nella seconda metà del ’500 alla luce di Lepanto, ed. Gino Benzoni (Florence,
1974), pp. 71–94 at pp. 83–6, 94 (map).
138 Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 116.
307
Gé za dávi d
or else a gesture on the part of the victors.139 Volunteers formed a fourth cat-
egory, but often we do not know whether they had really chosen this job or
were indirectly forced into it by poverty or some other problem.
Military authorities also extended the earlier network of small river
lotillas plying the Danube and the Morava. These ships were indispens-
able in transporting victuals and war materiel, in Hungary especially on
the strategically important waters of Transdanubia. Around 1542–3, after
the inal Ottoman conquest, the irst naval commander (kapudan) of the
Danube River leet took oice, with his seat in Buda.140 Though signiicantly
smaller, the river Drava was also in use, and references to a lotilla on Lake
Balaton have survived as well. On the Great Plain, the Tisza, the country’s
second largest river, gave its name to a kapudanlık centred in Szolnok.141
Dated to 1589, a document mentions a captain commanding boats on the
river Maros.142 Similar naval commands also appeared in the Bosnian border
region, the irst in Gradiška on the Sava around 1535 and some six less impor-
tant captaincies elsewhere at diferent dates before 1580.143 Small kapudanlıks
located on the seaboard also existed, but only two of them were in Rumeli,
namely Kavala and Nauplia (Napoli, Anabolu).144 In Egypt, the kapudans
of Alexandria (İskenderiyye) and Damietta (Dimyat) are referred to in our
sources either because they defended the ports where they were stationed
or because they joined the sultans’ navy with their ships.145 Furthermore,
Suez, Moha, Remle/Basra and Lahsa all igured as captaincies of secondary
importance.146 Evidently sultans and admirals established subsidiary naval
commands, mainly in border regions. Although by the mid-1500s most of
the Mediterranean coastlands were part of the Ottoman domain, control
of the sea was always precarious, and the ports in this area needed constant
watching.
139 Aymard, ‘Chiourmes et galères’, p. 86; Motta, ‘Da Messina a Lepanto’, p. 89; Roma,
Biblioteca Vallicelliana Mss. N. 36, fols. 1r–26r; Venezia, Archivio di Stato, Lettere e scrit-
ture turchesche IV, pp. 115–16.
140 Markus Köhbach, Die Eroberung von Fülek durch die Osmanen 1554: Eine historisch-quellen-
kritische Studie zur osmanischen Expansion im östlichen Mitteleuropa (Vienna, Cologne and
Weimar, 1994), pp. 224–5.
141 Hegyi, A török hódoltság várai, vol. 1, pp. 101–2.
142 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Mühimme defteri 65, p. 92, no. 378.
143 Nenad Moačanin, ‘Kapudánságok a bosnyák határvidéken a 16–18. században’, Aetas 4
(1994), 51–8 at pp. 51–5.
144 Pál Fodor, ‘The Organisation of Defence in the Eastern Mediterranean (End of the 16th
Century)’, in Zachariadou, The Kapudan Pasha, pp. 87–94 at pp. 91–2.
145 Es-Seyyid Mahmud, XVI. Asırda Mısır Eyâleti, pp. 223–4.
146 Salih Özbaran, ‘Ottoman Naval Power in the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century’, in
Zachariadou, The Kapudan Pasha, pp. 109–17 at pp. 112–15.
308
The sinews of war

Armaments
Early Ottoman cannon founders began by casting real monsters, among
other things during the siege of Istanbul in 1453. However, huge guns became
obsolete very soon. The sultans and their military leaders quickly responded
to the new challenge and began to use French techniques developed in the
second half of the ifteenth century. From the study of a sample of over one
thousand pieces, it emerges that between 1522 and 1525 some 97 per cent of
the new cannon manufactured in Istanbul were of small or medium size.
The relevant list also demonstrates that founders in the Ottoman service
soon reduced the production of wrought iron guns and replaced them by the
more eicient bronze cannon.147 The greatest imperial foundry was located
in Istanbul, and as the preceding example suggests, it possessed remarkable
capacities. Smaller enterprises of this kind functioned during campaigns in
some 20 places all over the empire. Their output occasionally matched or
even outclassed the capacities of major European foundries.148
While we can reconstruct the locations and capacities of cannon-producing
workshops, much less information is available concerning handguns. Apart
from oicial enterprises serving the soldiery, private gunsmiths also manu-
factured muskets, which were sometimes of higher quality and consequently
more popular. To some extent, irearms also arrived from outside the empire,
but their number remains unknown. By the end of the sixteenth century,
Ottoman authors were quite critical of local handguns.149
Gunpowder mills (baruthane) and saltpetre pits functioned all over the
empire, and during the sixteenth century production met all needs. In
our epoch, eight major mills were in operation, three in Istanbul and one
each in Belgrade, Buda, Temesvár, Baghdad, and Cairo. Around 1570, the
baruthanes of Istanbul produced a minimum aggregate yearly output of
145,800 kilograms and a maximum of 291,600 kilograms. The quality of
Ottoman gunpowder usually met European standards, and manufacturers
throughout the empire tried to use identical proportions of ingredients,
no matter where they operated.150 At the end of the sixteenth century, the
147 Colin Heywood, ‘The Activities of the State Cannon Foundry (ṭōpḫāne-i āmire) at Istanbul
in the Early Sixteenth Century According to an Unpublished Turkish Source’, Prilozi za
orijentalnu ilologiju 30 (1980), 209–16 at pp. 214–15.
148 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, p. 180.
149 Ibid., pp. 90–1, 93, 95.
150 Ibid., pp. 128–63.
309
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government experimented with the importation of small quantities of gun-

powder from England; from this source, Ottoman arsenals received some
500 barrels per year.151
Provisioning
Provisioning is a crucial factor for the success of any campaign, and in this
ield the Ottomans were especially efective. When appointed grand vezir in
1539, Lüti Paşa reformed the previous “postal service”, now renamed menzil-
hane. Oicially determined stopping points not only served imperial couriers
but also functioned as supply centres for food and fodder during campaigns;
the new system functioned quite eiciently.152 When the sultan had decided
on a military enterprise, local kadıs received orders prescribing the quantities
of wheat, lour, barley and other necessities to be collected in their respec-
tive districts.153 Sheep-breeders/drovers (celep) were responsible for supplying
the soldiers with meat, mainly mutton, acquired from Rumeli, Moldavia and
Walachia and sometimes from the nomads of Anatolia.154 The sultan’s court
probably asked for more than the minimum required, while local oicers
often faced diiculties in assembling the quotas demanded. A short list prob-
ably dated to 1543 clearly shows this tendency. People living in nine adminis-
trative districts of relatively small size were to deliver 1,700 müd of lour and
2,000 müd of barley, but oicials could only collect 428 müd and 11 kile of lour
and 94 müd and 3 kile of barley in addition to some hay.155
Such a low degree of eiciency was not the rule, as is apparent from
another document prepared in the same year, probably at the end of the cam-
paign, which contains cumulative igures concerning the provisioning of the
army. These data do not permit us to gauge local efectiveness, but they do
give a general impression of the resources at the disposal of the Ottoman
151 Allan Williams, ‘Ottoman Military Technology: The Metallurgy of Turkish Armour’, in
War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th–15th Centuries, ed. Yaacov Lev (Leiden,
New York, Cologne, 1997), pp. 363–97 at p. 374.
152 Yusuf Halaçoğlu, Osmanlılarda Ulaşım ve Haberleşme (Menziller) (Ankara, 2002), for exam-
ple pp. 7, 13, 43.
153 Compare İsmet Binark et al. (eds.), 5 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (973/1565–1566), Özet ve
İndeks, Tıpkıbasım, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1994).
154 Bistra Cvetkova, ‘Les celep et leur rôle dans la vie économique des Balkans à l’époque
ottoman (XVe–XVIe s.)’, in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of
Islam to the Present Day, ed. Michael A. Cook (London, New York and Toronto, 1970), pp.
172–92; Antony Greenwood, ‘The Sixteenth Century Celepkeşan Registers in the Turkish
Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archives’, in Ciépo Osmanlı Öncesi ve Osmanlı Araştırmaları
Uluslararası Komitesi VII. Sempozyumu Bildirileri, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, İlber
Ortaylı and Emeri van Donzel (Ankara, 1994), pp. 409–26.
155 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri, 157, fols. 5r–6v.
310
army command: 4,815 müd of lour (2,470 tons) were collected, but the sol-
diers only received about 25 per cent. Of the surplus, 1,609 müd stayed in
Belgrade, the principal provisioning centre for the Hungarian campaigns,
where the Ottoman administration had huge storage facilities built. The
army conveyed 231 müd to Esztergom, and there still remained 1,740 müd of
lour at the disposal of the authorities. As regards barley, 9,649 müd (4,294
tons) were accumulated, of which 850 müd were shared out to the soldiers
and 3,450 müd passed on to the imperial stables. Stocks in Belgrade amounted
to 3,138 müd, and the various military leaders still had 2,209 müd at their dis-
posal, a really impressive quantity.156 Soia served as another site for military
storehouses, while Amasya and Aleppo played a similar role when the army
was to campaign against the shah of Iran, either on the north-eastern or the
south-eastern frontier.
The document covering the campaign of 1543 allows us to compute per
capita rations: janissaries as well as armourers, artillerymen and gun carriers
received about 1.4 kile of lour each, while salaried cavalrymen of the court
could count on 1 kile. The former also got between 0.2 and 0.3 kile of barley
per person; this quantity was small, but after all these infantry soldiers and
artillerymen only used a small number of horses. Cavalrymen, by contrast –
or rather their horses – enjoyed 2–2.4 kile of barley per capita. Unfortunately,
the document does not tell us how long these supplies should have lasted;
perhaps “a standard campaign season” was at issue, for during the war of 1521
the soldiers had received the same quantities of food and fodder, once again
for an unspeciied length of time.157 A rough computation gives the follow-
ing results: 1.4 kile of lour equals 34–36 kg; from this quantity bakers could
produce approximately 26–28 kg of bread and 13–14 kg of hardtack.158 If we
apply the per diem cereal rations recorded by Marsigli for Ottoman soldiers
when resting in barracks, which amounted to 320 grams of bread and 160
grams of hardtack, we may conclude that the quantity distributed suiced for
about 80–90 days.159 Consequently soldiers had to ind supplementary sources
of nourishment, particularly since both men and their mounts needed more
food and fodder while on the march.
In the course of imperial operations, the army rarely faced shortages.
One of the few known exceptions is the 1529 Vienna campaign, when the
156 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Maliye defteri, 499, pp. 170–2.
158 Géza Perjés, Mezőgazdasági termelés, népesség, hadseregélelmezés és stratégia a 17. század
második felében (1650–1715) (Budapest, 1963), pp. 53, 97.
159 Cited in Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, p. 89.
311
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lack of food and fodder, especially barley, seems to have reached excep-
tional dimensions.160 Stocks were so limited that only the cavalrymen of
the sultan’s court received lour and barley, and several poor people died of
starvation.161
Spying
When working out strategies for a campaign, information about the ene-
my’s political situation, economic conditions, military plans or actual
movements could be essential to say nothing of the peculiarities of the
landscape, roads and passes that soldiers would need to traverse. As recent
research has revealed, the Ottomans had a rather efective on-the-spot
intelligence network.162 Furthermore, certain European cities served as
centres of international spying. Venice played a very special role: in this
city, one could collect all sorts of knowledge from merchants and secret
agents, mainly about the Ottomans; yet spies serving the sultan also gath-
ered information here.163 Certain highly mobile merchants from Ragusa/
Dubrovnik quite often worked for both sides.164 In Iran, there lived quite
a few Sunni Turks, and some of them could supply useful information
about the shah’s military strength. Though we have no direct proof, we
can almost take it for granted that for instance Ulama Bey/Paşa, who had
temporarily served the shah but then fallen from grace, shared his experi-
ences of the Iranian court with Ottoman leaders when he led back to the
sultan’s territory.165
160 Ibid., pp. 25 and 219, note 49; Anton C. Schaendlinger, Die Feldzugstagebücher des ersten und
zweiten ungarischen Feldzugs Suleymans I (Vienna, 1978), p. 90.
161 Feridun Bey, Münşeat-i Selatin, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1274), vol. 1, pp. 575–6. Murphey, Ottoman
Warfare, pp. 65–103, and Finkel, The Administration of Warfare, pp. 121–208, have covered
other aspects of provisioning as well as “troop movement and army transport”.
162 Tivadar Petercsák and Mátyás Berecz (eds.), Információáramlás a magyar és a török végvári
rendszerben (Eger, 1999); Géza Dávid, ‘The mühimme defteri as a Source for Ottoman–
Habsburg Rivalry in the Sixteenth Century’, Archivum Ottomanicum 20 (2002), 167–209 at
pp. 199–200; Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, ‘Ottoman Spy Reports from Hungary’, in Turcica
et islamica: Studi in memoria di Aldo Gallotta, ed. Ugo Marazzi, 2 vols. (Naples, 2003), vol. 1,
pp. 121–31; Ágoston, ‘Information, Ideology’, pp. 78–92.
163 Hans-Georg Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas and Agostino Pertusi (eds.), Venezia, centro
di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XV–XVI). Aspetti e problemi (Florence, 1977);
Paolo Preto, ‘Lo spionaggio turco a Venezia tra mito e realtà’, in I turchi, il Mediterraneo e
l’Europa, ed. Giovanna Motta (Milan, 1998), pp. 123–32.
164 Nicolaas H. Biegman, ‘Ragusan Spying for the Ottomans: Some 16th Century Documents
from the State Archive at Dubrovnik’, Belleten 27, 106 (1963), 237–55.
165 Géza Dávid, ‘Ulama bey, an Ottoman Oice-Holder with Persian Connections on the
Hungarian Borders’, in Irano–Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries, ed. Éva M.
Jeremiás (Piliscsaba, 2003), pp. 33–40.
312
Soldiers in life and death

Our knowledge about the marital status of Ottoman garrison soldiers is
extremely limited. Thus a pay list dated 1558–9 from the vilayet of Buda is a
fortunate ind, for it not only records whether a given man was married but
also whether his wife was living with him.166 Our sample is rather modest,
covering 417 soldiers in ive fortresses; of this group, 109 men (26 per cent) had
spouses. Central European igures were not fundamentally diferent. Thus,
according to a presumably seventeenth-century document, in the Münster
garrison of Coesfeld 36 per cent of 918 soldiers had established families.167 The
percentage of married men in the province of Buda is perhaps higher than
anticipated at this stage of the Ottoman presence in Hungary, and it is also
surprising that 84 women lived together with their menfolk in the fortresses.
Those females who had not accompanied their husbands resided in towns
and villages of southern Hungary and the Balkans. Presumably, many men
who had left their spouses in faraway places expected to return to their homes
fairly soon.
A list dated to 1554 and enumerating 3,412 soldiers serving in Hungary also
contains information on their marital status and ethnic background. Here
we ind 514 married men, 15 per cent of all soldiers, with noticeable varia-
tions among the diferent ethnicities serving in the province. Soldiers from
Bosnia and Herzegovina seldom had wives (9.8 and 8.2 per cent, respectively);
these men usually had chosen the military as a lifetime career. On the other
hand, among the contingents from Greece, Anatolia and the Near East there
were many more married soldiers.168 A third register shows that marriage
was more widespread in certain fortresses than in others and that there were
also notable diferences between the various corps. Members of prestigious
units like the gönüllüs were probably older and thus more often had founded
families – 26 out of 48 deceased gönüllüs left orphans – but in the other corps
men with children were very much the exception.169 In general, cavalrymen
remained single more often than soldiers serving in the infantry.
We know nothing about women accompanying the army. It is diicult
to imagine that there were no females consorting with the soldiers during
the long months of marching, but we cannot tell whether military men
found themselves female company among the local populations or whether,

167 Tallett, War and Society, pp. 132–3.
169 Ibid., p. 223.
313
Gé za dávi d
similarly to the European custom, professional prostitutes joined the army

for an entire campaign.170
Nor is there much information available on the medical treatment of
wounded and sick soldiers.171 So far, we have found only very few references
to surgeons or doctors employed in the garrison towns; in Ottoman Hungary,
they were on record only in the three major fortresses of Buda, Pest and
Gyula.172 Presumably there were others about whom nothing is known; doc-
tors (tabibs, hekims), surgeons (cerrahs) and oculists (kehhals) must have regu-
larly been present in the armies.173 However, among the ten persons iguring
under the heading of “doctors” (atıbba) in a campaign record of 1521, only
two actually seem to have been tabibs, while eight apparently were religious
scholars (mevlanas, hocas).174 Herbalists (attars) must have also played a role in
curing the sick and preparing medicines and liniments, while we do not know
whether barbers (berbers), listed among the numerous craftsmen serving sol-
diers on campaign (orducus), dealt with minor medical problems as well.175
A contemporary witness noted that, in order to avoid epidemics, great
eforts were made to maintain cleanliness in the camp; two separate tents
served as toilets, and when pits illed up, the men covered them immediately
and moved the tents to some other place.176 Archival records conirm the obser-
vations of this Hungarian gentleman.177 However, these precautions could
not always prevent the outbreak of epidemics like typhus or dysentery.
According to the law book of the janissaries, on campaign soldiers known
as yayabaşıs were responsible for transporting the dead and wounded; this
text also describes the job of the mahfeci, who placed a framelike device on
army camels, where sick and wounded soldiers found temporary shelter.178
170 John R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620, 2nd ed. (Montreal, Kingston,
London, and Bufalo, 1998), p. 162.
171 Miri Shefer Mossensohn, ‘Medical Treatment in the Ottoman Navy in the Early Modern
Period’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50 (2007), 542–68; Rhoads
Murphey, ‘Ottoman Medicine and Transculturalism from the Sixteenth through the
Eighteenth Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (1992), 376–403.
172 Hegyi, A török hódoltság várai, vol. 2, pp. 479 (1630–1: Buda), 487 (1543: Pest), 495 (1557–8:
Pest); vol. 3, p. 1470 (around 1621: Gyula).
173 Topçular Kâtibi, vol. 1, pp. 12, 184, 402–3, 485.
175 Şç enol Çelik, ‘Osmanlı Sefer Organizasyonunda Orducu Esnafı ve İstanbul Orducuları’, in
Eskiçağ’dan Modern Çağ’a Ordular. Oluşum, Teşkilât, İşlev, ed. Feridun M. Emecen (Istanbul,
2008), pp. 355–86.
176 Péter Pécsi Kis, Exegeticon, ed. József Bessenyei (Budapest, 1993), p. 63.
177 Nurhan Atasoy, Otağ-ı Hümayun: The Ottoman Imperial Tent Complex (Istanbul, 2000), p. 18;
on p. 137 we ind a hayme-i âbhâne; i.e., “privy tent”.
178 Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Keleti Gyüjtemény, Budapest, T. O. 252, fols. 97a, 99a. For
a Hungarian translation, see Pál Fodor, A janicsárok törvényei (1606) (Budapest, 1989), vol. 1,
pp. 70–1.
314
A document written during the battle of Zenta in 1697 mentioned rafts for
transporting disabled janissaries on the Tisza and Danube rivers.179
Ottoman authors oicial or non-oicial rarely had anything to say about the
treatment of battle wounds. The chronicle of Topçular Katibi noted that sur-
geons worked in the trenches, dispensing medicine to the wounded; however,
some of the latter died in spite of this treatment. On another occasion, the same
author emphasised that wounded soldiers did not have to pay for their treatment
(harac vermezlerdi); the exchequer defrayed the relevant costs. In yet another
instance, this same work recorded that of certain injured persons each received
ten gold pieces as a reward, but perhaps this claim is an exaggeration.180
As for the death rate in Ottoman military operations, it is just as diicult
to estimate. Yet by means of the journal covering the 1543 campaign cited ear-
lier, when the sultan’s armies besieged and occupied three fortresses, a rough
guess is possible. The total loss cannot have been higher than 5–7.5 per cent, a
rate signiicantly lower than that experienced by European armies of the 1500s
and 1600s.181 Mortality in the 1629–30 eastern campaign must, however, have
been much higher: a contemporary estimate claimed that some 8,000–9,000
warriors died in battle, while around 30,000 persons lost their lives through
typhus.182 These igures are extremely high even if the number of participants
remains unknown and the igures are crude contemporary approximations.
Battle victims were buried, but few traces remain. Archaeological excava-
tions in the vicinity of Hungarian fortresses have brought to light very few
skeletons of Ottoman soldiers. Curiously enough, the one major contem-
porary group of mass graves unearthed so far contains only the remains of
some 900–1,000 Christian soldiers killed in or after the battle of Mohács in
1526; of the dead janissaries and cavalrymen serving the sultan in this confron-
tation, there remains not a trace.183
In conclusion: The Ottomans and the “military revolution”

When trying to establish the strength and eiciency of the Ottoman army
at the end of the sixteenth century, we cannot avoid discussing the complex
179 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, D.YNÇ, 34101, p. 7. Information kindly imparted by
Pál Fodor.
180 Topçular Kâtibi, vol. 1, pp. 334 and 281, respectively.
181 Tallett, War and Society, pp. 105–7.
183 László Papp, ‘A mohácsi csatatér kutatása’, A Janus Pannonius Múzeum évkönyve (Pécs, 1961),
vol. 5, pp. 197–252; Zsuzsanna K. Zofmann, Az 1526-os mohácsi csata 1976-ban feltárt tömegsír-
jainak embertani vizsgálata (Budapest, 1982); Borbála Maráz, ‘Újabb tömegsírok a mohácsi
csatatéren’, in Mohács emlékezete, 3rd ed., ed. Tamás Katona (Budapest, 1987), pp. 274–9.
315
Gé za dávi d
problem of the so-called European military revolution. During the last 60

years, a number of authors have examined the topic and – as so often hap-
pens when theoretical issues are at stake – they have arrived at sharply dif-
fering conclusions. Certain inl uential scholars have regarded a number of
contemporaneous technical innovations as the most important factor deter-
mining military efectiveness.184 By contrast, others have conceptualised a
“punctuated equilibrium evolution”; in other words, a series of sequential
military revolutions which started well before 1500.185 Yet others have rejected
the technological determinism involved in these two models, emphasising
instead fundamental changes in socio-economic conditions, which then insti-
gated military progress.186 According to a French author’s witty formulation,
throughout Europe an “army mentality” replaced the mindset of earlier aris-
tocratic warriors.187 Certain historians have argued against the revolutionary
character of the process and posited shorter or longer phases of advancement
interrupted by relative stasis; according to this model, until the end of the six-
teenth century, evolution dominated the scene.188
At the beginning, historians believed that these momentous developments
were a Western phenomenon in the narrow sense of the word. Further
research, however, has shown that the Viennese Habsburgs kept pace with
these developments and – at least during the Long War – their armies oper-
ated on the same principles as those of the French, Spaniards and Dutch.189
Commanders in Habsburg Hungary started to adapt to the new situation
after 1526; from this date onwards, they began increasing the garrison troops
stationed in fortiications near the Ottoman border. Further essential modi-
ications were administrative and technical, and thus more qualitative than
quantitative. One of the most important novelties was the creation of the Aulic
War Council in Vienna (1556); within Europe as a whole, this organisation was
184 Geofrey Parker, ‘The “Military Revolution, 1560–1660” – A Myth?’, in The Military
Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, ed.
Cliford J. Rogers (Boulder, Colo., San Francisco and Oxford, 1995), pp. 37–54 (originally
published in 1976, with a revised version in 1979).
185 Cliford J. Rogers, ‘The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War’, in Rogers, The
Military Revolution Debate, pp. 55–93 at pp. 56–7, 76–7 (originally published in 1993).
186 John Stone, ‘Technology, Society and the Infantry Revolution of the Fourteenth Century’,
The Journal of Military History 68, 2 (2004), 361–80.
187 André Corvisier, Armées et sociétés en Europe de 1494 à 1789 (Vendôme, 1976), p. 197.
188 Jeremy Black, War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450– 2000 (New
Haven, Conn. and London, 2000), p. 57; John Childs, Warfare in the Seventeenth Century
(London, 2001), p. 17.
189 József Kelenik, ‘The Military Revolution in Hungary’, in Ottomans, Hungarians, and
Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Conines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest, ed. Géza
Dávid and Pál Fodor (Leiden, 2000), pp. 117–59.
316
one of the irst specialist military institutions forming part of a central gov-
ernment that held regular sessions.
As the Habsburg emperors, who now also bore the Hungarian crown,
established arsenals with associated workshops in several politically and mil-
itarily signiicant centres, their armies became more efective than they had
been in the ifteenth century. A massive dif usion of irearms ensued: dur-
ing the Long War some 75 to 80 per cent of both Hungarian and foreign
troops used handguns. Similarly, architects transformed the art of construct-
ing fortiications with the implementation of the trace italienne.190 The best
examples, like the renovated fortiications of Vienna, Győr or Komárom and
the newly erected structures in (Érsek-) Újvár (Nové Zámky) and K árolyváros
(Karlovac), matched those of their most up-to-date Italian, Dutch or Maltese
counterparts. To supervise and realise these constantly increasing construc-
tion projects, the Habsburgs also formed a separate organisation concerned
with military architecture. All these institutional and administrative innova-
tions deserve particular attention, as for the period under discussion we have
no knowledge of similar arrangements relevant to other European theatres
of war.191
The Ottomans, on the other hand, were somewhat less resolute in chang-
ing their mode of ighting. Keith Krause has developed a model classifying
diferent polities according to their capabilities of manufacturing arms; in
this perspective, the Ottoman Empire is an example of the third-tier category
implying suicient scientiic and engineering skills to reproduce or copy basic
weapons but a lack of innovative spirit.192 Some scholars have argued that the
Ottomans or their European advisors occasionally improved what they had
borrowed, but these cases were exceptional. In the light of recent research,
however, this entire diagnosis has become somewhat problematic.193
Yet it is diicult to deny that, on average, European military establishments
were more dynamic than their Ottoman rival. Supposedly, in the mid-1500s
the sipahis refused to exchange their earlier weapons for handguns, arguing
that the latter were not suitable for a manly warrior. If true, this account
would indicate a lack of aptitude to keep up with the times. However, this
190 Parker, ‘The “Military Revolution, 1560–1660”’, pp. 41–5.

191 Pálfy, The Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 112–6.
192 Keith Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge,
1992), p. 19.
193 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, p. 187; Gábor Ágoston, ‘Disjointed Historiography and Islamic
Military Technology: The European Military Revolution Debate and the Ottomans’, in
Essays in Honour of Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, vol. 1: Societies, Cultures, Sciences: A Collection of
Articles, ed. Mustafa Kaçar and Zeynep Durukal (Istanbul, 2006), pp. 567–82.
317
Gé za dávi d
story comes from the writings of a Habsburg ambassador, and we thus

should treat it with some caution.194 Yet it remains true that while Ottoman
cannon founders rapidly implemented European methods of casting cannon,
the material composition of their guns often left much to be desired.195 But at
the same time the sultans’ gunners were efective as mediators, transferring
irearms to faraway countries.196
Moreover, Ottoman military men tended to neglect theory, limiting their
eforts to practice. Thus, for instance they made no efort to develop the study
of ballistics, while in Europe already before 1550 a few works dealt with this
branch of military science, Nicolò Fontana Tartaglia bringing out two rel-
evant works in 1537 and 1546.197 As a result, the sultans’ artillerymen often
miscalculated the course of their cannonballs, and the latter lew high above
the heads of enemy soldiers.198
The shortfall is most obvious in the ield of tactics, where the Ottomans
avoided renewal. As regards sieges, during the Long War both sides were
more or less on the same level; Ottoman sappers were especially good at dig-
ging trenches and mines. On the battleields, however, the traditional cres-
cent-shaped formation with the janissaries, artillery and azabs in the centre
surrounded by a Wagenburg with light sipahi cavalry on the wings, became
less and less efective, and the same observation applied to the old stratagem
of faked l ight. Commanders in the service of the Habsburgs increasingly
adapted to these tactics. Moreover, coordination was often missing between
the diferent Ottoman units, with chaos and defeat likely results. Since, how-
ever, pitched battles were usually of minor signiicance in Ottoman–Habsburg
confrontations, such losses had no long-lasting consequences.
Luck certainly was a factor that helped the army of Mehmed III to win
the battle at Mezőkeresztes in 1596, and while luck is an indispensable ingre-
dient of warfare, contemporary and somewhat later Ottoman observers did
realise that power relations were changing.199 In any case, this victory could
194 Charles Thornton Foster and F. H. Blackburne Daniell (eds.), The Life and Letters of Ogier
Ghiselin de Busbecq, Seigneur de Bousbecque, Knight, Imperial Ambassador (London, 1881),
vol. 1, pp. 242–3.
195 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, p. 198. (Here the author is more hesitant about Ottoman infe-
riority than in his earlier works in Hungarian.)
196 İnalcık, ‘The Socio-Political Efects’, pp. 202–9.
197 István Szabó, ‘Die Anfänge der äußeren Ballistik’, Humanismus und Technik 14, 3 (1971), pp. 1–9.
198 Tibor Szalontay, ‘The Art of War during the Ottoman–Habsburg Long War (1593–1606)
According to Narrative Sources’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto
(2004), pp. 165, 208–11.
199 Colin Imber, ‘Ibrahim Peçevi on War: A Note on the ‘European Military Revolution’’, in
Frontiers of Ottoman Studies: State, Province, and the West, 2 vols., ed. Colin Imber, Keiko
Kiyotaki and Rhoads Murphey (London and New York, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 7–22.
318
temporarily cover up but did not solve the military problems that the sul-
tans seemed unwilling to address. In part, the Ottoman side could counter-
balance these deiciencies by larger resources in manpower and materiel.
Furthermore, the sultans had the only standing army in Europe at their dis-
posal and therefore could deploy larger contingents in the Hungarian arena
than the Viennese High Command. Lastly, and decisively, Ottoman logistics
still excelled. Troops could be mobilised in the spring and transported over
long distances; by early summer, the sultans’ armies were ready for action.200
In the inal analysis, we can say that although the Ottomans made sev-
eral attempts to keep pace with sixteenth-century military developments in
central Europe, these eforts did not suice for a repetition of their earlier
successes in the Balkans. Often enough, their adversaries were able to thwart
even minor Ottoman projects. However, the sultans’ armies could protect
their earlier conquests for almost one hundred more years.
200 Pálfy, The Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 117–8; Gábor Ágoston, ‘Empires and Warfare in East-
Central Europe, 1550–1750: The Ottoman–Habsburg Rivalry and Military Transformation’,
in Crossing the Divide: Continuity and Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Warfare, ed.
David Trim and Frank Tallett (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 110–34.
319
10
Religious institutions, policies and lives
Gill es Ve instei n
The world of the scholar-oicials (ulema)

From its very beginnings, the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic polity through
and through. Early on, the lords (beys) of this dynasty, who soon laid claim to
the title of sultan, adopted the fundamental institutions of an Islamic princi-
pality, such as the kadı’s court, the mosque and its personnel, the allocution at
Friday prayers in which the preacher proclaimed the name of the legitimate
ruler, the theological college (medrese) and the fundamental institution of the
pious foundation. Yet, at the same time, everyday realities were more com-
plex, for Sunni Islam was not the religion of the population in its entirety.
Nor were there in this early period many religious cum legal scholars
(ulema) who had received their training locally; rather, such people had to be
brought in from other places, including those Anatolian principalities where
Islam had struck deeper roots or else from the Near East or Central Asia. Very
often, these “imported” doctors of the faith were both scholars and mystics,
with one or the other identity predominating; according to the terminology
used by Taşköprüzade, biographer of numerous early Ottoman religious
cum legal scholars, they were mevlas, adherents of the Hanei school of law,
and/or dervish masters or şeyhs.1 Moreover, among the early beys and their
companions, formal Sunni Islam co-existed with beliefs and practices derived
from diferent worlds: shamanism and other religions practiced by the Turkic
peoples before adopting Islam had left tangible traces, and the same thing
1 Taşköprüzade wrote in Arabic. See Ahmed b. Mustafa Taşköprüzade, Aş-şaka’ik an-

nu’maniyya i ‘ulâma ad-dawlâ al-cosmâniya, ed. Ahmed Subhi Furat (Istanbul, 1985). His work
has been translated into Ottoman Turkish; see Şaka’ik-i Nu’maniye ve Zeyilleri, trans. Mehmed
Mecdi, 5 vols., reprinted with editorial comments by Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul, 1989), vol.
1, Hadaiku’ş Şakaik. There also exists a translation into German, which, however, is diicult
to ind: Taşköprüzade, Eş-şaqaciq en-nomanijje von Taşköprüzade, enthaltend die Biographien
der türkischen und im osmanischen Reiche wirkenden Gelehrten, Derwisch-Scheih’s und Ärzte von
der Regierung Sultan ‘Otman’s bis zu der Sülaimans des Großen, trans. Oskar Rescher (Istanbul,
1927).
320
can be said of the antinomian and esoteric tendencies characterising the

Malamatiyya/Melametiyye style of mysticism. Shi‘ite tendencies also lour-
ished in this milieu, and presumably other types of religious practices that
our scanty sources do not permit us to identify.
The dominant igures of this syncretism typical of the Turkmen population
were the babas, or “fathers”, who operated as spiritual and apparently some-
times as temporal leaders, too. While alive, these men guided their disciples,
and after their deaths their spiritual powers aided those who piously visited
their tombs. These Turkmen babas maintained close connections with the
rising Ottoman dynasty. From the vita (Menakibname) recounting the life of
Baba Ilyas-i Horasani, who led the Babai revolt against the Seljuks in 1239–40,
we learn that Şeyh Edebali belonged to this movement and may have taken
part in the uprising.2 After taking refuge in the far north-west of Anatolia, this
şeyh was to interpret a dream of Osman, a minor local prince, as indicative of
the future grandeur of the latter’s dynasty; he was also to become the bey’s
father-in-law. With the blessing of the early Ottoman rulers, dervish orders
such as the Bektashis were to take up the heritage of the Babais.
However, the situation changed signiicantly once the early principality had
turned into a sultanate extending over Asia Minor and south-eastern Europe
and the governing apparatus grew stronger and more centralised. Now the
Turcoman and the sultans, who intended to rule as absolute masters, inhab-
ited diferent worlds. Locally trained religious cum legal scholars became
more numerous, even though some of them continued to attend the col-
leges of Egypt and Syria. Thus the Çandarlı, who formed a veritable dynasty
of four grand vezirs, had trained as ulema and were among the most efec-
tive architects of the iscally minded and overwhelmingly powerful Ottoman
Empire of the ifteenth century. However, their power was broken when in
the summer of 1453, just after the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II (r.
1444–6 and 1451–81) had his grand vezir Çandarlı Halil Paşa executed. For rea-
sons both religious and political, the Ottoman sultans from the early ifteenth
century onwards began to persecute those men that they – and/or the ulema
functioning as their advisors – considered heretics. Thus, with considerable
violence and bloodshed, Mehmed I (r. 1413–21) suppressed the movement of
Şeyh Bedreddin, an eminent legal scholar, ardent mystic and revolutionary
leader. As for Murad II (r. 1421–51 with an interruption), he persecuted the
antinomian mystics known as Huruis and Bayramis.
2 Elvan Çelebi, Menâkibü’l Kudsiyye i Menâsibi’l-Unsiyye (Baba-Ilyas Horasanî ve sülalesinin men-

kabevi tarihi), ed. İsmail E. Erünsal and Ahmet Yaşar Ocak (Istanbul, 1984; 2nd ed., Ankara,
1995), vv. 1994–7.
321
Gil l e s Ve i nst e i n
Between the mid-ifteenth and the late sixteenth centuries, we encounter

even more dramatic changes. Now the sultan unambiguously appeared as
the champion of Sunni Islam, while the ulema came to form a highly cen-
tralised and bureaucratised organisation. Three events, with their short-term
and long-term consequences, play a key role in this process. First, in 1453, the
conquest of Constantinople allowed the Ottoman dynasty to give free rein
to its imperial ambitions, and the centralised organisation of the ulema soon
became one of the pillars of the emerging empire. In 1501, Shah Ismacil I
(r. 1501–24) ascended the Iranian throne; this event began a long-term imperial
rivalry between the Ottoman and Safavid dynasties, and the former began to
view Shi’ism as a political threat. Finally, in 1516–17, Selim I (r. 1512–20) con-
quered Syria and Egypt, while North Africa apart from Morocco became
part of the Ottoman Empire under his successors Süleyman the Magniicent
(r. 1520–66) and Selim II (r. 1566–74). Within these greatly enlarged frontiers,
the Ottoman sultans as rulers of the central Islamic territories could lay claim
to a greatly enhanced status within the Muslim world.
Imperial ulema in an imperial capital

Shortly after the conquest of Constantinople, on 6 January 1454, Mehmed II
re-established the Orthodox patriarchate of this city, appointing the monk
Georgios Scholarios, who took the name of Gennadios II. This newly invested
Ottoman dignitary was to exercise many of the powers and prerogatives that
had traditionally pertained to his oice in Byzantine times. The sultan also
appointed as grand rabbi (haham başı) Moses Capsali, who held this oice
from 1453 to 1497. But we cannot be sure whether the authority of his oice
encompassed the empire in its entirety or was limited to Istanbul. As this
oice did not sit well with Jewish traditions, it lapsed after the death of the
second grand rabbi, Elijah Mizrahi (1498–1526), and did not re-emerge until
1835. As for the Armenians, they also received a patriarch, but only between
1526 and 1543. However, the story that Mehmed II was responsible for the lat-
ter’s institution as well is no more than a legend, born of the desire to have
an “ancient tradition” going back to the sultan who established the Ottoman
capital in Istanbul. But, in the early sixteenth century, the spiritual head of
the Istanbul Armenians did acquire a set of speciic rights and prerogatives,
and in 1543 Astuacatar appears in our sources bearing the title of “patriarch
of Constantinople”.3
3 Kevork B. Bardakjian, ‘The Rise of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople’, in
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1: The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and
Bernard Lewis (New York and London, 1982), pp. 89–100.
322
Throughout its history, Constantinople and later Istanbul had always been
home to people of diferent religions and denominations, but through the
measures just described, the Ottoman sultans oicialised this de facto situa-
tion. The arrangements adopted in the 1400s and 1500s were not identical to
the so-called millet regime, which in the nineteenth century, in the context of
the reforms known as the Tanzimat, accorded religious groups far-reaching
rights of self-government.4 But even so, a degree of autonomy certainly was
involved, especially since religious dignitaries so often were responsible for the
payment of certain dues to the Ottoman inancial administration. The sultans
recognised Christians and Jews as protected non-Muslims (zimmis), Islamic
religious law (şeri’at) deining their status. While this situation involved restric-
tions and often public signs of disrespect, zimmis also beneited from a degree
of tolerance.5 For legal scholars, this issue was a cause for concern, as only
unbelievers who had submitted voluntarily possessed the right to recognition
as zimmis. Constantinople, however, had been conquered manu militari. To
cope with this anomaly in the reign of Süleyman the Magniicent, decisions
by legal scholars and even full-ledged court procedures attempted to obtain
credence for the myth that the inhabitants of Constantinople had submitted
voluntarily. Mehmed II probably saw the matter in a diferent light, for due
to his claim to universal empire, a capital where the adherents of diferent
religions lived together seems to have been an overriding concern.6 Moreover,
there were practical problems involved; after all, in many of the sultan’s new
conquests there lived a substantial number of non-Muslims.
Priests and rabbis, who thus remained in place or else were reinstated, must
have played a signiicant role in limiting conversion to Islam. Certainly many
Christians and Jews must have found conversion a tempting prospect, for by
accepting Islam they both improved their social status and lightened their tax
load. Apart from the adolescents drafted for service in the army and the sul-
tan’s court (devşirme), the Ottoman government thus saw no need to resort to
forced conversions. Voluntary Islamisation certainly took place; but at least in
4 Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation Myths of the Millet System’, in Braude and Lewis, Christians
and Jews, vol. 1, pp. 69–88.
5 Arthur S. Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects (London, 1930, reprint, 1970);
Antoine Fattal, Le statut légal des non-musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut, 1958); Benjamin
Braude and Bernard Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews, vol. 1,
pp. 1–34.
6 Johann-Heinrich Mordtmann, ‘Die Kapitulation von Konstantinopel im Jahre 1453’,
Byzantinische Zeitschrift 21, 1–2 (1912), 129–44; Gilles Veinstein, ‘Les conditions de la prise de
Constantinople en 1453: un sujet d’intérêt commun pour le patriarche et le grand mufti,’ in Le
patriarcat œcuménique de Constantinople aux XIVe–XVIe siècles: rupture et continuité. Actes du
Colloque international, Rome, 5–6–7 décembre 2005, ed. Frantz Olivié (Paris, 2007), pp. 275–87.
323
south-eastern Europe only limited numbers of people were involved, apart

from Bosnia and – later on – Albania, where the locals had special reasons for
conversion.7 Throughout the period under discussion, Muslims remained a
minority in the Ottoman Balkans, and this fact surely is due to the continuing
strength of communal organisation.
Due to the ambiguities inherent in the religious policies of Mehmed II, all
sorts of totally unfounded rumours emerged in the West concerning the sul-
tan’s possible conversion to Christianity. Just like his ancestors, Mehmed the
Conqueror viewed his empire as an Islamic polity, and quite obviously the
Muslim religion was to enjoy a paramount position. On the contrary, the sul-
tan had scheduled Istanbul, the former metropolis of the unbelievers, which
for certain Ottoman Muslims continued to be an accursed site, to become a
Muslim city and even a holy place of Islam.8 He therefore entrusted one of his
close associates, the şeyh of the Bayrami dervish order Ak Şemseddin, with
the mission of locating the grave of Eyüp, standard-bearer of the prophet
Muhammad, who according to tradition had met his end during one of the
Arab sieges of Constantinople. Outside the city walls, where by miracle Ak
Şemseddin had discovered the grave close to the place where the Golden
Horn ends, the sultan ordered the construction of a mausoleum, a mosque
and a dervish lodge. The ruler evidently intended this complex to serve as
a site of pilgrimage, and it continues to play this role down to the present
day.9 Also directly after the conquest, Mehmed II transformed the church of
Hagia Sophia, famous in history and legend, into the Aya Sofya mosque, and
over time other Byzantine churches were “converted” in the same fashion.
Finally, on the site of the former monastery Church of the Holy Apostles, the
Conqueror ordered the construction of his mausoleum, and nearby that of
his own monumental mosque. The sultan had hoped that the latter’s dome
would surpass that of Aya Sofya; however, this was not to be. The mosque
and mausoleum complex also contained no less than eight juridical cum theo-
logical colleges; together they formed the “courtyard of the eight” (sahn-i
seman or semaniye), for several decades the highest-ranking schools in the
Ottoman Empire.
7 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Sur les conversions à l’Islam dans les Balkans ottomans avant le XIXe siècle’,
Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2 (1996), 153–67.
8 Stéphane Yérasimos, La fondation de Constantinople et de Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions
turques: légendes d’empire (Paris, 1990), pp. 201–10.
9 Paul Wittek, ‘Ayvansaray: un sanctuaire privé de son héros’, Annuaire de philologie et d’histoire
orientales et slaves 11 (1951), 505–26, reprinted in Paul Wittek, La formation de l’Empire ottoman
(London, 1982); A. İhsan Yurd and Mustafa Kaçalın, Ak Şemseddin Hayatı ve Eserleri (Istanbul,
1994); Stéphane Yérasimos, ‘La ville ottomane de 1453 à la in du XVIIIe siècle’, in Istanbul, ed.
Marie-France Auzépy et al. (Paris, 2002), pp. 153–360 at pp. 175–6.
324
Sultan Mehmed’s successors and the dignitaries of their governments

actively pursued the Islamisation of the city, not only by the conversion
of further churches but also – and most visibly – by the construction of a
sequence of imperial mosques, which completely transformed the cityscape.
The Süleymaniye complex, designed and executed by the famous architect
Sinan (about 1490–1588), was only the most impressive among a large num-
ber of structures serving pious and charitable ends. Moreover, after Selim I
returned from his conquest of the Middle East, the Topkapı Palace accumu-
lated a collection of holy relics in its treasury and in this manner came to
resemble the abode of the defunct Byzantine emperors, who also had been
avid collectors of such objects of devotion.10 Istanbul was further sanctiied
as a result.
Şeri’at and kanun

However, when establishing a corpus of laws, a major aspect of the construc-
tion of any empire, Mehmed II had no intention of limiting Ottoman legal
practice to the application of Islamic law. To a great extent, he relied on the
kanun, based on custom and sultanic commands, which in principle were not
to contravene Islamic law but merely to “ill in the gaps”. Covering many areas
of human endeavour, kanun was to occupy an exceptional place in the emerg-
ing Ottoman corpus of law, still embryonic under Mehmed the Conqueror but
which developed vigorously under his successors, including his son Bayezid
II (r. 1481–1512) and especially Süleyman the Magniicent, whom Ottomans
called “the legislator” (Kanuni). In Kanuni’s time, reconciling şeri’at and kanun
became a more important concern than it had been in the past, and the archi-
tect of this synthesis was the chief jurisconsult (şeyhülislam) Ebusuud Efendi
(in oice 1545–74). Members of the Ottoman elite elaborated a theory of the
caliphate that difered profoundly from that adopted by nineteenth-century
sultans, who were to style themselves “sultan-caliph”. Rather, sixteenth-cen-
tury legal scholars saw the caliph as a personage whose role it was “to order
what is right and prohibit what is wrong”. This understanding went back to
older thinkers such as al-Baghdadi and al-Mawardi, who regarded the caliph
as the mujtahid, who had the capacity to discern the correct interpretation
of Islamic religious law among the many variants proposed by the ulema, in
this case of the Hanei school of legal interpretation, and who possessed the
10 Tahsin Öz, Hırka-i Saadet Dairesi ve Emanat-i Mukkadese (Istanbul, 1953); Gülrü Necipoğlu,
Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 150–2.
325
power to enforce what he had understood to be right.11 From this understand-

ing arose a novel concept of the relationship between şeri’at and kanun: the
latter formed a particular response to questions that hitherto sacred law had
not categorically solved, permitting several possible interpretations.
Classifying the ulema

In the perspective of Mehmed II, the construction of empire also involved the
elaboration of a courtly protocol that ranked the highest dignitaries and gov-
erned their behaviour when on oicial business (teşrifat kanunu). Religious
cum legal scholars were accorded high honours: thus the professors (müderris)
of the eight new medreses founded by the Conqueror preceded all provincial
governors except those of the highest order. Teachers who were less promi-
nent, but still received 50 akçe per diem, came before military men and palace
oicials bearing the title of ağa. In the provinces, kadıs with a daily pay of 150
akçe were of a higher rank than the local inance directors (defter kethüdası)
and cavalry commanders (alaybeyi).12 Selim I later decreed that ulema holding
public oice, kadıs as well as müderris, legal experts (müftü) and administra-
tors of pious foundations all ranked as askeri. Even though they obviously
were not military men as suggested by the term asker, meaning “soldier”,
they enjoyed the privileges of the latter, particularly exemption from taxes.13
An oicially imposed order of precedence, which situated the ulema among
the privileged servitors of the sultan, implied further hierarchy within the
group, established already during the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror. Over
time, this hierarchy, expressed by the gradation of oicial salaries, became
more and more elaborate, and this inclusion of all recognised ulema within
a single “table of ranks” became a deining characteristic of the Ottoman
learned establishment (ilmiye).14
11 Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge,
2001); Hamilton A. R. Gibb, ‘Luti Pasha on the Ottoman Caliphate’, Oriens 15 (1962), 287–95;
Halil Inalcik, ‘Appendix: The Ottomans and the Caliphate’, in The Cambridge History of Islam,
vol. 1: The Central Islamic Lands, ed. Peter M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton and Bernard Lewis
(Cambridge, 1970), pp. 320–3 at p. 322; Colin Imber, ‘Süleymân as Caliph of the Muslims: Ebû
Su‘ûd’s Formulation of Ottoman Dynastic Ideology’, in Soliman Le Magniique et son temps,
ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris, 1992), pp. 179–84; Haim Gerber, State, Society and Law in Islam:
Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany, N.Y., 1994), pp. 58–78; Colin Imber, Ebu’s-
Su‘ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 98–111.
12 Abdülkadir Özcan, ‘Fatih’in Teşkilat Kanunnamesi’, Tarih Dergisi 33 (1980–1), 7–56; Ahmed
Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukukî Tahlilleri, 9 vols. (Istanbul, 1990), vol. 1, p. 324.
13 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri, vol. 3, p. 144.
14 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı (Ankara, 1965); Halil Inalcik, The
Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London, 1973); Halil Inalcik, ‘The Ruznamçe
Registers of the Kadiasker of Rumeli as preserved in the Istanbul Müftülük Archives’,
326
Oicial status accorded to a learned man derived from the rank of the insti-
tution where he taught. When in 1463–70 Mehmed II founded eight colleges
within the complex of his great mosque, he evidently intended them to form
the summit of this hierarchy. About 90 years later, however, the six schools
established by Süleyman the Magniicent near his imperial mosque (built in
1550–9) clearly outclassed the Conqueror’s colleges: four of the new founda-
tions trained religious cum legal scholars, while one of them specialised in
the prophet Muhammad’s traditions (hadis) and another in medicine.
In the course of their careers, students and teachers needed to pass through
a sequence of colleges: when enrolling in higher-ranking establishments, the
students encountered more diicult texts than in the more elementary schools.
As in any scholastic routine, commentaries, compilations and extracts quite
often took the place of original works, and students used to memorise what
the teacher said or else copied out their own textbooks. Moreover, the salary
of the principal teacher was no secret to anybody and in the oicial pecking
order served to establish the rank of the school and professor concerned.15
We will review these establishments according to their places in the hierar-
chy, beginning with the lowest rank. The “exterior”, or hariç, medreses began
at 20 akçe, while a slightly higher category at 30 akçe also went by the name
of miftah (“key”). This term was due to the fact that students in “30 akçe col-
leges” often studied a treatise on rhetoric by Yusuf b. Abi Bakr al-Sakkaki (d.
1229) known as the Miftah al-culum or “key to the sciences”. Higher up but still
in the “exterior” category were colleges paying their teachers 40 and 50 akçe a
day, all situated in Bursa, Edirne and Istanbul.
The next category was that of the “interior” (dahil medrese), also with three
sub-divisions. In the colleges for “beginners” (ibtida-i dahil), students pursued
the legal studies that they had begun earlier by working their way through the
text known as the Hidaya (“correct guidance”), by al-Marghinani. Next were
the schools preparing candidates for study in the eight medreses of Mehmed the
Conqueror, known as the tetimme or musile-i sahn. Successful candidates
then could go on to the imperial colleges properly speaking. Certain medreses
founded by Sultan Süleyman paid their professors 60 akçe per diem and there-
fore were known as altmışlı. In this case, there were only two sub-categories,
namely the “beginners” (ibtida-i altmışlı) and the “complementary schools”
(hareket-i altmışlı). As for the fourth and highest category, it consisted of the
Turcica 20 (1988), 251–75; Richard C. Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of
the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London and Oxford, 1986), pp. 27–72.
15 Cahid Baltacı, XV-XVI Asırlar Osmanlı Medreseleri: Teşkilat Tarih (Istanbul, 1976); Mübahat S.
Kütükoğlu, XX. Asra Erişen İstanbul Medreseleri (Ankara, 2000).
327
establishments forming part of the Süleymaniye complex: once again, cer-

tain schools counted as preparatory (musile-i Süleymaniye), followed by the
Süleymaniye medreses in the narrow sense of the term. Among the latter,
the college for the study of the Prophet’s traditions held the highest rank. As
noted previously, the rank of the institution determined that of the professor
teaching in it.
A parallel hierarchy existed among kadıs. Once again, oicial salaries indi-
cated rank, but the prestige of the city in which a given judge oiciated also
counted for something. This prestige might be due to the historical and reli-
gious role of certain cities. Thus the judges appointed to ancient political
and religious centres of the Islamic world now part of the Ottoman Empire
enjoyed the bonus of working in one of the “judgeships of the throne” (taht
kadılıkları). In the same way, an oice in Istanbul or, even better, inclusion in
the sultan’s council (divan-ı hümayun) gave the holder particular authority;
after all, when attending to his duties in this city, he was likely to encoun-
ter vezirs and other high-ranking personnel. While kadıs were administrators
irst and foremost, they needed to have gained experience as scholars and
teachers as well; and, at least in principle, the rank to which a kadı might
aspire depended on the college where he had previously taught.
Kadıs oiciating in small towns (kasabat kadıları) received 25 to 150 akçe a
day and formed the lowest level of the judicial hierarchy. In larger places, the
oicial revenues of a kadı began at 150 akçe and might rise to almost 300 akçe;
in 22 cities considered to be of yet higher prestige, the judge could count on
300 akçe a day. Only in the most important places, namely the former capitals
Bursa and Edirne as well as Cairo, Damascus, Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem,
all major centres of the Muslim world conquered by Selim I, did the judge
receive a salary of 500 akçe; yet the rank and pay of the kadı of Istanbul was
higher still. Among the most prestigious cities were the three successive capi-
tals of the Ottoman Empire, namely Bursa, Edirne and Istanbul; as for the
taht kadılıkları, they included Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad, the latter con-
quered by Süleyman the Magniicent. Damascus and Baghdad successively
had been capitals of the caliphate, while for certain periods in its history
Aleppo, too, had been a princely centre of major importance.
However, above the judges of even the most important Ottoman cities
there were the scholar-oicials incorporated into the central administration.
Already in the fourteenth century, Sultan Murad I (r. 1362–89) had instituted an
army judge (kadıasker) superior to all other kadıs. Towards the end of his reign,
Mehmed II decided to appoint two such judges, one for the Ottoman Balkans
(Rumeli) and the other for Anatolia; the administration also experimented
328
with a kadıasker in charge of the Arab provinces, but this oice disappeared
very soon. These “great judges” formed part of the Imperial Council, with
authority over all other kadıs. They chose the incumbent judges from among
the many candidates proposed to them.
The army judges pronounced their verdicts in the name of the sultan, for
the divan-ı hümayun decided many cases, especially those that might be politi-
cally sensitive, such as disputes involving the ambassadors of foreign rulers and
also accusations of ritual murder against local Jews. Moreover, any subject of
the empire might lawfully appeal to the justice of the sultan. But the divan-ı
hümayun was not a court of appeals in the modern sense of the term. Very
often this authority merely transmitted afairs of which it had cognizance to
the kadıs; when receiving the relevant iles, the latter obviously realised that
the eye of the grand vezir or even the sultan was upon them. To stimulate the
kadı’s zeal, the central authority sometimes admonished him to ensure that
the matter was solved once and for all and did not trouble the sultan again
(tekrar kapuma gelmelü etmeyesiz …).16 In exceptional cases, when convinced
that the complainant had good reason to be wary of the local judge, the sul-
tan’s council might transfer the case to a colleague oiciating in another town
not too far away.17 Occasionally the council might take matters into its own
hands and decide the case or at least determine the relevant punishments; but
even in such instances, a kadı irst received the order to investigate and locate
the suspect.
The central power thus exercised a good deal of caution when intervening
in local judicial afairs. Presumably sultans and vezirs wished to avoid over-
loading the army judges with a plethora of cases. But, in addition, every kadı,
no matter what his rank, enjoyed judicial autonomy, and the government
respected this prerogative. The illustrious jurisconsult Ebussuud Efendi had
expressly stated this principle of Islamic law according to which the judge-
ment of a kadı could only be appealed if the sultan had authorised this move
by special decree. Moreover, even in such a case, the appeal was not accept-
able if the original decision had been in conformity with religious law. As
the famous legist explained, sultans and even caliphs did not have the right
to annul a judgement of that sort.18 When keeping in mind this principle of
16 İlhan Şahin and Feridun Emecen (eds.), II. Bâyezid Dönemine Ait 906/1501 Tarihli Ahkâm
Defteri (Istanbul, 1994), p. 19.
17 Hans Georg Majer (ed.), Das Osmanische Registerbuch der Beschwerden (Şikayat defteri) vom
Jahre 1675 (Vienna, 1984), fol. 32b, doc. no. 3.
18 Paul Horster, Macrūzāt. Zur Anwendung des islamischen Rechts im 16. Jahrhundert: die “juris-
tischen Darlegungen” (Macrūżāt) des Schejch ül-Islam Ebū Sucūd (gest. 1574) (Stuttgart, 1935),
p. 52.
329
judicial autonomy, we gain a better understanding of the sense in which we

may speak of hierarchy and subordination among kadıs, for no matter how
modest the kadı’s rank, he was autonomous in his judgements, and in these
matters no higher authority had the right to intervene. However, the kadı’s
revenues were subject to modiication due to a decision made by his superiors,
and these authorities could both appoint him and revoke his appointment.
Süleyman the Magniicent decided to crown this already elaborate hier-
archy by giving it a formal superior. From the very beginning, the legal
expert (müftü) of the capital had of necessity played an important role. But
his authority had been mainly personal, due to his knowledge and virtues,
for originally he did not form part of the scholarly cum juridical hierarchy.
But after 1545, when Sultan Süleyman appointed the former army judge of
Rumeli Ebussuud müftü of Istanbul, the new oice-holder became the chief
jurisconsult (şeyhülislam) of the Ottoman Empire in its entirety. Now he was
higher in rank than any other judge or scholar and received a salary to match.
Given his dignity and the trust he enjoyed, Sultan Süleyman consulted him
not only on juridical issues but also on political ones, demanding Ebussuud’s
opinion on matters of war and peace, legislation on landholding and the rules
that should govern the administration of pious foundations. Ebussuud felt
that all these matters saddled him with heavy responsibilities and distracted
him from his real task, which was to emit legal opinions (fetva). But like it or
not, Selim II (r. 1566–74) drew him yet further into politics, for now he was
to submit, in the shape of documents known as telhis, the names of eligible
candidates for the highest oices that ulema might be called upon to ill. In
the past, this task had been part of the grand vezirs’ responsibilities, but in
the sovereign’s opinion these oicials had not always made the right choices
and were now to refrain from interfering in these matters. Known as mevali,
the oices now granted upon the recommendation of the chief jurisconsult
included the kadıs and all professors with revenues of over 40 akçe. In addition,
the mevali encompassed a fair number of less important positions, including
certain prayer leaders (imam), preachers in Friday mosques (hatib) and even
men chanting the call to prayer (müezzin). Otherwise the army judges had the
right to propose candidates for these inferior positions.19
When analysing the discussions that preceded the Ottoman conquest of
Cyprus, we encounter a good example of the now enhanced position of the
chief jurisconsult in political afairs. This campaign involved breaking the
19 Madeline C. Zili, ‘Sultan Süleymân and the Ottoman Religious Establishment’, in Süleymân
the Second and His Time, ed. Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul, 1993), pp. 109–20 at pp.
115–16.
330
treaty with Venice, which successive sultans had conirmed by oath and most
recently, in 1540, Süleyman the Magniicent had sworn to uphold.20 To solve
this juridical and moral problem, the famous jurisconsult Ebussuud Efendi
invoked the Islamic past of the island, which in his view permitted the sultan
to do whatever he deemed appropriate. The preamble to the question posed
to the legist ran as follows:
A piece of land originally had belonged to the dar al-islam. After a time the vile
inidels invaded it, ruined the Islamic colleges and mosques and illed the preachers’
pulpits and the galleries with marks of inidelity and error, with the intention of
insulting the religion of Islam by many evil actions and spreading their ugly behav-
iour all over the world. As required by [his task of] protecting Islam, His Majesty the
Sultan has decided to take the land in question out of the hands of the contemptible
inidels and join it to the dar al-islam…
On this occasion, the chief jurisconsult justiied the sultan’s breaking of his
oath by the observation that Islamic ediices had once existed on the island
which the inidels who had later gained control of Cyprus had had the temer-
ity to profane. Thus the honour of Islam was at stake, which took prece-
dence over all other considerations. In the sixth year of the Hijra (627–8), the
Prophet himself had set a precedent when after two years he broke the pact
he had concluded with the inidels of Mecca, for the interests of Islam were
more important than any other concern. Ebussuud Efendi took up this latter
argument when he airmed that nothing prevented the sultan from breaking
what in any event had been no more than a truce.21
In the late seventeenth century, Hezarfen Hüseyin asked himself whether
according to Ottoman protocol the şeyhülislam preceded or followed the
grand vezir; in other words, whether this dignitary was the second or third
personage in the Ottoman Empire. He arrived at the conclusion that normally
the chief jurisconsult was third in line, but meaningfully he added that the
Ottoman ruler saw matters diferently because “the afairs of state are based
upon religion.”22 Moreover, in the view of this author, the salaries that top-
level members of the ilmiye received in the late seventeenth century were ini-
nitely higher than those of the early Ottoman period; after all, they relected
the enrichment of the Ottoman Empire in the intervening period. Hezarfen
20 For the text of the relevant capitulation, compare Mehmed Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Venedik
Devlet Arşivindeki Vesikalar Külliyatında Kanunî Sultan Süleyman Devri Belgeleri’, Belgeler
1, 1–2 ( July 1964), 110–220 at 121–8.
21 M. Ertuğrul Düzdağ, Şeyhülislâm Ebussu’ûd Efendi Fetvaları Işığ ında 16. Asır Türk Hayatı
(Istanbul, 1983), no. 478, pp. 108–9; Imber, Ebu’s-Su‘ud, pp. 84–5.
22 Hezarfen Hüseyin, ‘Telhîsü’ l beyân f î kavânîn-i âl-i Osmân’, Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, Paris, Ancien fonds turc, ms. 40, fol. 234v.
331
Hüseyin did, however, add that “the honours rendered to the ulema in this
Sublime Empire have no equivalent elsewhere in the entire Islamic world.”23
Ulema careers
After reviewing the diferent oices accessible to members of the ulema, we
will now discuss the ways in which people entered this career and what they
needed to do in order to advance in it. The studies and competencies outlined
earlier did not suice; in addition, co-optation was a prerequisite. According
to Atai, a seventeenth-century biographer of the Ottoman ulema, in the early
period positions were given out in a rather haphazard fashion. Once again,
it was Ebussuud Efendi, while he was still an army judge, who established
the rules that later generations were to follow. Ebussuud drew up a list of
the high-ranking scholar-oicials who every seven years should propose can-
didates (mülazim) from among their respective entourages. Such candidates
might be advanced students (danişmend), tutors (muid) and other close col-
laborators of the dignitary submitting their names. Apparently, in real life
the Ottoman authorities only moderately respected these seven-year periods
(nöbet): on various occasions, the government might decree that an excep-
tional nöbet was in order, and high ulema sometimes even proposed their can-
didates without reference to any nöbet at all.
Ebussuud’s original list has not survived, but records concerning the nöbet
of 963/1555–6 ill this gap to some extent. Each of the kadıs of Istanbul, Bursa
and Cairo presented four mülazims, while those of Damascus, Aleppo and
Baghdad handed in two names per person, and the teachers of the sultan’s
sons also could suggest suitable candidates. At the nöbet of 976/1566, the kadıs
of Istanbul, Edirne and Bursa were able to sponsor ive candidates each, while
the taht kadıları proposed three per person. Ebussuud also determined that
the two army judges should keep registers of the mülazims applying for posi-
tions within their respective competencies. In this way, he hoped to ensure
that nobody was forgotten and candidates received their positions according
to their dates of application. In brief, the new regulations were to do away
with the previous disorders, which had been the source of much arbitrariness
and injustice.24
Upon entering the ulema path, the mülazim could choose one of two routes;
this choice, which determined his later career, was a notable characteristic of
23 Ibid., fol. 235r.

24 Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul, pp. 45–55; Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, Koğuşlar
Kitablığı 888, fol. 349b, no. 1532 and 347a, no. 1600.
332
the Ottoman cursus honorum. Those young men who opted for “the road
of judgeships” did not need to teach, or at least not beyond the hariç level.
They immediately or at least rapidly received judgeships, which paid better
than the positions available to a beginning müderris. Financially speaking, this
career path was more rewarding in the short term, but with respect to promo-
tions it was a dead end, as ulema without professorial experience could not
expect to rise beyond judgeships in the most modest of small towns, with
daily emoluments of 25–100 akçe.
As for the second route, known as the “road of teaching positions”, it began
with a lengthy tour through the diferent grades of colleges, during which the
budding scholar-oicial, if he was lucky, got himself promoted to ever more
prestigious schools. This course was not only long but also demanded inan-
cial sacriices, as the daily emoluments at the end of the professorial cursus
honorum still were no more than 100 akçe a day. Moreover, a teacher did not
have the opportunities for more or less licit extra earnings always available to
a kadı. But this kind of sacriice was the prerequisite for appointment to the
higher positions in the hierarchy of judges, which brought power, prestige
and also the most elevated salaries.
Taşköprüzade’s account of his own – admittedly very successful – pro-
fessional career exempliies these rules. As we might expect given his “love
for holy scholarship”, this author chose the “road of teaching positions”. His
irst appointment was to a provincial school, when in Receb 931/April–May
1525 he started to teach at the college of Dimetoka, today in Greece, close to
the Greco-Turkish border. Two years later, we ind him in Istanbul at what
was surely a rather modest institution, founded by a certain Mevla İbn el-hac
Hasan. After three years, he received another provincial position, this time to
the İshakiye medrese in Üsküb/Skopje; there Taşköprüzade remained for six
years before returning once again to Istanbul, this time as a professor at the
Kalenderhane medrese, from which two years later he moved to the college
founded by vezir Mustafa Paşa. His stay in this position was very brief, for
the following year he found himself in Edirne, where he also taught for only
a year. His next step inally was a clear promotion, for Taşköprüzade now
received a position at one of the eight colleges founded by Mehmed II, at this
time not yet outranked by the Süleymaniye. Even so, after ive years we ind
him returning to Edirne, where he became a professor at the college founded
by Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512).
After a one-year stint in this school, there came the turning point in
Taşköprüzade’s career, for at the age of ifty-one, in the fullness of life as he
put it, he became kadı of Bursa. Two years later, he returned to his academic
333
career, once again at one of the Conqueror’s colleges. Taşköprüzade metic-

ulously recorded his academic activities in this position, as he had done for
his earlier medrese appointments as well. He produced a copy of the Sahih
al-Bukhari, one of the major works on traditions derived from the prophet
Muhammad, and also taught the Hidaya from the beginning of the section
on marriage until the section covering marriage contracts. In addition, he
introduced his students to the Kitab al-Talwih, proceeding from the begin-
ning to the fourth section, and also covered the appendixes to the Kaşşaf of
Seyyid el-Şerif, taking his class all the way to the section on the irst surah of
the Qur’an.
This time, Taşköprüzade taught for four years before, on 17 Şevval 958/18
October 1551, he obtained the highest promotion of his life when he became
kadı of Istanbul. With regret, he noted that the responsibilities of a judge
removed him from “holy scholarship”, but he resigned himself, quoting the
Qur’an (33/38, English translation by Marmaduke Pickthall): “and the com-
mandment of Allah is certain destiny”. But three years later Taşköprüzade
had to resign, as chronic conjunctivitis had caused him to go blind. His oicial
career was over; however, he continued his scholarly work, under diicult
conditions, until his death in 1561.25
By the centralisation and hierarchy which the Ottoman rulers imposed
upon the ulema, the sultans and their grand vezirs came to control this body of
scholar-oicials; for this purpose, they used certain high dignitaries that they
could appoint and depose without any trouble. As previously noted, not all
appointees followed the cursus honorum outlined in the case of Taşköprüzade.
After all, the entourage of the sultan, including his former teacher (hoca) and
other palace functionaries, quite often intervened to promote their own can-
didates. As a result, appointment to high ulema oices might become a prize
fought over by various coteries among Ottoman governing circles. Moreover,
in some cases scholar-oicials simply purchased their positions.
Venal judges and the problem of unemployment

If we believe a critical discourse widespread among Ottoman writers from
the later sixteenth century onwards, the system as it functioned at that time
promoted careerism and cupidity among the holders of high oice more
than knowledge or virtue. In the “justice edicts” (adaletnames) emitted in the
name of the sultan, we encounter the most dramatic versions of this partic-
ular discourse. Thus a text promulgated under Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) dated to
25 Taşköprüzade, Aş-Şaka’ik an-Nu’maniyya, pp. 855–65.
334
30 September 1609 did not mince words when denouncing the disorders and
abuses that had crept into public administration, and in one section the ruler
particularly targeted the kadıs and their substitutes, the naibs. Around 1600,
the kadıs tended to farm out these latter positions to the highest bidder and,
as a result, while in oice the naibs had to maximise their proits.26
From the relevant passage, the reader comes away with an unedifying pic-
ture of the cupidity and nastiness widespread among oicials who in princi-
ple should have administered justice. Thus these men undertook numerous
inspection tours in the countryside, using the occasion to demand sheep,
lambs, chickens, butter and honey, while for their mounts they collected
straw, barley and hay. Needless to say, they never paid for any of these deliv-
eries. Some kadıs and naibs entered cemeteries to count and register the new
graves so as to ine villagers for not having reported the deaths and requested
a burial permit. Inidels could only obtain these permits against payment.
The idea behind these “lists of new graves” was not to check whether
funerals had been properly conducted or to collect demographic data but
rather to locate decedents. When a deceased person left an inheritance and
there were minors or absentees among the heirs, it was obligatory to ask the
kadı for a properly certiied inventory of the goods and chattels involved,
and the judge could demand a fee for his service. But when there were no
minors or absentees, the heirs did not need to call upon a kadı; however,
judges avid for gain did not hesitate to impose their services nonetheless.
Moreover, dignitaries of this type tended to exaggerate the value of the
inheritances at issue because the dues they could demand were proportional
to the inancial worth of the deceased. If certain items tempted the cupidity
of the judges, they often grabbed them for themselves; and, even worse, they
re-registered inheritances already taken care of by their predecessors, with
the excuse that the heirs had hidden part of the inheritance and the registers
were thus incomplete. Certain kadıs thus managed to redo some inventories
twice or even three times over, with the result that the heirs lost half of the
inheritance. To top it all of, while there were statutes ixing the amounts of
money that kadıs and naibs could collect for registering diferent kinds of
documents, these oice-holders did not hesitate to badly overcharge whoever
needed their services.
Disputes among claimants to tax assignments (timar, zeamet) or among
administrators of pious foundations or şeyhs of dervish lodges typically gave
26 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Sur les nâ’ib ottomans’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 25 (2001),
247–67.
335
rise to other types of judicial corruption. The adaletname accused the kadıs
of not ruling in favour of those who had the law on their side but rather
giving the advantage to those paying 5 or 10 piastres or even a gold coin or
two. When on inspection tours, which as we have seen tended to cost the
inhabitants dearly, kadıs on the lookout for gain falsely accused local wealthy
people of having held back money that should have gone to the exchequer,
merely to pocket a bribe. Even if the Muslims of a given town or village testi-
ied that this or that person was innocent, the kadıs did not hesitate to record
the contrary in their registers. By contrast, when receiving the payment they
had demanded, corrupt kadıs were perfectly capable of deleting crimes and
misdemeanours already on record; they even delivered attestations of virtue
and piety.
Tax farming was another source of abuses. When tax farmers were
indebted to the hilt or even bankrupt, kadıs, after receiving the appropriate
bribes, assigned them guarantors from among the better-of inhabitants with-
out asking the latter or even informing them that they stood to lose their
entire fortunes to the exchequer.
All these abuses had come to the “august knowledge” of the young sultan.
According to the edict at hand, the ruler expressed his consternation when
inding out that kadıs and other oice-holders blatantly ignored his orders,
which after all expressed quite clearly what the sultan’s servants could and
could not demand from the empire’s subjects. When courageous persons
reminded the sultan’s corrupt servitors – including certain kadıs – of their
duties, the latter did not hesitate to accuse the men who had warned them of
disobeying the imperial orders. They had their potential nemeses arrested and,
supposedly as a penalty, robbed these unfortunates of all their possessions.27
According to the authors of the adaletnames, all evil was due to human
vices. A century later, however, Hezarfen Hüseyin had come to realise that
the system also was to blame and that vices tended to spread from the top of
the hierarchy down to its base. These are his comments:
In addition to being scholars, kadıasker s must be very pious and abstemious.
Certainly some of them [meaning those currently oiciating] are genuine scholars,
but they have debts and as soon as they begin their period in oice, they sell the
kadı-positions [in their gift] to the highest bidder. But can you expect a man to be
just, if he arrives in his place of oice heavily indebted? … While it is the responsi-
bility of the kadı to implement the law of God, at present [most kadıs are mainly
concerned with] inding out how they can best take away people’s money.28
27 Halil İnalcık, ‘Adâletnâmeler’, Türk Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi 2, 3–4 (1965), 49–145 at pp. 129–30.
28 Hezarfen, ‘Telhîsü’ l beyân’, fol. 241v.
336
We usually think that abuses of this type crept in when the empire was in
decline. But do we really know when they began?
In addition, a demographic factor exacerbated competition among the
ulema; given population growth and increased educational opportunities,
there was an ever-increasing disproportion between the number of jobs
available and the number of candidates qualiied to ill them. Quite a few
advanced students never became candidates (mülazim), and many of the lat-
ter never obtained positions. In addition, there were fully trained scholars
who spent more years out of oice and waiting for a position (mazul) than on
active duty. Due to the insuiciency of positions, waiting periods increased
in length, while kadıs and professors could expect to oiciate for ever-briefer
timespans.
Scholar-oicials in imperial politics

As we have seen, sultans and vezirs had established their control over the ulema,
but, as a corollary, these latter personages became more and more inl uential
in the empire’s politics. Admittedly, after 1453 there were no longer any schol-
arly members of the Çandarlı dynasty to be appointed grand vezirs, nor do
we ind inance directors (baş defterdar) of ulema background. This particular
“mixing of career lines” ended with Pirî Paşa (d. 1532), the last grand vezir of
Selim I and the irst holder of this oice under Süleyman the Magniicent.
Where inance directors were concerned, the recruitment of ulema may have
continued somewhat longer, but one Ebul Fazl Mehmed Çelebi (d. ca. 1574
or 1575) seems to have been a late exception, for beginning with the reign
of Mehmed the Conqueror, high-level administrators typically began their
oicial careers as “servitors of the sultan” (kul), usually drafted from among
Christian peasant boys by means of the procedure known as devşirme; these
new-style oice-holders received their training not in the medrese but in the
palace schools. Or oicials already in the sultan’s employ brought their sons
and nephews to train for bureaucratic jobs while serving apprenticeships as
junior scribes. These “men of the pen” (ehl-i kalem) gained more and more
inl uence in the course of the sixteenth century, and between them kul and
ehl-i kalem managed to oust the ulema from positions not part of the juridical-
religious hierarchy.
But even so, the ulema continued to play signiicant political roles. As we
have seen, the sultans of the sixteenth century frequently asked for the advice
of their chief jurisconsults even in political matters. Moreover, the opinions
of the latter carried much weight among the high dignitaries of the empire
collectively known as “pillars of the state”, who came to run political afairs
337
at the end of our period, when most sultans spent but a limited amount of
time and energy in governing the empire. The two army judges also igured
among this select group of oice-holders, although they seem to have limited
their activity to legal matters. Moreover, the kadıs played a pivotal role in local
administration apart from acting as notaries and applying şeriat and kanun;
the central administration continued to view them as its principal supports in
the provinces. As a result, kadıs might collect taxes, draft workmen for oicial
building projects and deal with a variety of other matters that had little to do
with the scholarly subjects they had once studied and taught in the medrese.
In brief, as Halil İnalcık once put it, the kadıs formed the backbone of provin-
cial administration.29 After all, governors of diferent levels were often con-
cerned purely with military matters, and when not on campaign they mainly
dealt with issues that in later periods were to become the responsibility of the
police and gendarmerie.
Upholding Sunni “right belief ” and the problem of heterodoxy

Certainly the sultans and vezirs of the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries spent a
great deal of efort on the construction of a strong empire with an active and
powerful administrative apparatus. Centralisation and regularisation were
part of this project, yet by themselves they do not explain the religious policy
of the sultans and particularly their staunch and sometimes rigid defence of
Sunni “right belief ”, which implied completely abandoning the latitudinarian
attitude of their fourteenth-century predecessors. To explain this change, we
need to look at the sultans’ conl ict with the Safavid dynasty, which began
when Shah Ismacil I (r. 1501–24) created a rival empire and began to make over
Iran into a country inhabited largely by Shi‘ites. Moreover, the Safavids had
a considerable number of adherents among the Anatolian population, while
Ottoman–Safavid conl ict frequently recurred throughout the 1500s and early
1600s. When analysing the religious policies of the Ottoman sultans, we need
to take all these factors into consideration.30
29 İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, p. 118.

30 Hanna Sohrweide, ‘Der Sieg der Safaviden in Persien und seine Rückwirkungen auf die
Schiiten Anatoliens im 16. Jahrhundert’, Der Islam 41 (1965), 95–223; Erica Glassen, ‘Schah
Ismâ‘îl – ein Mahdî der anatolischen Türkmenen?’ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des
Morgenlandes 121 (1971), 61–9; Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, ‘Le règne de Selîm 1er tour-
nant dans la vie politique et religieuse de l’empire ottoman’, Turcica 6 (1975), 34–48; Oktaj
Efendiev, ‘Le rôle des tribus de langue turque dans la création de l’état safavide’, Turcica 6
(1975), 24–33; Irène Mélikof, ‘Le problème kızılbaş’, Turcica 6 (1975), 49–67; Faruk Sümer,
Safevî Devletinin Kuruluş ve Gelişmesinde Anadolu Türklerinin Rolü (Ankara, 1976); Roger M.
338
The Ottoman–Safavid conl ict and the Kızılbaş problem

The Ottoman–Safavid conl ict was a “classical dispute” between two empires,
with certain territories coveted by both sides. But it was also a religious and,
more broadly speaking, “ideological” conl ict. Shah Ismacil I had begun life
as the hereditary master of a Sui fraternity that a few decades earlier, under
his father and grandfather, had accepted extremist Shi‘ite views, and true
to his origins he established an empire of a rather special kind.31 Moreover,
Shah Ismacil drew much of his support from Turcoman tribes, some of them
nomadising in Iran, but the same tribes were also active in central, western
and southern Anatolia, where in fact they had been living for several centu-
ries. Thus the Ottoman elite felt threatened not merely by a foreign enemy
but also a domestic one. In this perspective, “Redhead” (Kızılbaş) tribesmen,
allies and disciples of the shah, acted upon his orders, or at least the sultan’s
government readily suspected them of such “subversive” activities.
Beginning with Bayezid II and intensifying under his successors, the sul-
tans’ reaction took several forms. Thus, to ensure stricter control of the
Muslim population, Süleyman the Magniicent in 944/1537–8 commanded
that a mosque be constructed in every village. But the sultans’ reaction was,
above all, military.32 Selim I defeated Shah Ismacil near Çaldıran in 1514, while
his son and successor Süleyman campaigned against the “Two Iraqs” and
took Baghdad from Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524–76) in 1534–5. Once the city was
in his hands, Sultan Süleyman immediately demonstrated the religious and
symbolic aspects of this enterprise by ordering the construction of a funerary
monument for the miraculously located remains of the great legal scholar Abu
Hanifa (ca. 699–767), from whose teachings had originated the school of law
(mezheb) followed by the Ottomans and most present-day Turks. Moreover,
accompanied by his grand vezir, paşas and ağas, the sultan undertook a pil-
grimage to Najaf and Karbala to visit the mausoleums of the Prophet’s son-in-
Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge, 1980); Irène Mélikof, ‘L’islam hétérodoxe en
Anatolie: Nonconformisme, syncrétisme, gnose’, Turcica 14 (1982), 142–54; Adel Allouche,
The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conlict (906–962/1500–1555) (Berlin, 1983);
Roger M. Savory, ‘Kızılbâş’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden,
1986), vol. 5, pp. 243–5; Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, Les Ottomans, les Safavides et leurs voi-
sins: Contribution à l’histoire des relations internationales dans l’Orient islamique de 1514 à 1524
(Istanbul, 1987); Jean Aubin, ‘L’avènement des Safavides reconsidéré’, Moyen Orient et Océan
Indien 5 (1988), 1–130.
31 Jean Aubin, ‘La politique religieuse des Safavides’, in Le Shiisme imamite, colloque de
Strasbourg (6–9 mai 1968) (Paris, 1970), pp. 236–43.
32 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Les premières mesures de Bâyezîd II contre les Kızılbaş’, in Syncrétismes et
Hérésies dans l’Orient seldjoukide et ottoman (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Gilles Veinstein (Louvain,
2005), pp. 225–36.
339
law Imam cAli and the latter’s son Imam Husayn. Presumably, by this gesture
Sultan Süleyman meant to make it clear that the struggle against “heretics”
did not exclude veneration for the family of the Prophet.
In Anatolia, Sultan Süleyman had serious trouble defeating the Turcoman
rebellions of Baba Zülnun (1526) and Şah Kalender (1527), campaigns that
resulted in a great deal of bloodshed. Afterwards the Kızılbaş mostly avoided
open rebellions, but even so the Ottoman authorities continued to persecute
them. Once the treaty of Amasya (1555) for some decades had established an
uneasy peace with the Safavids, the conl ict lost its “inter-imperial” aspect
and continued on the domestic level only, with the local adherents of the
Safavid project acting more or less in secret. Matters calmed down somewhat
after the mid-1580s, but the “ideological” aspect of the conl ict never entirely
disappeared.33
From the edicts that the central administration sent to its local representa-
tives, whose job it was to investigate and repress real and imagined Kızılbaş,
we learn that several criteria counted as clear indicators of “heretic” sympa-
thies, making it unnecessary to engage the suspects in theological debate.
Some people refused to name their sons Ebubekir, Ömer and Osman after the
irst three caliphs, whom Anatolian Shi‘ites held in abhorrence; the authori-
ties regarded this behaviour as highly suspect. People also courted trouble if
their neighbours claimed that they did not perform the ive daily prayers and,
even worse, avoided communal Friday services.34
“Heresy” in the courts

Given oicial concern with the “Kızılbaş peril”, the authorities began to chase
down any religious dissidents within Islam, no matter what their background.
Here there was no trace of the relative tolerance, strongly tinged with indif-
ference and disdain, that some Muslims typically adopted towards Jews and
Christians. Repression came in diferent forms. Some suspects were executed
in secret or under some “non-political” pretext to avoid negative reactions on
the part of a local society that administrators considered unpredictable. In
other cases, local kadıs and their subordinates undertook court cases ending
33 Andreas Tietze, ‘A Document on the Persecution of Sectarians in Early Seventeenth-Century

Istanbul’, in Bektachiyya: Études sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de
Hadji Bektach, ed. Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (Istanbul, 1995), pp. 165–70.
34 Ahmed Rei k, On Altıncı Asırda Türkiye’de Rafızilik ve Bektaşiliğe Dair Hazine-i Evrak
Vesikalarını Havidir (Istanbul, 1932); Colin Imber, ‘The Persecution of the Ottoman Shi’ites
According to the Mühimme Defterleri, 1565–1585’, Der Islam 56 (1979), 245–73; Saim Savaş,
‘Les menées safavides en Anatolie au XVIe siècle et les mesures prises à leur encontre par
l’Etat ottoman’, Anatolia Moderna 9 (2000), 47–96.
340
in condemnations, while the highest authorities in the capital, including the

army judges and the chief jurisconsult, proceeded against more inl uential
persons of heterodox backgrounds. At some of these trials, the sultan himself
was present.
Personages of heterodox convictions stood accused of being “heretics
and atheists” (zındık ve mülhid), several trials of this type taking place under
Süleyman the Magniicent.35 In 1527, the accused was a scholar by the name
of Molla Kabız; according to contemporary chroniclers, he was the instiga-
tor of a current that claimed the superiority of Jesus over Muhammad. In
his irst trial, presided over by the two army judges and at which the sultan
assisted, Molla Kabız gained an acquittal because his judges ran out of argu-
ments against him. In a second trial, this time presided over by the şeyhülislam
İbn Kemal, the judges also debated at length, but in the end the accused was
sentenced to death as a heretic. Moreover, a certain Hakim İshak had inspired
a mode of thinking, probably derived from Jewish and/or Christian roots,
according to which the Old and New Testaments were just as valuable as
the Qur’an. Ebussuud Efendi condemned him in a legal opinion, and Hakim
İshak was executed as well.
In the inal analysis, the network of medreses covering the empire, the activ-
ity of the kadıs, the supremacy of the chief jurisconsult and the heresy trials
presided over by scholar-oicials all served the same aim: to ensure the main-
tenance of Sunni “right belief ” as espoused by the Ottoman dynasty.
“Permitted” Sui orders (tarikat)

Oicial promotion of Sunni Islam (“Sunnitisation”) did not exclude the
continuing presence of a Sui-tinged version beside the religion of the
legists.36 As for the adherents of Suism, they normally organised in “orders”,
or mystical fraternities. Some individuals even tried to incorporate both the
esoteric and exoteric dimensions of Islam in their religious lives. Certainly
this widespread tendency towards mysticism gave rise to some controversy:
deriving his inspiration from the rigorist Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), Mehmed,
later known as Birgevi, a provincial müderris from the little town of Birgi in
35 Ahmed Yaşar Ocak, ‘Les réactions socio-religieuses contre l’idéologie oicielle ottomane
et la question de zendeqa ve ilhad (hérésie et athéisme) au XVIe siècle’, Turcica 31–3 (1991),
71–82; Ahmed Yaşar Ocak, ‘Idéologie et réactions populaires: un aperçu général sur les cou-
rants et les mouvements socio-religieux à l’époque de Soliman le Magniique’, in Soliman le
Magniique et son temps, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris, 1992), pp. 185–92.
36 I owe the term “Sunnitisation” to Nathalie Clayer, Mystiques, état et société: Les Halvetis dans
l’aire balkanique de la in du XVIe à nos jours (Leiden, 1994).
341
western Anatolia, was highly critical of what he considered an impure version

of Islam. But in the sixteenth century such voices were quite rare and only
gained in signiicance after the end of our period, with the rise of the move-
ment of the Kadızadeli during the early 1600s.37 Yet, in the atmosphere of
the times, people strongly emphasised the diference between “licit or accept-
able” (makbul) dervish fraternities and those that religious scholars regarded
as “condemnable” (merdud); in some cases, a given order might contain both
“acceptable” and “condemnable” branches.38
Among the “acceptable” tarikats, the Zeyniyye was of importance dur-
ing the 1400s but disappeared soon afterwards.39 By contrast, the Halvetiye/
Khalwatiyya, which had originated in Azerbaijan and remained important
throughout Ottoman history, enjoyed its greatest inl uence during the 1500s
and 1600s, producing several new branches in the central provinces of the
empire.40 Şeyh Çelebi Halife (d. 1484 or 1485) initiated Bayezid II into the
Halvetiye when Bayezid was still a prince in Amasya; later on, the şeyh fol-
lowed the sultan to Istanbul, where the newly enthroned ruler had invited
him. Sultan Süleyman also was close to several Halveti şeyhs, one of them
Mustafa Musliheddin Nureddinzade (1502–74) from Filibe/Plovdiv in today’s
Bulgaria. According to the biographer Atai, Nureddinzade persuaded
Süleyman, at that time already sick and elderly, to personally participate in
the Szigetvar campaign of 1566, in the course of which the sultan died. As for
Murad III (r. 1574–95), he also joined the Halvetiye; his şeyh was a certain Şüca,
whose inl uence upon the monarch gave rise to acrimonious controversy.
Quite a few dervish şeyhs were able to render political services in exchange
for the sultan’s patronage. All over the empire, the Halvetis, for instance,
defended Sunni “right belief ” as propounded by the Ottoman government.
Together with local scholar-oicials and military authorities, they cooperated
in the repression of dissidents. Müniri Belgradi, a jurisconsult of Bosnian
background, composed a collection of saints’ biographies known as the
silsilat al-mukarrabin ve manakib al-muttakin.41 This author showed Halveti
37 Madeline C. Zili, ‘The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in the Seventeenth-Century
Istanbul’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45, 4 (1986), 251–69.
38 Hans Joachim Kissling, ‘Einiges über den Zejnîje-Orden im osmanischen Reich’, Der Islam
39 (1964), 143–79; Marc Gaborieau, ‘Tarîqa et orthodoxie’, in Les voies d’Allah: Les ordres mys-
tiques dans le monde musulman des origines à aujourd’hui, ed. Alexandre Popovic and Gilles
Veinstein (Paris, 1996), pp. 195–202; Gilles Veinstein and Nathalie Clayer, ‘L’Empire ottoman’,
in ibid. pp. 322–41.
39 Osman Türer, ‘The Sui Orders in Anatolia,’ in Sui sm and Sui s in Ottoman Society: Sources,
Doctrine, Rituals, Turuq, Architecture, Literature, Iconography, Modernism, ed. Ahmed Yaşar
Ocak (Ankara, 2005), pp. 219–56 at 251–2.
40 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société, pp. 63–179.
41 Ibid., p. 56.
342
şeyhs acting as spiritual guides to Ottoman frontier troops in places today

located in Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Bulgaria. This is what the author
had to say of şeyh Ali Dede Sigetvari, a disciple of Nureddinzade, who had
lived in Mecca for a long time and inally had become the guardian of Sultan
Süleyman’s cenotaph in Szigetvar: “In the borderlands he dispensed his abun-
dant teachings. Thirsty with ecstatic love and ardour, he set out with the cam-
paign against Varad [Oradea in today’s Rumania], without having been able
to inish a set of poems (gazels)”.42 Of şeyh Muslihüddin Efendi of Sremska
Mitrovica, our author had the following to say: “In his time everywhere rul-
ers and governors acted with his aid. … He very much desired to be useful.
… [And the soldiers said]… [w]e saw the sheik in this or that battle, and there
was no limit to [the force of] religion.”43
Other orders had a more questionable reputation but still enjoyed a degree
of sultanic favour. Certainly the Mevlevis (“whirling dervishes”) – or at least
their Veledi branch, named after Mevlana Celaleddin’s son Sultan Veled – were
in this position; members of the Ottoman elite apparently had more reserva-
tions with respect to the rival Şemsi branch. In the long run, the Veledis grew
into a mainstream Sunni order with many elite members, and when Sultan
Süleyman passed through Konya on his way to do battle against the Safavids
(1534), he did not neglect to visit the tomb of Mevlana Celaleddin. Even the
Bayramis, with their antinomian background, sprouted a branch espousing
Sunni right belief: we have already encountered Mehmed the Conqueror’s
spiritual guide Ak Şemseddin, and, following him, the Celvetiye branch also
adopted a staunchly Sunni attitude.
“Illicit” dervish orders

On the other hand, the branch of the Bayramis that adopted the name of
Melami clearly stood outside the circle of Sunni “right belief ” due to the
Melamis’ extremist notions reminiscent of Shiʻism. For this reason, the
Ottoman authorities sought them out in order to punish them. The Melamis
also professed the “oneness of being”; politically speaking, this belief meant
that they tended to regard their master as their temporal as well as their spir-
itual chief, so that the relevant Sui şeyh could easily become the more or less
openly declared rival of the sultan. This rivalry found expression in current
terminology: Melami-Bayramis called their leader Kutb-i Mehdi (“messianic
42 Nathalie Clayer, ‘Une vie de saint dans l’Europe ottomane’, in Popovic and Veinstein, Les
voies d’Allah, pp. 586–8 at p. 587.
43 Veinstein and Clayer, ‘L’Empire ottoman’, pp. 337–8.
343
pole”), Suret-i Rahman (“God’s epiphany”) and Sahib-i Zaman (“Master of

the age”).44
A young şeyh named İsmail Maşuki (d. 1529) professed these potentially
seditious ideas with special ardour, while at the same time he managed to
gain new types of adherents. In the past, the Melamis had mainly attracted
Anatolian peasants and artisans, but İsmail Maşuki, the “adolescent sheik”
(oğlan şeyh), succeeded in winning over educated men, poets, bureaucrats,
ulema and wealthy merchants of Istanbul. Sultan Süleyman’s servitors were
not slow to react: Maşuki and 12 of his disciples were arrested in the Ottoman
capital and sentenced to death; the şeyhülislam İbn Kemal’s legal opinion rele-
vant to this afair has come down to us. Dated 25 August 1529, this text claims
that the accused propagated ideas very similar to those for which, about a
century earlier, Bedreddin of Sımavna had been hanged in Serres.45
Some 40 years after Maşuki’s death, we encounter an analogous scenario.
At its centre was Hamza Bali, in his youth a disciple of the oğlan şeyh. A
Bosnian, Hamza Bali seemingly had wider contacts beyond his home prov-
ince, as he supposedly was a chief disciple and emissary of Hüsameddîn
Ankaravi, a şeyh connected to Ankara who had died in prison. Concerning
the end of Hamza Bali, Müniri Belgradi once again provided precious and
revealing information. The author reported how Hamza Bali felt threatened
in Istanbul and knew what could happen to him once his residence became
known; he therefore led from Istanbul to Bosnia. Activating his previous ties
to some of his faithful, he stopped over in the upper part of the town of
Tuzla, where he appointed chief disciples (halifes). However, these activities
led to a denunciation on the part of the Halveti şeyh Nureddinzade, and the
court sent an oicial poursuivant (çavuş) to Tuzla, who took Hamza Bali by
surprise and carried him of to Istanbul, where he was executed in 1573.
Once again, as Müniri Belgradi informs us, the court condemned the şeyh
as a “heretic and atheist”. But the author did not agree that the two main
points of the accusation against Hamza Bali really amounted to “heresy and
atheism”. On the one hand, the şeyh had permitted people to address him
as “sultan”, and on the other he had declared that, if he wished, he could
make the plague disappear from Istanbul. In the eyes of Müniri Belgradi, who
was a dervish sympathiser, these two points appeared in rather a diferent
44 Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, ‘Les Melâmî-Bayrâmî (Hamzavî) et l’administration ottomane aux

XVIe–XVIIe siècles’, in Mélâmis-Bayrâmis: Études sur trois mouvements mystiques musulmans,
ed. Nathalie Clayer, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone (Istanbul, 1998), pp. 99–114 at
p. 109.
45 Ocak, ‘Les réactions socio-religieuses’, p. 79.
344
light: “I have had occasion to meet many people who follow his path and visited
the regions where they live: they have no principle but love. To sum it all up, they
call their sheik sultan because of the immoderate love that they bear him.”
At the same time, the author denied that, in proclaiming that he could
deliver Istanbul from the plague, Hamza Bali had set himself up as a magician
and thus committed a crime: “Being a saint and possessing miraculous pow-
ers does not constitute blasphemy or atheism”. Müniri thus concluded that
Hamza Bali’s guilt had not been established “except in the imagination”.46 He
also gave his readers to understand that the government had taken fright at
the success of the şeyh ’s propaganda, not only in the Balkans but also among
the elite in Istanbul and the janissaries. When hearing of Hamza Bali’s death,
a janissary even committed suicide by stabbing himself and, just before dying,
sighed “oh my sheik”. In other words, Müniri Belgradi, a jurisconsult with
an inclination towards dervishes, felt that the government had wildly over-
reacted in the face of what its members regarded as political subversion. Due
to frequent persecution, some Melamis, now often called Hamzevis in mem-
ory of their major martyr, took refuge in Bosnia, the place where Hamza Bali
had lived as well as an ancient homeland of heresy ever since the time of the
Bogomils.
Other Melamis found a way of surviving by joining other dervish fraterni-
ties who were willing to accommodate their beliefs while being less exposed
to the ire of the Ottoman authorities. This practice was common enough
among people who sufered persecution for religious reasons, particularly
the Kızılbaş, and Mevlevis, Bektaşis and even some of the “less respectable”
branches of the Halvetiye provided places of refuge for religious dissidents.
Quite obviously, not all representatives of this last-named fraternity resem-
bled Nureddinzade, the nemesis of Hamza Bali. We have observed that cer-
tain illicit dervish communities possessed branches that were acceptable to
the government, but the opposite could also be true. It is thus important to
diferentiate between the diferent branches of the major orders, and cer-
tainly the powers that be did not fail to do so.
Thus a Halveti şeyh by the name of İbrahim Gülşeni featured among the
men accused of “heresy and atheism”. At one time, Gülşeni had been a dis-
ciple of Ömer Ruşeni (d. 1475). Arrested in 1530, Gülşeni was interrogated
at length in the presence of Sultan Süleyman. Once again, the accusation
was that, like the Melamis, he believed in the incarnation of God in human
46 Müniri Belgradi, ‘Silsiletü’ l-Mukarrabîn ve Menâkibü’ l-Müttakin’, Istanbul, Süleymaniye

Kütüphanesi, Şehid Ali Paşa no. 2819/3, quoted in Clayer, Mystiques, état et société, p. 89.
345
form (hulul). But İbrahim Gülşeni was able to convince his judges and also the
sultan of his innocence; he then returned to his native Cairo, where he died in
1533 and was buried in a mausoleum that still survives.47
But nevertheless the government and the şeyhülislam continued to pros-
ecute İbrahim Gülşeni’s disciples. In 1550, there began the trial of Muhiddin
Karamani, şeyh of the zaviye of Çoban Mustafa Paşa in Gebze, on the out-
skirts of Istanbul. In the records of this trial, which survive in the archives of
the Istanbul Müftülük, we encounter once again the accusations once made
against şeyh Bedreddin: belief in the unity of all things (vahdetü ‘l-vücud),
claims to divinity (uluhiyyet), rejection of the obligatory Islamic rituals and,
in a materialist perspective, of all notions of resurrection and the hereafter.
Muhiddin Karamani was sentenced to death and decapitated.48
Relations between the Ottoman government and the Bektaşiye were espe-
cially complex. The earliest princes of the dynasty had been very close to
this fraternity, as is apparent from several references in the vita of the order’s
eponymous saint Hacı Bektaş.49 Possibly the irst Ottoman sultans even con-
tributed to the formation of the order, for apparently they encouraged peo-
ple to associate this particular holy man with a large number of local saints
whose cults had previously been independent of that of Hacı Bektaş, or even
rivals to the veneration of this minor participant in the mid-thirteenth-cen-
tury Babai uprising. Hacı Bektaş seems to have lived as a recluse in the village
of Suluca Kara Öyük in central Anatolia; in the fullness of time, his mauso-
leum became the nucleus of the modern town bearing his name.
Sultan Bayezid II visited this sanctuary and had its domes covered with
lead; he even accorded an annual gift of several thousand akçe to the Kızılbaş
halife in the province of Teke, in the south-west of Anatolia.50 But everything
changed with the advance of Shah Ismacil, once the Ottoman government
became conscious of the dangers inherent in the Bektaşi-Kızılbaş connection.
Bektaşi tradition has it that Selim I closed down the lodge, and only in 1551 did
Süleyman allow it to re-open.51 Imperial benefactions did not resume before
the eighteenth century. Certainly the order was heterodox and more than
any other served as a refuge for dissidents leeing persecution. As a result,
47 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, ‘The Takiyyat Ibrahim al-Kulshani in Cairo’, Muqarnas 5 (1988),

43–60.
48 Ocak, ‘Les réactions socio-religieuses’, p. 81.
49 Irène Mélikof, Hadji Bektach: un mythe et ses avatars. Genèse et évolution du soui sme populaire
en Turquie (Leiden, 1998), pp. 92–103.
50 Sohrweide, ‘Der Sieg der Safaviden’, p. 139.
51 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The tekke of Haci Bektach: Social Position and Economic Activities’,
Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976), 183–208.
346
Huruis, in addition to Shi‘ites and especially Kızılbaş, have left traces of their
ideas in the doctrine of the order, syncretistic to a fault.52 But, even so, the
Bektaşis remained licit and, as is well known, had considerable inl uence
among the janissaries. Perhaps the Ottoman authorities considered that this
order was “under control” due to its centralised structure, a legacy of the
order’s “second founder”, Balım Sultan (active 1501–2 to 1516–17).53 After all,
brutal repression had not eliminated heterodoxy, and if necessary Ottoman
rulers and vezirs could be pragmatic; thus the order may well have appeared
as a convenient manner of channelling political and religious dissension into
a course that the authorities could live with.54
The shadow of God on earth

The sovereigns responsible for the construction of the elaborate institutions
and policies upholding Sunni “right belief ” were no longer the local lords of
little-known background that they had been in the early 1300s, or even the
“sultans of Rum” notable for their successes against the inidels that they had
become, at the latest after the conquests of Bayezid I Yıldırım (r. 1389–1402).
We will now analyse the changes in the religious status of the sixteenth-cen-
tury Ottoman sultans that accompanied – or followed from – their gains in
political power.
In the Islamic tradition, the conquest of Constantinople had an eschato-
logical signiicance, and therefore this victory possessed signiicant symbolic
meaning; but even so, the Ottoman sultan claimed no more than the title of
“king of the warriors for the faith” (şah-ı güzat). In the oicial communica-
tion concerning his great victory that Mehmed II addressed to the Mamluk
ruler al-Malik al-Ashraf Inal, the sender certainly emphasised the magnitude
of his personal merits. But, at the same time, he accepted his limits when
contrasting “[the person] who takes it upon himself to equip the men who
labour [on the road of] gaza and cihad ” – in other words those who prepared
armies for holy war – and “[the person] who assumes the arduous task, inher-
ited from his father and ancestors, of re-animating once again the ceremony
52 Hamid Algar, ‘The Hurûf î Inl uence on Bektachism’, in Popovic and Veinstein, Bektachiyya,
pp. 39–53; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Bektashis: A Report on Current Research’, in Popovic and
Veinstein, Bektachiyya, pp. 9–30 at pp. 23–6; Mélikof, Hadji Bektach, pp. 104–43.
53 Mélikof, Hadji Bektac, pp. 154–9.
54 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Conl ict, Accommodation and Long-Term Survival: The Bektashi Order
and the Ottoman State (Sixteenth–Seventeeth Centuries)’, in Popovic and Veinstein,
Bektachiyya, pp. 171–84.
347
of the pilgrimage to Mecca”.55 In this manner, Mehmed II acknowledged the

political and religious role of his prestigious correspondent, who every year
was responsible for the protection of the great Islamic pilgrimage to the holy
cities of the Hijaz.
The padişah of Islam

Whatever the religious value of the conquest of Constantinople, in the eyes
of literate Muslims the status of the Ottoman sultans changed much more
profoundly once they had come to rule Syria and Egypt due to the conquests
of Selim I. Certainly the Ottoman attack upon a Sunni sultanate, which
moreover had gained great prestige because of its role as a rampart of Islam
against Mongols and Crusaders, was illegal in terms of religious law. Nor
did outside observers take very seriously Selim’s pretext that the Mamluk
rulers had colluded with the heretics of Iran. In spite of such reservations,
military success soon eliminated objections based on legal principle, as is
apparent from the rapid submission of the Şerifs of Mecca to the Ottoman
conqueror. Selim’s conquests of a broad swath of territory were of obvi-
ous strategic and economic value. But the symbolic gain also was not neg-
ligible. While the Ottoman capital remained in Istanbul and the provinces
conquered early on, for the most part taken from inidel rulers, continued
to be the core lands of the empire, this polity now was no longer a “sultan-
ate of the frontier”. Gone were the times when the Ottomans had ruled a
territory that previously had been external to the Muslim world and thus, as
far as Islamic observers were concerned, lacked a sacred history and geog-
raphy. On the contrary, the sultans now controlled the innermost sanctum,
the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and after the campaigns of Süleyman
the Magniicent, they also ruled the historic centres of the caliphate, namely
Damascus and Baghdad.
As the Ottomans extended their domination over the Arab lands, they con-
fronted Islamic schools of law other than the Hanei to which they had been
subscribing for centuries: in the east, Shaicis and Hanbalis were a signiicant
presence, while the Malikis were dominant in western North Africa. All these
variants count as moving within the bounds of Sunni “right belief ”; there-
fore Shaicis, Hanbalis and Malikis co-existed with the dominant school of
law without major troubles. But this co-habitation was anything but egali-
tarian. In the Arab provinces, Hanei ulema sent out from Istanbul occupied
the highest positions as deined by the cursus honorum previously discussed;
55 Feridun Bey, Münşeât al-Selâtîn, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1274/1857), vol. 1, pp. 228–31.
348
as for the locals, most had not built their careers in Istanbul, and they were
only eligible for lower-level positions.56 Apart from doctrinal peculiarities, the
ulema of the Arab lands retained their organisation, and upon occasion they
were quite capable of expressing their hostility towards certain aspects of
Ottoman law, especially where interest-bearing loans and iscal practices were
concerned.57 In their eyes, the Ottoman sultan remained the sultan of Rum;
he had not in any way become the padişah of Islam.
Surely sultans and vezirs were aware of these reservations, but they do
not seem to have had a great impact on the self-image that Ottoman mon-
archs chose to project. In his most solemn missives, the titles attributed to
Sultan Süleyman show that this ruler was highly aware of his enhanced posi-
tion: when enumerating the conquests of his ancestors as well as his own,
the monarch and the secretaries speaking in his name proudly made the holy
cities and the ancient caliphal capitals precede all other places. The address-
ees were meant to understand that the Ottoman sultans took pride of place
among the sovereigns of Islam. Only the Great Moghuls of India, at least in
the reign of Akbar (1542–1605), were in a position to contest this pre-eminence
and to substantiate their claims, establishing a presence in Mecca.58
The servitor of the two Holy Sanctuaries

After his conquests of 1516–17, Selim I immediately adopted the ancient
Mamluk title “servitor of the two Holy Sanctuaries” (hadim al-haramayn);
holding this prestigious title made Selim and his successors the protectors of
Mecca and Medina. In addition to various rights and prerogatives, this title
also conveyed heavy responsibilities which the Ottoman rulers could only
undertake because of their de facto power. Put diferently, this title relected
the strength of their position and also legitimised it.
The sultans not only were responsible for the defence of the holy cities but
also needed to embellish and supply them; in addition, the Ottoman rulers
annually had to disburse large sums of money as alms, known as the sürre-i
hümayun. They also had to ensure that two well-organised caravans departed
from Cairo and Damascus every year; in both of these a palanquin, the mah-
mal, represented their authority, as had previously been the custom during
56 Gamal H. El-Nahal, The Judicial Administration of Ottoman Egypt in the Seventeenth Century
(Minneapolis and Chicago, 1979); Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times
of Isma‘il Abu Taqiiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Cairo, 1998).
57 Abdulkarim Rafeq, ‘The Syrian ‘ulamâ, Ottoman Law and Islamic Shari‘a,’ Turcica 26 (1994),
9–32.
58 Naim ur-Rahman Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations (A Study of Political and Diplomatic
Relations between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, 1556–1748) (Delhi, 1989), p. 191.
349
the Mamluk sultanate. The Ottoman rulers also had the prerogative of annu-
ally supplying the kisve, a black covering for the Kaaba.59 For the entire jour-
ney, the sultans had to ensure the safety and security of the pilgrims. After
some prudent hesitation at the beginning of the Ottoman–Mamluk conl ict,
shortly after the end of the ighting in July 1517, the Şerif of Mecca, Barakat
II b. Muhammad b. Barakat, recognised Selim I as his suzerain. For this pur-
pose, he sent his son as an ambassador to Cairo, where by then the victorious
sultan was busy establishing an Ottoman framework for the new province of
Egypt.60
Selim thus returned from his decisive campaign as hadim al-haramayn. In
the Nushatü ’l-selatin, the historian and litterateur Mustafa Ali praised his
achievement in the following terms: “Thus his zeal was the cause that he
raised the honour of the Empire higher than under his great ancestors, and
adding the noble title of Servant of the two Sacred Cities to his illustrious
khutba he surpassed all the other sultans in rank.”61
We thus need to abandon the tenacious legend that Selim I had acquired
his title of caliph by a renunciation of the last scion of the Abbasid dynasty,
at that time resident in Cairo. In the early 1500s, the title had lost much of its
former prestige; on the other hand, the notion of the caliph as the spiritual
head of all Muslims, internationally accepted in the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca
(1774), is of much later vintage and emerged in a totally diferent historical
context. Even so, however, the de facto supremacy of the Ottoman sultans
among all Muslim monarchs and their control of the ancient metropolises of
the Arab empires in the long run did encourage people to regard these rulers
as the successors to the caliphs of the early period of Islam.62
Given this situation, the protection of the two holiest Muslim sanctuaries
became a major component of Ottoman “imperial ideology” and the self-
image of Ottoman sovereigns. The preamble to a command issued by Selim
II to his governor of Egypt dated 17 January 1568 forms but one textual exam-
ple among many. In addressing a subordinate and reminding him of the many
59 Bernard Lewis, ‘Khâdim al-ḥaramayn’, Encyclopédie de l’islam, 2nd ed., (Leiden, 1978), vol. 4,
pp. 932–3; Jacques Jomier, Le Mahmal et la caravane égyptienne de La Mecque, XIIIe–XXe siècles
(Paris, 1953).
60 Ibn Iyas, Journal d’un bourgeois du Caire: chronique d’Ibn Iyâs, trans. Gaston Wiet, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1955 and 1960), vol. 2, pp. 184–8.
61 Andreas Tietze, Mustafâ ‘Âlî’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1979 and 1982), vol. 1,
p. 51.
62 Faruk Sümer, ‘Yavuz Selim s’est-il proclamé calife?’ Turcica 31–3, (1991), 343–54; Gilles Veinstein,
‘La question du califat ottoman’, in Le choc colonial et l’islam: Les politiques religieuses des puis-
sances coloniales en terres d’islam, ed. Pierre Jean Luizard (Paris, 2006), pp. 451–68.
350
achievements of the dynasty, the monarch declared that “sultans of reputa-

tion and monarchs of high rank glorify and elevate themselves by [exercising
the oice] of servitor of the two Holy Sanctuaries”.63
When the Mamluk sultans ruled in Cairo, their Ottoman rivals had not
been able to undertake any construction work in the holy cities.64 But after
1517 they were free to engage in architectural projects and urban reconstruc-
tion: in the sixteenth century, their principal undertaking was the restoration
of the Great Mosque in Mecca.65
At the same time, the mahmal (in Ottoman, mahmil and mehmel) inherited
from the Mamluks every year departed from Damascus and Cairo with the
pilgrimage caravans. Admittedly, no Ottoman sultan ever visited Mecca. Cem
Sultan (1459–95), son of Mehmed II and brother of Bayezid II, was the only
male representative of the dynasty ever to do so; but whatever his ambitions,
he never ascended the Ottoman throne. Shortly after the end of our period,
the young Sultan Osman II (r. 1618–22) declared his intention to perform the
pilgrimage, but many people suspected him of ulterior motives, so that the
project merely exacerbated the hostility of his adversaries and contributed to
his downfall. 66 Under these circumstances, it was the function of the mahmil
to symbolise the presence of the Ottoman monarch.
As for the mahmil covers, in the course of the Ottoman period they changed
colour several times: while at irst they were yellow, at a later stage they turned
crimson and yet later green. The new protectors of the Holy Sanctuaries, at
the acme of their fortunes, ordered more elaborate versions, and the same
thing applied to the gilded balls aixed to the ends of the palanquin. European
visitors who watched the outgoing mahmils paraded in processions indicate
yet another change.67 While originally the mahmil had been a purely political
symbol, in time it became the subject of a particularly fervent popular devo-
tion, and the same thing applied to the kisve and the cordage which was to
hold the latter in place; after all, these items were to stay in contact with the
Kaaba for a full year. Already in the mid-1500s, people attributed supernatural
63 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Mühimme Defteri, VII, doc. no. 721, in 7 Numaralı
Mühimme Defteri (975–976/1567–69), 3 vols. (Ankara, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 351–2.
64 Shai Har-El, Strugle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War, 1485–1491
(Leiden, 1995), p. 104.
65 Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517 –1683 (London and
New York, 1994), pp. 92–126.
66 Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein, Le sérail ébranlé: Essai sur les morts, dépositions et avène-
ments des sultans ottomans (XIVe–XIXe siècles) (Paris, 2003), pp. 224–5.
67 Jomier, Le Mahmal, pp. 12–13.
351
powers to these items.68 To justify this devotion ex post facto, many observers
believed that the palanquin, while in reality empty, contained a particularly
valuable copy of the Qur’an.
The sultan in the eyes of Mecca pilgrims: Guaranteeing

the completion of the pilgrimage
After Sultan Süleyman had conquered Yemen, a third caravan under Ottoman
auspices appeared in Mecca, including a third mahmil proceeding in the name
of the sultan. However, this mahmil existed for less than a century, between
1543 and 1630, because Ottoman control of this remote province was noth-
ing if not precarious. By contrast, Sultan Süleyman’s conquest of Baghdad in
1534 did not result in the revival of an Ottoman-sponsored “Iraqi” palanquin,
which had, however, existed under the Ilkhans of Iran after Islamisation, and
also the Jalayirid and Akkoyunlu dynasties. But a sultanic command to the
governor of Basra dated March 1565 records that after the Ottoman conquest
of 1546 local authorities constituted a direct caravan to Mecca, which was
to proceed separately from its Damascus and Cairo counterparts. After all,
the distance between Basra and Mecca was only 20 days of travel. However,
as the new caravan had not received due authorisation from the sultan, the
Şerifs of Mecca used this circumstance as a pretext for demanding money
from the pilgrims. Thereupon the inhabitants of Basra turned to the sultan,
asking for the conirmation of a fourth pilgrimage caravan. However, the
sultan refused, stating: “It is not my will that after the conquest [of Basra], a
mahmil depart for the glorious Kaaba nor should a caravan leave [this city] for
the pilgrimage.”
How should we explain the sultan’s refusal? Perhaps he did not want the
additional responsibility of sending another palanquin, symbolising imperial
power and protection of the pilgrims, on a desert route which, just like all
other roads of access to Mecca, was exposed to Bedouin attack. It is also possi-
ble that once again fear of the iniltration of Iranian spies was at issue; at least
the administration posed the problem in these terms a few years later.69
In the course of the sixteenth century, the relative importance of the Cairo
and Damascus caravans changed. In the Mamluk period as well, the Cairo
68 Pierre Belon du Mans, Voyage au Levant (1553): Les observations de Pierre Belon du Mans, ed.
Alexandra Merle (Paris, 2001), p. 397; Voyages en Egypte des années 1611 et 1612; Voyages en
Egypte de Johann Wild, ed. and trans. Oleg V. Volkof (Cairo, 1973), p. 124.
69 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Mühimme Defteri, VI, doc. no. 761 and MD 14, doc.
no. 542 (978/1570–1). Mühimme VI has been published. See 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri
972/1564–65, 3 vols. (Ankara, 1995), vol. 1, p. 417.
352
and Damascus caravans had belonged to the domains of the same ruler. But
as the Cairo caravan came from the capital, it enjoyed certain prerogatives,
including the precedence of its mahmal when in Mecca, a privilege which
members of the relevant caravan jealously defended against their Damascene
rivals. In the Ottoman period, the Cairo caravan certainly continued to trans-
port the kisve, which Coptic weavers manufactured in the citadel of this city.
But even so, the metropolis of the Nile now was only a provincial capital and
the Damascene caravan enjoyed higher prestige, for the alms (sürre) sent by
the sultans travelled by way of Damascus and the same thing applied to pil-
grims from Istanbul and the empire’s central provinces.70
If according to the period involved the Ottoman sovereigns thus patronised
two or three oicial caravans, which they had inherited from preceding
regimes, we must keep in mind that the subjects of other rulers also partic-
ipated in the pilgrimage. Relatively frequent were the Moroccans, in addi-
tion to Iranians, Indians, Central Asians and inhabitants of the Caucasus.
Moreover, among these pilgrims there were Shi‘ites as well as Sunnis. But
once they had joined one of the great caravans, these non-Ottoman Muslims
took their places behind the mahmil and thus accepted the authority and pro-
tection of the sultan. Thus, in a limited but very tangible sense, the Ottoman
sultans’ power encompassed the entire Islamic world.
Given these circumstances, Selim I, Süleyman and their successors pro-
tected pilgrims on a much broader scale than the Mamluk sultans, who had
always remained a purely Middle Eastern power. As the Ottoman Empire
now extended over three continents, the protection of the pilgrimage also
acquired a global dimension. It is fascinating to note that certain great enter-
prises undertaken or at least conceived in the euphoric early years of Selim II
by the grand vezir Sokollu Mehmed Paşa (about 1505–79) and his associates,
according to oicial discourse wholly or at least in part should have protected
pilgrimage traic as well as the two holy cities. Thus the sultan questioned
the governor of Egypt about the feasibility of a Suez Canal project. The open-
ing of this route would have allowed the Ottoman navy to do battle in the
Red Sea, thus protecting Mecca from the Zaydis of Yemen and, moreover,
ight the Portuguese, who constantly caused trouble for Indian pilgrims and
the ships on which they travelled.71 Another such canal, planned and perhaps
even begun, was to link the Don and the Volga; in this manner, the sultan
70 Abdul Karem Rafeq, ‘New Light on the Transportation of the Damascene Pilgrimage dur-
ing the Ottoman Period’, in Islamic and Middle Eastern Societies: A Festschrift in Honor of Prof.
Wadie Jwaideh, ed. Robert Olson (Brattleboro, Vt., 1987), pp. 127–35.
71 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Mühimme Defteri, VII, no. 721.
353
planned to retake Astrakhan, recently conquered by the Russians. In this case,

too, Ottoman oicials in the name of their sultan presented the city as an
essential stopping point for pilgrims who wished to travel to Mecca without
passing through “heretic” Iran.72 Furthermore, at least when addressing the
Spanish Moriscos, the Ottoman authorities justiied the conquest of Cyprus
by the need to prevent the Venetian authorities on the island from providing
aid and comfort to the pirates who had been making life diicult for pilgrims
in the eastern Mediterranean.73
In place of a conclusion
In the present chapter, we have focused on the learned hierarchy, not only the
co-optation of the ulema into the Ottoman project but also their increased
dependence on the will of the ruler and his third- or second-in-command,
the chief jurisconsult. In this context, the institution of a ixed cursus honorum
and the need for scholars of high ambition to study in Istanbul facilitated
government control over its learned men. At least in part, this control served
the cause of religion: turning their backs on the latitudinarian practices of an
earlier age, sixteenth-century sultans made the defence and enforcement of
Sunni “right belief ” into a major political goal. Yet this policy did not mean
that the government permitted no alternative to the religion of its scholars
and legists; as a result, we have needed to examine the close but often also
tension-ridden relationships between the representatives of Islamic mysti-
cism and the Ottoman elite.
Moreover, we have discussed the manner in which the conquest of the
Arab provinces changed the status of the Ottoman sultans, not only in terms
of power politics but also in a global religious context. Previously these mon-
archs had been successful ighters on the margins of the Islamic world, but the
conquests of Selim I catapulted them into a central and even paramount posi-
tion, where they could command a vastly enhanced prestige but also needed
to take on heavy responsibilities. Selim I, Süleyman and their successors made
72 Halil İnalcık, ‘Osmanlı-Rus Rekabetinin Menşei ve Don-Volga Kanalı Teşebbüsü (1569)’,

Belleten 12, 46 (1948), 349–402; Akdes Nimet Kurat, Türkler ve İdil Boyu (1569 Astarhan Seferi,
Ten-İdil Kanalı ve XVI.-XVII. Yüzyıl Osmanlı-Rus Münasebetleri) (Ankara, 1966); Gilles
Veinstein, ‘Une lettre de Selim II au roi de Pologne Sigismond-Auguste sur la campagne
d’Astrakhan de 1569’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 82 (1992), 397–420.
73 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Autour de la lettre de Selîm II aux Andalous et des origines de la guerre
de Chypre’, in Espana y el Oriente islamico entre los siglos XV y XVI (Imperio Otomano, Persia
y Asia central): Actas del congreso Universita degli Studi di Napoli « l’Orientale » ; Naples 30 de
septiembre –2 de octubre de 2004, ed. Encarnación Sanchez García (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 271–81.
354
it into a major factor of their imperial legitimacy that they ensured the safety
of the pilgrimage caravans, supplied the holy cities with alms in food and
money and beautiied the mosques of Mecca and Medina. As the subjects of
foreign Muslim rulers also undertook the pilgrimage, joining the caravans
that set out from Cairo and especially Damascus, every year the Ottoman
sultans in a limited but signiicant manner airmed their position as the par-
amount rulers of the Islamic world. In the protection and promotion of the
pilgrimage to Mecca, religious and political concerns came together.
355
11
Ottoman population
Sur aiya N. Fa ro qh i
In the century and a half covered by this volume, Ottoman governmental

structure changed enormously, and so did the society subjected to the rule
of the sultans and their oice-holders. At the beginning of our period, the
empire governed by the sultans extended over the Balkans to include cen-
tral Anatolia, while the eastern section of the peninsula for the most part
was still under the rule of princes recognising as their overlords not the
Ottomans but the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Greater Syria. The latter
term refers to the region stretching roughly from the present-day Turkish
border to that of Egypt; it encompasses today’s Syria, Lebanon, Israel and
Palestine. Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81) made the Tatar hanate of the
Crimea into a dependent principality and the Black Sea into an Ottoman
lake. He also began the long, drawn-out project, completed only in 1669
with the conquest of Crete or even in 1715 with the re-conquest of the
Peloponnese after a short Venetian occupation, of driving Venice out of the
eastern Mediterranean. But for the time being the Venetians and to a lesser
extent the Genoese were still very present in the region. While there sur-
vive very few oicial counts recording the empire’s taxpayers of that early
period, we can assume that Mehmed II ruled over a population that was
Christian to a very large extent.
But by 1603, when our period ended, the Ottoman polity had turned from
a regional empire into a world one, and the religious composition of the pop-
ulation had dramatically changed as well. The crucial step was the conquest
of the Mamluk sultanate in 1516–17, followed by the annexation of the Hijaz,
which made the Ottoman sultans the acknowledged protectors of the pil-
grimage to Mecca. There followed the – albeit temporary – acquisition of
Yemen and the more durable conquest of Iraq. By the 1530s, the sea captains
of Sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–66) challenged the Portuguese in the Indian
Ocean, and while they did not succeed in driving their opponents out of Goa
or Hormuz, they did ensure Ottoman control over the Red Sea and thereby
356
Ottoman population
the security of Mecca and Medina. In addition, the sultans had established
their rule on the coast of North Africa all the way to the borders of the sultan-
ate of Morocco, and on the Red Sea littoral as well, founding the coastal prov-
ince of Habeş (Abyssinia). 1 As a result, the sultans now governed the central
Islamic lands once controlled by the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, and their
subjects were largely Muslims, of whom a considerable number spoke Arabic
as their mother tongue. Certainly many of the newly conquered regions
were thinly settled by peasants farming the dry steppe or even oases in the
desert, or else inhabited by camel-raising Bedouins. Yet the total population
of the empire greatly increased as a result of the conquests of sultans Selim
I and Süleyman.
Against this backdrop, our discussion of the Ottoman population will form
a triptych. We begin by introducing the most important sources and the histo-
riography that in the past 70 years or so has attempted to analyse and evaluate
this material. Our second section will deal with some signiicant character-
istics of this population. In the absence of direct data on births, marriages
and deaths, we will draw what conclusions we may from the often scanty
information that we do possess. Relevant data concern epidemics and the
condition of women and non-Muslims, as well as the frequent conversions
to Islam observed among the latter. In the long run, conversion signiicantly
changed the religious makeup of the Ottoman population. We will also take
note of the urbanisation that often accompanied the consolidation of the sul-
tans’ rule. As for the third part, it concerns migration, much of it involun-
tary: l ights from the countryside, slaves carried away from their homes and
forced removals of populations by administrative iat. We will also discuss
more or less voluntary migration. Young men left their homes in search of
work, including military service in the sultans’ armies. Entire families might
move in search of security and more or less congenial political regimes; such
migrations happened especially but not exclusively in border regions. Last
but not least, there were the nomads and semi-nomads, the most mobile of
all populations. The sultan’s government often encouraged these people to
establish agricultural villages, even if by 1603 the irst attempts to forcibly set-
tle them were still 80 years or so in the future.2
1 Salih Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion towards the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century (Istanbul,
2009), pp. 59–76; Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunun Güney Siyaseti, Habeş Eyaleti
(Istanbul, 1974).
2 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Aşiretleri İskân Teşebbüsü (1691–1696) (Istanbul,
1963).
357
Using tahrirs as sources for the history of Ottoman

populations: Overall parameters
Historical demographers focus on births, deaths and migrations as the causes
that determine the size and age composition of any given population. As in
the Ottoman realm of the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries neither the admin-
istration nor religious communities recorded births or deaths, these central
aspects of population change escape us. Even gravestones, which have become
important as sources for the cultural and occasionally even demographic his-
tory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are rare for our period and
thus of limited use. Our discussion will therefore be based only in small part
on quantitative evidence; in quite a few cases we will proceed in a manner
familiar to medievalists and use limited or even anecdotal evidence to illus-
trate trends that remain impossible to quantify. In addition, while historical
demographers usually deal with religion only in a marginal sense – namely
insofar as religious practices afect births, migrations and deaths – we will
include religious changes in our consideration of population characteristics.
As religion was so central to the manner in which Ottoman oicials classiied
the populations they recorded, we cannot make sense of our sources without
taking this factor into account.
Most of our information about Ottoman populations comes from the
enormous series of registers compiled by Ottoman oicials that cover the
towns and villages of at least the central provinces of the sultans’ empire;
scholars call them tahrir or tapu tahrir. These documents provide listings of
the tax-paying population and therefore a static picture; for most information
on movement, we need to turn to other sources.
After all, it was not the job of the oicials in charge of compiling tahrirs
to collect demographic information. Rather they were to keep track of par-
ticular types of taxes, namely those assigned as revenue sources to grantees
serving as cavalry soldiers (timar, zeamet), timar-holders being known as sipahi
and assignees with zeamets as zaim.3 Provincial governors and their retainers
also received their pay in this fashion, although the sums of money at issue
were much larger. A sizeable share furthermore fell to the sultans and other
members of the Ottoman dynasty; these large blocks of revenue were known
as hass. Tahrir registers thus were of interest to the state elite because they
recorded revenues and only in a secondary fashion the taxpayers that had
3 Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and
Colin Imber (London, 1973), pp. 104–18.
358
Ottoman population
produced them. In addition, these volumes contained records of revenues

and lands in mortmain (vakıf ); taxpayers who resided in these territories paid
at least part of their dues to the trustees of the pious foundations in question.
Vakıf revenues apart, taxes did not appear in these records unless assigned
as timar, zeamet or hass. Thus the head tax payable by non-Muslims (cizye),
which did not fall into this category, did not appear in the tahrirs but always
in special registers.
One variety of Ottoman tahrirs – the basic format – was called “detailed”
(mufassal); these registers contained the names of individual taxpayers and the
taxes these men were required to pay. As a result of their great bulk, mufassal
registers were not easy to handle; in particular, it was diicult to compute the
total revenue of a province available for assignment as timar, zeamet and hass,
or else not disposable because it was in mortmain. By contrast, the “abridged”
(icmal) registers only listed those settlements available for assignment, along
with the revenues expected and the numbers – but not the names – of working
and producing taxpayers. With the aid of these registers, it was much easier to
make the computations preliminary to determining the extent of individual
timar, zeamet and hass. However, given frequent mistakes in copying, counting
and computing, icmals are always less reliable than mufassals.
Oicials were to prepare registers at regular intervals, but in real life irreg-
ularity was the norm. Certainly we ind a few sets of such records document-
ing large areas and almost simultaneous; for instance, in the early 1580s, the
oicials of Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–95) covered many Anatolian provinces in
rapid succession. Yet if we look at any particular place, we soon ind that reg-
isters appeared at highly variable intervals. Accidents of preservation surely
count for something. But many irregularities were due to the administration’s
lack of money or else accidents on the road that the oicials in charge of the
count must often have sufered. Last but not least, the unwillingness of cer-
tain taxpayers to provide information must have delayed the completion of
many registers.
In the tahrirs, settlements formed districts (kaza, nahiye) and districts sub-
provinces (sancak or liva, meaning “lag”). In their turn, several sancaks made
up a province (beylerbeylik, meaning “[territory] in charge of a lord of lords”
or high-level governor). Thus the tax registers also provide a comprehensive
overview of the administrative structure of the empire, or at least of its cen-
tral territories. However, dependent principalities, whose rulers owed alle-
giance to the sultan but where no direct Ottoman administration existed, did
not enter into the registers. Thus we have no tahrirs concerning Walachia,
Moldavia, the domain of the Crimean Tatars or the Hijaz, to name but a few
359
examples. Certain sections of today’s Greece also seem to have escaped the
attention of the recorders.
These tax registers, the oldest samples of which date to the 1430s but which
become more abundant only by the late ifteenth century, are the basic source
for the population historian concerned with the eastern Mediterranean.4
However, we do need to ask ourselves to what extent these registers are
indeed reliable guides to Ottoman populations. Certainly they are not as use-
ful as they had once seemed. Closer inspection has shown for instance that
some oicials in charge of compiling tahrirs were given to copying from their
predecessors. Occasionally they openly acknowledged this fact, explaining for
instance that the inhabitants of such and such a village had not shown up for
the count. From the registers compiled in the bureaus of local kadıs (sicil)
it has also emerged that – to mention one very striking example – certain
Palestinian peasants openly mocked the scribes sent to prepare the tahrirs
and may well have given them fanciful answers.5 While the insults that the
villagers addressed to the sultans’ oicials active in this region do not to my
knowledge have any counterparts in kadı registers covering other Ottoman
provinces, surely similar confrontations occurred elsewhere as well.
In other cases, moreover, oicials did not acknowledge their copying, so
that only a comparison of older and more recent tahrirs will show to what
extent independent counting had really taken place. Heath Lowry’s warning
that we must never use tahrirs singly but always in series is therefore most
appropriate.6 However, we occasionally have to deal with regions on which
we possess no more than a single tahrir. In some cases, we may contextual-
ise the relevant data by confronting them with information derived from the
local kadı registers. While this procedure is often fruitful, such registers for
the most part survive only for the period after 1570 and thus do not help us
when dealing with older tax records.7
Ottoman populations as relected – or not – in the tahrirs

As we have seen, Ottoman registers contain the names of individual taxpay-
ers because these men were the ultimate revenue sources, without whose
4 Halil İnalcık (ed.), Hicrî 835 Tarihli Sûret-i Defter-i Sancak-i Arvanid (Ankara, 1954).
5 Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Oicials: Rural Administration around Sixteenth-
Century Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 91 and 127.
6 Heath Lowry, ‘The Ottoman Tahrir Defterleri as a Source for Social and Economic History:
Pitfalls and Limitations’, in Heath Lowry, Studies in Defterology: Ottoman Society in the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Istanbul, 1992), pp. 3–18.
7 Amy Singer, ‘Tapu Tahrir Defterleri and Kadı Sicilleri: A Happy Marriage of Sources’, Târîh 1
(1990), 95–125.
360
Ottoman population
labour no ields, pastures or mines could be productive. Therefore the tah-

rir s, especially those of the mufassal type, in spite of all their drawbacks,
are so precious to the historian of population. These lists included personal
names, patronyms and the names of the villages/town quarters where the
taxable populations resided. Oicials also categorised rural taxpayers by the
amount of land that they were supposed to be cultivating: a full or half farm-
stead (çift, nim çift) or a piece of land that was even smaller than a half-çift
(bennak). Peasants in these three categories counted as married men; fur-
thermore, in all settlements there lived a number of bachelors, normally
called mücerred. In some regions, we also encounter so-called caba or kara.
Oicialdom employed this term for bachelors who, while not possessing any
land, made their living independently from the men in whose households
they probably resided. Caba or kara may have worked on other people’s
farms or else as herdsmen.8
Beginning in the late 1930s and at an accelerating tempo in the course of
the 1940s and 1950s, Ömer Lüti Barkan – and somewhat later Halil Inalcik –
published a series of studies that introduced the Ottoman tax registers to the
scholarly world. Due to his ongoing dialogue with Fernand Braudel, popu-
lation questions were especially important for Barkan.9 Since that time, an
enormous bibliography has accumulated, which due to its bulk we cannot
begin to review here.10 But at present many scholars seem to feel that, for the
time being at any rate, we have worked the potential of the tahrirs to excess.
As a result, a large share of the literature discussed here is at least 25 years
old. The current lack of interest is particularly meaningful, as the pace of
8 Halil İnalcık, ‘Osmanlılarda Raiyyet Rusûmu’, Belleten 23 (1959), 575–610.

9 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd ed., 2
vols. (Paris, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 362–4.
10 Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘XV. ve XVI. Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Toprak İşçliğinin
Organizasyonu Şekilleri’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 1, 1 (1939–40), 29–74;
1, 2 (1939–40), 198–245; 1, 4 (1939–40), 397–447; Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Türkiye’de İmparatorluk
Devirlerinin Büyük Nüfus ve Arazi Tahrirleri ve Hakana Mahsus İstatistik Defterleri’,
İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 1, 1 (1940–41), 20–59; 2, 2 (1940–41), 214–47;
Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda bir İskân ve Kolonizasyon Metodu Olarak
Vakılar ve Temlikler’, Vakıl ar Dergisi 2 (1942), 279–386; Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘XVI. Asrın
Başında Rumeli’de Nüfusun Yayılış Tarzını Gösterir Harita’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat
Fakültesi Mecmuası 11 (1949–50), glued into volume, no pagination; Ömer Lüti Barkan,
‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Bir İskân ve Kolonizasyon Metodu Olarak Sürgünler’, İstanbul
Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11, 1–4 (1949–50), 524–69; 13, 1–4 (1951–2), 56–78; 15, 1–4
(1953–4), 209–37; Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Tarihi Demograi Araştırmaları ve Osmanlı Tarihi’,
Türkiyat Mecmuası 10 (1951), 1–26; Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Essai sur les données statistiques
des registres de recensement dans l’Empire ottoman aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958), 9–36; İnalcık, Hicrî 835 Tarihli Sûret-i Defter ;
İnalcık, ‘Osmanlılarda Raiyyet Rusûmu’.
361
Ottoman history-writing has noticeably quickened in the last quarter century,

and important new studies now appear almost every few weeks.11
Disillusionment with the tahrirs has resulted from the experiences of
numerous scholars who have prepared the monographs on individual regions
and their populations, of which we now possess quite a few examples.12 These
historians soon came to understand that the tahrirs were by no means the
“census data” of the ifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. On
the contrary, as we have seen, these documents recorded only tax-paying
adult males and nobody else, the exception being those widows who at least
in many parts of the Balkans/Rumeli cultivated their deceased husbands’
lands, mostly on a temporary basis until their sons were old enough to
take over. Non-taxpayers often went unrecorded: garrison soldiers, servants
of the kadıs’ court, the blind and lame, in addition to prayer leaders, were
tax-exempt, and so were certain privileged dervishes and, depending on the
locality, other personages as well. All these men might or might not show
up in the registers. Boys usually entered the counts upon reaching puberty,
but the actual age was variable. Furthermore, some early registers did record
a few boys (sabi), but certainly not the entire underage male population. It
often remains unclear why certain juveniles and not others appeared in the
tax records, although in some cases the oicials seem to have included those
appearing close to adulthood.13 All these problems have prompted a recent
researcher to conclude that “there seem to be no easy solutions to the prob-
lems of Ottoman demographic history”.14
In addition, all estimates of population totals are hypothetical because we
do not know the size of the average household. Signiicant infant mortality
probably meant that the number of children actually present in any given
household was much smaller than the total ofspring born to the parent cou-
ple. In the Hungarian province of Simontornya in 1565, family size seems to
have oscillated between a minimum of 3.7 and a maximum of 4.6, but families
11 As an exception, compare Mübahat Kütükoğlu, XV ve XVI. Asırlarda İzmir Kazasının Sosyal

ve İktisâdî Yapısı (Izmir, 2000). As an example for the editions sponsored by the Ottoman
archives, compare İsmet Binark et al. (eds.), 166 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Anadolu Defteri
(937/1530) (Ankara, 1995).
12 Nejat Göyünç, XVI. Yüzyılda Mardin Sancağ ı (Istanbul, 1969); Feridun Emecen, XVI. Asırda
Manisa Kazası (Ankara, 1989).
13 Géza Dávid, ‘The Age of Unmarried Children in the tahrir defters (Notes on the Coeicient)’,
in Géza Dávid, Studies in Demographic and Administrative History of Ottoman Hungary
(Istanbul, 1997), pp. 25–36; Géza Dávid, Osmanlı Macaristanı’nda Toplum, Ekonomi ve Yönetim:
16. Yüzyılda Simontornya Sancağ ı, trans. Hilmi Ortaç (Istanbul, 1999), p. 64.
14 Oktay Özel, ‘Population Changes in Anatolia during the 16th and 17th Centuries’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004), 183–205 at p. 196.
362
Ottoman population
varied greatly over time and place.15 In the rural area of Simontornya, most
households probably consisted of parents and children, with an occasional
further relative thrown in. On the other hand, in cities close to the centre of
government, particularly Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne, many families owned
slaves, who did not appear in the tax registers. Yet slave-women might bear
the children of their owners, who were born as free descendants of their
fathers, thus increasing family size.16 Secondly, only a close study of several
registers covering the same region will allow us to determine which igures
are based on actual counts and which ones are merely carryovers from previ-
ous registers, an eventuality that we already have had occasion to note.
When estimating regional population size, it is best to make use of the age
data collected for many populations the world over ever since the 1700s and
visually organised in “age pyramids”.17 Adult males, in other words men 15
years and over, in all known cases roughly comprise between one-third and
one-quarter of the total inhabitants of a given province or country. If we
assume that the overwhelming majority of entries in the tax registers concern
adult males, we can thus estimate total population by multiplying by three to
get the minimum and by four to obtain the maximum possible size. However,
this method yields approximations and only works for good-sized regions.
In the case of towns and cities, agglomerations of unmarried men, such as
casual labourers, soldiers or monks, may be so large as to make this method
unreliable. Moreover, sometimes a higher quotient seems more appropriate.
Géza Dávid has suggested that we use a multiplier of ive to arrive at the pop-
ulation of Simontornya.18
Cizye and avâriz registers

Non-Muslim subjects of the sultans had to accept a number of restrictions
that marked them as inferior to the Muslims; furthermore, in return for an
assurance of life, property and the exercise of their religion, they paid the head
tax (cizye) demanded by the sultan in accordance with Islamic law. Early cizye
registers date to 894/1488–9 and the immediately following years; at this time
the Ottoman Balkans, including the island of Midilli/Mytilini, were home to
15 Dávid, Osmanlı Macaristanı’nda Toplum, p. 67.

16 Halil Sahillioğlu, ‘Slaves in the Social and Economic Life of Bursa in the Late 15th and Early
16th Centuries’, Turcica 17 (1985), 43–112.
17 Leila Erder, ‘The Measurement of Pre-industrial Population Changes: The Ottoman Empire
from the 15th to the 17th Century’, Middle East Studies 11 (1975), 322–45.
18 Dávid, Osmanlı Macaristanı’nda Toplum, p. 68.
363
between 500,000 and 600,000 cizye-paying families plus 40,000 to 50,000 wid-
ows. These igures constitute a minimum, as once again certain people were
exempt; some scholars assume that on general principles it makes sense to
add 20 per cent to Ottoman cizye data.19 If so, we can assume that Christians
and Jews in the Ottoman Balkans of the late ifteenth century numbered two
to three million; of course this igure must be taken “with a grain of salt”. For
Anatolia, cizye-paying households were slightly under ten thousand.
Moreover, Hungarian scholars have studied cizye records from the 1500s, which
sometimes list only the number of persons subject to payment but on occasion
include the names and patronyms of the individual taxpayers as well.20 However,
provincial oicials in charge of these counts sometimes have done their work
in such a sloppy fashion that even specialists have had trouble identifying these
documents as records concerned with the collection of cizye as opposed to other
taxes. At least with respect to Hungary, the contribution of head tax registers to
demographic history has been much weaker than that of the tahrirs.
While more widespread in seventeenth-century iscal practice than earlier
on, the collection of the tax called avâriz began in the 1500s, and relevant
records go back to this period. Originally an extraordinary tax that in time
became ordinary, the avâriz was payable by groups of taxpayers known as
avâriz-houses. If located within a single province or sub-province, all these
“houses” paid the same amount of tax. In the case of widespread poverty,
a large number of people, administratively speaking, came together in one
“house”; if the locality was better of, a smaller number of taxpayers made up
a unit with the same tax liability. For calculating population, these registers
are helpful only if the scribes compiling them have entered the names of the
taxpayers comprising the individual “tax houses”. Or at least the oicials must
have recorded the number of taxpayers that on average made up the “avâriz-
houses” in the region they had covered. Sometimes this information is in
fact available, but in other cases it is not. While avâriz records thus are not
especially helpful to the historian of population, sometimes no other source
material is available and scholars have done their best to “mine” them. Thus
Süleyman Demirci’s novel and extremely thorough study cautiously says that
in conjunction with other sources these registers are indicative “to a certain
19 Machiel Kiel and Friedrich Sauerwein, Ost-Lokris in türkischer und neugriechischer Zeit (1460–
1981) (Passau, 1994), p. 47.
20 Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘894 (1488/1489) yılı Cizyesinin Tahsilâtına âit Muhasebe Bilânçoları’,
Belgeler 1–2 (1964), 1–234 at pp. 12 and 108; Géza Dávid, ‘Timar Defter oder Dschizye
Defter? Bemerkungen zu einer Quellenausgabe f ür den Sandschak Stuhlweißenburg
(Rezensionsartikel)’, in Dávid, Demographic and Administrative History of Ottoman Hungary,
pp. 181–6.
364
Ottoman population
degree, of demographic trends”.21 The author does not seem to have found
much information on the number of taxpayers/avârizhane in central Anatolia
and thus has had to derive demographic indicators from “extraneous” data,
such as petitions by taxpayers pleading poverty, to reduce the number of
avâriz-houses in a given area.
A cause of many premature deaths

While we have no way of detailing just how many people prematurely lost their
lives due to epidemics, both current and soon-to-be-conquered Ottoman territo-
ries must have sufered from the great plague epidemics of the 1300s and 1400s.22
These events were as cataclysmic in Egypt and Syria as they were in Byzantium
and medieval western and central Europe. Given the scanty documentation on
the Balkans and Anatolia during this period, we cannot say anything about the
extent to which the “core lands” of the ledgling Ottoman Empire sufered as
well, but they cannot have escaped this scourge altogether.23
Apparently the attack of Timur’s army (1402) against Bayezid Yıldırım’s
recently formed empire became even more disastrous to the Anatolian popula-
tion because, as so often happened, the movement of armies spread the plague.
During the years immediately following the conquest of Constantinople (1453),
there was a major epidemic in Thrace and also in the new capital city, which
Mehmed II avoided by taking his army northward (1467). Further outbreaks
in the second half of the ifteenth century have been catalogued by Greek-
language sources; only one of the early Ottoman chroniclers mentioned
what he called the “taun-i ekber (great bubonic plague)”.24 However some-
times ther term taun also referred to non-plague epidemics. In the sixteenth
century as well, there were numerous outbreaks, some of them extremely
serious. On the plague of 1561, there survives the eye-witness testimony of
the Habsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. Apparently, when the
epidemic was at its height, some one thousand to twelve hundred people died
every day.25 After some discussion with the current grand vezirs and indirectly
21 Süleyman Demirci, The Functioning of Ottoman Avâriz Taxation : An Aspect of the Relationship
between Centre and Periphery. A Case Study of the Province of Karaman, 1621–1700 (Istanbul,
2009), p. 185. On the impact of the little Ice Age: Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the
Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2011).
22 Michael Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J., 1979).
23 Heath Lowry, ‘Pushing the Stone Uphill: The Impact of Bubonic Plague on Ottoman Urban
Society in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Heath Lowry, Defterology Revisited:
Studies on 15th and 16th Century Ottoman Society (Istanbul, 2008), pp. 17–50.
24 Lowry, ‘Pushing the Stone Uphill’, p. 28.
25 Ibid., p. 46.
365
Sultan Süleyman as well, the imperial ambassador inally received permission

to wait out events on one of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, at
that time almost uninhabited; later European ambassadors were to follow his
example by withdrawing to their summer houses.26
At the limits of the knowable: Ottoman women

Just like the records of many other cultures before the twentieth century,
Ottoman sources do not contain much information on women. Even gene-
alogies normally only include male ancestors; although Islamic religious law
allows people to inherit property from their mothers, for oicial purposes a
person’s only progenitor was his or her father.
As the overwhelming majority of women were not taxpayers, few tax records
mention them. Beyond females appearing in the kadıs’ registers as individu-
als because they left inheritances, divorced, manumitted a slave or else were
involved in criminal cases, archival sources mention women wealthy enough
to establish pious foundations (vakıf ). In Istanbul, females leaving charitable
bequests seemingly were more numerous than elsewhere. Perhaps the accu-
mulation of wealth and especially cash in the Ottoman capital made it easier
here than in the provinces for some fortunate women to secure a share of the
available material resources. Women could obtain wealth through inheritance
from their natal families; if widowed or divorced, the “deferred dowry” (mihr-i
müeccel) might be a further source of capital. In a limited number of cases,
women also were active in the market, especially as money-lenders.
We possess a register of Istanbul pious foundations, dated to the year
1009/1600; the overwhelming majority of people who had established these
charities evidenced no connections to the ruling dynasty. Thanks to this
bulky volume and its editor, Mehmet Canatar, we know at least the names
and patronyms of certain better-of women who lived in the Ottoman cap-
ital between 1453 and the end of our period.27 The list compiled by Canatar
contains approximately 1,381 names; because of frequent homonyms, it is
impossible to be more precise. While counting I have tried to eliminate the
second and/or third references to the same person, but this is a chancy busi-
ness. When the same name occurs several times in succession or in very close
26 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Seigneur of
Bousbecque, Knight, Imperial Ambassador, trans. and comments by Charles Thornton Forster
and Francis Henry Blackburne Daniell, 2 vols. (London, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 163, 333–4.
27 Mehmet Canatar (ed.), İstanbul Vakıl arı Tahrîr Defteri, 1009 (1600) Tarîhli (Istanbul, 2004), pp.
XXXIII–XL.
366
Ottoman population
proximity, I have counted only the irst occurrence and eliminated the later
ones. If not in close proximity, I have regarded women bearing the same name
and patronym as separate but homonymous persons. Given these uncertain-
ties, it is impossible to avoid all double-counting. In spite of these drawbacks,
however, this text contains one of the largest accumulations of female names
that we are likely to encounter for the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The document covers one and a half centuries; the list of Istanbul’s pious
foundations, however, is not complete, as those establishments that once had
existed but did not survive until 1600 do not enter our record. Presumably
small and poor foundations were more likely to soon disappear than those
more richly endowed. As women’s foundations typically were more modest
than those of men, the attrition rate of charities instituted by females should
have been greater than that of the vakıf s established by their men-folk. If
these assumptions are true, the number of pious foundations on record in
1600 gives us only a minimum indication of female-sponsored charities, and
the proportion of pious foundations actually established by Istanbul women
during the city’s irst 150 years as the Ottoman capital must have been higher
than the 42 per cent (1,381 out of 3,265 foundations) derived from the surviving
record. Of course it bears repeating that the women mentioned by the regis-
trar were not necessarily contemporaries but could have lived at any time dur-
ing the one and a half centuries covered by our document. As for the names,
they are real; only in a few rare cases do we encounter circumlocutions such
as “the mother of Prince so-and-so” or sobriquets like “the washerwoman”.
As we might expect, Istanbul was home to a large number of women who
appear to have been recent converts to Islam. The only possible way of even
roughly estimating their number involves looking at the women’s patronyms:
as Ottoman scribes avoided direct references to the non-Muslim ancestors
of a Muslim, it was customary to call the father of a convert Abdullah or
“slave of God”. However, as Abdullah is and was also a given name among
Muslims, we cannot assume that every son or daughter of Abdullah was
really a convert. Yet, in the sixteenth century, converts of higher status quite
often substituted names such as “Abdülmennan” or even “Abdurrahman”
and “Abdülkerim” for the “regulation patronym” Abdullah; for example, the
famous architect Sinan, known to have been the son of a Christian, often
favoured the “fancier” appellations.28 As we will not count the “daughters
of Abdülmennan” and related names among the converts, we have probably
28 Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London,
2005), p. 132.
367
more or less compensated for our over-estimation of converts merely known

as “daughters of Abdullah”.
Among the 1,381 female founders, 556 had Abdullah for a patronym, and we
can regard most of them as recent converts; this igure amounts to slightly
over 40 per cent of the total, an impressive value, demonstrating the rapid
Islamisation of the Ottoman capital after 1453. Quite a few of these women
probably had come to Istanbul as slaves, and it would be most interesting to
distinguish these freedwomen from the other converts. The term atike (freed-
woman) occasionally occurs, but it is too rare to be of use for any general
conclusions. Furthermore, although at this time women’s names based on
popular lowers such as çiğdem (crocus), gül (rose), benefşe or menekşe (vio-
let) or yasemin (jasmine) were often given to slaves, and the terms denoting
birds such as the nightingale (bülbül) or turtledove (kumrı) served the same
purpose, identifying freedwomen on the basis of their names alone is a haz-
ardous business.29
In a few cases, we ind the elaborate, “poetic” names of the kind favoured
by the sultan’s harem well into the nineteenth century, such as Ferahnâz,
Âitâb, Cânsûz or Mâh-ı Habîb. When these names occur in combination
with the “bint Abdullah” patronym, we can risk the assumption that the bear-
ers were members or ex-members of elite harems. But similarly elaborate
names might also occur among women born into Islam. Thus there was a
Mihrişâh hatun daughter of İskender Paşa and a Şâh-ı Zâmân daughter of
what was probably a diferent İskender.30 But many Muslims by birth bore
simple names with an Islamic connotation, such as Ayşe, Fatma or Habibe.
Of course we cannot claim that the characteristics of female vakıf-founders
in Istanbul were applicable also to other Ottoman women, but even if we
study the relevant igures as data pure and simple, refraining from extrapo-
lation of any kind, we can arrive at some interesting conclusions. Thus it is
noteworthy that a large number of converts should have decided to estab-
lish a vakıf at all instead of leaving their property to their heirs and donating
some of it, while they were still alive, to their friends and neighbours. Given
the rareness of women who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, estab-
lishing a foundation apparently was a more accessible manner of showing
piety. In addition to religious concerns properly speaking, some women who
founded vakıf s may have considered the social status of the family into which
29 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘From the Slave Market to Arafat: Biographies of Bursa Women in the Late
Fifteenth Century’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 24 (2000), 3–20.
30 Canatar, İstanbul Vakıl arı, pp. xxxix–xl.
368
Ottoman population
they had married and which probably had allowed them to accumulate some
property in the irst place. Leaving visible traces of their own lives on earth
may have been another motivating factor. Viewed from a diferent angle, as
nobody could establish a pious foundation without some property, however
modest, quite a few women who must have arrived in Istanbul as destitute
slaves ultimately came to own a house or a sum of money. We can thus con-
clude that the integration of these women into Istanbul’s Muslim society had
been reasonably successful; of course our sources have nothing to say about
the failures.
Our information on female Orthodox Christians is if anything even scant-
ier than that concerning Muslims, but some evidence is available on Jewish
women. Gravestones form one possible source, but most importantly for our
period, the responses of rabbis to questioners anxious to ind out whether
certain acts were licit or illicit according to Jewish law indicate examples of
demographically relevant behaviour among Istanbul’s Jewish communities.
Customs difered, as many of the Jews living in sixteenth-century Istanbul
had immigrated from a variety of communities in Portugal, Spain and Italy.
But certain common features also existed: most notably, girls were married
of at a very young age and expected to bear children as soon as they were
physically able to do so. As many young girls conceived before they were fully
grown, this practice resulted in numerous deaths in childbed and babies that
were too weak to survive. Minna Rozen has surmised that this behaviour
resulted from a desire to ill, as rapidly as possible, the gaps that had resulted
from the expulsion from Spain and the long trip to the Ottoman lands.31 From
the perspective of the individual family, the pressure to bear children intensi-
ied due to low survival rates, and gravestones indicate that shortly after the
end of our period, in the mid-1600s, the life expectancy of women was signif-
icantly lower than that of men.
The non-Muslim population and the routes of Islamisation

Among the empire’s non-Muslims, the vast majority were Orthodox
Christians. In Greater Syria and Iraq, there also were some Jacobites and
Nestorians, while Egypt contained a sizeable Coptic minority. Armenians
were present in eastern Anatolia and Istanbul, where Sulumanastır was the
residence of a patriarch, and also in Jerusalem, where the monastery of
31 Minna Rozen, A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453–1566
(Leiden, 2002), pp. 45–50, 103–5.
369
St. James attracted many pilgrims.32 But the main religious centre of the
Armenians was on Safavid territory in the town of Echmiadzin, near Eriwan.
As we have little information on sixteenth-century Armenian settlement pat-
terns in Istanbul and elsewhere, we have to fall back on the information fur-
nished by the mid-seventeenth-century Armenian scholar Eremya Çelebi: he
recorded over a thousand families in the Istanbul quarter of Samatya, near
the Sea of Marmara. By this period, Armenians also had come to be numer-
ous slightly further to the east, in the vicinity of the gate known as Kumkapı.
Galata had its contingent of Armenian inhabitants, too, and so did certain
Bosporus villages, which at this time were still very small.33
In the Balkans, the Orthodox population related to its church by means of
a network of parish priests who were allowed to marry; these priests were
subject to a hierarchy of bishops, archbishops and ultimately the patriarchs
of Antioch and Alexandria, as well as the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul.
Marriages were under church jurisdiction, but occasionally the marital prob-
lems of Orthodox couples appeared in the registers of the local kadı’s court.
Village and small-town priests learned their profession through apprentice-
ship, and only a few attended the patriarchal academy in the capital.34 Ottoman
administrative practice had long since accepted this system of church govern-
ment, and from the population’s point of view, it had the advantage of not
requiring great expenditures. Thus, in regions such as the former Yugoslavia,
where Orthodox and Catholics co-existed, the former often gained ground at
the expense of the latter.
Catholics lived on some Aegean islands, where sections of the population
had adopted this faith after 1204, when these territories were under the dom-
ination of Venice, Genoa or certain feudal lords of Italian background. In
Cyprus, by contrast, Catholicism more or less disappeared with the Ottoman
conquest (1571–3) due to war-related deaths, enslavement and emigration, but
in the 1600s a small community re-established itself.35 In today’s Lebanon, the
Maronites formed a close relationship with Venice and the papacy: already in
the twelfth century they had recognised the pope as the head of their church
32 Hrand Andreasyan (trans. and comment.), Polonyalı Simeon’un Seyahatnamesi, 1608–1619

(Istanbul, 1964), pp. 123–5.
33 Halil Inalcik, ‘Istanbul’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden,
1960–2006), vol. 4, p. 241.
34 Ladislas Hadrovics, Le peuple serbe et son église sous la domination turque (Paris, 1947).
35 Vera Costantini, Il sultano e l’isola contesa: Cipro tra eredità veneziana e potere ottomano (Milan,
2009), p. 102; Ariel Salzmann, ‘A Travelogue Manqué? The Accidental Itinerary of a Maltese
Priest in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean’, in A Faithful Sea: the Religious Cultures of
the Mediterranean, 1200–1700, ed. Adnan A. Husain and Katherine E. Fleming (Oxford, 2007),
pp. 149–72 at p. 164.
370
Ottoman population
but retained their own rites and performed religious services in Arabic. In
1584, the pope set up a college in Rome to train their priests.36 In the Balkans,
Catholics lived in the port town of Dubrovnik, whose upper class had adopted
Italianate culture. In spite of its small size (about 7,000 inhabitants), this town
was an active commercial centre and while subject to the Ottomans retained
an autonomous government. This peculiar situation must have contributed
to Dubrovnik’s staunchly Catholic allegiance. In Albania, among other fac-
tors, the Venetian domination of certain port towns prior to the Ottoman
takeover also had resulted in a sizeable Catholic population.
Last but not least, a number of Catholics lived in Istanbul’s northern
suburb of Galata as the descendants of the Genoese and other merchants
of Italian background who without a ight had submitted to Mehmed the
Conqueror in 1453.37 While in the 1400s their number was quite small, more
Catholics appeared in the area once permanent French and Venetian embas-
sies established themselves in villas north of the Galata walls in Pera (today
Beyoğlu). In this still semi-rural district, foreigners and local Catholics
prayed together in churches that though rebuilt in the 1800s are still in place
today.
In Hungary, the sultan’s administration tolerated both Protestants and
Catholics; in the autonomous principality of Transylvania, most of the
population was Orthodox, but the newly emerged Lutheran, Calvinist and
Unitarian churches obtained oicial recognition in addition to Catholicism.
For a while scholars assumed that under Ottoman rule Protestants were in
a favoured position because Hungarian Calvinists were strongly opposed to
the sultans’ archenemy the Habsburgs. But apparently this convergence of
interests did not result in determined oicial Ottoman support for Hungarian
Protestantism.38 Mostly this aid was indirect, as the sultans’ rule meant that
the Counterreformation only arrived very late, after the Habsburg con-
quest in 1699, and therefore was perhaps less efective than in the other
domains controlled by this arch-Catholic dynasty. In this sense, the survival
of Protestantism in Hungary owed something to Ottoman domination. On
the other hand, no Catholic bishops could – or would – reside in Ottoman
36 Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York, 1992), pp. 99, 242.
37 Halil Inalcik, ‘Ottoman Galata 1453–1553’, in Première Rencontre Internationale sur l’Empire
Ottoman et la Turquie Moderne: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Maison
des Sciences de l’Homme, 18–22 janvier 1985, ed. Edhem Eldem (Istanbul and Paris, 1991), pp.
17–116 at pp. 54–7.
38 István Bitskey, ‘Spiritual Life in the Early Modern Age’, in A Cultural History of Hungary: From
the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century, ed. László Kósa (Budapest, 1999), pp. 229–88 at p.
245.
371
territory. By the 1600s, in other words shortly after the end of our period,
Bosnian Franciscans, often in conl ict with Rome over jurisdictional mat-
ters, came to represent the Catholic Church in the eyes of both the Ottoman
administration and the faithful as well.
Conversion to Islam was a widespread phenomenon. However, in the
Balkans it is often diicult if not impossible to distinguish converts from
Anatolian immigrants and their descendants. As we have seen, irst-generation
converts appear as the “sons and daughters of Abdullah”, but descent from a
convert on the mother’s side does not appear in the records at all. Moreover,
the grandsons of a convert are impossible to distinguish from the general
Muslim population; given the often short lifespans current in the 1400s and
1500s, descent from a convert thus might become oicially irrelevant within a
very brief time. Especially if they were townsmen, old and new Muslims lived
in close proximity, inter-married and soon formed but a single population.
Partly for this reason, our information on conversion processes in the Balkans
during the 1400s and 1500s is very limited indeed. Nationalist assumptions are
thus often based on little evidence and have often gained a currency that they
do not deserve. For most regions, we simply cannot know the ratio of immi-
grants to converted Muslims. Only where Bosnia is concerned can we be sure
that the majority of local Muslims, who continued to speak a Slavic language,
were part of the pre-Ottoman autochthonous population.
Enslavement was a major route of conversion. While accepting Islam did
not mean that the slave obtained his or her freedom, manumission, which was
quite a frequent occurrence, normally pre-supposed that the man or woman
in question had accepted Islam. We do not know how much pressure slave-
owners typically applied to ensure conversion. Our only testimony comes
from returned captives and is therefore suspect; in fact, some of these men
tried to hide from their home communities that during their stays in the sul-
tans’ territories they had become Muslims. Thus it is obvious from the story
of the Nuremberg soldier Hans Wild, who returned to his native city after
lengthy enslavement and ultimate manumission that he must have converted
to Islam at some point; but the author never mentions this part of his biog-
raphy. And as he was a native of a Protestant town, there was no Inquisition
that might have forced him to be more explicit.
In the papal and Spanish domains, Inquisition courts demanded that peo-
ple who had spent time in the Ottoman Empire upon their return must give
an account of their religious conduct and convictions. In this situation, a
history of conversion to Islam was a major drawback, which the man – or
very rarely woman – might gloss over to the best of his or her ability. If the
372
Ottoman population
returnee was lucky, the judges might assume that slaves would have had
little alternative but to convert and therefore treat “conversion under pres-
sure” rather leniently. But the returnee had no guarantees of such indul-
gence, and on the other hand it was a major concern of the Inquisition
courts to maintain the number of rowers serving on the galleys of the
pope, as well as of Catholic kings and princes. If for one reason or another
an ex-Christian turned Muslim and returned to Spanish or papal territory
was sentenced to the galleys, he thus was likely to remain in this unenvi-
able position.39 In self-defence, former captives who had returned to the
Christian world and could not hide a previous conversion must have rou-
tinely claimed that their owners had forced them to change their religion
through beatings and other physical pressures. That said, it would, however,
be over-optimistic to assume that no captives in the world of Islam ever suf-
fered mistreatment of this kind.40
Conversion through slavery was common in the sultans’ realm as in many
other societies, but the so-called levy of boys (devşirme) that also accounted
for many new Muslims was an Ottoman peculiarity. In the 1400s and 1500s,
village youngsters from Anatolia and the Balkans were periodically “gathered
in” to serve the sultan in his army, and a privileged few joined the ruler’s
court as pages.41 While otherwise obligatory conversions were exceptional,
in this instance and as a matter of course the boys were expected to become
Muslims.42 Some oicials in charge of recruitment seem to have brutalised the
non-Muslim population, while others accepted bribes in exchange for “over-
looking” the boys of certain families. Such cases have entered the record only
if the culprits were caught, as happened to a certain Cani, who had collected
262 sheep for his services to probably desperate parents.43 Once the recruits
had joined the candidate janissaries (acemi oğlan) and later the janissary corps,
the Bektashi order of dervishes, to which many janissaries paid allegiance,
apparently facilitated the integration of these new Muslims through its often
syncretistic ceremonial.
39 Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: l’histoire extraordinaire des
renégats, XVIe-XVIIe siècles, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2006), pp. 418–24.
40 Ibid., p. 330.
41 Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, p. 78.
42 Basilike D. Papoulia, Ursprung und Wesen der “Knabenlese” im Osmanischen Reich (Munich,
1963), p. 80.
43 Andreas Tietze (ed.), Mustafā cAlī’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1979–82), vol.
2, p. 30; Nicolas Vatin, ‘La relégation dans l’empire ottoman (troisième quart du XVIe siè-
cle)’, in Le monde de l’itinerance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, ed. Claudia
Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser and Christophe Pébarthe (Bordeaux, 2009), pp. 581–614 at p. 589.
373
Contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, the devşirme did not nec-
essarily imply the severance of all family ties.44 People who reached promi-
nent positions in the Ottoman military and administrative apparatus might
ensure that younger relatives followed them into state service. As one exam-
ple among many, we might mention the relatives of the grand vezir Mehmed
Sokollu (ca. 1505–79).45 On a much more modest level, provincial janissaries
might intervene in the court cases of their Christian relatives as they could
testify against other Muslims, a form of recourse not available to Christians
or Jews. Some parents must have considered the levy of boys as a means of
upward social mobility, and long-Islamised Bosnians continued to send their
sons to the janissary corps.46
Last but not least, some people accepted Islam not because they were pres-
sured or obliged to do so but out of sheer conviction. Quite probably, the
endless disputes between Orthodox and Catholics must have made some
inhabitants of the sultans’ realm wonder whether perhaps neither side had
much of a claim to God’s grace; especially people who had experienced recur-
rent and arcane debates about the qualities of the Trinity may have concluded
that Christians of both parties had lapsed into polytheism. Others may have
abhorred the devotion that both Orthodox and Catholics showed to religious
images, or else accepted the claims of some Muslim holy men that the saints
whom they traditionally had venerated could be honoured in an Islamic
context as well.47 As for the less devout, becoming a “irst-class” and not a
“second-class” Ottoman subject must have been a signiicant consideration:
why show respect and submission to some ordinary Muslim when by conver-
sion this man could become one’s equal or even inferior? Furthermore, some
practically minded people may have igured that they had a better use for the
money that every year they had to spend on the cizye.
Be that as it may, a map based on data from the 1520s and 1530s shows
that many Balkan towns, such as Üsküp/Skopje or Soia, had Muslim major-
ities although local villagers remained Orthodox Christians.48 In Bosnia,
Islamisation proceeded much more rapidly than elsewhere; by the later 1500s,
44 Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah, p. 338.

45 Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafâ
Âli (1541–1600) (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 46.
46 Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, p. 78.
47 Frederick William Hasluck, ‘Ambiguous Sanctuaries and Bektashi Propaganda’, in Frederick
William Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, ed. Margaret Hasluck, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1929), vol. 2, pp. 564–96 at pp. 574–80.
48 Barkan, ‘Harita’.
374
Ottoman population
the Ottoman elite already regarded this area as a reservoir of soldiers willing
to ight unending border wars against the Habsburgs. In the vilayet of Buda,
by contrast, there were few conversions to Islam and many resident Muslims
were immigrants from nearby Bosnia. In Anatolia, apart from a few places
such as the regions of Kayseri and Sivas and the eastern provinces, by the
early 1500s the vast majority of the population had accepted Islam and very
few non-Muslims remained.49
Population and urbanisation

While we possess quite a few monographs on individual towns and regions,
nobody except Ömer Lüti Barkan apparently has dared to estimate the pop-
ulation of Ottoman Europe, Anatolia and the Syrian provinces on the basis of
the Ottoman tax registers.50 According to Barkan, in 1520–35 Rumeli and the
sultans’ capital, Istanbul, supposedly had a population of almost six million,
while Anatolia and certain territories called “Arab”, probably more or less
equivalent to Greater Syria, were home to about 5.7 million. By this count,
the Ottoman central provinces had a population of about 11–12 million peo-
ple, with Istanbul, the largest city, amounting to about 400,000 inhabitants.
None of these igures are very solid, and Barkan has suggested that the actual
population may have been higher by about 10–15 per cent; in other words, he
has posited an alternative igure of about 14 million. As Ottoman historians
have become more and more aware of the pitfalls inherent in the tahrirs and
especially the icmals, on which Barkan’s count is based, they have tended to
shy away from broad estimates and prefer to work on small regions, where
the sources are easier to control. Moreover, the lack of taxpayer enumera-
tions for all of North Africa, including Egypt, makes any estimate of the total
Ottoman population very hazardous indeed. Nicolas Michel has recently
studied the sole surviving set of Ottoman tax registers covering Egypt, dated
to 933/1527–8. Compiled ten years after the Ottoman conquest, these reg-
isters only record the presumably wealthier peasants, whom Michel calls
“rural entrepreneurs”. Diferently from other tahrirs, the Egyptian records
therefore do not convey any information on population at all. Barkan himself
49 Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of
Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971),
p. 445.
50 Cem Behar, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun ve Türkiye’nin Nüfusu 1500–1927/The Population of the
Ottoman Empire and Turkey (with a summary in English) (Ankara, 1996), p. 4.
375
once suggested a igure of over 30 million, which must refer to the later 1500s,
when population had signiicantly increased; however, Fernand Braudel has
considered this igure far too high.51
In the course of the sixteenth century, the sultans’ subjects multiplied, not
only due to Ottoman conquests but also because overall population expan-
sion, often observed in the territories where Latin Christianity predominated,
occurred in the Ottoman lands as well. Increased population and growing
opportunities for long-distance trade revived towns and cities. While in the
early 1500s Anatolian towns aside from Bursa, Ankara and Kayseri were for
the most part so small that it is diicult to speak of an urban network, this
situation had changed by the late 1500s, and a sizeable number of towns now
contained populations of ten thousand or more.52 At this time, the premier
city of Anatolia was Bursa, which held a population of about 65,000, and a
sizeable number of its inhabitants made a living from the textile industry.
Here merchants and weavers obtained Iranian raw silk that they transformed
into the precious fabrics demanded at the Ottoman court.53 Ankara was
home to a population of approximately 25,000 men and women; the city’s
principal crafts involved the weaving, dyeing and inishing of angora wool.54
In south-eastern Anatolia, towns such as Urfa and Diyarbekir grew to sub-
stantial size, probably because once there was no imperial border separating
them from nearby Aleppo the proximity to a major market increased the
incentive to expand craft production. Bire (today Birecik) became important
as the site of a naval arsenal on the banks of the Euphrates which the sultans
established in order to maintain control over Mesopotamia, conquered only
in the 1530s.
In south-eastern Europe, several important cities had come to prominence
only under Ottoman rule: Saraybosna/Sarajevo had been no more than a
village in pre-Ottoman times, and Byzantine Hadrianopolis/Edirne was also
a tiny settlement. Among the older towns, Salonika doubled its population
around 1500 when Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) permitted the immigration
51 Braudel, La Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 363; Nicolas Michel, ‘Migrations de paysans dans le delta
du Nil au début de l’époque ottomane’, Annales Islamologiques 35 (2001), 241–90.
52 Leila Erder and Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Development of the Anatolian Urban Network during
the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 23, 3 (1980),
267–303.
53 Behar, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun ve Türkiye’nin Nüfusu, p. 7.
54 Özer Ergenç, ‘1600–1615 Yılları Arasında Ankara İktisadi Tarihine Ait Araştırmalar’, in Türkiye
İktisat Tarihi Semineri: Metinler-Tartı şmalar 8–10 Haziran 1973, ed. Osman Okyar and Ünal
Nalbantoğlu (Ankara, 1975), pp. 145–68.
376
Ottoman population
of Spanish Jews, who were to use their skills in manufacturing woollen cloth
to provide “regulation” uniforms for the janissaries.55
Somewhat special was the situation of Ottoman Hungary, which Sultan
Süleyman began to conquer after capturing the border fortress of Belgrade in
1521. By the 1540s, the Ottomans and their Habsburg opponents had divided
up the former kingdom between them. Transylvania became a principality
under Ottoman suzerainty, with Sibiu/Herrmannstadt and Braşov/Kronstadt
major commercial centres. Central Hungary was now the vilayet of Budun/
Buda, and the former royal capital sufered considerably because it was now
a border town of mainly military signiicance. As for the Habsburgs, they
controlled a small strip of land along the border, under the name of Royal
Hungary, for which they paid tribute to the sultans; here the main city was
Poszony/Pressburg (today Bratislava).
Istanbul, the former Byzantine capital conquered by Mehmed II in 1453,
was the city whose population increased most rapidly. In the last century of
Byzantine rule, 50,000–75,000 people – estimates vary – apparently lived in a
number of scattered nuclei separated by gardens, vineyards and even ields.56
Just before the Ottoman attack, the population must have declined even fur-
ther, for quite a few inhabitants with the necessary means must have led the
city before the siege began, to the Aegean islands, Crete or quite simply the
Ottoman territories which, after all, began a kilometre or two outside
the city walls. When Constantinople was taken, moreover, the Ottoman sol-
diery carried of as slaves many of those inhabitants who had survived the
ighting. The population must have diminished yet further as a result. A sur-
vey of the city intra muros, undertaken in 1455 and surviving as a fragment,
shows 918 houses, of which 291 were empty or ruined; however, the area cov-
ered does not include the more densely populated sectors close to the Golden
Horn. On the northern shores of this long inlet, the town of Galata also was
surveyed in 1455, and once again the count is incomplete, for the surviving
fragment of the Galata register does not contain the western section of the
town. As a result, the text records only 1,108 individual taxpayers living in 908
houses; moreover, quite a few residences were still sealed up, as it was not
55 Barkan, ‘Harita’; Gilles Veinstein, ‘L’établissement des juifs d’Espagne dans l’Empire
Ottoman (in XVe–XVIIe s.): une migration’, in Le monde de l’itinerance en Méditerranée de
l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, ed. Claudia Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser and Christophe Pébarthe
(Bordeaux, 2009), pp. 667–84.
56 Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls: Byzantion-Konstantinopolis-
Istanbul bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1977), pp. 27–8.
377
clear whether the owners would come back and accept zimmi status.57 Both
the Istanbul and the Galata surveys remain unpublished; recently İdris Bostan
has discovered a further section of the Istanbul survey, but as yet there is no
information about its contents.58
Already by 1455 there had been some immigration into Istanbul, as the
relevant survey mentions Muslims, Jews and Christians sometimes from
rather distant places, such as Manisa or Filibe/Plovdiv.59 Some of these set-
tlers may have come of their own volition, but many must have been forcibly
brought in, with an obligation to remain in the city although otherwise they
retained the rights of free men and women (sürgün). Others had arrived in the
Istanbul region as slaves: in 1454, Mehmed II settled captives from the region
of Smederovo in Serbia. In yet other cases it is hard to judge whether the fam-
ilies in question were slaves or free sürgün. Probably the inhabitants of a small
fortress that negotiated their surrender to the sultan fell into the latter cate-
gory, but on this distinction the text is disturbingly vague. Many of the new
arrivals paid high taxes and were subject to legal disabilities that indicate prior
enslavement. Between slaves and sürgün, by 1499, 180 villages in the region
of Istanbul held almost 14,500 inhabitants; for once the register lists women
and children as well as their men-folk. Most of the settlers had come from
recent Ottoman conquests in Thessaly, Bosnia, Albania and Serbia, the latter
founding a village that they called Belgrad, but a few Kurdish settlements of
unknown antecedent were also in evidence.60
Some people who moved to Istanbul on their own initiative did so in
order to take up Mehmed the Conqueror’s ofer of free housing. They were
thus disafected when the sultan changed his mind and instead decided to
endow these buildings to the Aya Sofya complex of mosque and theologi-
cal school (medrese), for the Haghia Sophia had become a mosque immedi-
ately after the conquest.61 In the later ifteenth century, however, voluntary
immigration increased, and when Bayezid II ascended the throne, the pop-
ulation had reached some 80,000–100,000 persons at least, so that the city
probably was now twice as large as it had been in late Byzantine times.
57 Inalcik, ‘Ottoman Galata, 1453–1553’, pp. 37.

58 Halil Inalcik, ‘The Ottoman Survey of İstanbul, 1455’, 1453, İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Dergisi 3
(2008), 19–27 at p. 20.
59 Ibid., p. 22.
60 Stéphane Yérasimos, ‘Les déportés et leur statut dans l’Empire ottoman (XVe–XVIe siècles)’,
in Moatti, Kaiser and Péberthe, Le monde de l’itinerance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque
moderne, pp. 514–32 at pp. 523–5.
61 Halil Inalcik, ‘The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the
Byzantine Buildings of the City’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23 (1970), 213–49.
378
Ottoman population
This growth is all the more remarkable as the plague of 1467 had largely
nulliied the increase brought about by Mehmed the Conqueror’s policy of
resettlement.62
Major pious foundations established by Sultans Mehmed II, Bayezid II
and Süleyman, the latter acting once in the name of his deceased son Prince
Mehmed and once in his own, encouraged immigrants by providing jobs and
locales for trade and crafts. Mosques and medreses attracted professors and
students, while newcomers with little preparation but inl uential patrons
might ind jobs as cooks and cleaners.63 By the late 1500s already, the adminis-
tration had begun to worry about possible over-population, when widespread
military rebellions in Anatolia resulted in a stream of refugees seeking the
protection of the walled city. This concern intensiied shortly after the end
of our period, when Murad IV (r. 1623–40), with rather excessive optimism,
decided that the Anatolian countryside was once again safe, and many more
or less recent migrants had to return to their places of origin.64 By that time,
the city contained several hundred thousand inhabitants, although the lack of
surveys does not permit any deinite statement.
Urbanisation in the Arab provinces

In 1516–17, the Ottomans conquered three major cities: Cairo, Aleppo and
Damascus. As we have seen, no Egyptian tax register provides demographic
information. But Cairo seems to have prospered enough during the irst
century of Ottoman rule that immigrants from Syria, such as the merchant
Isma’il Abu Taqiyya, settled there and made their fortunes.65 In the long run,
Cairo expanded, probably from under 200,000 inhabitants in the late Mamluk
period to about 300,000 at the end of the seventeenth century. Growth was
apparent from the fact that tanneries with their evil smells now occasioned
complaints, and tanners moved farther away from the city centre; this
occurred at the very end of our period, between 1580 and 1630. Public baths
sprang up, denoting the presence of people who would pay for their use.
62 Lowry, ‘Pushing the Stone Uphill’, p. 43.

63 Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘Şehirlerin Teşekkül ve İnkişafı Tarihi Bakımından Osmanlı
İmparatorluğunda İmaret Sitelerinin Kuruluş ve İşleyiş Tarzına Âit Araştırmalar’, İstanbul
Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 23, 1–2 (1962–3), 239–96.
64 Hrand D. Andreasyan, ‘Celâlilerden Kaçan Anadolu Halkının Geri Gönderilmesi’, in İsmail
Hakkı Uzunçarşılı’ya Armağan (Ankara, 1976), pp. 45–54.
65 Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian
Merchant (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998).
379
New water fountains also appeared, although their number in the 1500s was
modest when compared with the following century.66
Aleppo had been a hub of international trade already in the Mamluk
period, and the Ottoman conquest permitted its merchants to increase their
activities. Rather puzzlingly, however, the tax registers of the sixteenth cen-
tury indicate a diminishing number of taxpayers. In 1537–8, Aleppo suppos-
edly was home to about 80,000 men, women and children; by 1584, their
number had dropped to 75,000.67 In terms of taxpayers alone, 11,224 entries in
1519 declined to 8,883 in 1526, and by 1585 the tax-paying population amounted
to only 8,430.68 Charles Issawi has suggested that Ottoman oicials seriously
under-counted the non-Muslim inhabitants.69
But a further consideration surely is also relevant: as we have seen, the tax
registers often omitted people who because of their ailiation with the mil-
itary were exempt from many if not all taxes. Moreover, in the later 1500s,
with inlation eating away at the soldiers’ pay, these men began to engage in
crafts and trade so as to make ends meet; at the same time, certain merchants
and artisans joined the military. Aleppo soon had acquired a substantial gar-
rison, whose members became involved in the local business scene. Quite
possibly some artisans and merchants thus disappeared from the tax registers
simply because they had joined one or the other military corps. Given this
situation, we should add about 20 per cent to the recorded taxpayer igures to
arrive at the number of actually resident house-holders, and surely the num-
ber of ordinary townspeople “disappearing” from the registers in this fashion
was greater at the end of the sixteenth century than during the irst years of
Ottoman rule.
On the other hand, in the sixteenth century Aleppo expanded dramati-
cally in terms of built-up areas. In the 1530s and 1540s, the Ottoman governor
Hüsrev Paşa sponsored the construction of a great mosque, which numbered
a major commercial centre (han) among its revenue sources. Another gover-
nor, of the ancient Dukakinzade family, added a second mosque surrounded
by three hans; shop-lined streets were also part of the complex. In the 1570s,
the han of the customs oice was a major addition; it provided almost 350
66 André Raymond, ‘The Ottoman Conquest and the Development of the Great Arab Towns’,
International Journal of Turkish Studies 1 (1979–80), 84–101; André Raymond, Grandes villes
arabes à l’époque ottomane (Paris, 1985), pp. 158–60.
67 Behar, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun ve Türkiye’nin Nüfusu, p. 12.
68 Barkan, ‘Tarihi Demograi ’, p. 22.
69 Charles Issawi, ‘Comment on Professor Barkan’s Estimate of the Population of the Ottoman
Empire in 1520–30’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958), 329–31;
Barkan, ‘Essai sur les données statistiques’.
380
Ottoman population
new business locales. Aleppo’s sixteenth-century building boom ended with

the Bahramiyya mosque, again amply supplied with attendant shops and
markets. While elite igures could have built mosques in the absence of an
expanding population, merely to enhance the legitimacy of Ottoman rule,
hans and shops were only useful if tenanted. It thus makes sense to assume
that the city was growing, and the construction of major pious foundations
promoted expansion; less than a century earlier, Istanbul after all had experi-
enced a similar development.70
Damascus by contrast housed mainly inter-regional and not inter-empire
traders. Along with Cairo, this city was the starting point for a pilgrim cara-
van to Mecca, and many traders made a living by supplying the pilgrims with
mounts and other necessities. The textile crafts were highly developed, and
some of their products doubtless found their way to Istanbul and Bursa with
the return caravans. In this city as well, we observe a contradiction between
the tahrirs on the one hand, which show a decline in taxpayers from 10,423
in 1521–30 to only 7,778 in 1595, and on the other hand the contemporary
expansion of the built-up area.71 Süleyman the Magniicent had a complex of
mosque cum public kitchen constructed and also endowed the mausoleum
of Muḥyi al-Dīn al-cArabī, thus providing employment to a substantial num-
ber of townsmen. Furthermore, in 980/1572, Derviş Paşa had a major busi-
ness centre constructed, which took its name from the city’s lourishing silk
trade. Given the size and activity of the Damascus garrison, the passage of
artisans and traders into the military establishment may once again explain
at least part of this contradiction between our two sets of data. But in terms
of commercial activity Aleppo was certainly the principal city of the Syrian
provinces in the early Ottoman age.
In the “Far West” of North Africa, Algiers and Tunis were the two major
centres, but due to the lack of tahrirs all population estimates are very doubt-
ful. No igures at all survive for our period; where the late 1700s are con-
cerned they revolve around 80,000 for Tunis and 30,000 for Algiers.72 During
the 1500s, both cities, but especially Tunis, received a large number of immi-
grants from Spain. We cannot know how many people in the course of the
century left Spanish ports on their private initiative and paying their own
way. But in and after 1609, just after the end of the period we are concerned
with, the Spanish crown had about 300,000 persons oicially deported; the
70 Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban
Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden, 2004), pp. 1–22.
71 Barkan, ‘Tarihi Demograi ’, p. 22.
72 Raymond, Grandes villes arabes, pp. 62–5.
381
expulsion involved not only declared Muslims but virtually all people with
Muslim antecedents. Most of the expellees probably immigrated to North
Africa.73 Apparently Tunis was a favoured destination because the city ofered
opportunities for traders and artisans, while the surrounding countryside lent
itself to garden cultures of the type that many Muslims had practised while in
Spain. Unfortunately, while we have records of the Moriscos forced to leave
the Iberian Peninsula, researchers have not found any igures concerning
arrivals in Ottoman territory.
In the eastern borderlands, the major Ottoman city was Baghdad, not con-
quered by Sultan Süleyman until 941/1534, after the city had been in Safavid
hands for a generation or so. An abridged (icmal) tahrir prepared shortly after
this event (951/1544) and succeeding registers show that in Baghdad as well the
Ottoman administration heavily invested in mosques and theological schools.
As a symbol of Sunni right belief, the sultans and their governors particularly
honoured the saintly igure of cAbd ul-qādir Geylānī; at the same time, sev-
eral tahrirs documented the institution of timars, zeamets and hass. In the late
1700s, the city supposedly was home to about 90,000 inhabitants.74
Population increase, diminishing food supplies and

l ights from the countryside
It has become axiomatic that in pre-industrial settings periods of rapid popula-
tion growth are also “hard times”, in which food becomes increasingly scarce,
for typically agricultural expansion fails to keep pace with population growth.
With respect to the Ottoman realm, this issue has also attracted scholarly
attention. Where population growth is at issue, we have seen that the tahrirs
apparently relect a signiicant population expansion that in the course of the
sixteenth century occurred throughout the sultans’ territories. As for changes
in the food supply, we can estimate taxable harvests on the basis of the tahrirs
because these documents record the tithes that the peasants usually had to
deliver in kind; the attendant provincial tax regulations (liva kanunnameleri)
73 Antonio Luis Cortés Peña, ‘La emigración de los musulmanes granadinos (1482–1502),
primer acto de una trágica ruptura’, in Moatti, Kaiser and Péberthe, Le monde de l’itinerance
en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, pp. 479–96; Rafael Benítez, ‘La monarquía
hispánica y el control de los moriscos expulsados’, in Moatti, Kaiser and Péberthe, Le monde
de l’itinerance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, pp. 497–514 at p. 512.
74 Yusuf Halaçoğlu, ‘Bağdat, Osmanlı dönemi’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol.
4, ed. Tahir Altıkulaç et al. (Istanbul, 1991), pp. 433–7; Tahir Aydoğmuş, ‘XVI. Yüzyılda Bağdat
Tarihi’, in VIII. Türk Tarih Kongresi, Ankara, 11–15 Ekim 1976: Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler
(Ankara, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 1473–6; Raymond, Grandes villes arabes, p. 65.
382
Ottoman population
normally tell us whether the tithe was meant to be one-tenth, one-eighth,

one-ifth or some other percentage of the total crop. This information allows
us to calculate the oicially recognised harvest of grains and also of minor
crops such as almonds, nuts or vetches; however, the tithes of perishable
products such as grapes and other fruit were calculated in money only, and
thus the amounts actually harvested remain unknown.
According to the evidence provided by the tahrirs, in many places six-
teenth-century grain production deinitely did not keep up with population
growth.75 A particularly telling example concerns ten rural districts of north-
central Anatolia documented from the late ifteenth century onwards and
throughout the 1500s in which nowhere did the increase in grain harvests
even begin to equal population growth. Retaining seed must have posed par-
ticular challenges; after all, in dry-farming areas yields were low and peasants
therefore had to reserve a disproportionately large part of the harvest for the
following year. But we do not know to what extent our information is reli-
able; oicials recorded data for taxation purposes, and at the end of the day
the tahrirs may well have depicted a rural economy appearing even poorer
than it was in real life.
After all, in certain cases both peasants and timar-holders had an interest
in under-reporting.76 If in the course of compiling a new tahrir it emerged
that a given village produced more revenue than recorded in the previous
register, the taxpayers’ interest in concealing this augmentation is obvious.
But if the timar-holder had only a small tax assignment, as was often the case,
the revenue based on the increased agricultural product after re-evaluation
might be greater than the amount to which the sipahi was oicially entitled.
Presumably, in such a case the central administration would appoint a second
revenue-holder, who would demand a share of the agricultural revenues that
the grantee already in place regarded as his particular source of livelihood.
In such a situation, peasants and revenue-holders may well have backed each
other up and the crops oicially taxed thus were much less than the actual
average harvest. While we cannot prove these assumptions, they seem prob-
able nonetheless.
However, despite attempts at minimising taxation, the food supplies
of many villages must have dwindled, especially in campaign years when
75 Huri Islamoğlu-Inan, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and
Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century (Leiden,
1994), p. 180.
76 Bruce McGowan, ‘Food Supply and Taxation on the Middle Danube’, Archivum Ottomanicum
1 (1969), 139–96 at p. 185.
383
peasants needed to supply the stopping points of the armies en route to

the battlefronts. Quite often, transporting the grain over bad roads was at
least as costly as the oicially determined value of the grain itself. Matters
became even more diicult as the armies requisitioned scarce draft animals,
which the peasants might be unable to retrieve even after the job inally was
done.77 Villages located far from military routes might still deplete their food
reserves. They often had to pay substantial amounts in cash, which they must
have acquired at least in part by selling grain that they would otherwise have
consumed. While in the earliest stages of Ottoman expansion warfare in cer-
tain cases paid for itself, by the sixteenth century the peasantry shouldered a
substantial part of the costs of war in the shape of increased taxes.78
Historians have constructed diferent scenarios concerning the villagers’
reactions in such situations. Mustafa Akdağ has proposed that as sixteenth-
century Anatolian population increased, a signiicant number of young
men were unable to marry because they could not gain access to a farm-
stead. Some of these youngsters enrolled in juridical cum theological schools
(medreses) in preparation for careers in the judicial and educational services.
But even though late sixteenth-century provincial administration intensiied
and new judicial districts emerged, there were never enough positions to
go around. In the same fashion, medreses increased in number, but not suf-
iciently for all candidates to receive teaching posts. Disappointed students
rebelled, demanding employment. But the government only ofered amnesty
to the rebels if they served in the army for more or less symbolic pay, and this
most of them were unwilling to do.79 We may thus conclude that life in the
village was not very attractive to many peasant boys and they were more than
anxious to get away.
Some of these young men joined the mercenaries that the central govern-
ment of the time increasingly hired to wage its wars. These soldiers did not
enjoy the job security and other privileges of the janissaries and cavalrymen
in permanent service and sometimes rebelled in order to obtain positions in
the standing army.80 However, from the government’s point of view, hiring
77 Lüti Güçer, XVI.- XVII. Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Hububat Meselesi ve Hububattan
Alınan Vergiler (Istanbul, 1964), pp. 29–30.
78 Heath Lowry, ‘Changes in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Peasant Taxation: A Case Study of
Radilofo (Radolibos),’ in Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society,
ed. Anthony Bryer and Heath Lowry (Birmingham and Washington, D.C., 1986), pp. 23–38
at p. 31.
79 Mustafa Akdağ, Celâlî İsyanları (1550–1603) (Ankara, 1963), p. 99.
80 Halil Inalcik, ‘Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700’,
Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980), 283–337 at p. 297.
384
Ottoman population
mercenaries on a temporary basis was a means of ielding the large armies

required by the wars against Habsburgs and Safavids at an “afordable” price.
Therefore the majority of mercenaries never did have a realistic chance of
becoming janissaries or salaried cavalrymen. In the later seventeenth century,
soldiers without access to the regular Ottoman army often found employment
in the households of vezirs and paşas, for a governor now had to ind and pay
the men that he would need to run his administration. But this employment
was not very secure either, as it was apparently common for such dignitar-
ies to hire and ire mercenary bands at short intervals.81 As in the case of the
medrese students, attempts by the government to pacify the former soldiers
were often unsuccessful, and disafected students and ex-military men caused
a great deal of unrest.82 From our present point of view, these conl icts are
important because they gave rise to many migrations whose origins and des-
tinations are, however, often impossible to discern.
Michael A. Cook has approached the matter from a diferent angle. His
argument focuses not on the alternatives open – or closed – to young villagers
but on the relationship of peasants to the land. His analyses resemble those
of certain European medievalists concerned with twelfth- and thirteenth-
century population growth. Similarly to parts of medieval Europe, certain
regions of sixteenth-century Anatolia supposedly sufered from “population
pressure”; in other words, the cultivation of marginal lands became more fre-
quent, and there was a tendency to sub-divide farms into units no longer via-
ble because they were too small.83 With the decline of European population
during the plagues and famines of the 1300s and early 1400s, many marginal
lands reverted to pasture and villagers gave up their farmsteads, in some cases
for good.84 Around 1600, abandoned settlements were no rarity in Anatolia
either, but these villages apparently disappeared because of the rampant inse-
curity caused by tax collectors and mercenaries both employed and unem-
ployed.85 Typically the inhabitants relocated in hilly territory, which in spite
of its limited agricultural potential ofered better security. Once again, socio-
political conl ict gave rise to migration.
81 Metin Kunt, Bir Osmanlı Valisininin Yıllık Gelir-Gideri Diyarbekir, 1670–71 (Istanbul, 1981), pp.
55–8.
82 Mustafa Akdağ, ‘Türkiye Tarihi İctimaî Buhranlar Serisinden Medreseli İsyanları’, İstanbul
Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11, 1–4 (1949–50), 361–96; Akdağ, Celâlî İsyanları.
83 Michael A. Cook, Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia, 1450–1600 (London, New York and
Toronto, 1972).
84 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 1, pt. 2: Paysannerie
et croissance (Paris, 1977), p. 503.
85 Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth, Ländliche Siedlungen im südlichen Inneranatolien in den letzten vier-
hundert Jahren (Göttingen, 1968), pp. 200–3.
385
Mustafa Akdağ, Michael A. Cook and Wolf Dieter Hütteroth have concen-
trated on the “push” factors that caused young men to leave their villages.
By contrast, Halil Inalcik has emphasised that the demand of the central gov-
ernment for mercenaries acted as a “pull” factor causing young men to try
their luck outside of the region where they had been born.86 In Inalcik’s per-
spective, the increasing availability of handguns – despite oicial attempts
to prevent this development – allowed discontented villagers an option that
many of them took up. Viewing the question from yet another angle, Huri
Islamoğlu Inan has emphasised that population increase might, at least under
certain circumstances, also open up new ields of activity to villagers who
needed to compensate for the declining yields of their farms. Thus the dif u-
sion of marketable crops, including cotton and rice, and the development of
village crafts might permit families to survive without leaving their homes.87
If these alternatives were available, peasants obviously could make a living
without ploughing up ever more marginal lands and/or sub-dividing their
farms beyond the point of viability. Most recently, however, Oktay Özel has
once again emphasised the formidable diiculties confronting peasants in an
era of population increase and political crisis.88
Whichever way we interpret these data, the Anatolian countryside of the
late 1500s was not a particularly restful place in which to live. However, there
is a signiicant diference between the low-level disturbances caused by small
robber bands and the “bandit armies”, also known as Celalis, that by the end
of our period not only scoured the countryside but also took and plundered
major towns and cities such as Urfa, Ankara and even Bursa. Possibly the
organisers of these armies had the ambition to join the Ottoman governmen-
tal apparatus, and in fact some of them inally accepted high-level positions on
the Ottoman–Habsburg frontier. Karen Barkey therefore has made the point
that contrary to French kings of the early and middle 1600s, who violently
repressed provincial uprisings against increased taxation that royal adminis-
trations imposed to inance the growing costs of foreign wars, Ottoman sul-
tans relied on the integration of rebels into the ruling group.89
However, other aspects of bandit life also should enter the model. When ex-
peasant mercenaries left the vicinity of their villages and joined rebel armies,
86 Halil Inalcik, ‘The Socio-Political Efects of the Dif usion of Fire-arms in the Middle East’, in
War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (London, 1975),
pp. 195–217.
87 Islamoğlu-Inan, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire.
88 Özel, ‘Population changes’.
89 Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca,
N.Y. and London, 1994), pp. 195–203.
386
Ottoman population
they generally acted with much less restraint than they had done in their places
of origin, where they had friends and relatives living in the neighbourhood.
In fact, their commanders might encourage the rebel soldiers to be ferocious,
for the more apparent the “nuisance value” of such unoicial armies, the
greater the chance that the central government would attempt to reduce the
danger by inducting the soldiers into the regular army as mercenaries. Last
but not least, the integration of the commanders into the Ottoman govern-
mental apparatus might not be permanent, and they might either get killed
very soon or else desert and revert to banditry. These limits of the “integra-
tion model” have become clear in the case of early twentieth-century China,
where documentation is much better than for sixteenth-century Anatolia. But
there are enough parallels to make it seem likely that in the Anatolian case as
well the “integration model” was at best only partially successful.90
Migrations under duress: Captives

Mercenaries were by deinition migratory, and as long as they joined the
sultans’ armies we may view their movements as government-sponsored,
although an element of choice was also present. But, in their turns, soldiers
of all kinds caused sometimes quite massive migrations under duress because
they took captives and sold them as slaves. Some of the latter ultimately were
ransomed or manumitted by their owners, and a few freedmen managed to
return home and write down their experiences, providing us with valuable
evidence on the migrations of captives in the train of Ottoman armies. Thus
Hans Wild has described his travels during the early 1600s, which led him
to Mecca and Cairo, while Johann Michael Heberer von Bretten has left an
account of his captivity on an Ottoman galley in the late sixteenth century;
after having crossed the Mediterranean several times, he narrowly missed
being sent to North Africa.91 These returnees were the fortunate ones; lucky
in a diferent sense were some young captives who were brought into the
sultans’ palace and, similarly to the devşirme boys we have already encoun-
tered, received an education that in due course would it them for service in
the Ottoman administration.
90 Ibid., pp. 200–1; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Seeking Wisdom in China: An Attempt to Make Sense of
the Celali Rebellions’, in Zafar nama: Memorial Volume to Felix Tauer, ed. Rudolf Veselý and
Eduard Gombar (Prague, 1996), pp. 101–24.
91 Johann Michael Heberer von Bretten, Aegyptiaca Servitus (Heidelberg, 1610), reprinted with
an introduction by Karl Teply (Graz, 1967); Johann Wild, Reysbeschreibung eines Gefangenen
Christen Anno 1604 (Stuttgart, reprint 1964); Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Ransom Slavery
along the Ottoman Borders (Early Fifteenth to Early Eighteenth Centuries) (Leiden, 2007).
387
However, these elite slaves were a small minority, and some of the others,
if assigned to the one-ifth share of all booty that fell to the sultan, might after
Islamisation seize the chance of joining the Ottoman army. But this type of
opportunity must have been more easily available in the 1400s, when population
was still sparse.92 Certainly a few opportunities of this kind opened up even in
the sixteenth century, yet due to the expansion of the navy, many captives found
themselves rowing the galleys outitted by the sultans’ servitors, a hard and
dangerous job with a low life expectancy. Captives also quite often worked in
the naval arsenal, both in Istanbul and in the North African ports of Tunis and
Algiers. Others laboured on land holdings surrounding the Ottoman capital
and belonging to members of the elite or else to pious foundations, and in the
registers covering the construction site of the Süleymaniye mosque complex
(1550–7) a small number of slaves are also in evidence.93 Last but not least, many
captive men and women served private owners from among the Ottoman sub-
ject population, and the court register of the township of Üsküdar (today part
of Istanbul) dating to the years of 919–27/1513–21 is full of entries concerning
slaves sold, escaped or manumitted.94 With respect to late ifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century Bursa, a careful survey of the local population has shown that
15 per cent were in all probability recent Muslims and for the most part former
slaves; in this city, it was common practice to employ servile labour as weavers
and manumit the people concerned after they had worked for a certain time or
woven a pre-established quantity of cloth. Even if we only retain as freedmen
those people that the recorders identiied as such by the term atik, former slaves
headed 64 out of 923 households, or almost 7 per cent.95
Female slaves served in the households of wealthy people either as menials
or as concubines; in Bursa, some of them probably also laboured on the loom.
Similarly to the young males previously discussed, a few exceptional slave
girls might end up in the palace. Hürrem Sultan/Roxelana, later the wife of
Süleyman I (r. 1520–66), had been a captive probably from what is today the
Ukraine, and Nurbanu, who apparently married Süleyman’s successor, Selim
II (r. 1566–74), claimed to be of noble Venetian origin. However, Benjamin
92 Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah, p. 231.

93 Ömer Lüti Barkan, Süleymaniye Cami ve İmareti İnşaatı (1550 –1557), 2 vols. (Ankara, 1972 and
1979), vol. 1, pp. 132–7.
94 M. Akif Aydın, Bilgin Aydın and Ekrem Tak (eds.), İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri Üsküdar Mahkemesi,
1 Numaralı Sicil H. 919–927/M. 1513–1521 (Istanbul, 2008); Yvonne Seng, ‘Fugitives and
Factotums: Slaves in Early Sixteenth-Century Istanbul’, Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 39, 2 (1996), 136–69; Yvonne Seng, ‘A Liminal State: Slavery in Sixteenth-
Century Istanbul,” in Slavery in the Islamic Middle East, ed. Shaun Marmon (Princeton, N.J.,
1999), pp. 25–42.
95 Sahillioğlu, ‘Slaves’, pp. 86–7.
388
Ottoman population
Arbel, a recent biographer, considers all sources concerning her background

as more or less apocryphal.96 Other young girls, after serving a sultan or prin-
cess for a short while, were married of to former pages who had just “grad-
uated” from the palace training program (çıkma).
If a female slave bore a child that her proprietor recognised as his own,
this concubine could expect freedom after the owner’s death. In this case,
the family of the latter would probably marry her of to a former servitor. If
during his lifetime the owner decided to free his concubine, he might marry
her himself; such cases sometimes found their way into the kadı registers.
Once brought to the Ottoman central provinces by the soldiers who had cap-
tured them or by professional slave-traders, females were likely to stay put
and become part of the local population.
Enslaving captives taken in war with non-Muslim rulers was a licit act, but in
addition quite a few young sons and daughters of Ottoman subjects were kid-
napped illegally and sold someplace far away from their homes – another case
of blatantly involuntary migration.97 Pirates scoured the Aegean Sea and the
Anatolian coastlands. As galleys were an important component of the navy, the
demand for rowers was always high. Among naval captains and owners of gal-
leys, pirates thus could count on inding purchasers of their booty who would
not ask many questions. Moreover, in some cases the kidnappers might not be
people who robbed for a living but men with a “regular” source of income,
such as a merchant who sold an apprentice that he had taken along on a jour-
ney. Most cases of illegal enslavement known to us are on record in the chan-
cery registers (Mühimme) if the people concerned had managed to take their
complaint to Istanbul, or else in the kadı registers of a town where the illegally
enslaved person attempted to prove his or her free status.98 Presumably there
were many cases that never made it into the records, and many young people
so abducted never returned from their involuntary migrations.
Slavery was of particular importance in the Ottoman “Far West”, namely
in Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. While local society consisted of Arab or Berber
Muslim peasants, nomads and artisans, the “political class” typically came
from outside North Africa. Many, especially in Algiers, were soldiers recruited
in Anatolia, a further example – among many – of military mobility. Among
and Oxford, 1993), pp. 58–9, 92; Benjamin Arbel, ‘Nūr Bānū (c. 1530–1583): A Venetian Sultana?’
Turcica 24 (1992), 241–59; Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Saiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy’,
Turcica 32 (2000), 9–32 at p. 17.
97 Nicolas Vatin, ‘Une afaire interne: le sort et la libération de personnes de condition libre
illégalement retenues en esclavage’, Turcica 33 (2001), 149–90.
98 Ibid.; see also Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah, pp. 231–2.
389
the sea captains, we ind quite a few freebooters from Christian Europe,
Dutchmen and Englishmen among them. These elite igures commanded the
services of numerous slaves, both male and female, some taken while travel-
ling across the Mediterranean and others in the coastal regions of southern
Italy and Spain, particularly Mallorca, Minorca and the other islands of the
western Mediterranean. 99 The Habsburg kings of Spain never applied for the
“privileges” (ahidname) that the Ottoman sultans accorded to friendly rulers,
and in consequence inhabitants of Spain and the Spanish possessions in Italy
could be enslaved according to Islamic law. Some of the people enslaved in
North Africa ultimately returned home, their ransoms often paid through the
mediation of the Trinitarians and other religious orders that worked among
the captives and tried to dissuade them from accepting Islam and becoming
part of local society. On the other hand, quite a few captives did just that:
once they no longer had any hope of ransom or exchange, they converted to
Islam. While this move did not liberate them from slavery, it was often, as we
have seen, the irst step towards a later manumission and social integration.
Ottoman subjects also might be enslaved abroad, either because of cap-
ture in war or because they fell into the hands of the Maltese corsairs, whose
activities in many respects resembled those of their Algerian and Tunisian
counterparts. At the conclusion of peace, the Signoria of Venice typically sent
home all Ottoman captives taken in war unless the government considered a
particular personage as dangerous; in this case, the prisoner was quietly exe-
cuted. If they belonged to the governments of the Papal States and Genoa,
Muslim slaves typically rowed the galleys; if in private hands, they served in
the households of prominent people. Some former slaves of modest condi-
tion remained in Italy, although given the Counterreformation atmosphere
prevalent in the later 1500s, integration was on the whole more diicult than
in Muslim lands. But in the absence of much active help from the Ottoman
side where the ransoming of prisoners was concerned, many captives may
have had few alternatives.100
Migrations under duress: Sürgün and service to the sultans

Free civilians also were caught up in migrations ordered by the sultans, as the
latter claimed the right to settle their subjects in places of their own choosing
99 Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah.
100 Salvatore Bono, Schiavi musulmani nell’ Italia moderna, Galeotti, vu’ cumprà, domestici
(Naples, 1999); Pál Fodor, ‘Maltese Pirates, Ottoman Captives and French Traders in the
Early Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean’, in Dávid and Fodor, Ransom Slavery along the
Ottoman Borders, pp. 221–38 at pp. 227–33.
390
Ottoman population
(sürgün). Such settlers needed to leave their homes, often for remote places.
Sometimes the Ottoman rulers wished to populate a new conquest with “reli-
able” people who had been their subjects for generations, or else they planned
to remove the established aristocracies of newly conquered provinces from
those localities where the noblemen in question had relatives, adherents and
property. Thus, after the conquest of the Comnene principality of Trebizond/
Trabzon, Albanians were brought in from the Balkans, while certain aristo-
crats of Byzantine background were sent there.101 As we have seen, sürgün also
arrived in newly conquered Istanbul. Even in the later 1500s, when the sultans
no longer wished to attract population to their capital, upon occasion wealthy
provincials from Anatolia accused of usury were banished to Istanbul in order
to operate butchers’ shops. Given the low prices that butchers received for their
meat at that time, such service was sure to bankrupt the men involved.102
In other instances, people with special skills whom the court considered
desirable were sent to Istanbul as sürgün. When Selim I (r. 1512–20) briely
conquered Tabriz, he recruited a sizeable number of artists and artisans;
some of them or their descendants were still in the employ of the palace
in 932/1526.103 Other artists and artisans came to Istanbul from Cairo shortly
after the Ottoman conquest and at the end of the sixteenth century, when
Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–95) required certain well-known carpet weavers to
relocate to Istanbul.104
Towards the end of our period, the servitors of Selim II (r. 1566–74) once
again ordered people from Anatolia to leave their homes and settle in a distant
place, this time in Cyprus, newly conquered from the Venetians. There were
several reasons for a campaign of forced settlement. First of all, the island
had lost many of its previous inhabitants due to massive enslavement: a single
register detailing the captives taken in Nicosia/Lef koşe mentions over 13,700
people, largely women and children; the total population of Cyprus before
the Ottoman conquest amounted to about 165,000 persons.105 Presumably the
owners sold many of these captives in other provinces, particularly Syria and
Istanbul. Given a large quantity of unused land on the island, the settlement
of sürgün also aimed at supplying landless people with farms, thus making
them iscally productive.
101 Barkan, ‘Sürgünler’, inal section (vol. 15), pp. 219–22.

102 Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production
in an Urban Setting (Cambridge, 1984), p. 231.
103 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, ‘Osmanlı Sarayında Ehl-i Hiref (Sanatkârlar) Defteri’, Belgeler 11,
15 (1981–6), 23–76; Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 151–7.
104 Ahmet Rei k, On Altıncı Asırda İstanbul Hayatı (1553–1591) (Istanbul, 1934), p. 133.
105 Costantini, Il sultano e l’isola contesa, pp. 66 and 91.
391
However, just as in the case of the Istanbul butchers, forced settlement

in Cyprus also might function as a form of punishment. Local communi-
ties could choose the people to be resettled, and as a result quite a few men
considered undesirable in their home communities found themselves on the
sürgün lists. By contrast, people with connections at the sultan’s court some-
times managed to obtain exemptions; thus the chief architect Sinan, who
was at that time building his masterpiece, the Selimiye mosque complex in
Edirne, obtained a decree from his patron the sultan which exempted his rela-
tives in a village near Kayseri from forced relocation to Cyprus.
Many of the people drafted strongly resisted resettlement. A couple of
kadıs oiciating in the Black Sea region even made money out of the locals’
distress by falsely claiming to possess oicial orders for the transfer of virgin
girls to Cyprus as brides for local military men. The oicials concerned with
the case assumed that the errant kadıs had spread these lies so as to collect
the fee coming due when a judge registered a marriage. Some families appar-
ently believed these stories and hurriedly married of their daughters, even to
bridegrooms of much lower social status. Perhaps others paid the judges to
get their daughters exempted, although our text does not say so.106 Cyprus’s
initial character as a “penal colony” must have frightened of quite a few fam-
ilies, the prevalence of malaria and intermittent but serious locust invasions
acting as further deterrents.107 By no means all involuntary settlers remained
in place or even arrived at their destinations.108
Sürgün should have lived permanently in the places to which they had been
assigned, but in addition the government also decreed migrations that its oi-
cials intended to be temporary. Ottoman rulers demanded large numbers of
artisans both for military campaigns and for the great mosque-building proj-
ects that as organisational feats rather resembled warfare. When on campaign
the troops needed the services of shoemakers, blacksmiths, tailors and a host
of other artisans, for as a principle of Ottoman military policy command-
ers attempted to minimise the appearances of soldiers on their way to the
front in urban markets and shops, where they could easily become involved
in crimes and disputes. Typically the government counted on the cooperation
106 Ismet Binark et al. (eds.), 12 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri 978–979/1570–72, 3 vols. (Ankara,
1996), no. 705, transcription in vol. 1, p. 428.
107 Ronald Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World,
1571–1640 (New York, 1993), pp. 175–82, 188–91.
108 Barkan, ‘Sürgünler’; Şenol Çelik, ‘Türk Fethi sonrasında Kıbrıs Adasına Yönelik İskân
Çalışmaları’, in Kaf Dağ ının Ötesine Varmak: Festschrift in Honor of Günay Kut. Essays
Presented by Her Colleagues and Students, ed. Zehra Toska, Journal of Turkish Studies 27, 1–3
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), vol. 1, pp. 263–304.
392
Ottoman population
of local guilds; presumably the latter selected the artisans who were to serve
in person and collected the funds that these men would need before they
could set up shop in the army camp. In addition, guilds also must have dis-
bursed money to the families of absent artisans, or at least to those that could
not survive without the daily contribution of the breadwinner. However, the
details of these operations continue to escape us.109
When specialist artisans went to work for the sultans directly, we possess
a certain amount of information on their temporary migrations. Thus the
building of the Süleymaniye and the more modest construction sites that
produced pavilions in the sixteenth-century gardens of the sultans also occa-
sioned migrations. Sometimes the artisans drafted made their way to the cap-
ital on their own; particularly those men who were itinerant construction
workers by trade must have relied on private arrangements. But when the
administration felt that many of the draftees might escape, the latter were
sent to Istanbul under guard. Non-Muslims might have to surrender the
receipts for their cizye payment, for presumably they would not risk being
stopped and required to pay a second time. Once they arrived in the city, the
workmen may have found that they needed to serve but intermittently, so
that some of them might also work for private persons. But when the sultan’s
administration required workmen, even vezirs might have to stop their build-
ing projects. Yet if certain “temporary” workmen managed to establish links
to the private sector, some of them might settle in Istanbul on a permanent
basis, and in this roundabout fashion the tightly controlled building projects
of the central administration must have promoted a certain amount of vol-
untary migration.
Migrations in search of income, security and more

or less congenial regimes
In principle, Ottoman peasants were to stay in their villages, cultivate the soil
and pay their taxes unless the sultan sent them of as sürgün or they received
permission to leave from their local administrators. However, as so many sipa-
his and zaims were often absent on campaign, quite a few peasants took of
without asking for permission. If they settled in a town, the administrators
of timars, zeamets, hass or pious foundations might locate them and in the
court of the local kadı demand their return. But in the absence of surnames
109 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Du marché urbain au marché du camp: l’institution ottomane des orducu’’,
Mélanges Professeur Robert Mantran, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi (Zaghouan, 1988), pp. 299–327.
393
identiication was not always an easy task, and an ex-peasant might show wit-
nesses to the efect that he had lived in the city for so long that a statute of
limitations now applied.110 In some cases, the administrator might prefer to
collect an additional tax and let the migrant remain where he was.
In many cases, migration was necessary for survival, for under ifteenth-
and sixteenth-century conditions, mountainous regions and islands typically
did not produce enough to feed their populations.111 As a result, every spring
young men left these places in search of work; some returned in the autumn,
while others stayed away for several years or even their entire working lives.
At the end of the latter, certain migrants found their way back to their home
villages, but others stayed away for good, transferring their families to the
localities where they had found work. Some permanent migrants married
local women and rapidly became part of the society into which they had
entered.
For Ottoman migrations in search of work, we possess a relatively large
number of documents concerning the regions that today form Albania. In
addition to economic need, in this region socio-political factors stimulated
out-migration. In some cases, blood feuds in the home community induced
people to migrate. Moreover, in the mid-1400s already, before the con-
quest of Constantinople by the Ottomans and especially after the death of
Skanderbeg/George Kastriota and the collapse of his rebellion against the
rule of Mehmed the Conqueror (1468), entire communities migrated and
established Albanian-speaking villages in Sicily and southern Italy. In the lat-
ter region, much land had fallen vacant because of plague epidemics, and
therefore local feudatories were willing to accept the newcomers. Religious
diferences were not as yet an impediment to the migrants’ insertion into the
society of southern Italy, as the Albanian populations only accepted Islam in
the seventeenth century.112
Other Albanians of the 1400s and 1500s migrated to Venice, where many of
them found work in and around the port. In this city, commoners often came
together in religious cum charitable organisations known as scuole, and the
Albanians soon applied for permission to establish such an organisation. For
a while the Venetian authorities were of two minds; the Signoria wished to
integrate the migrants as soon as possible but had trouble deciding whether
they should be integrated as individuals or families or else as a group with a
110 Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen, p. 268.

111 Braudel, La Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 39–41.
112 Alain Ducellier et al., Les chemins de l’exil: Bouleversements de l’Est européen et migrations vers
l’Œst à la in du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1992), pp. 400–5.
394
Ottoman population
common linguistic and cultural background. As the Signoria inally preferred

this second alternative, the Albanians were allowed their scuola and although
much altered its building survives to the present day.113
In the sixteenth century, with the Albanian provinces irmly integrated
into the Ottoman Empire, some Albanians, with the sultan’s permission,
apparently became mercenaries in Venetian service.114 But most of them now
migrated to Istanbul. By the late 1500s, janissaries and other possessors of
gardens and vineyards near the Ottoman capital employed them to guard
the fruit prior to harvesting and probably also for less legitimate purposes.
After all, in this period it was common for janissaries to use strong-arm tac-
tics when setting themselves up in business, and as outsiders whose livelihood
depended on the goodwill of their employers, the immigrant guardsmen
must have been useful helpers whenever violence was at issue.
While Albanian migrations normally involved young men without spe-
cial privileges, other movements from – as yet – Byzantine territories to Italy
were often an elite afair. The Byzantine Empire had been steadily contracting
already in the fourteenth century, and but for Timur’s invasion and the fall of
Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) the Ottoman armies probably would have conquered
the city half a century earlier than they actually did. Realising that jobs under
the new dispensation might be limited and their social status much reduced,
some Byzantine scholars emigrated and found themselves jobs as teachers
in Italy. Italian cities were ready and sometimes even anxious to hire them,
as public servants now often needed a humanist education. In many cases,
that included some knowledge of classical Greek and familiarity with the
Byzantine textual tradition of ancient Greek writings that Italian educated
men now increasingly wished to read in the original. Certain igures of the
Byzantine nobility also emigrated or at least contemplated emigration. Thus
Lucas Notaras, killed on the orders of Mehmed the Conqueror shortly after
the conquest of Constantinople, previously had taken out citizenship in both
Venice and Genoa. Anna Notara, one of his female relatives, actually made
it to Venice, where her considerable fortune allowed her to sponsor artwork
and become one of the pillars of the local Orthodox Christian community.115
113 Ibid., pp. 143–220.

114 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Venetian Presence in the Ottoman Empire’, in The Ottoman Empire
and the World Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu İnan (Cambridge, reprint 1987), pp. 311–44 at pp.
321–2.
115 Deno John Geanakoplos, Byzantine East & Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle
Ages and Renaissance; Studies in Ecclesiastical and Cultural History (New York and Evanston,
Ill., 1966), pp. 112–24.
395
Migrations at the limits of empire: Border societies,

border-crossers
Migrations in border regions were a special case. In certain places where feudal
dues were heavy, Ottoman rule attracted Balkan peasants either because taxes
and labour services were lower on the Ottoman side or because service to
the sultans’ armies made it possible to supplement income from farming.
Especially in areas close to the Habsburg–Ottoman frontier in Hungary,
where a condominium of Hungarian lords and Ottoman timar-holders estab-
lished itself, peasants had to pay dues to both sides.116 Apparently the sultans’
administrators accepted this arrangement because these lords, though resid-
ing in Habsburg territory, sent their servitors to hold court in the villages,
and thus the Ottoman side could minimise administrative overhead in areas
where there were few if any Muslims. But of course the peasants had an
incentive to abandon regions of double taxation and, given the prevalence of
serfdom in Hungary, some of them probably moved to Ottoman territories
farther away from the frontier. However, we cannot say very much about the
number and identity of these fugitives.
Young men in search of a better life crossed not only the land frontiers but
also the Adriatic and western Mediterranean, which separated France and the
principalities comprising modern Italy from the sultans’ lands. Most migrants
must have come to the Ottoman territories as captives, but voluntary arrivals
were also in evidence, for in North Africa or Istanbul barriers to upward mobil-
ity were not as high as in the estate societies of early modern Europe, where
the ascent to prominence – if successful – normally took several generations.117
Discontent with Spanish rule also might induce people from southern Italy, for
instance, to defect to the Ottoman side. Thus one of the companions of the
political author and philosopher Tommaso Campanella in his failed rebellion
against Spanish domination actually sought refuge in Istanbul.118 Mi faccio turco
(I will “turn Turk”, in other words become a Muslim) was sometimes simply
an expression of annoyance, but in certain cases the speaker followed up on his
intent, and we even ind quite a few Italian friars and priests who emigrated to
the Ottoman realm and became Muslims.119
116 Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, ‘Hungarian Studıes in Ottoman History’, in The Ottomans and
the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography, ed. Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden,
2002), pp. 305–49 at p. 320.
117 Bennassar and Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah, pp. 437–93.
118 Jean Delumeau, Le mystère Campanella (Paris, 2008), p. 111.
119 Salzmann, ‘A Travelogue Manqué?’, pp. 149–72.
396
Ottoman population
Joining the sultan’s border guards was a further option for young men
seeking a life of mobility. In this case, it was not even necessary to become a
Muslim, as one ighting unit, known as the martolos, consisted of Christians.120
Such irregular soldiers received no or minimal pay and served in the hope of
booty. Prisoners’ ransoms typically involved large sums of money, especially
if the irregulars had managed to capture oicers of some prominence, and
cattle-rustling was a supplementary source of income.121 Requiring constant
movement, life as an irregular soldier on the border may have attracted young
men who had no liking for the sedentary life of a Balkan peasant.
In addition to irregulars, janissaries also organised raiding parties, taking
captives north of the Danube in Walachia, which was an Ottoman subject
territory. In times of war, the local princes sometimes made their subjects
into fair game for Ottoman raiders because they had formed alliances with
enemies of the sultan. But after the conclusion of peace these princes once
again paid tribute to the Ottoman ruler, and there remained no legal basis for
the enslavement of their subjects. Raiding, however, was ubiquitous in border
areas and continued, albeit on a lower level, even in times of peace.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the inaccessible fortress of Senj
on the Adriatic coast (in Ottoman, Seng; in Italian, Segna) was home to a
border society of raiders under the sponsorship of a Habsburg archduke.122
Supposedly the Uskoks, as they called themselves, were refugees from
Ottoman rule, but quite a few of them really had started life as subjects of
Venice or even the Habsburgs. These border raiders legitimised their aggres-
sions against Venetian and Ottoman ships alike by claiming that they would
attack anybody who traded with “the enemy” (in other words, the Ottoman
sultan) or accepted his protection. Even if they were Christians, such people
supposedly deserved their fate because they contravened the tenets of their
faith.
Kidnapping people was part of Uskok piracy, but the migration they
caused was often temporary, as they typically held prisoners for ransom or
else exchanged them. Only those captives from the Ottoman world who were
unlucky enough to be sold might live out their lives as galley slaves in the ser-
vice of Christian powers and thus form yet another category of involuntary
migrants. Finally, just after the end of the period discussed here, another bout
120 Robert Anhegger, ‘Martoloslar hakkında’, Türkiyat Mecmuası 7–8, 1(1940–2), 282–320.
121 Dávid and Fodor, Ransom Slavery, pp. xiii–xxii.
122 Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the
Sixteenth-Century Adriatic (Ithaca, N.Y. and London, 1992), pp. 52, 101–2, 175–236.
397
of migration ended the life of the pirate community. Under strong pressure
from Istanbul to ensure the protection of Ottoman merchants in the Adriatic,
the Republic of Venice in 1615–17 waged war against the archduke, who had
been patronising the Uskoks. This confrontation ended with the Habsburgs
removing the pirates from Senj and resettling them in inland frontier zones.
Other border-dwellers that raided Ottoman territory and thus pro-
voked the l ight of “regular” peasants and townsmen were the Cossacks,
whose number included disafected gentlemen from the Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth and also ex-peasants leeing serfdom.123 Cossacks lived in
the regions to the north of the Black Sea, where they worked at ishing
and animal husbandry, which they supplemented by piracy. Quite often the
Cossacks attacked the towns of the Anatolian seaboard; if captured, they
were enslaved, and must have accounted for many of the so-called Rus that
served the well-to-do inhabitants of sixteenth-century Bursa.124 However,
Cossack raids peaked in the early seventeenth century, shortly after the end
of the period treated here.
Nomads and settled populations

Nomads were another example of people permanently on the move whose
motivations had little to do with the political concerns of the Ottoman admin-
istration. By the sixteenth century, the central government therefore looked
upon nomads with misgivings and showed a decided preference for settled
folk. Yet, in early Ottoman history, several sultans and their principal servitors
may well have had close connections to the nomad world; certain scholars
have even hypothesised the existence of an Ottoman tribe.125 But because so
few documents survive from the 1300s and almost all chroniclers recording
the deeds of the sultans wrote their works much later, namely in the late if-
teenth and early sixteenth centuries, solid information on this topic is impos-
sible to obtain.
For the thirteenth century, we have some evidence of nomad immigration
into the Balkans from Anatolia. In the following period, this type of immi-
gration continued, as is apparent from the icmals of around 1530 that we have
123 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated

Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden, 2000), p. 129; Linda Gordon, Cossack
Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine (Albany, N.Y., 1983), pp. 42–3.
124 Sahillioğlu, ‘Slaves’.
125 Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (Bloomington, Ind., 1983),
pp. 33–5.
398
Ottoman population
already encountered. In those regions that today form eastern Bulgaria, pop-
ulation was sparse and a large share consisted of so-called yürük, nomads who
owed services to the Ottoman army.126 In the ifteenth century, yürük often
served in the military. In a manner that we can no longer re-construct, they
had lost their tribal structures at an early date, or at least the recording oi-
cials claimed that they had done so. Instead these nomads formed groups
known as ocaks. A certain number of men fought in the sultan’s army, while
those ocak members not on active service were responsible for supplying their
fellow members while on campaign. To ensure that yürük services remained
available to the government, oicials discouraged these people from settle-
ment, and thus their treatment was diametrically opposed to that of other
nomads.127
In terms of Ottoman administrative thinking, the Balkan yürük formed a
category intermediate between the tax-paying population and the tax-collect-
ing members of the army and administration. This privileged status applied
even though some nomads had come to the Balkans not of their own volition
but had been forcibly settled (sürgün). However, in the sixteenth century, the
government gradually phased out the military activity of the yürük, but these
nomads still performed guard duty near Balkan mines and transported goods
demanded by the Ottoman administration.
Another group of nomads with a special status were the Tatars, who for
the most part lived in the Crimea and the grasslands to the north of the Black
Sea but also had immigrated into present-day Bulgaria at a fairly early time.128
The Crimean Tatars were ruled by their own princely dynasty, the Giray, who
claimed descent from Djingis Khan. Certain nomad confederacies, such as
the Nogay, were subject to the hans in theory but in practice did not always
obey them. As we have seen, in dependent principalities the Ottoman sultans
did not order taxpayers to be counted. We therefore only possess information
on the numbers and tax categories of the people inhabiting the province of
Kefe/Cafa/Feodosia, which the Ottomans established in order to maintain
a modicum of control over the activities of the Tatars.129 The centre of this
province was the town of the same name, which in 1520 and 1542 held a pop-
ulation of over 16,000 taxpayers, although it is not clear how many men were
actual household heads.
126 Tayyip Gökbilgin, Rumeli’de Yürükler, Tatarlar ve Evlâd-ı Fâtihan (Istanbul, 1957), pp. 29–38.
127 Ibid., p. 49.
128 Stéphane Yérasimos, ‘Les déportés et leur statut dans l’Empire ottoman (XVe–XVIe siè-
cles)’, pp. 520–1.
129 Yücel Öztürk, Osmanlı Hakimiyetinde Kefe, 1475–1600 (Ankara, 2000), p. 232.
399
From the Ottoman viewpoint, the Tatars were valuable auxiliaries in

Balkan campaigns and sometimes also in the sultans’ wars against Iran.130
Once again, the Tatars’ principal asset was their mobility. Kept outside of
the regular ield army, they usually formed the avant-garde, whose job it was
to disorganise the enemy by raiding the civilian population, setting ire to
towns and villages and carrying of large numbers of prisoners. Slave-hunting
was not limited to wartime but occurred even in periods of peace. On the
long and ill-deined borders with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and
the tsars of Russia, taking captives was an important source of livelihood in
addition to stock-breeding. Upon occasion the customs records of Anatolian
Black Sea towns such as Samsun have survived, and these record the prison-
ers introduced into the Ottoman realm on their way to the slave markets of
Istanbul and beyond.131
When attempting to study the nomad population, researchers encounter
challenges similar to those which once faced Ottoman scribes, for nomads and
their animals were very hard to count. Oicials typically recorded these people
in small units called cemaat, a catch-all phrase that could be used also for reli-
gious or non-nomadic ethnic groups and even for people sharing certain legal
disabilities, such as sharecropper slaves settled on the land. Perhaps the larger
tribal units that had existed in the pre-Ottoman period, known as boy, were no
longer of much practical importance in the 1500s or the administration had
its own reasons for ignoring them.132 Sometimes registers recorded only the
nomad populations of a given area; in other instances, we ind them inter-
spersed with the village population, as they must also have been in real life.
Probably the sixteenth-century population expansion forced certain nomads
to settle, and the tahrirs relect this process when cemaats of an earlier period
appear in more recent registers as ordinary villages. However, it is hard to say
which nomads had genuinely settled down and which ones merely featured
as peasants for the convenience of the inancial administration; after all, vil-
lagers owed a slew of taxes from which nomads were exempt. Moreover, in
Anatolia, where rainfall agriculture is – in a pinch – possible everywhere, the
transition from nomadism to village life and back again if necessary was not
too diicult to achieve.133
130 Carl Max Kortepeter, Ottoman Imperialism during the Reformation: Europe and the Caucasus
(London and New York, 1972), p. 57.
131 Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen, pp. 89–90.
132 Faruk Sümer, Oğuzlar, (Türkmenler), Tarihleri – Boy Teşkilâtı – Destanları, 3rd ed. (Istanbul,
1980).
133 Xavier de Planhol, De la plaine pamphylienne aux lacs pisidiens: nomadisme et vie paysanne
(Paris, 1958), pp. 115–18.
400
Ottoman population
Many peasants also possessed some sheep, and the tahrirs quite often
recorded the right of certain villages to uninhabited or sparsely inhabited
grazing lands (mera). In addition, many Anatolian peasants visited summer
pastures (yayla) usually located some distance away from the main settle-
ment, where they grazed their sheep. Some of these lands belonged to a
given locality, reserved for the exclusive use of its inhabitants, while in other
cases several villages frequented the same pasture. Or else nomads and settled
folk might take turns using the same yayla. Furthermore, in certain parts of
the Mediterranean and Aegean coastlands of Anatolia, migration was univer-
sal for reasons that had nothing to do with grazing and livestock; many sites,
including the Büyük and Küçük Menderes valleys, were abandoned by every-
body with the means to do so during the malarial summer season. Pirate
attacks further compounded the dangers of spending time on the coastal
plains in summer. All these activities meant that even settled peasants or
townsmen did not necessarily “stay put” throughout the year, and therefore
their lifestyles had some ainity to those of the nomads.
On the other hand, in certain regions, such as for instance the Çukurova,
nomads cultivated ields that they harvested upon returning from their high-
land pastures in the autumn. Such an arrangement was of course only possi-
ble if the tribal units in question frequented the same sites year after year.134
The capsules of the cotton cultivated at that time did not open when ripe, and
the risk of spoilage therefore was much reduced even if the owners could not
immediately harvest their crop. As a result, some nomads grew cotton, and
“part-time” agriculture could even transcend immediate subsistence needs;
people legally classed as cemaats thus drew part of their sustenance as cul-
tivators. Quite possibly the oicials preparing the tahrirs, who after all were
largely strangers to the region they covered, really had trouble categorising
some of these groups as either peasants or nomads. Yet wherever the sultan’s
servants might take their registers, they were sure to encounter migration as
an important feature of local society.
In conclusion
The Ottoman lands of the early 1500s were not densely inhabited, although
by the century’s end population increase had been large enough to generate a
number of major cities and a coherent urban network. Apparently, Mehmed
134 Mustafa Soysal, Die Siedlungs- und Landschaftsentwicklung der Çukurova, Mit besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Yüregir-Ebene (Erlangen, 1976).
401
the Conqueror, as well as his immediate predecessors and successors, coped

with the relative rarity of human beings by adopting forced settlement as a
favoured means of stabilising their rule.
If the impression that we gain from the early tax registers is more or less
correct, these population transfers were on the whole successful, while the
Cyprus settlement project of the 1570s and afterwards was something of a
failure. Perhaps the stabilisation of Ottoman rule had allowed a genuine peas-
ant society to develop in Anatolia, and these villagers were less inclined than
the nomads and semi-nomads of an earlier age to pack up and go. Economic
opportunity may also have played a role. Earlier transfers quite often brought
sürgün to Istanbul, and the possibilities of making a decent living in or near
the capital of the expanding Ottoman Empire were probably greater than
those available in Cyprus, an island whose long-term economic crisis presum-
ably was well known to the deportees.135 Last but not least, the mercenary
rebellions and long wars against the Habsburgs and Safavids may have made
it diicult for the Ottoman administration to supervise the recently arrived
Cyprus sürgün, and many of the unwilling migrants must have seized the
opportunity to get away.
At the same time, the Ottoman administration expected its non-sürgün pop-
ulation to stay put, and the administrators of timars, zeamets, hass and pious
foundations could track down escapees and get the kadıs’ courts to order
these migrants to return. But in this case as well, there was a signiicant gap
between declared aims and practical life. Migrating peasants were often dii-
cult to track down, especially if they had joined the sultans’ armies. But even
those who had simply moved to mountainous areas were not so easy to ind
for both tax collectors and marauding soldiers, and the protection aforded by
an inaccessible site, relative though it may have been, allowed these people to
continue as peasants. If we take into account that nomads were even harder
to supervise than people who tilled the soil, we will not over-estimate the
control that the Ottoman administration, in spite of all the rules and regula-
tions that it emitted, was able to exercise over the local population.
Control was easier when slaves were involved, and apparently a sizeable
number of the inhabitants of both Bursa and Istanbul in the 1400s and early
1500s were recent converts and many of them even former slaves. If the
impression conveyed by our primary and secondary sources is reasonably
accurate, then in the case of these two cities at least we should diferentiate
between the post-conquest situation, when there was an enormous inl ux of
135 Costantini, Il sultano e l’isola contesa, pp. 138–9.
402
Ottoman population
captives ultimately Islamised and acculturated, and the urban population of

the late 1500s, where the local element was of much greater signiicance. But
while the diference was important, we should not exaggerate. To the great
displeasure of the authorities, Istanbul continued as a magnet for migrants,
during the sixteenth century and later on as well. And given the plagues and
other risks inherent in life in a great pre-industrial city, without substantial
immigration Istanbul could not have become the premier city of the six-
teenth-century Mediterranean and continue to play this role for a long time
after the end of our period.
403
part iii
*
CULT URE AND THE A RTS

12
The order of knowledge, the knowledge
of order: Intellectual life
Gottfrie d Hagen
In a list of the “diseases of the soul”, the philosopher Kınalızade Ali (d. 1572)
lists, together with all other vices, two kinds of ignorance: simple ignorance
(cehl-i basit), which is ignorance aware of its ignorance, and complex igno-
rance (cehl-i mürekkeb). Since cognizance of ignorance is the beginning of
every quest for knowledge, simple ignorance is not even reprehensible ini-
tially. It can be healed by recognising the unique position of human beings
among all animals, distinct through the gift of speech – and thus capable of
preserving and transmitting knowledge. The other kind of ignorance, how-
ever, is not even to be cured by Jesus, who can heal the deaf and the blind.
When encountering such a person, the only cure a wise man may undertake
is to teach him mathematics, so as to awaken in him the desire for deinite
proof, and then lead him on to other knowledge to which he will apply him-
self with the same desire.1
This passage demonstrates the value that sixteenth-century Ottoman soci-
ety placed on knowledge, also hinting at the way in which people acquire it
and alluding to the instrumental relations between diferent kinds of knowl-
edge. After scattered and heterogeneous beginnings in the pre-imperial
period, between the conquest of Constantinople and the late 1500s, a new,
coherent system of knowledge production and dissemination came into being
in the Ottoman Empire. Around 1600, towards the end of the period under
consideration, we encounter a well-established canon of knowledge which
has fully appropriated the classical Islamic tradition and expanded on it. This
Ottoman canon of knowledge fully deserves to be called classical in itself, as it
has attained systematic organisation and internal ordering while at the same
time imposing order onto its subject matter. Just as Ottoman religious archi-
tecture moves from the loosely grouped zaviye-mosque arrangement to the
1 Ali Çelebi Kınalızade, Ahlâk-ı Alâî, ed. Mustafa Koç (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 176–9.
407
Gott fr ie d h age n
rigidly structured and ordered imperial mosque embodied in the layout of

the Istanbul mosques of Mehmed the Conqueror and Süleyman I, Ottoman
intellectual life gains breadth and splendour as well as regularity and order.2
In this chapter, we will attempt to summarise the more salient aspects of this
canon of knowledge.
Sociologically, the system of knowledge and knowledge production to be
studied here is centred upon the Ottoman imperial household and the house-
holds of the governing elite, together with the upper echelons of the learned
class (ilmiye). Yet Ottoman historians have a tendency to overemphasise the
dynasty and its household, denoted as the “Ottoman state”, despite the limits
of the latter’s reach and its absence from so many spheres of life. However,
the background, distribution and preservation of the written sources that
document the ideas we seek to study almost inevitably lead to a compara-
ble imbalance, for knowledge that was not “oicially sanctioned” had little
chance of survival. As a result, historians often assume that social status more
than anything else pre-determines the outlook and world view expressed in
the surviving texts. Yet this bias is highly problematic. Instead, intellectual
traditions have their own dynamics, and the links between intellectual life
and political ideologies in the pre-modern age are far more ambiguous than
state-focused historians are ready to admit.
Obviously, the Ottoman system of knowledge accessible to us is only one
of the multiple cultural sub-systems existing within the empire, and an appro-
priate representation of Ottoman intellectual history would have to address
the ideas of numerous groups difering in social status, language, ethnicity,
religion or place.3 Nor will we claim that such sub-systems existed separately
from each other – in fact, multiple interactions must have been the norm.
Simply and pragmatically, the availability of sources and the linguistic and
cultural expertise of the author dictate the focus of the current chapter; he
has not been able to examine texts in Greek, Armenian or Slavic languages.
Similarly, the geographical focus will largely be on Istanbul, which in the
period under consideration developed from a peripheral position in relation
to the great centres of Islamic learning in Syria, Egypt and Central Asia to a
centre of gravity in its own realm.
2 Howard Crane, ‘The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques: Icons of Imperial Legitimacy’, in The
Ottoman City and Its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order, ed. Irene Bierman, Donald Preziosi,
and Rifa’at A. Abou-el-Haj (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1991), pp. 173–227; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘The
Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: An Interpretation’, Muqarnas 3 (1985), 92–117.
3 Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London,
2000), pp. 7f.
408
The order of knowledge, the knowledge of order
Systematising knowledge
In contrast to historian Aşıkpaşazade’s romanticised picture of an illiterate
Osman I, the “classical period” boasted an abundance of written sources,
as the Ottoman elite systematically collected books and greatly appreciated
the most handsome exemplars. The library of Mehmed II, with its texts in
Christian and Islamic languages, has attracted much attention. But the pal-
ace was not the only collector of books. After the scholar Müeyyedzade died
in 1516, his heirs dispersed his 7,000-volume library, but Selim I ordered its
restitution, documented in a list in the palace archive. After conquering the
Mamluk Empire, Ottoman soldiers and scholars also brought signiicant
numbers of books from Cairo to Istanbul.4 Yet already in 1502, Bayezid II had
had an independent and systematic catalogue of the palace library prepared,
which ran to 340 folios and included 7,200 titles in 5,700 volumes.5 The regis-
ter of Istanbul’s mid-sixteenth-century pious foundations (vakıf s) explored by
Ismail Erünsal shows numerous libraries available to the students of Islamic
colleges (medreses) and others.
Taşköprüzade Ahmed (d. 1561), a famous Ottoman legal scholar, wrote his
bibliographic encyclopaedia Miftah al-saʿada wa misbah al-siyada in Arabic. It
is the most visible expression of the Istanbul elite’s desire to cope with this
new wealth of circulating knowledge by ordering and regulating it, canonis-
ing some parts and excluding others. The introduction contains a system-
atic discussion of the ethics and virtues of learning, and the relationships of
teachers and students in the process of instruction. As both Taşköprüzade
and his son Kemalüddin Mehmed (d. 1621), who produced an enlarged ver-
sion of his father’s work in Turkish under the title Mevzuatu’l-Ulum, were
part of the Ottoman ilmiye, these texts function as a kind of code of conduct
for people within the Ottoman medrese system. During this period, the latter
came into its own, with master–student relationships inspired at least in part
by the strict hierarchy between şeyh and disciple in the budding Ottoman der-
vish orders. The main part of this work, however, provides a systematisation
of the sciences that far exceeds the specialised curriculum of the medrese. In
a very philosophical way, Taşköprüzade created his own categories, difering
4 İsmail E. Erünsal, Osmanlı Vakıf Kütüphaneleri: Tarihî Gelişimi ve Organizasyonu, Türk Tarih
Kurumu Yayınları. VII dizi (Ankara, 2008), p. 128; Barbara Flemming, ‘Literary Activities in
Mamluk Halls and Barracks’, in Studies in Memory of Gaston Wiet, ed. Myriam Rosen-Ayalon
( Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 249–60.
5 Erünsal, Osmanlı Vakıf Kütüphaneleri, pp. 460–5.
409
from his medieval predecessors and drawing on Aristotelian concepts as for-

mulated by Avicenna:6
Know that all things exist at four [diferent]levels: in writing [kitaba], in verbal expres-
sion [ʿibara], in the mind [ad ẖ an], and in substance [aʿyan, rendering the Greek ousia].
The former ones are always means to the latter ones, as writing points to the words,
those in turn to what is in the mind, and that points to what exists in substance. It
is obvious that existence in substance is the real, original existence, and regarding
existence in the mind there is disagreement if it is real or symbolic [majazi], and the
irst two are deinitely symbolic. Then, the irst three are certainly instrumental. The
sciences relating to the substances are either practical [ʿamali], meaning that they
aim to attain something other than themselves, or theoretical [nazari], meaning that
they aim to attain themselves. In both of those, disputation is either based on the law,
these are the legal sciences, or according to the requirement of reason, this is philos-
ophy [al-ʿilm al-hikami]. These are the seven principles.7
Subsequently, Taşköprüzade divides his encyclopaedia into seven parts, the

irst three of which bear a certain resemblance to the trivium of medieval
Western learning: (1) the sciences related to writing, such as calligraphy; (2)
the sciences related to the word, such as grammar and poetry; and (3) the
sciences of the mind, especially logic. However, the next group combined
the remaining liberal arts with the next level, namely the law: (4) the natural
and occult sciences, including mathematics and medicine; (5) practical philos-
ophy; and (6) the legal sciences. These irst six parts are separated from the
seventh and last section, which deals with the puriication of the soul and spir-
itual knowledge in the broadest sense. A separate introduction makes it clear
that this last section is the ultimate goal of learning, the stripping away of the
worldly concerns to which other sciences ofer the key. Every chapter consists
of numerous sub-chapters, each of which is dedicated to a speciic science.
The irst ive parts are much shorter than the last two; they all briely discuss
the main concerns of the science under consideration, and this is followed
by a list of essential books written on the relevant topics. Thus the work is
a bibliography as much as an encyclopaedia. In the last section, however, the
author’s desire to present a rigid, authoritative summary of the ield entirely
eclipses the bibliographic concern.
Aside from the obvious Sui background, Taşköprüzade’s categorisation
stands for the claim of the ilmiye not to teach everything but to control all
6 See S. van den Bergh, art. ‘ʿayn’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al.
(Leiden, 1960–2006), vol. 1, pp. 784–5.
7 Ahmed b. Mustafa Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, 3 vols. (Cairo, 1968),
vol. 1, p. 74.
410
realms of knowledge. Certain sciences are only permissible to certain degrees,

while others are considered inherently forbidden according to religious law;
in this matter the author agreed with his colleague Birgivi Mehmed b. Pir Ali
(d. 1573), a famous and controversial legal scholar, and also with the author
of yet another contemporary encyclopaedia, the Netaʾicü’l-fünun by Nevʿi.8
In the perspective of these authors, knowledge ultimately is appreciated only
in written form and is validated by scholarly authority, leaving only limited
means of access to the canon for the non-academic. These writers also remind
their readers that any kind of knowledge was subject to judgment sub specie
aeternitatis; that is, people should value it according to its potential contribu-
tion to their future salvation. This holds true even for the ields which are not
per se religious and typically did not feature in the medrese curriculum.
A survey of Ottoman intellectual history in all its intertwined strands of
theology, philosophy, law, natural sciences, medicine, history and political
thought is beyond the scope of this chapter. Ottoman multi-lingual schol-
arship has long been a serious obstacle for modern researchers.9 Moreover,
modern Western and Turkish biases have resulted in selective and hetero-
geneous approaches to the history of Ottoman knowledge and knowledge
production, so that historians only recently have begun to relect on the phil-
osophical and epistemological interconnectedness of the diferent sub-ields.
According to some authors, however, it is exactly this epistemological unity
focused on the understanding of existence and the divine, and on a common
language to express ideas, that is most characteristic of philosophical and sci-
entiic thought during the Seljuk and Ottoman periods.10
In the broadest sense, the ideas we will study here emerge from the human
encounter with the physical world and the desire to understand its inner
workings; from the experience of living in society, and in particular of social
orders based on inequality; from the realisation of space and place; and from
the exposure to time experienced in multiple linear or cyclical ways by indi-
viduals and collectives. Broadly speaking, we might summarise these themes
8 Jan Schmidt, ‘The Occult Sciences and Their Importance in Ottoman Culture’, Osmanlı
Araştırmaları 23 (2004), 219–54 at p. 220; Bernd Radtke, ‘Birgivīs Ṭarīqa Muḥammadīya. Einige
Bemerkungen und Überlegungen’, Journal of Turkish Studies 26, 2 (2002), 159–74.
9 İhsan Fazlıoğlu, ‘Osmanlı Döneminde “Bilim” Alanındaki Türkçe Telif ve Tercüme Eserlerin
Türkçe Oluşu Nedenleri ve Bu Eserlerin Dil Bilincinin Oluşmasındaki Yeri ve Önemi’,
Kutadgubilig: Felsefe-Bilim Araştırmaları 3 (2003), 151–84 at p. 175; Gottfried Hagen, ‘Arabic in
the Ottoman Empire’, in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed. Kees Versteegh
(Leiden, 2005), pp. 501–5.
10 İhsan Fazlıoğlu, ‘Türk Felsefe-Bilim Tarihinin Seyir Defteri (Bir Ön Söz)’, in Dünden Bugüne
Osmanlı Araştırmaları: Tespitler, Problemler, Tekliler, ed. Ali Akyıldız, Ş. Tufan Buzpınar and
Mustafa Sinanoğlu (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 159–95 at p. 175.
411
under the headings of “history”, “science” and “geography” if those modern

terms did not imply a particular interest and epistemology shaped by aca-
demic discourses, which potentially suppress or obfuscate the speciic way
in which a pre-modern or early modern society explores its world, with the
desire to ind a transcendent meaning in it. While religious practices and doc-
trine remain outside the purview of this chapter, religion as an interpretive
system ordering and validating human experience will be at the very centre
of our analysis.
Cosmography as encyclopaedia
In conformity with the spirit of the period, the study of the physical world also
generated its own encyclopaedias, which were meant to be comprehensive and
accessible compendia of essential knowledge. One of them became known in
the Islamic world as ʿAjaʾib al-makhluqat, in Turkish sometimes simpliied to
ʿAcaʾibname. Modern scholars have come to call this genre cosmography, as in
it the representation of the universe and the earth occupy a prominent place.
We will continue to use this term for the sake of convenience.
In this ield, Zakariya al-Qazwini’s (d. 1283) two-part work ʿAja’ib al-makhluqat
and Athar al-bilad occupies a central place, the irst volume being dedicated to
the natural world and the second to human geography. Al-Qazwini’s works
found many readers in the Ottoman lands, together with the even more pop-
ular Kharidat al-ʿajaʾib, written around 1419 and erroneously attributed to Ibn
al-Wardi, and a number of others.11 Taşköprüzade was particularly interested
in the edifying aspect of these works, which combine exact observation of
natural history with a selection of geographical mirabilia under the guiding
principle of acknowledging God the Creator’s omnipotence by contemplat-
ing phenomena of the visible world.12 In his heuristic approach, the author
juxtaposes strict rationalism based on ancient Greek traditions of science
with so-called Islamic cosmology, which draws on religious authorities such
as the Qur’an and hadith in addressing natural phenomena such as rainbows,
thunderstorms, or tides. Anton Heinen has identiied the terms tafakkur and
tadhakkur, contemplation and recall, as the two complementary principles
11 Rudolf Sellheim, Materialien zur arabischen Literaturgeschichte, vol. 1: Verzeichnis der orientalis-
chen Handschriften in Deutschland (Wiesbaden, 1976), pp. 176–86.
12 Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, vol. 1, p. 385; Syrinx von Hees, Enzyklopädie
als Spiegel des Weltbildes. Qazwinis Wunder der Schöpfung – eine Naturkunde des 13. Jahrhunderts
(Wiesbaden, 2002); Syrinx von Hees, ‘Al-Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt: An Encyclopaedia of
Natural History?’ in Organizing Knowledge: Encyclopedic Activities in the Pre-Eighteenth Century
Islamic World, ed. Gerhard Endress (Leiden, 2006), pp. 171–86.
412
of producing knowledge about the physical world.13 Al-Qazwini’s redactors

and successors often shifted their focus between these diferent approaches.
In particular, Kharidat al-ʿajaʾib largely abandoned the critical observation
advocated by al-Qazwini in favour of all kinds of pious legends, making his
work extremely popular among the Ottomans, including Taşköprüzade and
the historian Mustafa Ali, who based much of the geographical introduction
to his world chronicle on this source.14
Beginning in the late 1300s, certain Ottomans not only read and studied
these classics in Arabic and Persian but also produced translations, usually
more or less liberal adaptations of one of the works discussed here. Even in
the late seventeenth century, the Qazwini translation begun by Süruri when
he was tutor to Prince Mustafa, the son of Süleyman the Magniicent, was
regarded as worthy of completion.15
In the reign of Mehmed II, the prominent dervish and scholar Yazıcıoğlu
Ahmed Bican, known as an early translator of al-Qazwini, has used the frame-
work of a cosmography to impart to his followers essential knowledge about
the creation, the cosmos and especially the imminent end of time. Dürr-i
Meknun is ultimately a didactical work, teaching the purpose of creation and
the transience of this world. But the author also has included a chapter on the
places destroyed by God’s wrath, all with the purpose of inculcating moral
behaviour, complaints about the corruption of the age being a topos in other
texts of the period as well.16
Around 1600, on the other hand, Mehmed Aşık’s (d. 1596) Menazıru’l-avalim
led his readers in exactly the opposite direction. Menazıru’l-avalim was typ-
ical for the period also because of its combination of scholarly authority
with literary ambition. The author obviously made a living in the retinue of
Ottoman dignitaries, being charged with occasional administrative jobs, but
his main social capital was his erudition in conjunction with his experiences
during his travels. A report on his captivity in the Caucasus and daring escape
13 Anton M. Heinen, Islamic Cosmology: A Study of as-Suyūṭīʾs al-Hayʾa as-sanīya fī l-hayʾa

as-sunnīya, with Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Beirut and Wiesbaden, 1982);
Anton M. Heinen, ‘Tafakkur and Muslim Science’, Journal of Turkish Studies 18 (1994),
103–10.
14 Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, vol. 1, p. 385; Jan Schmidt, Pure Water for
Thirsty Muslims: A Study of Muṣṭafā ʻĀlī of Gallipoli’s Künhü l-aḫbār (Leiden, 1991), p. 29.
15 Feray Coşkun, ‘A Medieval Islamic Cosmography in an Ottoman Context: A Study of
Mahmud el-Hatib’s Translation of the Kharidat al-ʿAjaʾib’, unpublished M.A. thesis, Boğaziçi
University (2007); Günay Kut, ‘Türk Edebiyatında Acâibü’ l-mahlükât Tercümeleri Üzerine’,
in Beşinci Milletlerarası Türkoloji Kongresi Bildiriler (Istanbul, 1985), pp. 183–93.
16 Ahmet Bican Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’, in Dürr-i Meknûn: Kritische Edition mit Kommentar,
ed. Laban Kaptein (Asch, 2007), chap. 12.
413
apparently started him on his career as boon companion and early prede-
cessor of the famous travel writer Evliya Çelebi, who incidentally did not
hesitate to plagiarise the work of Mehmed Aşık. We can use this work, qua
culmination and conclusion of a genre, as an example of the Ottoman trend
to organise, structure and classify knowledge, and this work can also serve
as a guide to the realms of knowledge, canonised and un-canonised, of the
period under study.
The irst concern of a cosmographer is to establish the structure of the uni-
verse. Ottomans were familiar with diferent cosmologies, especially those
from diverse Sui traditions.17 Often we ind the two most important ones
explicated side by side, although they appear, to the modern mind, as mutu-
ally exclusive. The scriptural authorities of Islamic cosmology provide the
core for a creation narrative which relates a highly symbolic order with God’s
throne and footstool at the top and seven layered heavens mirroring seven
degrees of inferno. Angels, devils and demons populate this universe, and
cosmographers discuss in some detail the characteristics and hierarchies of
these beings. An angel standing on the back of a bull, which in turn stood on
a giant ish emerging from the world ocean, held the entire structure of the
cosmos in place.18
On the one hand, we ind this image of the world in rather “popular” (i.e.
non-scholarly) works, such as the widely read catechism known as Book of
Forty Questions, whose irst few queries deal mainly with creation and the
structure of the cosmos.19 On the other hand, this “popular” religiosity was
obviously not connected to a speciic class or level of education, for scholars,
too, appreciated it for its symbolic signiicance, so that most people regarded
it as all but indisputable. The spheres of the four elements separated these
“upper worlds” (avalim-i ulviyye) from the “lower world” (alem-i suli), mean-
ing the physical cosmos accessible to human senses. Here again, cosmogra-
phers disagreed about its structure: Mehmed Aşık reported opinions that the
earth was lat, and in cosmographies we frequently ind maps showing a circu-
lar earth surrounded by the world ocean (bahr-i muhit), which in turn was sur-
rounded by the Mountain of Qaf, near which the authors sometimes placed
the fountain of the “Water of Life” mentioned in the Qur’an.20 For practical
17 Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Military, Administrative, and Scholarly Maps and Plans’, in The
History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian
Societies, ed. John B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago, 1992), pp. 209–27.
18 Metin And, Minyatürlerle Osmanlı-İslam Mitologyası, 3rd ed. (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 81, 83.
19 Joachim Hein, Das Buch der vierzig Fragen: eine Sammlung koranischer Geschichten (Leiden,
1960).
20 Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1.
414
purposes, however, the cosmographers adopted a simpliied version of the

geocentric model going back to Ptolemy: a spherical earth in the middle of a
concentric series of nested spheres, which carried the moon, the sun, the ive
known planets and inally the ixed stars. An outer sphere surrounding all the
others set them all in motion, albeit at diferent speeds. Below the sphere of
the moon lay the spheres of the four elements: ire, air, water and inally the
heaviest, earth, at the centre, more than half covered by water.
Astronomy
The knowledge of astronomy which Mehmed Aşık displays in his description
of the cosmos is very limited. In few areas of knowledge did popular imagi-
nation difer so fundamentally from the state of the art information available
to the Ottoman elite. As astronomy along with mathematics was one of the
few scientiic subjects forming a regular part of the medrese curriculum, the
discrepancy between “learned” and “popular” is even starker.21
A substantial tradition of astronomical study and observation in Islam
goes back via the Abbasid caliphate and the caliph al-Maʾmūn in particular, to
Ptolemy’s Almagest as a kind of founding document. But some of the most
important advances in Islamic astronomy are due to the Mongols, who, begin-
ning with Chenggis Han, took an active interest in the subject by attract-
ing astronomers from all the lands under their domination. Chenggis Han’s
grandson Hülägü (d. 1265) founded the observatory of Maragha near Tabriz,
“often seen as the apex of Islamic observatories,” as a “pan-Eurasian enter-
prise” involving Chinese astronomers as well as Western sources.22 A simi-
larly cosmopolitan astronomical institution operated, next to other “experts
in futurology”, at the Mongol (Yuan) court of China. In the Timurid period,
the observatory of Samarqand founded by Uluğ Bey (d. 1449), a grandson of
Timur, was the leading institution. Here was the workplace of Kadızade Rumi
(d. ca. 1432), a scholar and mathematician from Bursa, whose commentary on
al-Chaghmini’s textbook became one of the most widely used astronomical
works in the Ottoman realm.23 Under him trained the talented Ali Kuşçu (d.
1474), who after the murder of Uluğ Bey irst took refuge with the Akkoyunlu;
later, Mehmed II lured him with an exorbitant stipend to Istanbul, where he
taught at the Aya Sofya medrese.24 Mirim Çelebi (d. 1525), a grandson of both
21 Cevat İzgi, Osmanlı Medreselerinde İlim (Istanbul, 1997), pp. 189–329, 333–462.
22 Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, 2001), p. 163.
23 Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu et al., Osmanlı Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi (Istanbul, 1997), pp. 8–20.
24 A. Adnan Adıvar, ‘ʿAlī al-Kushdji’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 393.
415
Ali Kuşçu and Kadızade Rumi, wrote further commentaries on the works of
his ancestors and also contributed to the literature on astronomical instru-
ments and other applications, such as sundials.25
Keeping time in the course of the day and throughout the cycle of the
lunar and solar years had immediate practical importance for the fulilment
of religious obligations.26 Many mosques in the Ottoman period had a spe-
cial oice for timekeeping, called muvakkıthane, and the timekeepers typically
trained in the medreses. As managers of time, astronomers also determined
the proper moment to begin and end all kinds of activity – economic, mil-
itary, ritual and spiritual.27 But particularly timekeeping was indispensable
to administrators since the revenues of an agricultural empire such as that
of the Ottomans depended on the harvest cycle. Practical men appreciated
astronomical observation because its practitioners produced calendars and
tables that facilitated the administration of agricultural resources. Yet, in
addition, in Allsen’s words, “timekeeping always has ritual and cosmological
implications. Any astronomical irregularity, any miscalculation of a cosmic
event such as an eclipse, undermined the emperor’s connectedness to the cos-
mos and thus his legitimacy and mandate to rule.”28
Presumably the Ottoman interest was not substantially diferent from that
of the Mongols; in other words, the ultimate purpose of astronomy was
always astrology (ahkamü’n-nücum) in the broadest sense of the term. Certain
litterateurs even claimed that a ruler must keep an astrologer at his court.29
Taşköprüzade emphasised the diference between astronomy, which was
part of the mathematical sciences (min furuʿ al-riyadi), and astrology, which
worked “with the guidance of nature” (bi-dalalat al-ṭabiʿa). Thus the author
emphasised that the connection between the stars on the one hand and the
terrestrial events and processes inl uenced by them on the other were all part
of the larger structure of the physical world. Apparently Taşköprüzade did
not worry too much about long-standing legal strictures against astrology,
which after all appears to jeopardise the dogma of God’s omnipotence. In
this context, it is noteworthy that one of the early calendars claimed that the
25 Ekmeleddin İhsanoglu and Mustafa Kaçar, ‘The Sources and Early Works of Ottoman
Science’, in The Turks, vol. 3: The Ottomans, ed. Hasan Celal Güzel, C. Cem Oğuz and Osman
Karatay (Ankara, 2002), pp. 756–75 at p. 762.
26 David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and
Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2004).
27 Allsen, Culture and Conquest, p. 175.
28 Ibid.
29 Sâlim Aydüz, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Müneccimbaşılık Müessesesi’, Belleten 70, 257 (2006),
167–272 at p. 186.
416
prophet Idris had adopted astrology. We certainly should read this statement
as a legitimating claim.30
Belief in the eicacy of the stars was ubiquitous. Thus the great histo-
rian Mustafa Ali (d. 1600) explained in the general introduction to his world
history how the constellation at the moment of conception determined the
fate of the child.31 Remarkably the author did not bother to use the theologi-
cally correct phrase, namely that the stars only relected what God Almighty
had ordained. Mustafa Ali had his own horoscope cast twice in 1568, asking
the astrologer about the outcome of the military campaign to which he was
being dispatched.32 More than for anybody else, however, the “judgment of
the stars” mattered for the sultan himself.
Several perpetual almanacs, which indicated constellations and prognos-
tics for the cycle of a solar year, were popular in the Ottoman Empire, most
prominently the Şemsiye, also known as Melheme, of Salahuddin Yazıcı, writ-
ten in 1408. Scribes often copied this versiied treatise in a mesnevi format; in
1635–6, the Mevlevi dervish İbrahim Cevri composed an updated version.33
Under Bayezid II, a large number of astronomers locked to the Ottoman
court, dedicating a total of 30 works to him.34 A register tentatively dated to
the years after 1495 lists six astrologers (müneccim) among the recipients of
salaries from the imperial treasury.35 Of all Ottoman astronomical works that
contain a dedication to a member of the House of Osman, almost half are
dedicated to Bayezid II.
We do not know when the sultans irst instituted the oice of chief court
astronomer, charged with the preparation of astronomical tables and predic-
tions for every year; late sources provide diverging lists, and no additional
documentation has surfaced. Only with Mustafa b. ‘Ali al-Muvakkıt (d. 1571),
a proliic author of astronomical as well as geographical works, did the oice
gain a irm place in the hierarchy of the sultans’ palace.36 In addition to serv-
ing the court, chief astronomers cum astrologers also often took oice within
the ilmiye and elsewhere. Their main task was to prepare annual almanacs
30 Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, vol. 1, pp. 359f.; Nihal Atsız, Osmanlı
Tarihine Ait Takvimler (Istanbul, 1961).
31 Schmidt, Pure Water, p. 120, with reference to Künhü’l-Ahbar, vol. 1, p. 21.
32 Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa
Ali (1541–1600) (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 48f.
33 Barbara Flemming, ‘Prognostika und Geschichte’, in IX. Türk Tarih Kongresi, Ankara 21–25
Eylül 1981: Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler (Ankara, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 745–51 at p. 747.
34 İhsanoğlu et al., Osmanlı Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi, p. 112.
35 Aydüz, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Müneccimbaşılık Müessesesi’, p. 183.
36 İhsanoğlu et al., Osmanlı Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi, pp. 161–79.
417
with the relevant predictions for each single day, to be submitted to the sultan
on the spring equinox, the beginning of the Iranian solar year (nevruz).37 A
great many of these calendars with various types of prognostications, as well
as calendar-type tables and notes of important events, have come down to
us.38 Before any important action, the sultans and their dignitaries demanded
horoscopes. Thus, for instance, Tursun Bey reports that the hour for begin-
ning the construction of the Rumeli Hisarı fortress (1452) was chosen with
the help of astrologers, incidentally one of the earliest attestations of such a
specialist in the retinue of an Ottoman ruler.39
General textbooks and specialised treatises on instruments and timekeep-
ing make up much of the intellectual output of Ottoman astronomers. But
the crucial part of their work was the preparation of astronomical tables
based on observations, to serve as the basis for further calculation.40 Before
telescopes became available, there was only one way to improve the quality
of measurements and observations, namely to increase the size of the instru-
ment. Most spectacularly, Uluğ Bey sponsored this expansion of astronomical
activity in Samarqand, where the remnants of his mural quadrant, several sto-
reys high, are still visible today. Astronomy thus became a worthy object of
imperial patronage because it required great investments both in instruments
and scientiic education. It is no coincidence that the essential astronomical
tables produced in the observatories of Maragha and Samarqand bore the
names of their imperial sponsors: Zij-i Ilhani and Zij-i Sultani or Zij-i Uluğ
Bey, respectively. Mehmed II’s sponsoring of Ali Kuşçu and a continuing inter-
est on the part of Bayezid II thus place the Ottoman court squarely within this
imperial tradition.
For all the money he was willing to spend on the stars, however, there is
no evidence that Mehmed II also planned to establish his own observatory
in continuation of the Timurid model, to have a zij-i Osmani to his name.
Such an attempt only occurred towards the very end of our period, under
Sultan Murad III. The guiding spirit of this enterprise was Takıyüddin, argu-
ably the most important of all Ottoman astronomers. Born in Damascus,
he embarked on an ilmiye career, though certainly with a special focus on
astronomy and mathematics, working irst in Cairo, then after 1570 in
37 Aydüz, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Müneccimbaşılık Müessesesi’, p. 194.

38 Ibid., pp. 208–24.
39 Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, ed. Mertol Tulum (Istanbul, 1977), p. 44; Aydüz, ‘Osmanlı
Devleti’nde Müneccimbaşılık Müessesesi’, p. 170.
40 D. A. King and J. Samsó, ‘zīdj’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 11, pp.
496–508.
418
Istanbul. Under the protection of the sultan’s inl uential advisor and future
şeyhülislam Hoca Sadeddin (d. 1599), in 1571 Takıyüddin became chief astrono-
mer (müneccimbaşı). Murad III agreed to establish a new observatory and pay
all the expenses; Takıyüddin himself was promised a princely salary as well
as a iefdom to supplement his income. In 1574, the irst sections of the obser-
vatory began operations, and new buildings and instruments were added
through 1577.
While reports about an observation well are contradictory, miniatures
show a giant wooden armillary sphere, pointing to an ambitious program
of upgraded observation, supported by improved timekeeping with the help
of mechanical clocks, on which Takıyüddin wrote several treatises. Scholars
have pointed out that Takıyüddin’s and Tycho Brahe’s observatories, more or
less simultaneously, used very similar instruments. In fact, a Western spherical
globe is clearly visible on one of the miniatures showing the Istanbul obser-
vatory, indicating close interconnectedness between Ottoman and European
circuits of scientiic knowledge.41 But the enterprise turned out to be short-
lived: already in 1580 a wrecking squad of soldiers tore down the facilities so
thoroughly that later sources were unable to indicate the precise location.
We do not really know the ultimate reason for this end of the last grand
astronomical enterprise in the Islamic world. As for the oicial fetva, it cites
theological objections against astronomy and astrology in addition to the
harm these pursuits might do to the empire; political historians point to
inighting between the şeyhülislam and Takıyüddin’s powerful protector Hoca
Sadeddin, and historians of science cite Takıyüddin’s misinterpretation of the
comet of 1577 as having de-legitimised the enterprise.42 In the verse chronicle
that is the main source for this afair, we also ind the claim that Takıyüddin
assented to the destruction, arguing that the revision of the tables of Uluğ
Bey was now complete. Five years later, the astronomer died in Istanbul.
Much ink has been spilled by historians of science to explain why Islamic
(and Chinese) astronomers, despite excellent observation facilities and a
proud tradition of mathematical modelling, failed to develop a heliocen-
tric system or, after its development by Copernicus, to swiftly adopt it. As
a major factor, scholars have proposed the lack of scientiic institutions as
41 Abdülhak Adnan Adıvar, Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim, 4th ed. (Istanbul, 1988), pp. 99–109, espe-
cially the supplemental notes by Sevim Tekeli; Avner Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Scientiic
Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660 (Baltimore, 2010).
42 Aydın Sayılı, The Observatory in Islam and Its Place in the General History of the Observatory
(Ankara, 1960); İhsanoğlu et al., Osmanlı Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi, pp. 199–210; Aydüz,
‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Müneccimbaşılık Müessesesi’, p. 242; D. King, ‘Takiyüddin’, in Gibb
et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 10, pp. 132–3.
419
the framework supporting disinterested research.43 However, most discus-

sants ignore the uncomfortable fact that the heliocentric system was math-
ematically convincing only with Kepler’s innovations, and even then took
another century to irmly take root in Europe. Other explanations have
more or less subtly drawn on culturalist arguments, with the destruction
of Takıyüddin’s observatory as “exhibit A” for the thesis that Islam and sci-
ence are incompatible.44 Posed in this way, the question is, however, rooted
in the old-fashioned school of history of science which primarily seeks to
create a heroic narrative of progress driven by individual luminaries towards
an enlightened future. Or at the very least the question is thoroughly
Eurocentric, taking what happened in Europe as a model rather than as
an anomaly on a world-historical scale, albeit a very successful one. Our
presentation should suggest that this is a moot point: Ottoman interest in
astronomy, as in any other branch of science (as we will see), was strictly
anthropocentric, directed at practical applicability, and the tables and models
available by 1600 suiciently served this interest.
Universal geography
We return to our guide through the orders of knowledge, Mehmed Aşık’s
Menazıru’l-Avalim, the bulk of which is devoted to geography. As mentioned
before, despite references to other models, for practical matters cosmogra-
phers typically followed a Ptolemaic model involving a spherical earth, and
Mehmed Aşık was no exception. According to this author and his medieval
predecessors, about one-half of this spherical earth consisted of land, sur-
rounded by an ocean which penetrated it in seven major seas, from the Baltic
and Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. The southern half of this hemisphere
was too hot to be inhabitable or even known, leaving only the “inhabitable
quarter” (al-rubʿ al-maʿmur) for the geographer to describe. Following ancient
Greek models – though typically giving credit to Ptolemy alone – Islamic
geographers had divided the surface of the northern hemisphere into paral-
lel latitudinal zones called climes (iqlim), distinguished by the duration of the
longest day.45 The seven resulting climes roughly covered the area from the
43 Toby E. Huf, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, 2nd ed. (Cambridge
and New York, 2003).
44 Cemil Aydın, ‘Beyond Culturalism? An Overview of the Historiography on Ottoman Science
in Turkey’, in Multicultural Science in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Kostas
Chatzis and Efthymios Nicolaidis (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 201–16.
45 A. Miquel, ‘Iḳlīm’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 3, pp. 1076–8.
420
southern margin of the inhabited world, often assumed to be the equator,

to its northern edge. In another manifestation of the all-pervasive notion of
inter-related orders, these seven climes did not simply cause diferences in
lora, fauna and culture due to diferent climatic conditions but also through
their association with a celestial body; to geographers and their readers, the
characteristics of the seven climes and their efects arguably became the centre
of interest.46 Again, typical of the overall preference for balance, the middle
clime was considered the best, both in terms of its conditions and the quali-
ties it brought about in its populations. By the same token, the seven climes
could easily serve as the fundamental organising principle for any description
of the world, and the authors of a wide variety of texts, including Mehmed
Aşık in his Menazıru’l-Avalim, have used them as such.
The “scientiic” map that divides the surface of the world into seven paral-
lel strips of equal latitude, however, intersects with a “mental map” in which
the viewer stands at the centre and which extends outward in concentric
circles. Nearest to the beholder is an area of cultural, linguistic and climatic
familiarity. Next comes a periphery, which is similar, yet diferent in a num-
ber of important respects, and inally the entire system is surrounded by a
fringe of utterly incommensurable otherness. In other words, the people of
the inner circle are one’s “own”, on the periphery there live “others” with
whom interaction is possible, but on the fringe the observer who ventures
this far will only ind monsters and demons.47 By no means are the relevant
boundaries co-terminous with political frontiers. On the one hand, Mustafa
Ali, a member of Istanbul’s elite, in his description of Ottoman Cairo, heavily
exoticises the city, while on the other hand Seydi Ali Reis found the culture of
the Mughal courts of India very similar to his own.48 Moreover, the boundar-
ies shift outward with the accumulation of geographical knowledge.
Visual representation in maps remained rare. The Ottomans inherited an
ancient tradition of strongly abstract world maps, ultimately going back to the
tenth century and the “Atlas of Islam”, through the popular Kharidat al-ʿajaʾib
mentioned earlier. Similar maps, all more mythical than realistic in character,
46 Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, vol. 1, pp. 384f.

47 Michael David Bonner and Gottfried Hagen, ‘Muslim Accounts of the Dār al-Ḥarb’, in The
New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 5, ed. M. A. Cook (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 474–94 at p.
476, building on Pınar Emiralioğlu, ‘Cognizance of the Ottoman World: Visual and Textual
Representations in the Sixteenth Century Ottoman Empire (1514–1596)’, unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Chicago (2006).
48 Andreas Tietze, Mustafa Ali’s Description of Cairo of 1599 [text, transliteration, translation, notes]
(Vienna, 1975); Seydi Ali Reis, Mir’âtü’l-Memâlik: İnceleme, Metin, İndeks, ed. Mehmet Kiremit
(Ankara, 1999).
421
also found their places in certain world histories of the late sixteenth century.
Mehmed Aşık’s own works typically do not include maps.49
In the eclectic and atomistic concept of the “marvels of creation”, every
single marvel attested to the same transcendent phenomenon, while writers
and readers paid no attention to continuities and commonalities. Obviously,
most marvels were located in the peripheral and marginal regions. However,
another branch of Islamic geography, which took the cultural-historical
region, also called iqlim, as its basic unit, foregrounded continuity and com-
monality as structuring principles. It is Mehmed Aşık’s great merit to have
opened the cosmographic tradition and its atomistic and theocentric out-
look to those more historical views, most easily accessible in Abu ‘l-Fida
al-Ḥamawi’s (d. 1331) great compilation Taqwim al-buldan and in Nuzhatu’l-
qulub by Ḥamdallah Mustawi (d. after 1339–40), the massive cosmography
of Ilkhanid Iran. Taqwim al-buldan uniies a number of earlier traditions, in
particular the “Atlas of Islam”, and the mathematical strand going back to
adaptations of Ptolemy. By contrast, Nuzhatu’l-qulub contains a vast amount
of invaluable information on Iran that has nothing to do with the theological
concern of the marvel but is useful mainly to administrators. While these
two authors record and catalogue the familiar, primarily the world of Islam,
Mehmed Aşık has gone one step further in re-centring the gaze of the cos-
mographer on the familiar inner circle of the world.50 Having assimilated the
scholastic tradition of medrese learning, this author usually restricts himself
to juxtaposing accounts from diferent sources even when they are obviously
contradictory. Validated by traditional authority, they stand, even when hun-
dreds of years old.51
However, where he knew better, Mehmed Aşık inserted his own experi-
ences, which after a lifetime of travel and service in various provinces of the
Ottoman Empire were substantial. Instead of scholarly written authority, he
sought to authenticate his own contributions by meticulously indicating the
date and occasion of his visit.52 Thus Mehmed Aşık in his way recognised that
traditional cosmography, at least in the description of the lands of the earth,
49 Karamustafa, ‘Military, Administrative, and Scholarly Maps and Plans’.

50 Ignatii Iulianovich Krachkovskii, Arabskaia geograicheskaia literatura, Izbrannye sochineniia
(Moscow, 1957).
51 Mehmed Âşık, Menâzırü’l-Avâlim, ed. Mahmut Ak (Ankara, 2007). See the Introduction
by Ak.
52 Ak, Menâzırü’l-Avâlim; Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit: Entstehung
und Gedankenwelt von Kātib Čelebis Ǧihānnümā (Berlin, 2003), pp. 104–11; Gottfried Hagen,
‘The Traveller Mehmed Aşık’, in Essays on Ottoman Civilization: Proceedings of the XIIth
Congress of the Comité International d’Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes (CIÉPO), Praha, 1996,
Archív Orientální Supplementa (Prague, 1998), pp. 145–54.
422
had reached its limits. The realism of contemporary experience was one way
to revive the genre. Yet it turned out to be the last attempt of its kind, for
the next great Ottoman work of world geography, Katip Çelebi’s Cihannüma,
begun in 1648, built irst on Sipahizade’s alphabetical re-ordering of Taqwim
al-buldan, then supplemented it with Menazıru’l-avalim, and ultimately aban-
doned these models in favour of a new one, the European atlas as it emerged
in the late sixteenth century.53
New geography outside of the canon

In all of this, however, Mehmed Aşık strictly upheld the scholarly and mental
maps established by the cosmographical tradition, which given the Ottoman
position at the margin of the larger Islamic world, and in view of the intensi-
fying interaction with neighbours to the north as well as the east, was already
becoming obsolete at the time of writing.54 Parallel to his traditional ency-
clopaedia, a new universe of geographical knowledge was emerging. Due
to its novelty and relation to the West, it has attracted much more attention
from modern historians; yet its marginal position in relation to the traditional
canon is often overlooked. This new geographical knowledge came from two
main sources: empiricism, in other words travel, and new literary sources, in
particular Western works.
The most important of these new developments is maritime geography.
Seafaring in the Mediterranean, traditionally a trans-cultural or multi-cultural
enterprise, had accumulated a stock of essential professional knowledge,
transmitted in portolan charts and sailing handbooks called isolarii.55 Portolan
charts had been produced since the 1300s in the western Mediterranean,
with a centre in Mallorca. While the vast majority of those preserved are
in Romance languages, a few examples have come down to us in Arabic.
There are some portolan-style world maps, but the majority are charts of
the Mediterranean, strictly to scale, with a grid of loxodromes to facilitate
calculation of a course across the open sea towards a speciic port. Sometimes
owners bound several maps together to form a kind of atlas.56 The isolario
53 Gottfried Hagen, ‘K âtib Çelebi and Sipahizade’, in Essays in Honour of Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu,
ed. Mustafa Kaçar and Zeynep Durukal (Istanbul, 2006), pp. 525–42; Hagen, Osmanischer
Geograph.
54 Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London, 2004).
55 Henry R. Kahane, Renée Kahane and Andreas Tietze, The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish
Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin (Urbana, Ill., 1958).
56 Tony Campbell, ‘Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500’, in The History
of Cartography, volume 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the
Mediterranean, ed. John B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago, 1987), pp. 371–463.
423
consists of small-scale maps of individual islands, often taken from a portolan

chart, along with supporting text.57
We can link the adoption of these models by the Ottomans to the name
of Piri Reis (d. 1554), a captain in the Ottoman navy with a distinguished ped-
igree of seafarers and corsairs: he was the nephew of the Ottoman admi-
ral Kemal Reis.58 Like many men in his profession, Piri Reis probably had
encountered sailors from a variety of backgrounds, who had been to the
farthest parts of the world. But he was the only one to actually use these
sources to bring forth novel works. In 1513, Piri Reis created a world map in
the style of a portolan, which according to a note on the chart itself he had
compiled from Arab and Western maps. Only its westernmost third is extant
today, showing the Atlantic Ocean, parts of Spain and the African coast in the
east and an outline of southern and central America, including a number of
islands in the Caribbean, in the west. These latter parts are based on a now-
lost map by Columbus, as well as oral knowledge pertaining to Columbus’s
last voyage, obtained from a Spanish captive.59 Praises for Piri Reis’s scientiic
and cartographic achievements tend to overlook that in the fast-paced age
of discoveries much of his knowledge was already outdated by the time he
made his map.
However, a fragment of another map made by Piri Reis in 1528–9, also sur-
viving in the Ottoman palace library, is of the highest quality. It is apparently
only one-sixth of what was once a world map, showing the north-western
Atlantic coast from the Antilles to Labrador in excellent detail: “If this frag-
ment is representative of the entire map, the latter would have occupied a
rightful place among the best specimens of the period, including the famous
Portuguese world map of 1519 known as the Miller Atlas.”60
Piri Reis also wrote an isolario, entitled Kitab-ı Bahriye, in which he described
the entire coastline of the Mediterranean, counter-clockwise from Gallipoli,
in a series of small maps with accompanying text. The irst version appeared
in 1521, in 130 chapters, with a map attached to each chapter, surviving in
about 20 manuscripts. Having attracted the attention of grand vezir İbrahim
Paşa, in 1526 Piri Reis prepared a new version, expanded to 210 chapters and
57 Cristoforo Buondelmonti, ‘Liber insularum’, in Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber insularum

archipelagi: Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf Ms. G 13: Mit Beiträgen von Arne
Efenberger und Fabian Rijkers, ed. Irmgard Siebert and Max Plassmann (Wiesbaden, 2005).
58 Svatopluk Soucek, Piri Reis & Turkish Mapmaking after Columbus: The Khalili Portolan Atlas
(London, 1996), p. 36.
59 Ibid., pp. 54–79; Gregory W. McIntosh and Norman J. W. Thrower, The Piri Reis Map of 1513
(Athens, Ga., 2000).
60 Soucek, Piri Reis and Turkish Mapmaking after Columbus, p. 80.
424
maps, together with a grandiloquent introduction in verse, as a presentation

copy for Sultan Süleyman. Ten manuscripts, for the most part carefully exe-
cuted, are known today.61 In addition, three portolan atlases on vellum, of
exquisite beauty and produced between around 1560 and 1580, have surfaced
in the last few decades in Turkish libraries.62
Travellers also produced works about countries and peoples situated on
the margins of the Ottoman mental world. A courtier in the entourage of
Cem Sultan, the brother and competitor of Bayezid II for the succession of
Mehmed II, wrote an account of Cem’s stay in Italy, which, however, fur-
nishes little information on the country itself. Similarly minor is the yield
of factual knowledge the reader may derive from the elegant prose of Seydi
Ali Reis (d. 1562). In Mir’atü’l-Memalik, he narrated his tribulations in Mughal
India, where he was stranded after a botched naval excursion in 1554, having
to return overland, through Shaybanid Central Asia and Safavid Iran. In the
exoticism of India, Sui shrines and poetic exchanges with Mughal princes
provided him, as we have seen, with a strong sense of cultural familiarity.63
Seydi Ali Reis also wrote a manual for seafaring in the Indian Ocean, using the
works of the Arab pilots Ahmad b. Majid and Sulaiman al-Mahri, apparently
as the intellectual exercise of an educated gentleman.64
More informative was the Khitay-name (Book of China), which the Iranian
merchant Ali Ekber wrote in Persian and submitted to Sultan Süleyman
in 1520. While ambiguities in the itineraries have led one researcher to
believe that the author used written sources rather than travelling himself,
61 A partial edition of the irst version is Pirî Reis, Bahrije: Das türkische segelhandbuch für das
mittelländische meer vom jahre 1521, ed. Paul Kahle (Berlin and Leipzig, 1926). For the second
version in facsimile, see Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye intro. Fevzi Kurdoğlu and Haydar Alpagot,
(Istanbul, 1935), and again with an English translation, Pirî Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye, ed. Ertuğrul
Zekâi Ökte et al. (Istanbul, 1988). A list of manuscripts is in Svat Soucek, ‘Islamic Charting
in the Mediterranean’, in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp.
263–92 at pp. 291–2.
62 Ibid., reproductions in Kemal Özdemir, Ottoman Nautical Charts and the Atlas of Ali Macar
Reis (Istanbul, 1992).
63 Seydi Ali Reis, Mir’âtü’l-Memâlik: Inceleme, Metin, Indeks, ed. Mehmet Kiremit (Ankara, 1999).
The English translation by A. Vambéry omits the poetry, which arguably is a crucial com-
ponent if one is to understand the work as a whole. See Seydi Ali Reis, The Travels and
Adventures of the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali Reïs in India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Persia, dur-
ing the Years 1553–1556, trans. from the Turkish Ármin Vámbéry, with notes (Lahore, 1975). For
a French translation, see Reis Seydî Ali, Le Miroir des pays de Seyyidî Ali Re’is, ed. Jean-Louis
Bacqué-Grammont (Paris, 1999).
64 Joseph von Hammer, ‘Extracts from the Mohit, That Is the Ocean, a Turkish Work on
Navigation in the Indian Seas’, Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1834),
pp. 545–53; ibid. (1836), pp. 441–68; ibid. (1837), pp. 805–12; ibid. (1838), pp. 767–80; ibid. (1839),
pp. 823–30. For a partial German translation, see Die topographischen Kapitel des indischen
Seespiegels Moḥîṭ: Festschrift zur Erinnerung an die Eröfnung des Seeweges nach Ostindien durch
Vasco da Gama (1497), trans. Maximilian Bittner, intro. Wilhelm Tomaschek (Vienna, 1897).
425
the description of the administrative and judicial system of Ming China is

detailed and surprisingly accurate.65 But the same cannot be said about the
curious collection of legends and fables in simple Turkish which purports to
convey the history of China, India and other Asian peoples, by an otherwise
unknown Seyi Çelebi and presented to Murad III, a sultan known for his
taste for the esoteric and curious.66 This ruler also ordered a translation of Ali
Ekber’s work into Turkish. In the same period, an unknown person compiled
a history of the discovery and conquest of the New World, from a number of
Italian sources, and presented it to Murad III in an illustrated copy as Hadis-i
Nev, or Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, which for a century remained the main Ottoman
source of information on America.67
Historians continue to hotly debate the signiicance of this literature.
Three dimensions are relevant: the scientiic, the aesthetic cum cultural and
the political. Arguments often depend on the researcher’s political or disci-
plinary background and agenda. While previous generations have faulted the
Ottomans for their lack of interest in the outside world and failure to keep
pace with European explorations, more recent scholars have taken pains to
demonstrate that the Ottomans were just as interested, and scientiically as
advanced, as their European counterparts.68 Piri Reis’s works show that he
was well integrated into Mediterranean circuits of navigational knowledge;
his skill and expertise matched that of the best European sailors and cartog-
raphers. His and his colleagues’ maps share a visual idiom that was widely
understood from Portugal to the Levant, although the low of information,
for instance about America, seems to have been erratic. Nor incidentally is
there any evidence that Western sailors learned from their Muslim counter-
parts. Seydi Ali Reis in his sailing handbook, on the other hand, mostly copied
from the works of famous pilots Ahmad b. Majid and Sulaiman al-Mahri.
A twentieth-century scholar has dismissed it as the exercise of a litterateur
65 Yih-Min Lin, ‘A Comparative and Critical Study of Ali Akbar’s Khitay-nama with Reference
to Chinese Sources (English Summary)’, Central Asiatic Journal 27 (1983), 58–77; Emiralioğlu,
‘Cognizance of the Ottoman World’.
66 Josef Matuz, L’ouvrage de Seyi Çelebi, historien ottoman du XVIe siècle: Édition critique, traduc-
tion et commentaires (Paris, 1968). See also Emiralioğlu, ‘Cognizance of the Ottoman World’.
The author is not identical with the poet Seyi; see Christine Woodhead, ‘Seyfī’, in Gibb
et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 10, p. 149.
67 Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hind-i garbi
and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990); Tülây Duran et al. (eds.), Tarih-i
Hind-i garbi el-müsemmâ bi-Hadis-i nev (Istanbul, 1999). The book was among the irst works
printed in Turkish by İbrahim Müteferrika (1730).
68 Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982). For a more nuanced study,
see Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It. See also Svat Soucek, ‘Piri Reis and
Ottoman Discovery of the Great Discoveries’, Studia Islamica 79 (1994), 121–42.
426
with limited understanding of the matter at hand, and therefore considers

the work to be without practical value.69 Literary qualities certainly prevail in
Seydi Ali Reis’s travelogue Mir’atü’l-Avalim.
Throughout, Ottoman authors took care to package potentially useful
information in aesthetically appealing ways, using beautiful language and
intriguing images. Even Piri Reis’s irst map included entertaining images of
animals, ships and monsters right out of cosmographic legends. His narra-
tive also featured digressions about his own exploits with Kemal Reis, and in
order to make his Bahriye palatable to the sultan he felt compelled to upgrade
its literary qualities with a lengthy rhymed introduction recounting the seven
seas on the basis of popular knowledge and sailors’ yarns.70 More often than
not, in the works preserved, the aesthetic aspect may have eclipsed the prac-
tical. Most likely, no copy of Bahriye known to us was ever taken to sea, and
the only preserved portolan perhaps used on shipboard was that of Mehmed
Reis b. Menemenli.71 While Piri Reis thought of the text of the Bahriye as
the most important medium of information, later copies often omitted it,
reducing the work to a string of beautiful pictures, like a cofee-table book;
the so-called Atlas of Seyyid Nuh is a good example of the genre.72 Especially
the second version of the Bahriye included a strong plea for expertise in the
service of the House of Osman, but apparently nobody attempted to build
and improve on the scientiic and practical side of Piri Reis’s work.73 Tarih-i
Hind-i Garbi framed the history of the New World as part of a cosmography,
quoting many legends from the classics, and with its illustrations in the tradi-
tion of al-Qazwini it appeared more as a “book of wonders” than an account
of recent world-changing political events. Furthermore, Seydi Ali Reis did not
write a description of India but rather a lively travel narrative patterned on
the old Middle Eastern formula al-faraj baʿd al-shidda (relief after distress).
It is impossible to determine what exactly went through the minds of
Ottomans viewing maps and reading exotic travelogues; however, it is fair to
say that today’s science- and policy-minded historians tend to underestimate
69 Gerald Randall Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese,
Being a Translation of Kitāb al-Fawāʾid fī uṣūl al-baḥr waʾl-qawāʾid of Aḥmad b. Mājid al-Najdī,
together with an Introduction on the History of Arab Navigation, Notes on the Navigational
Techniques and on the Topography of the Indian Ocean and a Glossary of Navigational Terms
(London, 1972), pp. 44–5.
70 Svatopluk Soucek, ‘Tunisia in the Kitāb-i baḥrīye by Pīrī Reʾīs’, Archivum Ottomanicum 5 (1973),
129–296.
71 William C. Brice, Colin Imber and Richard Lorch, The Aegean Sea-Chart of Mehmed Reis ibn
Menemenli A.D. 1590/1 (Manchester, 1977).
72 Hans-Joachim Kissling, Der See-Atlas des Seyyid Nuh (Munich, 1966).
73 Soucek, ‘Piri Reis and Ottoman Discovery’.
427
the cultural and aesthetic aspects of their experience.74 Scholars have argued
that the set of texts about foreign countries discussed here relects an Ottoman
imperial vision of the world. In this context, the “discovery literature” in
Ottoman Turkish supposedly results from, and in turn informs, a long-term
policy aimed at expansion and conquest with respect to China and, more
recently, the Indian Ocean.75 Yet we may object that the works in question are
few and far between and that whatever political implications they may sug-
gest are typically no more than random remarks, while their main concern is
literary and edifying. As a whole, the literature surveyed here is remarkably
non-belligerent and pays little attention to political and cultural boundaries;
as we have seen, Seydi Ali Reis actually emphasises the cultural and linguistic
commonalities with the Mughal princes of India.76 Moreover, much of the
information ofered was either legendary to begin with or quickly outdated.
Seafarers and authors never updated and improved the available works in
any systematic form, as would have been necessary had they served a coher-
ent policy of expansion. Having distinguished himself as an expert in the
Mediterranean, at a great old age Piri Reis was despatched to the Red Sea,
and in 1554 he was executed after a failed confrontation with the Portuguese.
Through the message this event imparted to later generations, Piri Reis’s
death on the orders of his sultan may well have been the harbinger of an
Ottoman failure to pursue exploration and cartography.77
Frequently, it was individual more than societal concerns that made authors
write down travel experiences, although they certainly did pander to the
known interests of their audiences.78 Although interesting in its particulars
for its content and its context, Ottoman knowledge production about foreign
countries difered too much from the European “discovery literature” for a
comparison to be fruitful. Whereas Europeans produced enormous amounts
of travelogues for a vast readership eagerly awaiting the most recent news
from every corner of the world and creative publishers assembled collections
74 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History,
ed. Edward H. Dahl, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago, 2005).
75 Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010); Andrew C. Hess, ‘Piri Reis
and the Ottoman Response to the Voyages of Discovery’, Terrae Incognitae 6 (1974), 19–37.
76 Palmira Brummett, ‘Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space, from World History
to Pīrī Reʾīs’, in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Daniel Gofman and
Virginia Aksan (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 15–58.
77 Soucek, ‘Piri Reis and Ottoman Discovery’.
78 Nicolas Vatin, ‘Pourquoi un Turc ottoman racontait-il son voyage? Note sur les relations
de voyage chez les Ottomans des Vâkı’ât-ı Sultân Cem au Seyâhatnâme d’Evliyâ Çelebi’,
Études Turques et Ottomanes: Document de Travail 4 (1995), 3–15, reprinted in Nicolas Vatin, Les
Ottomans et l’occident (XVe–XVIe siècles) (Istanbul, 2001).
428
like Ramusio’s Delle navigationi e viag i or compiled atlases like Ortelius’s

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ottoman knowledge production about the periph-
ery remained scattered, haphazard and incomplete. No author took the trou-
ble to collect the potentially vast reservoir of knowledge available in the minds
of merchants and sailors, and diplomats’ reports remained locked up in the
archive, never making it into Mehmed Aşık’s – or anybody else’s – canon.79
By the same token, travel narratives from within the Ottoman Empire, like
the journal of Qutbaddin al-Makki or the illustrated campaign accounts by
Matrakçı Nasuh and others, remained singular works without resonance in
their time.80 The synthesising of all this information with a concern for its
practical applicability was to be the project of a diferent person and a difer-
ent period.81
Natural history
Ottoman geography was at its core human geography. Spaces devoid of
human settlement were of no interest to the geographer. Aside from natural
wonders, Mehmed Aşık, like his predecessors, considered physical geography
inasmuch as it was important for humans, be it hot springs, food resources or
obstacles to travel.
At the same time, the sense of order apparent from the works of the cos-
mographers extended to nature as well. In the Islamic tradition of science
as inherited by the Ottomans, three hierarchical realms feature in God’s
creation, a concept which Mehmed Aşık adopted to structure his account.
Animals form the highest order, to which man also belongs, although he is
distinct from all others through his gift of speech. Plants belong to the second
realm and earth and stones to the third. Mehmed Aşık gives us lengthy lists of
diferent animals, plants, minerals and other substances, compiled from classi-
cal sources such as al-Damiri’s (d. 1405) zoological work Hayat al-hayawan.82
79 Victor L. Ménage, ‘The Mission of an Ottoman Secret Agent in France in 1486’, Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society 3–4 (1965), 112–32; Giancarlo Casale, ‘“His Majesty’s Servant Lutf î”: The
Career of a Previously Unknown Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Envoy to Sumatra, Based on
an Account of His Travels from the Topkapı Palace Archives’, Turcica 37 (2005), 43–82.
80 Richard Blackburn (ed.), Journey to the Sublime Porte: The Arabic Memoir of a Shariian Agent’s
Diplomatic Mission to the Ottoman Imperial Court in the Era of Suleyman the Magniicent; the
Relevant Text from Quṭb al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī’s al-Fawāʾid al-sanīyah fī al-riḥlah al-Madanīyah wa
al-Rūmīyah (Würzburg, 2005); Naṣūḥüʾs-Silāḥī (Maṭrāḳçī), ‘Beyān-ı menāzil-i sefer-i ʻIrākeyn’,
in Beyān-ı Menāzil-i Sefer-i ʻIrākeyn-i Sulṭān Süleymān Hān, ed. Hüseyin G. Yurdaydın (Ankara,
1976).
81 Hagen, Osmanischer Geograph.
82 L. Kopp, ‘Ḍamīrī’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 2, pp. 107–8.
429
These lists merit discussion here only inasmuch as they cohere by way of
the concept of “sympathetic qualities” inherent in all the items listed. These
qualities, khavass in Arabic, havass in Turkish, exist in every created thing, and
thus establish occult connections between things in diferent realms of nature,
substances, ideas, locations or celestial bodies insofar as the sympathetic qual-
ities of these entities are related or opposed to each other.83 Intelligible to the
initiated but often kept secret to prevent abuse, “sympathetic qualities” in
one thing or creature may serve to manipulate another being, so that in the
exploitation of havass for the manipulation of others medicine and magic
inextricably intertwine.84 Modern scholars have for a long time dismissed the
concept of havass as lacking theoretical and scientiic foundations, as a cor-
ruption or aberration of rational and scientiic thought.85 Such criticism, how-
ever, does not take into account that the thought processes establishing and
perpetuating the entire system of occult interconnectedness were certainly
grounded in rational and, to a degree, empirical observations. It is more fruit-
ful to critically analyse the ideas of past eras in their respective intellectual
and social contexts than to fault them for their epistemologies, but Ottoman
magic has barely been studied so far. At this point, it may suice to say that
this conceptual system its the desire to understand the world as structured
through inter-related orders remarkably well.
The body
The last large section of Menazıru’l-Avalim is devoted to man as “the noblest
being and the most perfect and most beautiful creature”.86 Mehmed Aşık does
not concern himself with the origin of life and the duality of body and soul.
These questions are relevant for theologians and philosophers but do not con-
cern natural history except for the development of the fetus in the womb,
regarding which the author entirely relies on scriptural authorities. In the
remaining section, the author deals with human anatomy in tedious detail,
but his very insistence indicates that this knowledge was part of a canon rel-
evant not only to specialists. We will pursue this issue further into the realm
of medicine to discuss basic ideas of body and health.
83 M. Ullmann, ‘khāṣṣa’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 4, pp. 1097–8.
Compare Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, vol. 1, pp. 370, 385.
84 Schmidt, ‘Occult Sciences’.
85 Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, Handbuch der Orientalistik.
Erste Abteilung: Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten (Leiden and Cologne, 1972), pp. 393f.
86 Menazıru’l-Avâlim, vol. 2, p. 219b. A similar arrangement is found in Dürr-i Meknun; see
Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’.
430
Physicians transmitted their medical knowledge by training their aides

through practice, or else students attended the Süleymaniye medrese, the only
institution of its kind to include a special section of medicine. There is no
evidence that the various hospitals in Ottoman cities also trained physicians,
as scholars have sometimes assumed.87 Ottoman physicians had, as in other
realms of knowledge, adopted the Arabo-Islamic tradition of anatomy and
surgery, which Mehmed Aşık also knew.88 But surgery as a massive physical
intervention was in the Ottoman understanding of health and treatment only
a last resort. Ottoman understandings of bodily health were more complex
and more closely related to larger systems of order:
The Ottomans, like other premodern cultures, positioned the human body in two
parallel circles or cosmoses. The wider one dealt with the interaction between the
surrounding world and the body – in other words, the environment. The inner cir-
cle was focused on the body as the exterior form of a complex cosmos within it.
The discussion dealt with each cosmos and at the same time emphasized the intrin-
sic interactions between cosmoses and their reciprocal inl uences.89
The four humours are the “physiological building blocks” of the body, cor-
responding to the four elements: blood/air, phlegm/water, black bile/earth,
and yellow bile/ire.90 For the preservation or restoration of health, the bal-
ance of these humours is crucial. Outside factors such as climate or diet may
afect it; the logic of medication is to a large degree based on giving the patient
substances that possess characteristics which may restore the balance of his
humours due to the sympathetic correspondences just discussed. Mehmed
Aşık’s discussion of mineralogy, botany and zoology provides many examples
of this thinking, and works on materia medica follow the same principle.91
Ottoman authors even categorise musical modes according to their correspon-
dence with the four elements; according to the element connected to a given
musical mode, the latter may inl uence the human body in the same man-
ner as the element itself. Musical therapy as frequently applied in Ottoman
hospitals thus rests on the same principle of Galenic humouralism.92 Given
87 Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany,
N.Y., 2009), p. 142.
88 Ibid., pp. 49–54.
89 Ibid., p. 66.
90 Ibid., p. 15; Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’, p. 11.
91 Edith Gülçin Ambros, ‘Beans for a Cough, Lion’s Gall for a Laugh: The Poet and Physician
Ahmedi’s materia medica as a Mirror of the State of the Art around 1400 in Anatolia’, in
Acta viennensia ottomanica: Akten des 13. CIEPO-Symposiums Wien, ed. Markus Köhbach, Gisela
Prochazka-Eisl and Claudia Römer (Vienna, 1999), pp. 21–7; Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’,
chap. 13.
92 Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, p. 75, quoting Mustafa Âlî.
431
the use of such obvious or secret correspondences between body, substances

and environment, by modern scientiic concepts certain aspects of Ottoman
medical practice appear sound and others as pure magic. However, such an
extraneous evaluation misses the crucial point that these correspondences
all follow the same logic, and adherents regularly claim that experience has
proven the validity of these practices (empirica, mücerreb).93
Humouralism was not the only system of medicine employed in Ottoman
society. Another set of practices was “folkloric”, varying considerably accord-
ing to time, place and cultural context and therefore extremely hard to clas-
sify. Practitioners often rationalised folk medicine in humouralist terms;
claims of empiricism could apply to both as well. Moreover, both folk medi-
cine and humouralism can transcend cultural boundaries: many practitioners
of medicine in Ottoman society were of Jewish origin, including prominently
Moses Hamon, the inl uential physician of Süleyman the Magniicent. Others
had received their training in Egypt and had come – or been transferred – to
Istanbul.94
A third medical system, however, was conceptually diferent. Prophetic
medicine (al-tibb al-nabawi in Arabic), healing through the power inherent
in the word and practice of the prophet Muhammad, was only accessible to
Muslims. Yet prophetic medicine was not totally separate from humoural-
ism and folk medicine. Practitioners did not reject humouralism but consid-
ered it incomplete; they added on a spiritual dimension, using God’s names,
words from the Qur’an or prophetic hadith, and also amulets and talismans in
addition to other treatments. But often their ideas came down to little more
than a theological re-conceptualisation of humouralism.95 As a classic of the
genre, readers in the central Ottoman lands might familiarise themselves with
al-Suyuti’s Al-manhaj al-sawi wa l-manhal al-rawi i l-tibb al-nabawi and also
al-Qastallani’s treatise on the life of the Prophet, which included a section on
the topic; the famous Ottoman poet Baki (d. 1600) translated this piece into
Turkish.96
According to Shefer, “Ottoman integralism portrayed body and mind as
meshed into one entity and positioned this entity in relation to its surrounding
93 Sabine Dorpmüller, Religiöse Magie im “Buch der probaten Mittel”: Analyse, kritische Edition und
Übersetzung des Kitāb al-Muǧarrabāt von Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf as-Sanūsī (gest. um 895/1490),
Arabische Studien (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 39f.
94 Miri Shefer, ‘Physicians in Mamluk and Ottoman Courts,” in Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies
in Honour of Michael Winter, ed. David Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon (London, 2006), pp.
114–22.
95 Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, p. 28.
96 Baki, Maʿalimü l-yaqin i sirat seyyidi l-mürselin (Istanbul 1261/1845).
432
environment”.97 In consequence, there was a powerful moral dimension to

the understanding of the body. An inl uential scholar and critic of Ottoman
morality, the preacher Birgivî Mehmed (d. 1573), structured a substantial
part of his catechism al-Tariqa al-Muhammadiya around the members of the
human body and listed every vice and sin in which people might engage by
means of the relevant parts of their bodies.98 In diferent proportions, the four
humours existed in everybody, determining his temperament and character.
Accordingly, a trained eye could recognise a person’s good and bad qualities
from his bodily appearance. Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bican’s Dürr-i Meknun warns,
for instance, that nothing good can come from short men with blue eyes,
sparse beards, few teeth and a belly as if they were pregnant: “[…] Righteous
is the man whose body is healthy and who maintains his health”.99
In rudimentary form, Ahmed Bican here applies the art of physiognomy,
which in its more reined and perfected form was held in high esteem through-
out our period (kıyafet or iraset). A sixteenth-century treatise says the sultan
should “acquire the skill and expertise to discern their inner character from
outward behaviour and from their external appearance the true nature of
his kul … and those in the hierarchy of government, and even his subjects
[reaya]”.100 Ottoman purchasers of slaves systematically applied this knowl-
edge, and so did oicers recruiting boys into the janissary corps (devşirme).
But physiognomy also applied to the sultans: thus Seyyid Lokman produced
Kıyafetü’l-insaniyye i şemail-i ‘Osmaniyye, an album of portraits of the sultans
with a systematic introduction explaining some of the main features, while,
however, warning that the sultans are not comparable to normal human
beings.101 Thus knowledge of the body and its workings aforded much more
than just a healthy life; it provided controlling insight and power over others
and helped to keep them in their places within the cosmic order.
Man and society

Cosmography does not devote any attention to the description and under-
standing of human beings beyond bodily existence; it ignores human society
and its changes as documented by history. Kınalızade Ali (d. 1571) gives us a
97 Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, p. 66.

98 Radtke, ‘Birgivīs Ṭarīqa Muḥammadīya’; Gottfried Hagen, ‘World Order and Legitimacy’,
in Legitimizing the Order: Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, ed. Maurus Reinkowski and
Hakan Karateke (Leiden, 2005), pp. 55–83.
99 Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’, chap. 11; see also the paraphrase at p. 220.
100 Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, pp. 95–6.
101 [Seyyid Loḳmān Çelebi], Kıyâfetü’l-İnsâniyye fî Şemâili’l-‘Osmâniyye (Istanbul, 1987), p. 5a.
433
possible explanation when he says that there are two categories of things,
those created perfect, like the earth and nature, and those that have to be per-
fected in the course of their existence, like man.102 Striving for an ideal state
in which felicity (saadet) can be achieved is therefore the underlying theme of
the study of human afairs. As we have seen, the human body is a microcosm
manifesting relations between substances that also apply to the macrocosm;
therefore it is at the same time a metaphor for other larger orders, such as the
order of society.
As mentioned before, the perfect king is like the experienced physician, and the
subjects are like the human body. The physician has to know what the [possible]
diseases of the body are, their symptoms, their causes, and their remedies. Equally,
the king has to know the healthy state of the kingdom – which consists of it being
in balance – and how its illness – which consists of slipping from balance into al ic-
tion, and from wholeness into deiciency – occurs, and by which measures it can be
returned to its original health and wholeness.103
Ottoman visions of social order and politics draw heavily on the Persianate
tradition of manuals of statecraft. One of the great works of Persian advice
for kings, the Qabusname of Kaykavus b. Iskandar, was available in Turkish
already in the fourteenth century; by 1432, four more translations had fol-
lowed.104 The Siyasatname of the Seljuk vezir Nizamülmülk and Nasihat al-
Muluk by al-Ghazali (d. 1111) had all appeared in Turkish by the end of the
ifteenth century, some of them several times.105 This literature is primarily
concerned with “right” or “just” government within a pre-existing frame-
work of institutions, oices and social groups, which the authors will relect
but not analyse or justify.
People more or less closely involved in state afairs – or wanting to be –
also wrote manuals of advice for kings. The grand vezir Lüti Paşa called
his treatise on good government Asafname, after the advisor of the biblical
King Solomon, easily identiied with Lüti ’s lord, Sultan Süleyman. Modern
readers must be careful not to reduce the advice-to-kings (or mirror-for-
princes) literature to plain factual political memoranda. As the trope of the
biblical advisor indicates, their authors intended them as carefully crafted
102 Ayşe Sıdıka Oktay, Kınalizâde Ali Efendi ve Ahlâk-ı Alâî (Istanbul, 2005), p. 430.
103 Ibid., p. 479.
104 Kaykavus ibn Iskander, ‘Ḳābūsnāme [Turkish]’, in The Book of Advice by King Kay Kāʾus ibn
Iskander; the Earliest Old Ottoman Turkish Version of His Ḳābūsnāme; Text in facsimile from the
Unique 14th Century Manuscript, Together with a Study of the Text and a Select Vocabulary by
Eleazar Birnbaum, ed. Eleazar Birnbaum (Duxbury, Mass., 1981), pp. 4–6.
105 Douglas A. Howard, ‘Genre and Myth in the Ottoman Advice for Kings Literature’, in
Aksan and Gofman, The Early Modern Ottomans, pp. 137–66 at pp. 138–9.
434
works of art, and we should read them as such. Authors routinely supported
their cases with rhetoric and literary tropes, expended as social capital in the
struggle for patronage and attention at the Ottoman court. Mustafa Ali’s
Nushatu’s-Selatin is an obvious example; the author, always vying for a state
appointment, used every stylistic device at his command to ensure that his
patrons appreciated his highly critical assessment of the Ottoman Empire’s
situation.106 However, the heyday of advice-for-kings literature came only
when the period under consideration here had ended, when Aynı Ali, Koçi
Beg, Katib Çelebi, Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa and İbrahim Müteferrika
reacted to the numerous iscal, social, political and administrative crises of
the seventeenth century.
Apart from this literature driven by contemporary interest in state afairs,
another strand ofers a diferent, more philosophical kind of insight into
Islamicate, and speciically Ottoman, understanding of social order and
government, with Kınalızade Ali’s Ahlak-i Alai as its most important repre-
sentative. Once again, this literature builds on Persianate models, as is appar-
ent from the title Ahlak-i Alai (Alid Ethics) in analogy to Nasiruddin Tusi’s
Akhlaq-i Nasiri and Jalaluddin Dawwani’s Akhlaq-i Jalali. In turn, these works
draw on Greek philosophy, dealing with ethics as far as the individual is con-
cerned but also with the government of the household (oikos) and the state
(polis). For Kınalızade, state and government only form a small portion of this
complex, connected through the metaphor of the human body and the anal-
ogy between the household and society at large. In another twist of the same
metaphor, the head of the household appears as the doctor, who balances the
humours through appropriate medication.107
From his ancient and Islamic predecessors, al-Farabi in particular, Kınalızade
Ali adopts the concept of man as a zoon politikon, forced to form communities
to compensate for his weaknesses. Men are created diferent; every one has
his place in a social group in which he provides a vital service, a contribution
to the “virtuous polis”, which is to be knowledgeable, righteous and pious. By
contrast, the “non-virtuous polis” may be ignorant (cahil), mischievous (fasık)
or in error (dall).108 Five classes form the fundament of the moral economy
of the “virtuous polis”: the “distinguished” (afadil) rule and guide the city by
their superior knowledge and wisdom. While the “orators” (zu’l-elsine) teach
106 Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu, ‘Lüti Paşa Asafnamesi (Yeni Bir Metin Tesisi Denemesi)’, in Prof.
Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu’na Armağan (Istanbul, 1991), pp. 49–99; Howard, ‘Genre and Myth in the
Ottoman Advice for Kings Literature’, pp. 148–9.
107 Oktay, Kınalizâde Ali Efendi ve Ahlâk-ı Alâî, p. 329.
108 Kınalızade, Ahlâk-ı Alâî, p. 451.
435
and guide the uneducated masses with words, the “accountants” (muqaddir)
control and supervise weights and measures. It falls to the “warriors” (gazi)
to protect the community against external enemies and undertake conquests.
People who are economically active (erbab-i emval), such as farmers, artisans
and merchants, form the last class of people.109 Elsewhere we ind four clas-
ses as the basis of a more politically conceived economy: the men of the
pen (ehl-i kalem), the men of the sword (ehl-i şimşir), the merchants (tüccar)
and the agriculturalists (zira’at-ger). Returning to the metaphor of the human
body, Kınalızade Ali describes these four classes as corresponding to the four
humours of Galenic medicine.110
As people not only belong to diferent classes but also have diferent ethical
qualities, the social order is subject to disruption by the unruly, the evil and the
ignorant. Therefore it is the essential task of government to “rein people in”,
as indicated by the etymology of the Arabic term siyasa; in other words, to
keep them in place. Justice as the right balance between these groups involves
treating everybody according to his place in the social order rather than treat-
ing all people equally. However, such diferentiation does not mean license to
oppression, for the subjects are entrusted to the ruler, and he is responsible
for their well-being.
In Ahlak-i Alai, the inter-dependence of ruler, ruling class and ruled has
found its perfect expression in the “Circle of equity” (daire-i ʿadliye), which
is appended to the work as part of the “legacy” of Alexander the Great, the
perfect king. Its eight maxims are typically written around the perimeter of
a circle:
There can be no royal authority without the military
There can be no military without wealth
The subjects produce the wealth
Justice preserves the subjects’ loyalty to the sovereign
Justice requires harmony in the world
The world is a garden, its walls are the state
The Holy Law orders the state
There is no support for the şeri’at except through royal authority111
109 Hagen, ‘World Order and Legitimacy’, p. 63; Oktay, Kınalizâde Ali Efendi ve Ahlâk-ı Alâî, pp.
445–59.
111 Cornell Fleischer, ‘Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism, and “Ibn Khaldûnism” in Sixteenth-
Century Ottoman Letters’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 18 (1983), 198–220 at p. 201;
Hagen, ‘World Order and Legitimacy’; Linda T. Darling, ‘The Circle and the Tree: A Vision
of Justice in the Middle East’, in Historical Dimensions of Islam: Essays in Honor of R. Stephen
Humphreys, ed. James E. Lindsay and Jon Armajani (Princeton, N.J., 2009), pp. 151–82.
436
As we have seen, Kınalızade Ali regards the king as the physician, whose task
it is to preserve or restore the health of this organism; in other words, the
perfect balance between its diferent parts or humours. This view has several
implications. Firstly, the socio-political order is divinely ordained and there-
fore largely beyond human inl uence. Humans may disrupt or upset the order,
but it is not their calling to establish it; in other words, there is only one form
of social order, not diferent ones for diferent states or periods.112 Secondly,
social groups and government are universal categories and in no way spe-
ciic to any culture or nation, just as cultural, ethnic, religious or other difer-
ences among the subjects are not part of the theory, not even the distinction
between nomads and sedentary folk so pervasive in other theories. On this
level of abstraction, the author does not even need to theorise the legal dis-
tinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, and diferences of ethnicity are
of interest only when it comes to domestic slaves.113 This universal mechanism
is captured by the ideal of nizam-i ‘alem, world order; therefore, interpreting
this term as an Ottoman aspiration to world domination is a modern ideo-
logical construct.114 The third implication of this metaphor is that the king or
sultan is separate from society. Other less elaborate theories of the polity as
a body equate the king with the head or describe him as part of the military
class, but Kınalızade Ali does not leave any room for such a view. Interestingly,
the second half of the sixteenth century, and the period of Murad III in partic-
ular, indeed saw an increasing retreat of the Ottoman sultans into the palace,
reducing interaction with their subjects to a minimum. Kınalızade did not live
long enough to see Murad III ascend the throne, but evidently he recognised
the signs of the times, even under the latter’s predecessors.
The king or sultan rules with the aid of the law. Some thinkers, like Tursun
Bey, allow for the possibility of legitimate rule based on purely rational law
(kanun) while admitting that the result will only be an externally imposed
order. This is inferior to an order based on sacred law (şeriʿat), for only the
latter can lead to felicity in both worlds (saʿadeteyn). Consequently, Kınalızade
Ali presents sacred law as the only possible basis for just government and felic-
ity, arguing that only this kind of law proved by miracles will gain everybody’s
willing obedience, whereas kanun as traditional law (not positive law) will
have to resort to coercion.
Although many of Kınalızade Ali’s illustrative examples – probably on pur-
pose – refer to the caliphs of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, he does not
112 Oktay, Kınalizâde Ali Efendi ve Ahlâk-ı Alâî, pp. 442–3.

113 Kınalızade, Ahlâk-ı Alâî, pp. 393–403.
114 Hagen, ‘World Order and Legitimacy’.
437
explicitly discuss the caliphate as an ideal form of government. This omission

is all the more intriguing as the Ottomans had used this title for a long time,
and, moreover, Kınalızade Ali’s contemporary, Sultan Süleyman’s long-term
şeyhülislam Ebussuud (d. 1574), had taken pains to demonstrate the legal claim
of the Ottoman dynasty to the defunct title of caliph, implying ultimate sov-
ereignty over all Muslims.115
Yet the sultan’s “authority over the substance and application of the law”
remained limited even as caliph.116 After all, Ottoman realities had only lim-
ited connection to this idealised theoretical state. Kınalızade Ali did not at all
conceptualise the signiicant possibilities for social mobility from the subject
class to the elite that the Ottoman system permitted, be it through recruit-
ment into the janissaries or else through a medrese career. Nor, as we have
seen, did the author analyse oicial policies of maintaining diferences among
the subject populations.
State-minded readings of Ahlak-i Alai have tended to focus on the ideal
of justice as a political principle and neglected another important aspect.
In a society constituted by diferent groups and classes, justice can help to
avoid conl icts; however, it can only induce an artiicial kind of unity. Only
by means of a diferent principle, namely love or attraction (mahabbet), can
people hope to achieve natural unity. Attraction rules within the family
(between husband and wife or between parents and children) but also within
the social order (between teacher and student, sheikh and disciple or king
and subject). Mahabbet exists even between animals, plants and inanimate
substances by virtue of their attracting or being attracted to other beings
that correspond to them in terms of their fundamental characteristics of
warmth/coldness or dryness/humidity. In fact, the concept of love is well
nigh ubiquitous when it comes to the interpretation of social and cosmic
relations.117 Thus, once again, the search for a universal principle that has
the power to unify what appears to be diferent manifests itself, attributed
to the prophet Muhammad in the context of the pilgrimage ritual but also
understood at the cosmic level: “The goal of the legislator (şariʿ) is as much
as possible to conirm the bond of unity, and to abolish the al iction of
plurality.”118
115 Colin Imber, Ebu’s-suùd: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 98–111.
116 Ibid., p. 111.
117 Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-
Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, N.C., 2005).
438
History: Concepts of time

Between the conquest of Constantinople (1453) and the late 1500s, Ottoman
historiography emerged and matured to the point where a set of authorita-
tive works came into being which deined a canonical understanding of the
past – and therefore of the present – similarly to Menazıru’l-Avalim in the
description of the physical world. Just as maps, geography and knowledge of
natural history help man to orient himself in space, history and memory per-
mit humans to orient themselves in time. Speculative and transmitted knowl-
edge about the great cosmic cycles overlaps with memories of collective and
individual experience.
To study the development of Ottoman historiography always means
understanding the bitter arguments over the past, the rifts in society at large
as well as among the elite, for while referring to the past, these disputes
concerned both the present and the future. Jan Assmann has developed the
concept of mnemohistory as the investigation into how and why collectives
remember. Mnemohistory is “not concerned with the past as such, but with
the past as it is remembered”; for a historian of memory, the “truth” of a
given memory depends not so much on its “factuality” as on its “relevance
to actuality”. Events are forgotten unless they live on in collective memory.
The reason for this “living on” lies in the continuous relevance of particu-
lar events, derived not from their historical past but from an ever-changing
present in which they are remembered as facts of importance.119 Seen from
this angle, the sudden outburst of historical writing especially in the period
of Bayezid II indicates considerable tension over the direction in which the
newly enlarged empire was heading socially, politically and ideologically. For
a long time, scholars have either dismissed certain episodes as obviously leg-
endary or else uncritically accepted them as factual accounts, but in reality
we will most fruitfully read such accounts as contributions to the struggle
over memory.120 In order to appreciate the function of historical accounts,
however, it is vital to understand the genre and the sense of history and
memory as it evolved in our period. There is no single line of development;
instead, diferent strands interweave and intersect, coming to the forefront
at diferent times.121
119 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1997), p. 9.
120 Karl Teply, Türkische Sagen und Legenden um die Kaiserstadt Wien (Vienna, Cologne and Graz,
1980).
121 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, p. 238.
439
The human sense of history operates with diferent concepts of time, and
to a degree the numerous groups by means of which every individual deines
his or her identity promote diferent understandings of time. All inhabit-
ants of the Ottoman Empire, subjects and elite alike, experienced their lives
foremost as personal time in which the profane annual cycle featured promi-
nently. However, personal time is related to other concepts of time in a num-
ber of ways, which we will now explore. In Ottoman historiography, diferent
concepts of time are present and frequently overlap, yet they can be analysed
as distinct. Research into the genre of historiography and its sub-categories
still is insuicient; while certain scholars have proposed the use of indigenous
categories for analysis of ifteenth- and sixteenth-century historiography, such
categories do not seem to allow suiciently precise distinctions.122
Mehmed Aşık was well aware of something that we can call cosmic time.
While his description of the globe, the universe and the realms of nature is
detailed and diferentiated, this author expresses only the most rudimentary
sense of history. His work begins with an account of creation, which culmi-
nates in the irst construction of the Kaaba, while Judgement Day provides
closure. Starting with Adam, who irst received a revealed law from God,
cycles of revelation history impart a structure to this cosmic time. Among the
prophets, cosmographers usually include the major biblical igures in addi-
tion to the so-called Arabian prophets Hud and Salih; the series ends with
the prophet Muhammad, whose law has abrogated all previous ones and will
only come to an end with Judgement Day.
Ottomans became familiar with this concept of sacred time in the form of
various translations and adaptations of a popular Arabic genre known as qısas
al-anbiya, the earliest translations of such texts into Turkish going back to the
early fourteenth century.123 Turkish kısasü’l-enbiya works were distinct from their
Arabic models in that they contained a section on Muhammad and thus provided
a complete account of revelation history by the standards of Sunnism. From a
Shi’ite point of view, sacred history after the death of the prophet Muhammad
was, however, mainly the history of rejection, oppression and sufering. As
such, the narrative continued with the lives of the Alid imams, as for instance in
Fuzûlî’s (d. 1556) martyrology Hadikatü’s-Süada, which culminated in the death
of Hüseyn in Karbala and was widely read among the Ottoman elite.124
122 Ibid., p. 237; Sholeh Alysia Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas: Ideology,
Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2000), pp. 24f.
123 İsmet Cemiloğlu, 14. Yüzyıla Ait Bir Kısas-i Enbiyâ Nüshası Üzerinde Sentaks İncelemesi
(Ankara, 1994).
124 Gottfried Hagen, ‘From Haggadic Exegesis to Myth: Popular Stories of the Prophets in
Islam’, in Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament and Qur’an as Literature and Culture, ed.
440
Obviously, revelation history provided no direct frame of reference to

any political entity of the time, being more relevant for individual piety
as a foundational narrative of Islam. In the chronological calendars of
the early ifteenth century, in a sense the beginnings of Ottoman histo-
riography, the sequence of the prophets served to anchor even the most
recent events. Moreover, the authors placed the prophets in an absolute
chronology leading all the way back to Adam, thus mapping revelation
history onto the cycles of astronomical time.125 Later, world chronicles
often narrated pre-Islamic history primarily as revelation history, and only
after Muhammad discussed a political history of dynasties. Ramazanzade
Mehmed Paşa, known as Küçük Nişancı (d. 1571), in the very title of his
work Kısas-ı Enbiya-i İzam ve Tevarih-i Hulefa-i Kiram retained a reference
to the history of the prophets. Yet as cosmic time implies that both the
beginnings and the end of history link up with current events in a single
unbroken chronology, awareness of an imminent end and the proximity
of Judgement Day permeated Ottoman historical thought. Late in the six-
teenth century, around the time of the Islamic millennium, this kind of
consciousness was to culminate.
In the formation and development of Ottoman historical thought, a sec-
ond concept of time was at work as well, which we can call mythical time.
Human beings can never bridge the chasm between personal time and this
time of origins, an idealised past irretrievably lost but always remembered.
Instead they will perform the narratives of such a past as a ritual return to it;
through the relevant stories, they transmit the foundations of collective iden-
tities and values. As for the Turks of Central Asia, an aristocratic nomadic
society, its members preserved and ritually remembered this mythical past
in a vast literature of heroic epics. Under the social conditions of Anatolia,
however, these epics seem to have become obsolete early on, with the Book
of Dede Korkut, written down early in the sixteenth century, as the only
example preserved.126 The theme of a larger-than-life hero in an ideal past
recalled as inspiration for the present found a diferent form of expression in
the “frontier narratives” which glorify the endless confrontations of Muslims
and inidels in Anatolia in works such as the Battalname, Ebu-Muslimname and
Danişmendname.127
Roberta Sabbath (Leiden, 2009), pp. 301–16; Meḥmed b. Süleymān Fuẓūlī, Ḥadīqat al-su‘adā’
(Istanbul, 1296/1879).
125 Atsız, Osmanlı Tarihine Ait Takvimler.
126 Karl Reichl, Turkic Oral Epic Poetry (New York, 1992), chap. 2.
127 Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995).
441
While these epics functioned primarily in the milieu of frontiersmen and

ighters, narratives serving a similar aim also appeared among religious com-
munities, in particular among dervishes and other followers of the numerous
local saints of Anatolia. Quite a few legends of saints (menakıbnames) have
come down to us which relate the lives of holy persons. Narrators give pride
of place to the saint’s mission, often understood literally in the sense that God
or a sheikh had sent the saint to a given locality; at later stages of the story,
there followed the establishment of a shrine, struggles with local power-hold-
ers and all kinds of miracles.128 These legends of saints share with the heroic
epic the focus on the life and deeds of an individual as the model or founder of
a community as well as the concept of time, for the deeds of the heroes and
saints occur in a past whose chronological distance from the present of reader
and narrator remains unspeciied. Neither the Battalname nor for instance the
Vilayetname of Hacı Bektaş, believed to have been written down in the late
1400s, give their readers any chronological information beyond vague claims
of simultaneity with certain rulers, often equally legendary.129
Increasingly, heroic epics came to occupy but a marginal position in the
canon. But menakıbnames retained their importance at the very least within
the religious communities that had produced them and whose members con-
tinued to perform and transmit them orally. As a result, it oftentimes was
only in the nineteenth century that dervishes and others committed to writ-
ing certain saints’ legends, especially from the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition.130 Given
the importance of oral transmission, hagiographies easily adapted to chang-
ing circumstances, accumulating diferent layers in the process. Thus the
Vilayetname of Hacı Bektaş relected tensions with political power-holders
in general, even while reproducing Ottoman claims to legitimacy. Numerous
competitions with other saints suggested that the Bektaşi order during its
formative period aimed to incorporate local sanctuaries in various places of
the empire. At the same time, the originally rather simple religious setting
was complicated by the insertion of more Sunni orthodox elements, perhaps
due to oicial pressures.
128 Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Kültür Tarihi Kaynağı Olarak Menâkıbnâmeler: Metodolojik bir Yaklaşım
(Ankara, 1997); Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Bektaşi Menâkıbnâmelerinde İslâm Öncesi İnanç Motileri
(Istanbul, 1983); Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Türk Halk İnançlarında ve Edebiyatında Evliyâ Menkabeleri
(Ankara, 1983).
129 Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı (ed.), Vilâyet-nâme: Manâkıb-ı Hünkâr Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî (Istanbul,
1995).
130 Abdurrahman Güzel (ed.), Kaygusuz Abdal (Alâeddin Gaybî) Menâkıbnâmesi (Ankara, 1999);
Rıza Yıldırım, Rumeli’nin Fethinde ve Türkleşmesinde Öncülük Etmiş bir Gâzi Derviş: Seyyid Ali
Sultan (Kızıldeli) ve Velâyetnâmesi (Ankara, 2007).
442
Between hagiography especially of the early Anatolian saints, heroic epic

and historiography there lies what we may call a “gray area”. Saints are often
treated like heroes, and their legends follow similar narrative patterns, some
of which recur in the early chronicles, which extol the virtues and deeds of
heroic individuals. Thus Umur Paşa, a historical igure, entered into legend,
and his menakıbname found a place in an Ottoman chronicle.131 Other political
personages might become the subjects of hagiographical accounts as well,
like Mahmud Paşa, the famed vezir of Mehmed II. Unfortunately, many ele-
ments in this latter menakıbname are hard to connect to events documented in
other sources, and we no longer know anything about the context or debate
in which this text must once have intervened.132 Similarly, the roles of saint
and warrior often overlap, as in the narrative of Seyyid Ali Sultan.133 The
Saltukname of Ebul Hayri Rumi, commissioned by Cem Sultan, the son of
Mehmed II, recounts the life of an elusive saint venerated in many places in
the Balkans, but the actual narrative has much more in common with a heroic
legend; especially the Battalname seems to have been a direct model. Given
this situation, literary analysis must often undermine any attempt to use epics
and saints’ legends as sources of factual information.134
Hagiographies originating from the larger trans-regional Sui orders
might become much more complex than the folk legends gathered in the
vilayetname literature, with its oftentimes strictly local audience. Thus, for
example, the hagiography of İbrahim-i Gülşeni (d. 1534), a prominent leader
of the Halveti order of dervishes, dealt with an individual in clearly identii-
able historical contexts, based on the personal memories of the author(s). Of
course, Gülşeni’s hagiographer Muhyi-yi Gülşeni (d. 1617) used the legend for
polemic or apologetic purposes, too, but he no longer held a mythical con-
cept of time.135
131 Halil İnalcık, ‘The Rise of Ottoman Historiography’, in Historians of the Middle East, ed.
Peter M. Holt and Bernard Lewis (London, 1962), pp. 152–67 at p. 157; Hasan Özdemir, Die
altosmanischen Chroniken als Quelle zur türkischen Volkskunde (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1975);
John Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image: Themes in Literature and the Visual Arts (Columbia,
S.C., 1993).
132 Theoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir
Mahmud Pasha Angelovic (1453–1474) (Leiden and Boston, 2001).
133 Yıldırım, Seyyid Ali Sultan.
134 Kemal Yüce, Saltuk-nâme’de Tarihî, Dinî ve Efsanevî Unsurlar (Ankara, 1987); Yorgos Dedes
(ed.), Battalname: Introduction, English Translation, Turkish Transcription, Commentary,
and Facsimile (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Sarı Saltık: Popüler İslâm’ın
Balkanlar’daki Destanî Öncüsü, XIII. Yüzyıl (Ankara, 2002).
135 Muhyi-yi Gülşeni, Menâkıb-ı İbrâhîm-i Gülşenî (Ankara, 1982); John C. Curry, ‘Home Is
Where the shaykh Is: The Concept of Exile in the Hagiography of İbrahim-i Gülşeni’,
Al-Masaq 17, 1 (2005), 47–60.
443
Personal time, deined by the horizon of individual memories and experi-

ences, is the third concept of time relevant for us. Certain individual accounts
of events, by eye-witnesses or participants, become part of the collective
memory, in accordance with the norms and values of the particular collec-
tive. Modern historians of the Ottoman Empire in search of factual data have
always privileged this last concept of time over the others, ignoring their
interplay and the diferent levels of meaning attributed to them.136 Memoirs
in the proper sense are not a familiar genre in the Ottoman context. But his-
torical writings explicitly and exclusively based on whatever political events
and military campaigns an individual author was able to observe, or have
related to him by eye-witnesses, form a small but important sub-genre of the
historiography. Sometimes gatherings in the sultan’s court and elsewhere lis-
tened to accounts of military campaigns called gazavatnames, presumably as
“modern” variants of heroic epics.137 Later on, prominent litterateurs edited
these texts as fethnames, which the sultan sent to other rulers to announce
recent victories. Such works typically covered only short timespans and cele-
brated sultans or military leaders as heroic ighters for Islam.
In its purest form, historiography as individual memory originated from
men close to political power. As examples, we might name bureaucrats like
Tursun Bey, who composed a history of Mehmed II and his times (Tarih-i
Ebu’l-Feth), and the imperial chancellor Celalzâde Mustafa, known as Koca
Nişancı, with his Tabakatü’l-Memalik ve Derecatü’l-Mesalik, a history of the
reign of Süleyman Kanuni up to the year 1557. Celalzade Mustafa had pre-
viously written several fethnames, which he then incorporated into his mas-
terpiece. Occasionally he quoted documents, some of which he may have
drafted himself. But otherwise Celalzade Mustafa, who had conceived the
extant portion of his work as only the thirtieth part of a vast panorama of the
Ottoman Empire in the time of Süleyman, took pride in not having to rely on
the historical works written by others.138 In the Selimname and Süleymanname
literature, we sense a struggle over memory, underpinning praise for indi-
vidual sultans or speciic actions and dictated by strong normative concepts.
Especially in Selim’s biography, the contentious issues are rather obvious.
136 Rhoads Murphey, ‘Ottoman Historical Writing in the Seventeenth Century: A Survey of
the General Development of the Genre after the Reign of Sultan Ahmed I (1603–1617)’,
Archivum Ottomanicum 13 (1993–4), 277–311.
137 Cem Murat Mengüç, ‘An Ottoman Historian, Safai’, angiolello.net/Menguc Ottoman
Historian.pdf; Reichl, Turkic Oral Epic Poetry.
138 Ḳoca Nisancı Celalzāde Mustafa, ‘Ṭabaḳātü’ l-Memālik ve Derecātü’ l-Mesālik’, in Geschichte
Süleymān Ḳānūnīs von 1520 bis 1557 oder Ṭabaḳāt ül-Memālik ve Derecāt ül-Mesālik von Celālzāde
Muṣṭafā genannt Ḳoca Niṣāncı, ed. Petra Kappert (Wiesbaden, 1981).
444
After all, as a prince he had rebelled against his father, Bayezid II, and when
the latter died shortly after his deposition, rumours were rife that Selim had
murdered him. The exact nature of the debate over Süleyman’s memory
remains to be explored. Among other aspects, authors may have wished to
comment on the struggle between Süleyman and his sons, a major conl ict
threatening the empire at the time of writing.139
Dynastic history
Dynastic history and world history ultimately constitute the two main genres
of Ottoman historiography. For political history, the dynasty is the funda-
mental unit. History happens through rulers, and in the absence of a ruling
house there is no history to be written. Prior to the 1700s, Ottoman historians
paid very little attention to pre-Islamic dynasties, with the possible exception
of Iranian history, for which the Shahnama probably was the most important
conduit. Classical sources also tended to interweave Sasanid and early Islamic
history. We can analyse both dynastic and world history by using the three
diferent concepts of time discussed, which authors have combined, multi-
plied and mapped onto one another, thus forming various sub-forms and
sub-genres. Throughout, we can observe, as in previous sections, a tendency
towards standardisation and canonisation.
When authors chose the duration of the Ottoman dynasty as the time-
frame for their historical writing, they identiied in one way or other with the
Ottoman enterprise, perhaps as members of the political, administrative or
military elite. Apart from narrative representations of history in the narrow
sense, the impact of dynastic identity is apparent in the prosopographical and
biographical compilations, which typically focus on the territory controlled
by the Ottoman sultans. Thus Taşköprüzade’s foundational compilation of
the lives of scholars and sheikhs referred to the newly expanded Ottoman
Empire in its entirety, as is apparent already in the title of his work: al-Shaqa’iq
al-nu’maniyya i ʿulamaʾ al-dawlat al-ʿUthmaniyya. Comprising the period up
to 1558, Shaqaʾiq made available bio-bibliographies and essential career data
concerning scholars in the service of the sultans. Beginning with the earliest
rulers, the author arranged his material by reign, indicating thereby that a
139 Christine Woodhead, ‘An Experiment in Oicial Historiography: The Post of şehnāmeci
in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1555–1605’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 75
(1983), 157–82 at p. 172; Hakkı Erdem Çıpa, ‘The Centrality of the Periphery: The Rise to
Power of Selîm I, 1487–1512’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (2007),
chap. 2.
445
collective identity of Ottoman scholar-oicials was taking shape. Apart from

the translation into Turkish we have already encountered, a number of later
authors continued the work of the two Taşköprüzades, an indication of its
crucial role.140 In a similar way, the emerging cultural self-conidence of the
Ottomans as “people of Rum” manifested itself in the irst collections of
poets’ lives (tezkire), beginning with Sehî’s Heşt Behişt in 1538 and culminating
a generation later in Aşık Çelebi’s Meşa’irü’l-Şu’ara (completed in 1569).141
Prior to our period, the only narrative account framed as a history of the
Ottoman dynasty is a section of about 300 verses in a classic of moral and
political advice literature, Ahmedi’s İskendername (ca. 1410), probably inserted
when the author – or somebody close to him – re-dedicated the work to an
Ottoman patron.142 This account remained relatively isolated; however, in the
later 1400s, especially after the death of Mehmed II, a l urry of works came
into being as a result of the power struggles between his two sons and the
re-orientation of the empire after the advent of Bayezid II. Presumably these
writers reacted to the defunct sultan’s autocratic regime, the struggle over his
succession and the marginalisation of the Turkish aristocracy.143 As a result,
Ottoman dynastic history, structured by the reigns of successive sultans,
became the historiographical form par excellence. Incidentally, Arab histori-
ography in the Ottoman period was to favour the same format, as opposed to
a strictly annalistic narrative.144
The earliest examples of the genre known as Tevarih-i Al-i Osman were
anonymous, written in simple, straightforward Turkish as a series of discrete
episodes, often in the format of popular tales preserved as oral narratives
with relatively little coherence. Combined with calendars, these collections
140 Ahmed b. Mustafa Taşköprüzade, ‘Al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmānīya fī ʿulamāʾ al-dawlat

al-ʿUthmānīya’, in eş-Şeḳā’iḳu n-nuʿmānīye fī ʿulemā’i d-devleti l-ʿos̱mānīye: Tasköprülü-zâde
ʿIṣām-ud-Dīn Ebu l’Ḫayr Ahmed Efendi. İnceleme ve notlarla neşreden Ahmed Subhi Furat, ed.
Ahmed Subhi Furat (Istanbul, 1985). The Turkish translation by Mecdî Mehmed Efendi (d.
1591) is much more popular. See Abdülkadir Özcan (ed.), Şakaik-i Nu’maniye ve Zeyilleri, 5
vols. (Istanbul, 1989).
141 Sehi Bey, ‘Heşt bihişt’, in Sehi Bey, Heşt Bihişt: Sehî Beg Tezkiresi: İnceleme, Tenkidli Metin,
Dizin, ed. Günay Kut (Duxbury, Mass., 1978); Aşık Çelebi, ‘Meşāʿirü’ l-şuʿara’, in Meşāʿirü ş-
şuʿara; or, Tezkere of ‘Aşık Çelebi, ed. G. M. Meredith-Owens (London, 1971); James Stewart-
Robinson, ‘The Ottoman Biographies of Poets’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24, 1–2
(1964), 57–74.
142 Ahmedi, ‘İskender-nāme’, in Ahmedi, İskender-nāme: İnceleme, tıpkıbasım, ed. İsmail Ünver
(Ankara, 1983), pp. 65b–68a, trans. in Kemal Silay, ‘Aḥmedī’s History of the Ottoman
Dynasty’, Journal of Turkish Studies 16 (1992), 129–200.
143 İnalcık, ‘The Rise of Ottoman Historiography’, p. 164; Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual,
p. 238.
144 Otfried Weintritt, Arabische Geschichtsschreibung in den arabischen Provinzen des Osmanischen
Reiches (16.-18. Jahrhundert) (Schenefeld, 2008).
446
acquired a chronological structure of sorts.145 As topics, individual leadership

and morality predominated, as similarly to the heroic epic, every episode car-
ried its object lesson within itself. The dervish Aşıkpaşazade (d. ca. 1484) was
perhaps the irst author within this genre to speak with a distinct voice – frank
and critical of the present – against which, in a recourse to mythical time, he
presented an idealised image of the Ottoman enterprise in its beginnings,
when the Ottoman gazis waged selless war against the inidels and the pos-
sessions of Osman Bey amounted to little more than a caftan, some blankets,
a few good horses and some herds of sheep.146
In the accounts of Aşıkpaşazade, Oruç (d. after 1502) and others, there
emerged a distinct Ottoman dynastic myth which presented the earliest
phases of the dynasty as already imbued with the spirit of holy war for Islam;
it struggled to demonstrate Ottoman loyalty to their alleged Seljuk overlords
and justify the sultans’ wars against fellow Muslims. In addition, these authors
provided the Ottomans with a tribal genealogy, proving their rank above com-
peting dynasties like the Akkoyunlu or Safavids or improving their Islamic
credentials through a connection to the sons of Noah. The famous dream in
which Osman was promised rule over the entire world served as the divinely
approved foundation for an alliance between the house of Osman and certain
dervishes.147 But the early chroniclers were not simply mouthpieces of impe-
rial ideology; on the contrary, they also participated in a debate about the
legitimacy and righteousness of the Ottoman imperial project by recount-
ing legends and counter-legends: the portrayal of Constantinople and even
Haghia Sophia as accursed locations, found in certain chronicles and related
texts, voiced a powerful rejection of Ottoman ambitions to take over this
infelicitous empire. In the period of Mehmed II, other authors circulated a
counter-legend which cast a much more favourable light on the city as a place
full of blessings.148 Such controversies demonstrate the conl ictual origins of
145 Victor L. Ménage, ‘The Beginnings of Ottoman Historiography’, in Holt and Lewis,
Historians of the Middle East, pp. 168–79 at p. 174.
146 Aşıkpaşazade, ‘Tevārīkh-i Āl-ı ʿOs̱mān’, in Die altosmanische Chronik des Āšiḳpašazāde: auf
Grund mehrerer neuentdeckter Handschriften, ed. Friedrich Giese (Leipzig, 1929, reprinted
Osnabrück, 1972); Aşıkpaşazade, ‘Aşıkpaşaoğlu Ahmed Âşık î: Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman’, in
Osmanlı Tarihleri, ed. Çiftçioğlu Nihal Atsız (Istanbul, 1949), pp. 79–318. A modern critical
edition is still a desideratum. For Osman’s estate, see Aşıkpaşazade, ‘Aşıkpaşaoğlu Ahmed
Âşık î. Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman’, p. 115.
147 ʿOruç, ‘[Tārīkh]’, in Oruç Beğ Tarihi (Giriş, Metin, Kronoloji, Dizin, Tıpkıbasım), ed. Necdet
Öztürk (Istanbul, 2007); Colin Imber, ‘The Ottoman Dynastic Myth’, Turcica 19 (1987), 7–27;
Barbara Flemming, ‘Political Genealogies in the Sixteenth Century’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları
7–8 (1988), 123–37.
148 Stéphane Yerasimos, La fondation de Constantinople et de Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions
turques: légendes d’Empire (Istanbul and Paris, 1990).
447
Ottoman historical thought, in which the past – true to Assmann – was of

immediate relevance for the present. When the empire was irmly established
under Mehmed II and Beyazıt II, these legends soon became obsolete, how-
ever, and in the later historiography ended up as mere baggage.
Yet other transformations of the Tevarih-i Al-i Osman genre continued.
Aşıkpaşazade narrated, for instance, how in the days of Orhan the daughter of
a Byzantine frontier lord handed over her father’s castle to the Ottomans after
seeing a gazi-saint in a dream that announced (and caused) her conversion
to Islam. Later authors found such pious legends to be at odds with a more
scriptural understanding of Islam. A generation later, Neşri (d. before 1520) as
a member of the learned establishment (ulema) retold the same story, replac-
ing the religious motivation by a simple love story between the Christian girl
and one of Orhan’s gazis. In this way, the rough and idiosyncratic narratives
of the early days were increasingly domesticated and rendered harmless at
the hands of later chroniclers.149
Parallel to this process, the adaptation of the simple, vernacular style of
the early chronicles to more elaborate elite tastes was under way. Persianate
models, adopted via the Timurid culture of Herat and Samarqand, are appar-
ent already in the chronicle of Oruç, with its ubiquitous references to the
heroes of the Shahnama. The Persian Heşt Behişt of İdris Bidlisi, begun in
1502–3, explicitly drew on the stylistic and organisational models of Persianate
historiography, while most of the content was lifted from the earlier Ottoman
chroniclers. At the same time, Turkish increasingly came into its own as a lit-
erary language, partly due to the adoption of Persian literary models from
the Timurid high culture of Herat and Samarqand. Tursun Bey’s Tarih-i Ebu’l-
Feth had already adopted for the writing of history the heavily Persianate style
of the Ottoman chancery, another crucial breeding ground for literary and
ideological trends.
Now, almost simultaneously with İdris Bidlisi, Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534) was
to produce a similar work, but in Turkish. He had gained fame as a legal
scholar, being the author of the most important Ottoman commentary on
the Qur’an, and rose to become şeyhülislam in 1526. Originally conceived in
eight parts like the Heşt Behişt, one for each sultan up to Bayezid II, continu-
ations were added later in Kemalpaşazâde’s lifetime, but he never completed
149 Paul Wittek, ‘The Taking of Aydos Castle: A Gazi Legend and Its Transformation’, in Arabic
and Islamic Studies in Honour of Hamilton A. R. Gibb, ed. George Makdisi (Cambridge, Mass.,
1965), pp. 662–72; Özdemir, Die altosmanischen Chroniken als Quelle zur türkischen Volkskunde,
pp. 290–310.
448
his work.150 Despite its scope and literary qualities, Kemalpaşazade’s history
ultimately had little impact; rather, the canonical version of the “Tevarih-i
Al-i Osman” came about with Hoca Sadeddin’s (d. 1599) Tacü’t-Tevarih, which
brought the diverging and conl ictual traditions of the earlier chronicles
into a uniied and distinctly authority-oriented master narrative. Dedicated
to Murad III but covering the dynastic history only to the death of Selim I,
Tacü’t-tevarih became extremely popular, de facto superseding all its prede-
cessors, partly due to its elaborate Ottoman high prose.151 Just as in the chan-
cery, style was expected to match content; the use of ornate prose allowed the
author to display his poetic skill and learning, and arguably this literary device
supported his authority and that of his account. Thus, style here is more than
prettiication that we can strip away without loss to content.
World history
World history, in comparison with dynastic history, developed at a very difer-
ent pace. Some early accounts of the Ottomans are actually part of world his-
tories, but even where we possess the full text, present-day scholars have paid
hardly any attention to those terse and obviously unoriginal parts. Examples
include Şükrullah’s Persian Bahjatu t-tawarikh (ca. 1458) as well as Enveri’s
Düsturname, with its account of the Aydınoğulları, who had preceded the
Ottomans in south-western Anatolia. Of Neşri’s Cihannüma, conceived as
a world history, only the sixth book, dealing with the Ottomans, is extant.
Furthermore, Ramazanzade Mehmed Paşa’s Kısas, mentioned earlier, is the
typical popular world history, providing a uni-dimensional line irst of proph-
ets and then of caliphs and dynasties from Adam to the Ottomans.
Yet sixteenth-century historians were clearly aware that the past was more
complicated and that even in most periods of Islamic history there had been
more than one dynasty at a time. In a manner reminiscent of the Table of
Peoples in Chapter 10 of the Book of Genesis, certain authors visualised the
connections between dynasties in a set of diagrams on scrolls, sometimes
generically entitled Silsilename, the most impressive of which was Lokman’s
Zübdetü’t-Tevarih, produced in the late sixteenth century.152 All these works
150 V. L. Ménage, ‘Kemālpasha-zāde’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 4, pp.
879–81.
151 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual.
152 Baki Tezcan, ‘The Politics of Early Modern Historiography’, in Aksan and Gofman, The
Early Modern Ottomans, pp. 167–98 at pp. 172–5; Sadi Bayram, ‘Silsilenameler ve 1598 Tarihli
Zübdetü’t-Tevarih’, Vakılar Dergisi 24 (1994), 51–116.
449
depicted history as one uniied genealogy of dynasties, branching out from

Noah and his sons, while making no clear distinction between the ancestry of
an entire people and that of the relevant ruling dynasty.153 For the most recent
period, the House of Osman provided unity. Several of these scrolls were
richly illustrated, while simpler versions just showed a circle for every indi-
vidual. It was only late in the sixteenth century that historians began to com-
pile universal histories which discussed as many dynasties as possible, with
a separate chapter for each. Relying on classical Arabic and Persian sources
for the pre-Ottoman period, they used earlier Ottoman sources for the rel-
evant sections of their surveys. Massive compilations, preferably in Arabic,
like Cenabi’s (d. 1590) Al-ʿAylam az-zahir i ahwal al-awa’il wa l-awahir and al-
Qaramani’s (d. 1611) Ahbar ad-duwal wa atar al-uwal, inaugurated the age of
Ottoman world historiography.
Although these works were popular as references, Mustafa Ali’s magisterial
world history, Künhü’l-Ahbar, eclipsed them all due to its scope, coherent intel-
lectual outlook and the author’s outspoken character. Künhü’l-Ahbar assumed
an authoritative position, opening a new period of Ottoman universal histo-
riography which would only come to a close a century later with the work
of Müneccimbaşı (d. 1702). We may take Mustafa Ali’s great work as another
part of the canon of Ottoman knowledge.
Künhü’l-Ahbar breaks down history into four major periods, namely the
beginnings (including the cosmography mentioned before), pre-Islamic and
Islamic history up to the Mongols, the Mongol and Turkic empires, and inally
the Ottomans. As the non-Muslim world appeared only in occasional frag-
ments, a contemporary and unique work on the kings of France, though put
together in Mustafa Ali’s lifetime, remained without impact.154 According to
Cornell Fleischer, Mustafa Ali “strove to adhere to a lat, seemingly objective
presentation of major, pertinent events and historical facts, with relatively few
intrusions of opinion or subjective tone”. And “Künhü’ l-ahbar was intended
as a work of history and part of a particular historiographical genre, exempli-
ied by Persianate historians like Rashīduddīn and Mīrkhwānd, even though
the canons of that genre might not be explicitly articulated.”155
By integrating Ottoman history into world history, Mustafa Ali consciously
subjected the sultans to comparison with other ruling dynasties. His critical
153 Schmidt, Pure Water, pp. 138–44.

154 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, p. 245; Schmidt, Pure Water, pp. 172–9; Jean-Louis
Bacqué-Grammont (ed.), La première histoire de France en turc ottoman: Chroniques des padi-
chahs de France (Paris, 1997).
155 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, pp. 237, 240.
450
attitude towards his own time very much motivated his writing history in the
irst place; to express his criticism, the author made use of an ininite number
of examples he had collected in his study of history. While the contentious
character of the Tevarih-i Al-i Osman hinged on the idealisation of a partic-
ular period of Ottoman history, especially the earliest sultans, Mustafa Ali’s
basis of reference was an ideal polity of non-equals, kept in just balance by an
enlightened ruler. While Künh is an extremely rich source, Ali’s political con-
cepts did not difer substantially from the ideas propounded in the Ahlak-i Alai
and elsewhere. But Mustafa Ali had distilled his ideal from a historical survey
all his own; the perpetual cyclical patterns of world history came about as
rulers observed or neglected the ideal of just balance.156
In the absence of an abstract theory of history, it is from practice that we
need to extract the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of Ottoman
historiography. Mustafa Ali’s concept of historical cycles has much in com-
mon with the theories of Ibn Khaldun; the correspondence seems to derive
partly from the fact that both authors treat similar historical cases of sed-
entary empires founded by nomadic tribes. But of greater importance is a
convergence of cultural traditions in historical consciousness, even more
remarkable as it is unlikely that Mustafa Ali had read Ibn Khaldun directly.157
Despite the mechanisms of rise and decline, history for Mustafa Ali is an
interconnected series of events caused by human decisions, hence his lengthy
biographical chapters at the end of every section. In fact, he declares that
“reviving the dead” is one of the purposes of history.158 A rational morality as
well as Islam guides individuals in their decisions; while moral action carries
its reward within itself, God also guides his servants by means of dreams, por-
tents and other interventions, or sends catastrophic events as warnings and
punishments in case of deviation. Such occurrences igure in conspicuous
frequency, for instance in the work of the chronicler Oruç.
As world histories focus on persons, such as rulers and their servants, no
room remains for more complex or abstract agents in history. However, as
political wisdom and morality are of central importance, these works show
a concern for statecraft that we have already encountered in the advice-to-
princes literature; a good example is the advice section which precedes Tursun
Bey’s history of Mehmed II. On the other hand, and to a degree in contradic-
tion with this practical and ethical perspective, all these histories agree that
the House of Osman occupies a special place in world history, announced in
156 Fleischer, ‘Dynastic Cyclism’; Schmidt, Pure Water.

157 Fleischer, ‘Dynastic Cyclism’.
158 Schmidt, Pure Water, p. 133.
451
divine approval for the irst sultan and merited by the piety and justice of his
successors.
We have encountered Sadeddin writing an authoritative account of
Ottoman history; he was the second şeyhülislam, after Kemalpaşazade, to do
so. In addition to Tursun Bey and Celalzade Mustafa, several grand vezirs of
the period, such as Ayas Paşa (d. 1539), Lüti Paşa (d. 1562–3?) and Rüstem Paşa
(d. 1561), featured among the high-ranking servants of the House of Osman
who wrote the history of their patrons. Given the close relationship of many
prominent historians with the imperial household, we may wish to examine
the role of these authors in the formulation of Ottoman imperial ideology.
But instead we may prefer to think of historiography as one arena in which
diferent concepts and formulations compete and that under the right circum-
stances can all igure as parts of an imperial ideology.159
Our queries are particularly pertinent to a group of mid-sixteenth to early
seventeenth-century historians who produced high-prestige works for the
court while holding special salaried posts called şehnameci. Following the
model of the Shahnama, the irst works of this type were verse narratives in
Persian; later examples were also in prose and in Turkish. Mustafa Ali, in con-
tinuous rivalry with the şehnamecis, wrote in similar forms.160 The 15 works
produced by the ive şehnamecis over the half-century that the oice existed
included individual campaign accounts, dynastic and world histories, and
an album of images showing the physical appearance of the sultans.161 The
highly ornamental literary style of these works corresponded to the exqui-
site decoration of the written copies, with splendid calligraphy, binding and
often rich illustrations all made in the palace workshops. Outside circulation
of these books on the other hand was minimal; often only one copy existed,
which probably never left the palace. Baki Tezcan, thinking of historiography
as serving imperial propaganda, has therefore considered the şehnameci pro-
ject a failure.162
Arguably, however, in the şehname literature speciically but also in other
works with a panegyric slant, like the earlier gazavatnames, the addressee was
not a public in need of indoctrination but rather the ruler himself. In their
praise of the sultan, panegyric works evoked the ideals and norms the latter
was to follow. Confronted with his actions, albeit in an idealised form, the
159 For a slightly later period, see Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and
Historiography at Play (Berkeley, 2003).
160 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, p. 240.
161 Woodhead, ‘Şehnameci’.
162 Tezcan, ‘The Politics of Early Modern Historiography’; Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual,
p. 240.
452
sultan might measure them against the norms proposed and draw political
and moral lessons from the comparison. On the other hand, an all too obvi-
ous discrepancy between the ideals presented and real life might well embar-
rass a sultan such as Murad III, who visibly did not conform to them.163
Prognostication and the end of time

In the Ottoman world view, the past was not simply preserved and made
accessible in human memory as would any series of random events. On the
contrary, its inherent regularity and moral signiicance allowed for its recon-
struction as a source of norms: Ottomans always knew what the past “must
have been”. This same sense, however, not only comprised the past and,
through it, lent meaning to the present; it also helped to prepare for the future,
because of the regularities of history, the cosmic cycles and the unchanging,
extra-historical character of human nature and society. Moreover, God had
pre-ordained every event from creation to the end of time as written on the
Well-preserved Tablet.164 Prognosticating events, both on the individual and
the cosmic levels, thus was almost an obsession of Ottoman society.
Apart from the astrological horoscopes mentioned earlier, individuals
found many other ways to ind out about their futures. Oneiromancy drew
on Hellenistic models and handbooks, which attributed meaning to speciic
elements in a dream. Dreams were also a favourite medium for Suis to deter-
mine their progress on the mystical path. Other means of obtaining knowl-
edge about the future included geomancy and searching books for oracles.165
Techniques using the involuntary twitching of limbs during sleep must have
resulted in rather crude predictions, yet this practice was current at all times
from one end of Eurasia to the other.166 In response to such omens, people
could change their behaviour or protect themselves against evil with the help
of prayers, sacriices, magic and talismans. Numerous instructions survive in
manuscripts, but to date no systematic study of the topic exists. Many prayers
were expected to protect against harm in battle, and certain Ottoman sultans
163 Woodhead, ‘Şehnameci’, p. 181.

164 A. J. Wensinck [C. E. Bosworth], ‘Lawḥ’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol.
5, p. 598.
165 Maria Mavroudi, ‘Islamic Divination in the Context of Its “Eastern” and “Western”
Counterparts’, in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı
(London and Washington, D.C., 2009), pp. 222–9.
166 Peter Zieme, ‘Türkische Zuckungsbücher’, in Scripta Ottomanica et Res Altaicae: Festschrift
für Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, ed. Ingeborg Hauenschild, Claus Schönig and Peter Zieme
(Wiesbaden, 2002), pp. 379–95; Mavroudi, ‘Islamic Divination’, p. 225.
453
wore talismanic shirts for the same purpose.167 Both the individual and the
universal, eschatological dimension efectively fused at the Ottoman court,
which, like its Mongol and Timurid predecessors, at times gathered a full-
ledged “bureau of futurologists”.168 In problematic decisions, divination lent
additional legitimacy by removing agency from the individual to the cosmos
and impacting public opinion as well. While omens from heaven bolstered
the imperial image of a heavenly mandate, multiple readings of such omens
always were possible and preserved policy options.169
The practices of speciic prognostication, in other words soothsaying, over-
lap with attempts to predict the end of history and of all time, a purpose for
which the Islamic tradition provided numerous and often contradictory signs.
However, speciic prognostication and concern with the end of the world are
not the same: Ahmed Bican, deeply concerned with the apocalypse, detested
soothsaying.170 While it is diicult to identify a notion of progress towards an
extra-historical goal of salvation in Ottoman historical thought, the immi-
nence of doom seems to have been permanently present in people’s minds.
Cosmographies like Menazıru’l-Avalim therefore typically conclude with a list
of the “signs of the hour”.171 This awareness is not always clearly distinguishable
from a personal sense of mortality and culpability before God. Laban Kaptein
argues that the apocalyptic expectations invoked in Dürr-i Meknun are irst of all
individual, relating to the moment of death; they do not necessarily imply an
immediate end of the world.172 The apocalyptic signiicance of the conquest of
Constantinople was not lost on Ahmed Bican. Authors vehemently criticising
the times of Süleyman also couched their strictures in apocalyptic terms.173
In the reign of Mehmed II, courtly interest in apocalyptic thought and
eschatology drew on Muslim as well as Christian texts and included the use of
Greek manuscripts copied for the sultan or obtained from other sources.174 At
167 Florian Sobieroj, ‘Gebete in den Handschriften der “Türkenbeute” als Quellen der isla-
mischen Religions- und Sozialgeschichte’, Archivum Ottomanicum 24 (2007), 61–80; Hülya
Tezcan, Topkapı Sarayı’ndaki şifalı gömlekler (Istanbul, 2006).
168 Allsen, Culture and Conquest, p. 207.
169 Ibid., pp. 204–6.
170 Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’, pp. 14, 149f.
171 Aşık, Menâzır, vol. 2, p. 268a.
172 Yazıcıoğlu, ‘Dürr-i Meknûn’, commentary on chap. 17.
173 Yérasimos, Fondation; Barbara Flemming, ‘Public Opinion under Sultan Süleymân’, in
Süleyman the Second and His Time, ed. Cemal Kafadar and Halil İnalcık (Istanbul, 1993), pp.
49–57; Barbara Flemming, ‘Der Ǧāmiʿ ül-meknūnāt: Eine Quelle ʿĀlīs aus der Zeit Sultan
Süleymans’, in Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients: Festschrift für Bertold
Spuler, ed. Hans Robert Roemer and Albrecht Noth (Leiden, 1981), pp. 79–92.
174 Mavroudi, ‘Islamic Divination’, see p. 228; Cornell Fleischer, ‘Ancient Wisdom and New
Science: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in
Farhad and Bağcı, Falnama, pp. 232–43 at p. 233.
454
the court of Süleyman Kanuni, Haydar the Geomancer, who had previously
served Shah Tahmasp of Iran, wielded an unprecedented degree of inluence.175
Later in the century, the sultan’s court used books of omens (falname), which
combined illustrations with prognostications in words, a model adopted from
the Timurids. Under Murad III, Mehmed III and Ahmed I, the rulers and their
high-ranking oicials showed an avid interest in books on prognostication and
eschatology, including Tercüme-i Miftah-i Cifr-i Cami and Ahval-i Kiyamet.176
Süleyman as a young man had fashioned himself as the mehdi to usher in the
end of time; as for his grandson Murad III, in many of his dreams he created
an image of himself as the highest spiritual authority (kutbü’l-aktab) but also as
a messianic igure.177 Such claims, however covert, speak to a tendency towards
extreme sacralisation of the persona of the sultan, by means of which Ottoman
rule acquired universal and thus apocalyptic signiicance. We may assume that
in the late sixteenth century Ottoman legitimacy no longer directly rested on
justice in government and victory in war; rather, both had become secondary
results of the sultan’s sacred status granted by divine favour alone and there-
fore not in need of worldly justiication. But the pendulum would swing back
to more archaic and popular sultanic discourses with Osman II and Murad IV,
who openly adopted older models of rule.178
Conclusion
Ottoman authors of the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries believed in the inter-
relation of historical and political events with cosmic orders; human reason
and insight can comprehend these connections. It has been the underlying
argument of this chapter that such an understanding of the universe, typical
of the classical period of Ottoman culture, had practical consequences, and
belief in prognostication was one of them. Just like magic, prognostication is
possible because the universe is structured and its diferent orders are inter-
connected. People were able to map the celestial bodies onto the regions of
the globe and thus understand the diferent races and peoples of mankind.
Their diversity corresponds to the diferent sympathetic qualities of stones,
175 Cornell Fleischer, ‘Seer to the Sultan: Remmal Haydar and Sultan Süleyman’, in Cultural
Horizons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat S. Halman, ed. Jayne Warner (Istanbul and Syracuse,
N.Y., 2001), pp. 290–9.
176 Serpil Bağcı, ‘The Falname of Ahmed I (TSM H.1703)’, in Farhad and Bağcı, Falnama, pp.
68–75.
177 Özgen Felek, ‘(Re)creating Image and Identity: Dreams and Visions as a Means of the Self-
fashioning of Murad III’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan (2010).
178 Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein, Le Sérail ébranlé: Essai sur les morts, dépositions et avène-
ments des sultans ottomans (XIVe–XIXe siècles) (Paris, 2003).
455
plants and animals. These also inl uence and react to the humours of the
human body, which is a microcosm of human society. We can continue this
list of correspondences in many directions without even having recourse to
more esoteric components such as hurui sm, the search for the secret cosmic
signiicance of the letters of the alphabet, so common in our era.179 The poetic
language of the classical period mirrored the multiple valences of every phe-
nomenon of the physical universe. As Walter Andrews has demonstrated, in
Ottoman poetry “four discourses – love, religion, politics, and psychology –
intersected in a complex ecological relationship”, each being available as a
metaphor for the other.180
Yet all these orders remained distinct and subject to diferent kinds of reg-
ularities. As Western early modern scepticism inally subjected all realms of
the known world, both physical and intellectual, to the same critical gaze of
empiricism and strictly rational analysis, Renaissance scholars began to view
the universe as gigantic clockwork. In the Ottoman context, the crucial irst
steps in this direction seemingly occurred in the seventeenth century with
the approach taken by Katib Çelebi, who dismissed the imagery of Islamic
cosmology as purely symbolical, ad usum delphini, and instead subjected the
celestial world to the same physical laws known on earth. In the same way,
Katib Çelebi overcame the fragmentation of knowledge imposed by the cat-
egories of Taşköprüzade, Mehmed Aşık, and others to unify it into one vast
complex, referring to the same epistemological principles throughout.181
In all of this, however, the Ottoman world view remained essentially theo-
centric, continuing to attribute ultimate agency and causation to God alone,
who had created the world and continued to create the links of cause and
efect within each of its parts as well as between them. Such theocentrism
oftentimes supposedly denotes a pre-modern, and in particular pre-Enlighten-
ment, outlook, as opposed to a modern view which takes human experience
and reason as the ultimate means for the comprehension of the universe; the
latter view is therefore called anthropocentric. However, the Ottoman world
view was anthropocentric in a diferent way, as it viewed all intellectual activ-
ity, all human knowledge, as serving the ultimate goal of individual or collec-
tive salvation. Outside of ascetic world rejection, a path open only to a select
few, the proper understanding and manipulation of phenomena within the
created world were important as means to this end.182
179 A. Bausani, ‘Ḥurūiyya’, in Gibb et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 3, pp. 600–1.
180 Andrews and Kalpaklı, Age of Beloveds, p. 228.
181 Hagen, Osmanischer Geograph.
182 Fazlıoğlu, ‘Türk Felsefe-Bilim Tarihinin Seyir Defteri (Bir Ön Söz)’.
456
13
The visual arts
Ç i̇ Ğ de m K afe sc i̇ o Ğ lu
Visual articulations of an imperial identity, as well as its dynamic encounters

and reformulations beyond the imperial locus, constitute a unifying thread
through the century and a half that is examined in this survey. Between the
1450s and the turn of the seventeenth century, the agents of – and the media
in which – such articulation occurred changed considerably. Scholarship on
Ottoman visual arts has tended to prioritise the “classical era”, particularly
the second half of the sixteenth century. The progressive and evolutionary
emphases of the art historical discipline on the one hand and the correspon-
dence of this period to the “classicism” of Ottoman institutions on the other
have reinforced the characterisation of this period as the unquestionable apex
of Ottoman arts towards which all converged and after which there followed
an insipid lack of creativity. Rather than the “classicization” of the later six-
teenth century, with its connotations of maturation, lucidity and stasis, this
chapter seeks to foreground the dynamism embodied in the shifting priorities
of artists, patrons and intermediaries over this century and a half and to high-
light the plurality of loci and actors that shaped the production and use of
artworks. The power of the Ottoman centre as the creator and disseminator
of cultural trends and of the Ottoman court as the primary arbiter of taste
were unquestionable for the larger part of the spatial and temporal expanse
with which this survey is concerned.
At the same time, patterns and mechanisms of patronage and organisation
of the arts changed within the courtly context. A multiplicity of other centres
and actors within the Ottoman realm, and within larger networks of cultural
connection and interaction in which the Ottomans participated, shaped cul-
tural predilections at the court, the capital city and in the provinces. Webs of
reciprocity informed exchanges between court and city, between centre and
provinces, and between the Ottoman court and its contemporaries.
Section divisions of this chapter, in chronological order and ofering a rough
periodisation within the century and a half that it focuses on, aim to highlight
457
ç i̇ Ğ d em k afe s c i̇ o Ğ lu
the connections of artistic production and consumption in various media to

the broader political and cultural matrix, which itself underwent signiicant
transformations. In the irst section, covering the period between around 1450
and around 1520, the discussion will focus on patterns of architectural and
artistic patronage, production and use in relation to multiple power hold-
ers and various centres of cultural production in the region that became the
Ottoman central lands. The second section (ca. 1520–ca. 1570) emphasises the
articulations of an Ottoman imperial identity and image across diverse media,
concomitant to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a world power and
to the further political and ideological transformation in the mid-1500s that
led the polity to reinforce its identity as the foremost Islamic state. In the third
section (ca. 1570–1600), the account concentrates particularly on the painting
and to a lesser extent the architecture of these decades; the discussion aims
to trace Ottoman patrons’ and artists’ responses to the set of contemporary
transformations in the structure of rule and also in the economy and social
order. While following major political transformations, this chronological
division lacks absolute precision, and where thematic discussions necessitate
it, objects and trends will be presented outside of the particular time frames
proposed here. This survey does not attempt a comprehensive portrayal of
visual culture across the wide geographic, cultural and demographic expanse
of the Ottoman domains and of the plural Ottoman society. Rather, it selec-
tively follows patterns in the courtly and urban production and use of build-
ings, objects and images; where available sources and the scholarship allow, it
touches on local practices and on local uses and adaptations of courtly idioms
in the ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse empire.
Multiple centres and a new vantage point, ca. 1450–ca. 1520

Webs of connections, novel encounters, and interactions with cultural worlds
within and around the region that would become the core Ottoman domains
fed into a visual culture of dynamic variety and remarkable heterogeneity.
A multiplicity of visual idioms characterised the art of these decades, when
the rising Ottoman polity had to confront other political entities ruling over
parts of Anatolia while it also had to reckon with various local power holders
within its expanding domains, including frontier warrior lords in the west and
hereditary aristocracies in the east. Timurid resonances in Ottoman, Karaman
and Dulkadir court arts represented a continuation of cultural trends estab-
lished in the wake of Timur’s invasion of Anatolia (1402). In the southern and
eastern parts of Asia Minor, Mamluk political inl uence was substantial and
458
The visual arts
imparted high prestige to Syrian and Cairene forms. Ottoman architectural

thinking and practice absorbed aspects of the late Roman and Byzantine leg-
acy of Constantinopolitan architecture, continuing a trend that had shaped
Ottoman building ventures from their early beginnings in Bithynia.
Emerging supreme within a landscape of multiple and rapidly altering
political entities, and driven by the imperial vision of Mehmed II and his
successors, the Ottoman polity embraced the high cultural traditions with
which it came into contact, absorbing, juxtaposing and at times synthesising
models from a broad and diverse array of sources. As a result, extant connec-
tions and channels of cultural interaction were expanded and acquired new
meaning, while novel connections shaped artistic ventures. Conquest, con-
solidation and growing political claims led to new encounters and shaped the
dynamic cultural eclecticism of the ifteenth-century Ottoman world. In the
early 1500s, Ottoman invasions of Mamluk and Safavid territory brought an
abundance of artists and objects into Ottoman courtly environments. From
a Constantinopolitan vantage point, Iran and central Asia, eastern Anatolia,
Mamluk Egypt, Byzantium and Italy were all visible and accessible in a novel
manner. Timurid, Mamluk and Renaissance resonances and engagements on
the one hand and Ottoman re-workings of late-antique and medieval legacies
on the other shaped the visual culture of the era.
Re-formulations in architecture: Istanbul and beyond

Radical changes in the visual domain paralleled the profound political
transformations that took place in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople. The domain of architecture ofers the most visible expres-
sion of this change, for the political reformulations and transformations
that characterised this period were most tangibly relected in the spaces that
housed the newly established institutions in the new capital, Istanbul. The
architecture of palaces and public structures accommodated and represented
socio-political and institutional change; at the same time, these buildings and
their urban conigurations relected the burgeoning imperial vision and iden-
tity of the Ottoman house.
Architectural projects in Istanbul aimed to introduce Ottoman visual, spa-
tial and institutional order to the newly instituted capital, itself a multi-lay-
ered entity bearing the millennial legacy of the eastern Roman Empire. Royal
construction, palaces and mosque complexes and military and commercial
structures encompassed the wide expanse of Constantinople. The new rul-
ing elite of devşirme origin followed a frequently quoted order by Mehmed II
to undertake constructions so as to decorate, glorify and order the recently
459
Figure 13.1. The Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, aerial view. (Photograph by Reha Günay)
established capital city. Two major projects by Mehmed II, the construction
of the Topkapı Palace (Topkapı Sarayı) and a mosque complex, occupying the
sites of the Byzantine acropolis and the Holy Apostles ecclesiastical complex,
respectively, were the premier testimonies to Ottoman empire building and
state construction.1
Today a palimpsest of architectural and decorative layers that accumulated
over the nearly four hundred years during which it served as the locus of
Ottoman rule, the Topkapı Palace nevertheless preserves its original layout
to a remarkable degree (Figure 13.1).2
Its three successive enclosures housed a series of public and private func-
tions. Service and administrative spaces illed the irst two courtyards; a
council hall lanked by a treasury tower constituted the node of the second
enclosure. Behind the ceremonial gate separating the second and the third
courtyards stood the sultan’s audience chamber. The monarch shared the
1 Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul:
Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (Philadelphia,
2009).
2 Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power; Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Feridun Akozan,
Topkapı Sarayı: Bir Mimari Araştırma (Istanbul, 1982).
460
The visual arts
third courtyard, housing his residence and recreational spaces, with the dor-
mitories of his pages; the small women’s section abutted this area. The mil-
itary appearance of the outer and inner enclosure walls, each marked with
numerous towers, and the double-towered entrance to the second courtyard
in an idiom newly emerging in contemporary Italy, resonated with a medieval
palatial paradigm that conlated the functions and the visual markers of the
palatial residence with that of the military stronghold.
Beyond the succession of courtyards, the vast enclosure that encompassed
the north-eastern tip of the Constantinopolitan peninsula housed gardens,
orchards and game preserves, dotted with kiosks and pavilions. To the west,
three such pavilions in Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian styles faced each
other, products of multitudinous encounters, metaphors of Mehmed II’s uni-
versal ambitions. The contemporary Greek chronicler Kritoboulos, under-
scoring the aesthetic predilections of his patron, wrote:
They were all built with a view to variety, beauty, size, magniicence; shining and
scintillating with an abundance of gold and silver, within and without and with
precious stones and marbles, with various ornaments and colors, all applied with
a brilliance and smoothness and lightness most attractive and worked out with the
inest and most complete skill, most ambitiously.3
While in its broad outlines the layout of the palace relected the Turco-
Persian notion of the “outer” and “inner” realms of the ruler’s domain (birun
and enderun), emerging protocols and the daily and ceremonial requirements
of the Ottoman ruling body shaped individual sections. In comparison to
what is known of pre-conquest palatial enclosures, the Topkapı Palace is strik-
ing in its highly articulated organisational scheme, which accommodated the
newly deined hierarchies of the administrative apparatus and manifested the
absolute authority of the sultan. Remaining evidence from Ottoman palaces
of the fourteenth and early ifteenth centuries suggests that they were loosely
organised ensembles with a number of pavilions and temporary structures.
A multi-functional tower served as the treasury, audience hall and residence
of the sultan, thus constituting the symbolic as well as the functional core of
the complex.4 Through the three-courtyard scheme of the Topkapı Palace, by
3 Kritoboulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Westport, Conn., 1954),
p. 107.
4 Ayda Arel, ‘Cihannüma Kasrı ve Erken Osmanlı Saraylarında Kule Yapıları Hakkında’, in
Prof. Doğan Kuban’a Armağan, ed. Zeynep Ahunbay, Deniz Mazlum and Kutgün Eyüpgiller
(Istanbul, 1996), pp. 99–116; Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power, pp. 99–116; Ekrem
Hakkı Ayverdi, Osmanlı Miʻmârîsinde Fâtih Devri, 855–886 (1451–1481), 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1973 and
1974), pp. 712–32.
461
contrast, the private, residential and recreational spaces reserved for the sov-
ereign and his immediate entourage were clearly distinguished from public
and administrative ones. A set of newly designed buildings fulilled separate
functions in the palace’s successive courtyards; their location and architec-
tural coniguration underlined the inner divisions and diferentiations within
these separate quarters. While strict geometry or symmetry did not govern
the design concept, a tight organisational layout imposed order on everyday
as well as ceremonial uses of space. Location, architecture and epigraphy of
the Topkapı Palace boldly manifested the imperial claims of the ruler.5
The palatial paradigm created by the patron and architects of the Topkapı
Sarayı would determine the spatial coniguration and symbolic uses of pal-
aces in princely capitals such as Amasya and Manisa, complexes founded
during the fourteenth and early ifteenth centuries and expanded later on.
As for the Edirne palace, started by Murad II (1421–51, with an interruption)
and completed by his successor, Mehmed II, it conformed to the model of
the Topkapı. Its continued use as a secondary royal residence informed the
reciprocal relationship it had to the Istanbul palace, as both complexes were
expanded and refurbished through the following centuries. In the later if-
teenth century and beyond, palaces of the grandees within the capital city
emulated the royal dwelling, with their succession of two or three courtyards
ranging in use from public to private quarters, and with spatial and sym-
bolic distinctions such as an audience hall and, in at least one case, a treasury
tower.6
In response to changing representational agendas and new cultural connec-
tions, the public architecture of the period presents equally bold re-phrasings
of extant forms. Mehmed II’s main architectural undertaking within Istanbul
is the grand complex of socio-religious structures built between 1463 and 1470
known today as Fatih (Figure 13.2).7 The project draws upon two distinct types
5 Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power.

6 Petra Kappert, Die osmanischen Prinzen und ihre Residenz: Amasya im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert
(Leiden, 1976); Çağatay Uluçay, Manisadaki Saray-ı Amire ve Şehzadeler Türbesi (Istanbul, 1941);
İlhami Bilgin, ‘Manisa Sarayı’, Dokuzuncu Milletlerarası Türk Sanatları Kongresi: Bildiriler
(Ankara, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 369–77. On vezirs’ palaces, see Nurhan Atasoy, İbrahim Paşa Sarayı
(Istanbul, 1972); Ebru Turan, ‘The Sultan’s Favorite: Ibrahim Pasha and the Making of Ottoman
Universal Sovereignty in the Reign of Sultan Süleyman (1516–1526)’, unpublished Ph.D. disser-
tation, University of Chicago (2007), pp. 142–5; Tülay Artan, ‘The Kadırga Palace Shrouded in
the Mists of Time’, Turcica 26 (1994), 55–124; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul, pp. 116–7,
201–2.
7 Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London,
2005), pp. 82–6; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul, pp. 66–96; Fevzi Günüç, Türk Kültür
ve Medeniyet Tarihinde Fatih Külliyesi/The Fatih Complex in Turkish History and Civilization
(Istanbul, 2007).
462
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Figure 13.2a. The mosque complex of Mehmed II, Istanbul: (a) aerial view. (Photograph
by Reha Günay)
of structures which until then had formed the main objects of Ottoman rul-
ers’ architectural patronage. One was the congregational mosque located at
the city centre near the commercial core, serving for Friday prayer and ser-
mon. The other object of royal patronage was the socio-religious complex
(imaret in contemporary texts, külliye in modern usage), which often consti-
tuted the core of an urban or suburban development through the wide range
of services it ofered and was thus one of the instruments of Ottoman territo-
rial consolidation. Usually located at the outskirts of a town, such complexes
were centred by a multi-functional dervish convent (zaviye) cum mescit and
the founder’s mausoleum, surrounded by a range of public structures such as
a soup kitchen, medrese, public bath and fountain. Designed for social and rit-
ual gathering and for accommodative purposes, the zaviye-mescit did not have
arrangements for congregational prayer.
Drawing upon former Ottoman practices, Mehmed II’s ensemble was at
the same time shaped by a set of novelties that were to have a signiicant
impact on Ottoman architectural ventures through the following centuries.
The ruler’s religious space no longer accommodated the once celebrated
dervishes and gazis; a congregational mosque replaced the multi-functional
zaviye-mescit as the visually and spatially dominant building. A plot outside of
the main core housed an elaborately designed and furnished hospice, a soup
kitchen and a caravansary, emphatically separating the space of prayer from
463
Figure 13.2b. The mosque complex of Mehmed II, Istanbul: (b) plan. (Photograph by Reha
Günay)
the space of accommodation. Like the Byzantine church of the Holy Apostles
on whose grounds it stood, and similar to the earlier Ottoman complexes at
whose centre stood a convent-mescit, the complex was conceived as a dynastic
funerary monument; shortly after his death, the founder’s mausoleum rose
behind the qibla (kıble) wall of the mosque. The foundation was also to serve
as the premier educational institution of the empire, with its eight medreses
464
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training the highest-ranking members of the Ottoman learned hierarchy.

Finally, echoing earlier Ottoman complexes, it was to function as the cen-
tre of a developing residential and commercial area in a district beyond the
inhabited core of late medieval Constantinople, housing a primary school
and a public bath, and surrounded by commercial establishments.
The completely novel spatial arrangement of the compound powerfully
resonated with the emerging coniguration of the learned hierarchy and its
recently re-deined position vis-à-vis the ruling body. The mosque stood alone
at the centre of a vast plaza measuring 210 meters to a side; in uncompro-
mising symmetry, the medreses lanked the latter in rows of four, while the
siting of the remaining dependencies followed the geometric logic of the lay-
out. The compelling symmetry and axiality of the design centred on a large
plaza testiies to the impact of notions of ideal planning newly being elabo-
rated in Renaissance Italy, and circumstantial evidence suggests the possible
involvement of the contemporary Florentine architect Filarete in the design
process.8 This radical re-formulation, which accommodated the absolutist
aims of Mehmed II, remained a lasting legacy for Ottoman architectural prac-
tice. In strong contrast to earlier royal complexes where the buildings adapted
to the topography of the land, their later Ottoman counterparts, with few
exceptions, were designed on an orthogonal principle, imposing strict geo-
metric schemes on the urban fabric.
The chronicler Tursun Bey’s comments on the mosque of Mehmed II
succinctly capture the building’s novelty, and its clear reference, through
its vaulting structure, to the primary religious monument of Istanbul, the
Hagia Sophia: “[H]e built a mosque in the likeness of the Hagia Sophia,
which, apart from encompassing all the arts of the Hagia Sophia, was built
according to the latest practices in a fresh new idiom and with immeasur-
able beauty; its miraculous splendor is apparent.”9 In other respects, the
mosque was based on Murad II’s Üç Şerefeli Cami, completed in Edirne
in 1447. The hemispherical dome that covered the larger part of the prayer
hall, the marble-paved courtyard and the multiple minarets signifying royal
patronage were references to the Edirne monument, which itself repre-
sented a departure from established norms for Ottoman congregational
mosques. Merging aspects of these two symbolically signiicant buildings,
the architects created a new iconography for the Ottoman sultanic mosque
8 Marcell Restlé, ‘Bauplanung und Baugesinnung unter Mehmed II Fatih’, Pantheon 39 (1981),
361–7; Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, 82–6; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul, pp. 73–5.
465
that would continue to resonate with Ottoman notions of monumentality

through the late eighteenth century.
The three urban projects sponsored by Bayezid II, their construction spread
over nearly two decades, embody the diverse cultural currents of the period
that followed the demise of Mehmed II. At the centres of the complexes in
Amasya, Edirne and Istanbul, completed in 1486, 1487–8 and 1505–6, respec-
tively, there is always a multi-functional zaviye-mosque, now appointed for
congregational prayer.10 A bold manifestation of their patron’s favourable
stance towards the dervish milieu, Bayezid II’s mosques feature large and
elaborately designed convent sections, presenting a compromise with respect
to the radical step taken by his father in the design of his Istanbul founda-
tion. The architect of Bayezid II’s Istanbul mosque, Yakub Şah bin Sultan Şah,
re-interpreted the layout of Mehmed II’s mosque in the capital. With a cen-
tral dome supported by two half-domes on the qibla axis covering the prayer
hall, the building presented a further step in Ottoman responses to the city’s
primary religious monument, the Hagia Sophia. Convent sections lanked
the prayer hall on two sides; like the patron’s mosque in Edirne, these lat-
eral wings were each arranged around a domed central hall to which four
iwans opened in a cruciform plan. Bayezid’s three complexes in princely and
sultanic capitals had diverse programmes and layouts, bespeaking the varied
priorities of the patron in these cities. Accommodative functions prevailed in
Amasya, where the buildings were aligned with the Kızılırmak. Also aligned
with a river, the Tunca, but governed by an orthogonal design, the Edirne
compound housed an elaborately designed and richly endowed hospital and
a medrese. In Istanbul, the monumental mosque lanked by the founder’s mau-
soleum was boldly displayed on the crossroads of the city’s main ceremonial
artery and a main street leading to the harbour area, its dependencies located
along these two streets.
From the 1460s onwards, forms of elite institutional and architectural
patronage were transformed as shifting agendas of self-representation dic-
tated changes in particular forms and the rise of others. The most typical of
Ottoman public buildings through the 1300s and early 1400s, the T-type con-
vent-mescit, underwent a signiicant adaptation: this multi-functional building
featured a central domed hall, which was abutted by an iwan used as a prayer
space on the vertical axis, and hospice rooms – at times opening into lateral
iwans – to the sides. While such buildings remained the basic form of the
10 Abdülkadir Dündar, ‘Bir Belgeye Göre Amasya II. Bayezid Külliyesi’, Ankara Üniversitesi
İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 44 (2003), 131–72. On Bayezid II’s projects, see İ. Aydın Yüksel, Osmanlı
Miʻmarisinde II. Bayezid Yavuz Selim Devri (Istanbul, 1983), pp. 15–30, 103–27, 184–216.
466
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ruling elite’s public patronage, they were now designated as congregational

mosques, with allocations for Friday prayer and sermon. Architects explored
new spatial arrangements to divorce the spaces of worship from the hospice
rooms for dervishes and travellers, with their ireplaces and storage facilities.
Separate side entrances for the hospice rooms, at times through iwans open-
ing to the building exterior, as in the Gedik Ahmed Paşa mosque in Afyon, or
the addition of an internal corridor separating the prayer space from the side
rooms, as in the Mahmud Paşa mosque in Istanbul, were among the solutions
ofered by architects working within this increasingly obsolete typology. The
oculus of the central dome and the fountain underneath were eliminated,
as the central hall became contiguous with the prayer iwan. Changes in ter-
minology relected transformations in architectural culture and patronage.
While extant foundation deeds deine many of the buildings as congrega-
tional mosques, their foundation inscriptions most often refer to them as ima-
ret, thus continuing an earlier system of references. Catering to the needs of
the frontier, instrumental in the creation of a spatial and institutional frame-
work in newly conquered territory and at times in use by ahi confraterni-
ties, the multi-functional T-type building was a cultural product of the early
Ottoman centuries.11 The institutional and architectural transformation out-
lined here preceded the inal obsolescence of this building type in the middle
decades of the sixteenth century, when visual manifestations of the Ottoman
elite’s ethos of provision and accommodation ceded to a strong emphasis on
Sunni orthodoxy (Figure 13.3).
Like the convent-mescit, the prominently scaled and located public bath
was a product of the early Ottoman centuries that continued to have sym-
bolic import until the mid-1500s. Unlike the former, the public bath surely did
not become completely obsolete, as its social, religious and hygienic func-
tions remained pertinent. But in contrast to the monumental bath-houses
built by the Ottoman elite through the 1540s, at times competing in size and
visibility with the mosques in their vicinity, patrons sponsored humbler struc-
tures, often tucked away in inconspicuous locations. Once again, we observe
the waning of early Ottoman representational priorities, predicated on hos-
pitality and provision of services in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious socio-
cultural environment. A comparison between the public bath of Bayezid II,
its tepidarium domes facing Istanbul’s main thoroughfare and ceremonial
11 Doğan Kuban, Osmanlı Mimarisi (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 75–122; Sedat Emir, Erken Osmanlı
Mimarlığında Çok-İşlevli Yapılar: Yapımsal ve İşlevsel Bir Analiz (Istanbul, 1992); Howard Crane,
‘Art and Architecture, 1300–1453’, The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey,
1071–1453, ed. Kate Fleet (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 294–7.
467
Figure 13.3. Gedik Ahmed Paşa mosque-convent, Afyon, 1477: (a) exterior view with side
iwans; (b) plan. (Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
468
The visual arts
axis, and that of the Süleymaniye complex, one of the minor buildings of
this most expansive of Ottoman architectural ventures, may demonstrate the
point. It may be signiicant that two royal women, Hürrem and Nurbanu,
continued to favour public baths for several decades more, commissioning to
the chief architect Sinan monumental and elaborately designed bath-houses
located on sites of high visibility and prestige within the capital city.
The architecture of the period between the 1480s, from which date the irst
large-scale urban projects of Bayezid II and his retinue, and the 1520s can be
characterised by two diverse currents. On the one hand, buildings sponsored
by the Ottoman elite were marked by a standardisation of formal vocabular-
ies and typologies compared to the previous decades, owing in large part to
the greater control over the arts through workshops functioning under court
patronage. As in the previous centuries, public structures were typically laid
out around arcaded courtyards, and particularly from the 1490s onwards, the
dome served as the basic vaulting element for rooms, pillared halls and arcades
alike.12 The consistent use of ashlar masonry and monolithic supports, often
spoliated columns, in buildings of high prestige marked a departure from the
possibilities and the aesthetic of brick or composite construction, bringing
the Ottoman architectural idiom closer to the Roman architectural tradition
of the Mediterranean.
At the same time, this was a period for exploring novel forms and idioms,
owing to the diversity of architects, artists and craftsmen working on projects
in various loci: experimentations with polygonal structures, which resonated
with contemporary Renaissance searches for centralised geometric schemes
elaborating on a set of ideal forms, included the Kapı Ağası medrese in Amasya
and the hospital of the Bayezid II complex in Edirne (Figure 13.4). The former
was laid out around a large octagonal courtyard, the latter around a hexagonal
domed hall.13 Ottoman expansions into Turkmen, Safavid and Mamluk terri-
tory opened another channel of novelty, as they brought to the Ottoman capi-
tal scores of artists and objects from courtly centres such as Tabriz, Damascus
and Cairo. Due to the presence of these masters and the high prestige of the
visual idioms of the eastern Islamic lands for the contemporary Ottoman
elites, Timurid-Turkmen and Mamluk forms became ever more visible.
12 Aptullah Kuran, ‘İznik Süleyman Paşa Medresesinin İnşa Tarihi ile Bağdaşmayan Mimari
Kuruluşu Üzerine Görüşler’, Türk Kültürü Araştırmaları 27(1989), 175–92; Ayverdi, Osmanlı
Miʻmârîsinde Fâtih Devri; Yüksel, Osmanlı Miʻmarisinde II. Bayezid Yavuz Selim Devri.
13 Albert Gabriel, Monuments turcs d’Anatolie (Paris, 1934), vol. 2, p. 56; Semavi Eyice, ‘Kapı Ağası
Hüseyin Ağa’nın Vakıları’, Ankara Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Araştırma Dergisi special
issue (1978), 159–66.
469
Figure 13.4a. Bayezid II complex, Edirne, 1488 (photograph by the author)
To the extent that they survive, the decorative vocabulary and pro-
grammes of public buildings of the period evince the continuation of
earlier trends, which were in turn tightly connected to the larger world
of the inter-regional Timurid aesthetic. At the same time, particularly in
the realm of the court, selective uses of Byzantine, Mamluk and Italian
forms expanded the visual vocabulary. As in the prestigious projects of
the pre-conquest era, in the later 1400s tile revetments in a range of dif-
ferent techniques, and hence of diverse visual efects, may be found in the
same building, where they would be juxtaposed with marble revetments,
wall paintings and inlaid and painted woodwork, creating a rich and varied
visual efect.
Historians have identiied at least two ceramic tile workshops hailing from
the larger Timurid-Turkmen world: the “masters of Tabriz”, who had already
decorated the Bursa foundation of Mehmed I (r. 1413–21), continued to work in
our period, while a Khorasani group was also employed in Bursa and Istanbul.
Techniques ranged from mosaic tile, monochrome polygonal tiles at times
with gold leaf or relief decoration, to polychrome cuerda seca and underglaze
tiles, including blues and whites as well as polychrome tiles that imitate the
cuerda seca. The work of these ateliers survives in the Tiled Pavilion (Çinili
Köşk, 1472) in the Topkapı Palace grounds, in Mehmed II’s congregational
470
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Figure 13.4b. Bayezid II complex, Edirne, 1488: plan of complex (1, mosque; 2, soup kitchen;
3, caravanserai; 4, hospital; 5, medrese). (Plan from Gülru Necipoğlu, Age of Sinan, p. 95)
mosque, and on the mausoleum of his one-time grand vezir Mahmud Paşa.14
The mausoleum of Prince Mustafa in Bursa (1479), also home to the tomb
of Prince Cem, is the last building to feature a range of tiles produced by the
Tabriz workshop. This building also houses the best-preserved programme of
14 Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, ed. Yanni Petsopoulos
(London, 1989), pp. 83–9; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘From International Timurid to Ottoman:
A Change of Taste in Sixteenth Century Ottoman Tiles’, Muqarnas 7 (1990), 136–71; Faik
Kırımlı, ‘İstanbul Çiniciliği’, Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı 11 (1981), 97–110 at pp. 96–7, 106.
471
wall painting from the period known to date, which also is marked by a close
ainity to Timurid models and the “landscape” features of Murad II’s mosque
cum dervish convent in Edirne.15
In the central cities of the Ottoman realm, the patronage of architecture
and urban institutions relected the political dynamics of the period, unfold-
ing towards the unrivalled predominance of the dynasty and the palace elite.
Through the 1540s, only the sultan, the ascendant ruling elite of devşirme ori-
gins, and servants of the palace built major public structures in the new cap-
ital. Mehmed II and the Istanbul-based elite were active sponsors of charities
in provincial centres as well, and prospects of economic expansion led vezirs
of the Imperial Council to invest in commercial infrastructure: in addition to
considerable structures in Istanbul, Mahmud Paşa built the covered commer-
cial centre (bedestan) of Ankara; in that city and in Bursa, he inanced large
urban caravansarys (hans) to serve the trade in camlet and silk, respectively. In
Soia, Mehmed II’s grand vezir also built a congregational mosque, a project
that otherwise was often a sultanic prerogative.
Beginning with the reign of Bayezid II, the sultan and grandees turned their
attention from the all-devouring new capital to centres of former political and
symbolic prominence. Bayezid II allegedly built his royal complex in Amasya
because of a promise made to the prominent Halveti şeyh Çelebi Halife, who
was inluential in his victory over Prince Cem during the fratricidal struggle that
followed the death of Mehmed II.16 In that same city, two members of Bayezid’s
princely household and at that time ağas of the court, namely Firuz and the chief
white eunuch Hüseyin, undertook constructions alongside the sultan. Hüseyin
Ağa’s bedestan (1483) and medrese (1489) were parts of a campaign that deinitively
altered the cityscape of Amasya, as constructions by the sultan and his courtiers
endowed the town with buildings in a visual idiom speciically connected to the
Ottoman centre. Bayezid II’s foundation in Edirne, the former capital and one
of the power bases of the gazi constituency, was one of the most expansive and
monumental urban ventures to date; within the same years, members of the
palace elite also sponsored numerous projects in that city.
While their inl uence in the sultan’s entourage visibly diminished, the
lords (beys) of the frontier, established as local dynasts with extensive land
holdings and control over entrenched patronage networks, remained highly
prominent sponsors of architecture, particularly in the Balkan provinces. In
15 Serpil Bağcı, ‘Painted Decoration in Ottoman Architecture’, in Ottoman Civilization, ed. Halil
İnalcık and Günsel Renda, 2 vols. (Ankara, 2003), vol. 2, pp. 736–42.
16 Natalie Clayer, Mystiques, états et société: les Halvetis dans l’aire balkanique de la in du XVe siècle
à nos jours (Leiden, 1994).
472
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provincial centres such as Skopje and Sarajevo, frontier lords sponsored urban
institutions alongside the Istanbul elite. Unlike the latter, their patronage was
directed also at smaller towns where their power bases were located, includ-
ing Iannitsa, Larissa, Veria and Trikkala.17 In towns the T-type convent-mescit
and in villages hospices where wayfarers might spend the night were the most
visible buildings sponsored by frontier lords; their larger foundations, on the
other hand, comprised the whole range of Ottoman public institutions and
infrastructural buildings. Their architects adapted sultanic models for urban
complexes to current needs and agendas, as in the Skopje foundation of Isa
Bey, comprising a convent-mescit (according to its foundation deed a hankah
trusted to an ahi) and soup kitchen, medrese, double bath, caravansarys and
three mescits in diferent neighbourhoods of the town.
In the early decades of the sixteenth century, Balkan-based ghazi families
also actively patronised the popular shrine complexes of Seyyid Gazi and Hacı
Bektaş in central Anatolia, an indication of their inl uence far beyond their
immediate power bases. Members of the Mihaloğlu family were active in the
early sixteenth-century remodelling of the Seyyid Gazi complex; descendants
of the Evrenos and Malkoçoğlu families, perhaps alongside Bayezid II him-
self, participated in the early sixteenth-century expansion of the Hacı Bektaş
complex near Kırşehir. We may regard the multiple architectural links of
these complexes to local traditions on the one hand and to trends emanating
from the centre on the other as relections of their roles as sites of negotia-
tion in this period that saw the redeinition of religious and cultural identities
increasingly determined by Ottoman-Kızılbaş duality and conl ict.18
The Hacı Bektaş complex and its environs were sites of patronage not only
for Ottoman central and peripheral power-holders but also for the Dulkadir
dynasty, which often was caught up in the struggles between the Ottoman
and Mamluk sultanates. Later on, the Dulkadir became major victims of the
conl ict between the sultan in Istanbul and the shah in Tabriz, for these con-
frontations precipitated the dynasty’s inal demise in 1522.19 The architecture
17 Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Osmanlı Miʻmârîsinde Fâtih Devri; Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Avrupa’da
Osmanlı Mimari Eserleri, 4 vols. (Istanbul, 1977–82); Aydın Yüksel, Osmanlı Miʻmarisinde II.
Bayezid Yavuz Selim Devri; Machiel Kiel, Studies in the Ottoman Architecture of the Balkans
(Aldershot, 1990); Slobodan Ćurčić and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos (eds.), Secular Medieval
Architecture in the Balkans and Its Preservation (Thessaloniki, 1997); Heath Lowry, The Shaping
of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1500: The Conquest, Settlement, and Infrastructural Development of
Northern Greece (Istanbul, 2008).
18 Zeynep Yürekli Görkay, ‘Legend and Architecture in the Ottoman Empire: The Shrines of
Seyyid Gazi and Hacı Bektaş’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (2005).
19 Baha Tanman, ‘Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli Külliyesi’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi
(Istanbul, 1997), vol. 14, pp. 459–71; Yürekli Görkay, ‘Legend and Architecture’, pp. 178–91.
473
of the Dulkadir dynasty in Maraş and Malatya was a product of the cultural
environment of southern and eastern Anatolian crossroads where Rum
Seljuk and medieval Armenian forms remained meaningful while currents of
Timurid-Turkmen and Mamluk impact shaped various monuments. Public
and commemorative structures such as mosques, medreses and mausoleums
followed medieval prototypes, while Mamluk details marked the stonework.
Farther to the south, the Ramazanoğlu of Adana remained largely within
the Mamluk orbit, as evinced by the congregational mosque in this town
(1513–41), whose immediate visual references were to the late medieval build-
ings of Aleppo and Damascus and whose later Ottoman additions, including
domed aisles, a vestibule and rich tile revetments, complicated its decorative
and architectural program.20
Parallel to the rapidly shifting political boundaries in eastern Anatolia
under the Karakoyunlu and Akkoyunlu, a comparable eclecticism emerged
in the architecture of this region, as succinctly captured by commemora-
tive structures built for members of these dynasties. Late ifteenth-century
Karakoyunlu mausoleums at Van, octagonal baldachins with conical domes
built of ashlar masonry, refer at once to the medieval Islamic and Armenian
traditions of this area. An Akkoyunlu mausoleum in Ahlat commemorating
the emir Bayındır (1491) is a cylindrical building featuring a gallery on round
arches and a conical dome, muqarnas capitals and a muqarnas portal with
carved loral decoration; this building, too, interprets intertwined medieval
Armenian and Rum Seljuk building traditions. Another Akkoyunlu mauso-
leum in Hisn Kiyfa, commemorating Uzun Hasan’s son Zeynel Mirza (ca.
1473), diverges radically from its counterpart in Ahlat: a cylindrical building
topped with a bulbous dome, completely covered with glazed brick and tile
mosaic, this is a self-consciously Timurid building in design and decoration.21
Courts and cities: Baba Nakkaş, urban ateliers, and Ottoman

variations on the Timurid-Turkmen decorative aesthetic
The inter-regional aesthetic created under the Timurid and Turkmen dynas-
ties, in wide circulation in the Islamic world at large, remained a primary
20 Hamza Gündoğdu, Dulkadırlı Beyliği Mimarisi (Ankara, 1986); Ara Altun and Belgin Demirsar-
Arlı, Tiles: Treasures of Anatolian Soil, Ottoman Period (Istanbul, 2008), pp. 157–63.
21 Albert Gabriel, Voyages archéologiques dans la Turquie orientale (Paris, 1940), pp. 79–81, 245–6;
Oluş Arık, ‘Turkish Architecture in Asia Minor in the Period of the Turkish Emirates’, in
The Art and Architecture of Turkey, ed. Ekrem Akurgal (Oxford, 1980), pp. 111–36 at pp. 132–5;
Metin Sözen, Anadolu’da Akkoyunlu Mimarisi (Istanbul, 1981), pp. 148–52, 155–8; Crane, ‘Art
and Architecture’, pp. 307–8.
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and highly prestigious strand within the multiple vocabularies of ornament

artists and patrons favoured through these decades. Ornamental idioms elab-
orated at Timurid, Akkoyunlu and Karakoyunlu courts constituted a basis
on which artists of the Ottoman realm built local variants and introduced
new vocabularies. Artists and craftsmen schooled in the Timurid tradition
arrived at courts beyond the larger Iranian realm as invitees, captives or self-
appointed gift-bearers in search of patronage, mediating the arrival of new
variants of the already multi-centred Timurid-Turkmen schools. Timur’s
invasion of 1402 and its aftermath, the Ottoman defeat of the Karaman and
Akkoyunlu dynasties in the 1470s, and inally Selim I’s victory in Chaldiran
(1514) and Ottoman expansion into Safavid territories mark three particular
moments when, in the wake of military confrontation and conquest, artists
and objects from the Persianate cultural sphere found an enthusiastic wel-
come in Ottoman courtly environments. Selim I’s conquests also resulted in
the Ottoman control of two important ports of East Asian trade, Aleppo and
Cairo, which facilitated the arrival of objects and ideas of eastern origin into
the Ottoman domains.
Referring to ornamental styles, Ottoman commentators by the 1520s dis-
tinguished rumi and hatayi forms as the landmark features of the Ottoman
decorative aesthetic.22 Artists often combined these motifs in a variety of
dense compositions based either on a geometric order or on a free-lowing
scroll. Rumi (literally “Roman”, which authors in the Persianate world called
“islimi”) is an abstract loral ornament featuring palmettes and half-palmettes
arranged according to a geometric order. A legacy of the late antique decora-
tive vocabulary of the Near East, it remained resonant through the centuries.
The term hatayi literally means “of Cathay”, pointing to the East Asian ori-
gins of this motif; as its distinctive element it featured a stylised lotus blossom
on a scroll in combination with other East Asian motifs. In the late 1400s and
early 1500s, a new set of motifs expanded the vocabulary of design: cloud
scrolls of East Asian inspiration, three-dot and stripe motifs, and peonies were
combined in myriad compositions.23 Together, this group constituted part of
the design vocabulary referred to as the “seven modes” (haft asl) in Safavid
and Ottoman sources of the later 1500s, highlighting the connections upheld
between the increasingly distinct visual cultures of the early modern Islamic
22 Cafer Çelebi, Hevesnāme, in Asaf Halet Çelebi, Divan Şiirinde İstanbul (Istanbul, 1953), pp.
22–3.
23 Bağcı, ‘Painted Decoration’; Atasoy and Raby, Iznik, pp. 76–7, 94–5; Julian Raby and Zeren
Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding in the Fifteenth Century: The Foundation of an Ottoman Court Style
(London, 1993), pp. 49f.
475
empires.24 The loral aesthetic with its many variants prevailed; commenta-
tors and artists perceived geometric interlace (girih) as an integral part of this
visual language, but designers used it more sparingly and even marginally.
Inscriptions adorned objects but infrequently.
The emergence of a set of institutional practices that integrated artistic
production more tightly into the palace hierarchies marks the turn of the six-
teenth century and accounts for the creation of a more uniied visual idiom
linked to Ottoman elite sponsorship of the arts. In these years, for the irst
time, payrolls document the existence of groups of architects, builders of
watercourses and craftsmen employed by the court; gift registers feature
groups of craftsmen or individuals who were either commissioned or else
presented works on their own.25 Listing a range of objects of material or
symbolic value kept in the various royal treasuries, the earliest comprehen-
sive inventories of the treasury holdings also date from the inal years of the
ifteenth century.26 Possibly as part of a treasury inventory, palace oicials
also inventoried the royal manuscript collection and a group of individual
designs, drawings and paintings during the irst years of Bayezid II’s reign.
These procedures brought the arts under closer courtly scrutiny and possibly
also within easier reach of artists and patrons.27
As part of a ransom he demanded from the Akkoyunlu in 1472, Mehmed II
asked for “rare books and muraqqa” (collections of calligraphies, images and
illuminations in a codex). His move signiies Ottoman participation in collec-
tion practices that were part and parcel of Timurid courtly culture, intimately
linked to the production and consumption of luxury manuscripts and objects.
24 Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘L’idée de décor dans les régimes de visualité islamiques’, in Pur décor?
Arts de l’islam, regards du XIXe siècle: collections des Arts Décoratifs, ed. Rémi Labrusse, Sophie
Makariou and Evelyne Possémé (Paris, 2007), pp. 10–23 at p. 13. For the Safavid context and
uses of the term, see David Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in
Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden, 2001), pp. 142, 150.
25 See the gift registers dated H. 909–917 in Istanbul, Atatürk Kütüphanesi, Muallim Cevdet
O71, partially published and studied in Rıf kı Melûl Meriç, ‘Beyazıd Camii Mimarı: II. Sultan
Bayezid Devri Mimarları ile Bazı Binaları’, Yıllık Araştırmalar Dergisi 2 (1957), 5–76, and Rıf kı
Melûl Meriç, ‘Bayramlarda Padişahlara Hediye Edilen San’at Eserleri ve Karşılıkları’, Türk
San’atı Araştırma ve İncelemeleri 1 (1963), 764–86.
26 For the 1496 inventory TKSA D4, see Julian Raby and Ünsal Yücel, ‘The Earliest Treasury
Registers’, in Chinese Ceramics in the Topkapı Saray Museum, Istanbul: A Complete Catalogue, ed.
Regina Krahl, Erbahar Nurdan, John Ayres, Ünsal Yücel and Julian Raby (London, 1986), vol.
1, pp. 77–81; Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power, p. 134. For the A.H. 910 (A.D. 1505)
inventory, see the facsimile in Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi Kılavuzu (Istanbul, 1938–40), doc.
21; J. Michael Rogers, ‘An Ottoman Palace Inventory of the Reign of Bayezid II’, in Comité
international d’études pré-ottomanes et ottomans, VIth Symposium Cambridge, 1st–4th July 1984:
Proceedings, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Emeri van Donzel (Istanbul and Paris,
1987), pp. 39–53.
27 Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, pp. 53, 100–1.
476
The visual arts
From at least the 1480s onwards, several Timurid-Turkmen albums were held
in the court treasury. Ottoman court artists partook in the creation and re-cre-
ation of albums, as they inserted new material into extant codices or created
new ones featuring works of Ottoman, Turkmen and Italian provenance.28
While viewers can distinguish an Ottoman court style of the later ifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, its relations to diverse media were complex.
On the one hand, technique and autonomous developments within the con-
text of particular media shaped individual objects, and on the other hand
the dynamic nature of relationships between numerous centres producing
not only for the court but also for a local or inter-regional market informed
design choices and priorities. Visual links, however, spanned diferent media.
Of particular interest in this regard is the “Baba Nakkaş” album, whose
designs, characterised by rosettes and bi- or tri-lobed blossoms, in addition to
large split palmette, lotus and oak leaf motifs on spirals, occur in the illumi-
nation and bindings of manuscripts and also in ceramics, textiles and carpets
(Figure 13.5). These recurrent motifs suggest that a design oice modelled
after Timurid kitābkhānas may have been at work already under Mehmed II,
and a payroll register from the inal years of Mehmed II’s reign indeed records
a group of painter-illuminators.29 The documents noted, on the other hand,
suggest that while the formalisation of court workshop practices began under
Mehmed II, a tighter net of organisational and archival practices emerged
only around the turn of the sixteenth century.
Under closer courtly scrutiny, the arts of the book, particularly calligraphy,
binding and illumination, were areas where from the later decades of the
ifteenth century onwards, patrons and artists elaborated a distinctive and rel-
atively uniied Ottoman idiom. In contrast to earlier bindings featuring a vari-
ety of materials, techniques and tools, the basic composition and techniques
of Ottoman bindings were canonised at the turn of the sixteenth century.
Pressure moulding and panel stamping, and a composition based on a central
medallion with pendants and corner quadrants, persisted well into the 1600s.
In illumination as in binding, motifs changed and the vocabulary of orna-
ment expanded in the course of the following decades, but the basic designs
28 Julian Raby, ‘Mehmed II Fatih and the Fatih Album’, Islamic Art: Studies on the Art and Culture
of the Muslim World 1 (1981), 42–9; Filiz Çağman, ‘On the Contents of the Four Istanbul
Albums H. 2152, 2153, 2154, and 2160’, Islamic Art: Studies on the Art and Culture of the Muslim
World 1 (1981), 31–6. On Timurid and Safavid albums, see David J. Roxburgh, The Persian
Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2005).
29 Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, pp. 54–60; Julian Raby, ‘Court and Export: Part 2. The
Uşak Carpets’, Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies 2 (1986), 177–88.
477
Figure 13.5. Page from the “Baba Nakkaş” album, circa 1470. Istanbul University Library, F
1423, fol. 15r. (By permission of Istanbul University Library)
and compositions, and in illumination the colour scheme dominated by lapis

and gold, remained remarkably stable.30
Calligraphy found fertile ground not only in Istanbul, where Mehmed II’s
scriptorium produced manuscripts in Turkish, Persian, Arabic and Greek,
but also in Amasya, where Bayezid’s princely court and a thriving network
of Sui lodges ofered literati a rich cultural environment. Mastership often
30 Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, pp. 54–60; Zeren Tanındı, ‘An Illuminated Manuscript
of the Wandering Scholar Ibn al-Jazari and the Wandering Illuminators between Tabriz,
Shiraz, Herat, Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul in the 15th Century’, in Art Turc/Turkish Art: 10e
Congrès international d’art turc/10th International Congress of Turkish Art, ed. François Déroche
(Geneva, 1999), pp. 647–55.
478
The visual arts
Figure 13.6. Calligraphic album of Şeyh Hamdullah; page with naskh and thuluth scripts.
(Topkapı Palace Library EH 2084)
ran within families. In the employment of Ottoman courts, masters of

calligraphy re-worked styles widespread in the post-Mongol Iranian world
for use in chanceries as well as in literary and artistic production. The six
cursive scripts, “hanging” chancery scripts and stylised Kuic all remained
popular, as did the juxtaposition of scripts in diferent styles within a sin-
gle sheet or in overlapping Kuic and nesih compositions. Connections with
Shiraz and Tabriz are attested to in the colophons of numerous manuscripts.
The legendary Şeyh Hamdullah, an intimate of Bayezid II and the protag-
onist of tales of calligraphic virtuosity, sportsmanship and divinely inspired
wisdom, created an Ottoman interpretation of the six cursive scripts that
would remain canonical through the later seventeenth century. To Ottoman
authors, Şeyh Hamdullah perfected Yaqut’s aklam-i sitta; to Ottoman cal-
ligraphers, he remained the master to whom they traced their genealogies
(Figure 13.6).31
31 Muhittin Serin, Hat Sanatı ve Meşhur Hattatlar (Istanbul, 2003), pp. 90–9; Muhittin Serin,
Hattat Şeyh Hamdullah: Hayatı, Talebeleri, Eserleri (Istanbul, 1992); Abdülhamit Tüfekçioğlu,
‘Osmanlı Sanatının Oluşumunda Yazı’, in Hat ve Tezhip Sanatı, ed. Ali Rıza Özcan (Ankara,
2009), pp. 59–73. For colophons, see Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, catalogue.
479
The epigraphic programs of major buildings paved the way for the devel-
opment of monumental cursive scripts. Royal scribes designed, and at times
signed, foundation inscriptions composed by important members of the
learned elite and calligraphic panels consisting of Qur’anic verses. Among
them were the famed Hamdullah and Ali bin Mezid al-Sui, who favoured the
monumental sülüs – called celi in modern scholarship – for use in structures of
broader public access.32 A calligraphic scroll featuring a huge Qur’anic verse
that carries the date of 1458 and the name of a Tabrizi master, probably cre-
ated as a model for use in a building, testiies to the design process of such
monumental inscriptions.33
Connections between the sultanic and princely courts – and also elite house-
holds – fostered a uniication of the visual idioms esteemed in this milieu, par-
ticularly with regard to the arts of the book. Gift exchange between Prince
Cem’s court in Konya and that of his father in Istanbul connected the arts
of bookbinding, illumination and calligraphy produced in these two cen-
tres. Şeyh Hamdullah’s early work was found not only in Amasya but also
in Mehmed II’s collections. Along with their works, calligraphers and paint-
ers occasionally moved in person from elite households to the royal scripto-
rium, as happened at the death of Firuz Ağa in 1526.34 By contrast, products
of the industrial arts responded to the ever-changing commercial and social
networks in which they were embedded and to varying degrees of govern-
ment control over urban artisans. Throughout the period and across media,
the court ateliers and their design priorities grounded in book culture concur-
rently impacted urban workshops to diferent degrees. The result, in the case
of luxury textiles, ceramics and carpets, was a turnout that was marked with
a visible duality. On the one hand, designs were shaped by earlier encounters
between craft industries, courtly tastes and market demands. On the other
hand, the decorative idiom favoured at the Ottoman court, derived from the
Timurid-Turcoman repertory and under constant revision, informed the
work of urban workshops.
The marked distinction between the “Baba Nakkaş” ceramic wares and
the contemporaneous “Miletus” type produced at various sites in western
32 Abdülhamit Tüfekçioğlu, ‘Amasya’da Sultan II. Bâyezid Câmii Kitâbelerinin Hattatı Hakkında
Bir Tespit’, in M. Uğur Derman 65th Birthday Festschrift, ed. Irvin Cemil Schick (Istanbul, 2000),
pp. 554–68.
33 Signed by Ata Allah b. Muhammad al-Tabrizi; Michael J. Rogers, ‘cat. no. 90: Calligraphic
Scroll’, in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, D.C.,
1991), p. 198.
34 Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, pp. 86–8, 101; İsmail Hakkı Uzuncarşılı, ‘Osmanlı
Sarayında Ehl-i Hıref (Sanatkârlar) Defteri’, Belgeler 11, 15 (1981–6), 23–76 at pp. 2, 28, 70.
480
The visual arts
Anatolia suggests such a duality between manufacture for the court and for
the urban milieu (Figure 13.7a).35
Large-scale objects marked by a high degree of technical sophistication
and ine and tightly structured designs are reminiscent of the drawings in the
Baba Nakkaş album, which suggest links to the courtly milieu in Istanbul. The
popular and mass-produced blue-and-white wares, displaying a wide range of
designs of various provenances shared with the “Baba Nakkaş” wares their
underglaze painting technique and their porcelain-inspired colour scheme.
Pottery forms, compositional choices and the decorative vocabulary of the
“Baba Nakkaş” wares drew on contemporary metalwork, court designs and
Chinese porcelains. Intense and free-lowing designs typical of the 1480s, often
white on a cobalt background, disappeared in the following decades; patrons
now preferred relatively sparser compositions favouring chinoiserie patterns
alongside the already popular rumi elements.
In addition to the inter-relationships between urban and courtly milieus,
among luxury textiles Italian imports played a signiicant role. Velvets, gold
brocaded silks and satins were produced in Bursa but also imported par-
ticularly from Venice and Florence. Documents also mention Indian and
Damascene textiles. At times created in response to speciications from
Istanbul, Italian luxury fabrics were in vogue particularly for the imperial
wardrobe and palace furnishings. Silks with complex ogival patterns that
re-interpreted, and at times Ottomanised, the compositions of highly presti-
gious Italian velvets soon appealed to wealthy buyers alongside velvets and
brocades in traditional “three dot” (benek) and “wavy stripe” (pelenk nakış)
patterns.36
Throughout this period, Venetian textiles remained objects of high prestige
in Ottoman, Italian and northern European lands alike. A signiicant number
of extant objects have proven diicult to attribute to the looms of Venice,
Florence or else Bursa, demonstrating that the production and use of these
conspicuous signiiers of wealth and status were profoundly interconnected
35 Atasoy and Raby, Iznik, pp. 82–9; Walter B. Denny, Iznik: The Artistry of Ottoman Ceramics
(London and New York, 2004), pp. 43–54. For Iznik excavations, see Oktay Aslanapa, Şerare
Yetkin and Ara Altun, İznik Çini Fırınları Kazısı II. Dönem (Istanbul, 1989); Ara Altun, ‘İznik
Çini Fırınları Kazısı Çalışmaları’, Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı (Ankara, 1997–2002); Ara Altun
and Belgin Demirsar-Arlı, ‘İznik Çini Fırınları Kazısı Çalışmaları’, Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı
(Ankara, 2003–7).
36 Fahri Dalsar, Türk Sanayi ve Ticaret Tarihinde Bursa’da İpekçilik (Istanbul, 1960), pp. 77–8;
Nurhan Atasoy, Walter B. Denny, Louise Mackie and Hülya Tezcan, İpek: The Crescent and the
Rose: Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets (London, 2001), pp. 182–90, 229–30; Suraiya Faroqhi,
Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London and New York, 2009),
pp. 95–101.
481
Figure 13.7a and b. Underglaze ceramic plates: (a) dish with rumi and Baba Nakkaş–style
ornament and pseudo-Kuic inscription, ca. 1480 (Musée du Louvre, DAI, inv. QA 6321); (b)
dish with tuğrakeş spiral design, ca. 1530–40 (Musée du Louvre, DAI, inv. 5592)
482
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Figure 13.7c and d. Underglaze ceramic plates: (c) dish with rosettes, lotus lowers and
saz leaves, ca. 1545–50 (Musée du Louvre, DAI, inv. MAO 385); (d): dish with tulips and
hyacinths, ca. 1560–75 (Musée du Louvre, DAI, inv. 27715)
483
Figure 13.8. Velvet with an ogival pattern, attributed to Bursa or Italy, ifteenth century.
(Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, inv. no. 13/1919)
and textile artists lived in a world that was larger than the frontiers of the
expanding empire (Figure 13.8).37
A comparable situation existed in the realm of carpet production: Uşak,
Bergama, Konya and possibly other smaller centres continued to provide for
the massive European demand for carpets with a range of geometric motifs.
Perhaps we also need to factor in an Asian market. Italian trading houses,
with their main bases in Constantinople but also maintaining important
37 Walter B. Denny, ‘Oriental Carpets and Textiles in Venice’ and Venice and the Islamic World,
828–1797, ed. Stefano Carboni (New York, 2007), pp. 174–91, 323, catalogue entries 79 and 80.
484
The visual arts
establishments on the Aegean coast, had long been the principal intermediar-
ies in the carpet trade to western Europe. Actors multiplied while the routes
and the volume of trade expanded throughout the period under examination.38
Most common Anatolian exports have been dubbed “Holbein” and “Lotto”
rugs by virtue of their ubiquity in Italian and northern Renaissance painting.39
Both feature variations of repetitive geometric compositions: “Holbein”
carpets had a design often based on octagon and star patterns, whereas the
“Lotto” rugs featured an open repetitive design in which angular rumi motifs
prevailed. Pseudo-Kuic borders of monumental efect, with geometric knot
designs loosely based on this angular Arabic script, were a legacy of medi-
eval carpet weaving in Anatolia. Other fragments, on the other hand, pres-
ent motifs such as lotus palmettes and multi-lobed leaves and compositions
that link them to late ifteenth-century courtly arts in other media, includ-
ing manuscript illumination and binding, metalwork, woodcarving and tile
decoration. Possibly due to the large-scale constructions of the period, these
carpets were much larger than the “Konya”, “animal”, and “Holbein” variet-
ies.40 The connection between the various centres of carpet manufacture in
western Anatolia and court styles continued through the later decades, as
weavers incorporated “star” and “medallion” designs that came to dominate
compositions. Weavers incorporated into their repertories the long-favoured
three-dot and stripe motifs (çintamani) and also motifs and colour combi-
nations reminiscent of later sixteenth-century tile designs.41 Like İznik and
Kütahya ceramics or Bursa silks and velvets, the carpet production of Uşak
and Bergama was highly varied in quality, size and dominant decorative aes-
thetic. These same centres – and diferent workshops within them – catered
both to the local and/or inter-regional market and the sultan’s court. Patterns
of courtly commission and supervision over artisanal production during these
decades, on the other hand, continue to escape us.
Concomitant to the integration of artistic production and consumption
into the increasingly more structured bureaucratic practices and hierarchies
38 Crane, ‘Art and Architecture’, pp. 331–5; Kurt Erdmann, Der türkische Teppich des 15. Jahrhunderts
(Istanbul, 1957), pp. 71–5; Julian Raby, ‘Court and Export: Part 1. Market Demands in Ottoman
Carpets, 1450–1550’, Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies 2 (1986), 29–38.
39 John Mills, ‘The Turkish Carpet in the Paintings of Western Europe’, in Turkish Carpets from
the 13th–18th Centuries, ed. Ahmet Ertuğ (Milan, 1996), pp. xxxix–xliv; Nazan Ölçer, ‘Osmanlı
Dönemi Türk Halı Sanatı’, Osmanlı Uygarlığı, ed. Halil İnalcık and Günsel Renda, 2 vols.
(Istanbul, 2003), vol. 2, pp. 788–823.
40 Raby, ‘Court and Export: Part 2’.
41 Walter B. Denny and Nazan Ölçer, ‘Anatolian Carpets from Uşak Manufactories’, in Anatolian
Carpets: Masterpieces from the Turkish and Islamic Art Museum, ed. Ahmet Ertuğ (Bern, 1999),
pp. 36–45.
485
of the empire was the articulation of reciprocities at diferent levels, based on

gift exchange between elites from within and outside of the Ottoman realm.
Gift-and-reward connections between artists and patrons were also at issue.
Whether working within or outside of the court workshops, artists produced
through a dual system of commissions and gifts.42 The presentation of pre-
cious objects became integral to norms and practices of gift-giving embed-
ded within a complex web of courtly patronage, and in fact in the very fabric
of courtly social and political interaction. A closely related practice, namely
the bestowal of robes of honour (hilat) on dignitaries, ambassadors, court-
iers and artists, created a considerable demand for luxury textiles. Of varying
quality and meaning in diferent contexts, conferring hilat was at all times a
means of conirming rank and status.43
Pictorial representation: Eastern and western horizons of Ottoman painting

In contrast to the relatively uniform visual idiom created by calligraphers,
binders and manuscript illuminators by about 1500, pictorial representation
remained expressly hybrid, varied and multiple well into the mid-sixteenth
century. Mehmed II’s patronage of Italian art and artists resulted in a num-
ber of works with varied resonance. Portrait medals produced throughout
his reign attest to the sultan’s keen interest in this newly revived medium
and his awareness of its possibilities for circulating multiple copies of his
mimetic image combined with inscriptions announcing his imperial claims in
European courtly circles. Portraits of Mehmed II and his courtiers were cre-
ated in diverse modes and media: in addition to bronze medals and oils on can-
vas by Italian residents at court, a set of single-page paintings vividly capture
the remarkable cultural wealth, pluralism and cosmopolitanism of Mehmed
II’s court.44 Among the sultan’s artists were Costanzo da Ferrara, Sinan Bey,
an Ottoman Muslim educated by an Italian master, and Şiblizade Ahmed,
42 Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, pp. 89f.; Meriç, ‘Beyazıd Camii Mimarı’, pp. 9–14;
Uzunçarşılı, ‘Osmanlı Sarayında Ehl-i Hıref (Sanatkârlar) Defteri’, pp. 65–76.
43 Atasoy et al., İpek, pp. 32–5; the Inʻamat defteri of A.H. 909–917 (A.D.1503–12), Istanbul,
Atatürk Library, MC O71; and Ömer Lüti Barkan, ‘İstanbul Saraylarına Ait Muhasebe
Defterleri’, Belgeler 9 (1979), 1–380 at pp. 296–380; Hedda Reindl Kiel, ‘East Is East and West
Is West, and Sometimes the Twain Did Meet: Diplomatic Gift Exchange in the Ottoman
Empire’, in Frontiers of Ottoman Studies: State, Province, and the West, ed. Colin Imber, Keiko
Kiyotaki and Rhoads Murphey, 2 vols. (London, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 113–23; Julian Raby, ‘The
Serenissima and the Sublime Porte: Art in the Art of Diplomacy’, in Carboni, Venice and the
Islamic World, pp. 91–119 at pp. 100–13.
44 Julian Raby, ‘Opening Gambits’, in The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, ed.
Selmin Kangal (Istanbul, 2000), pp. 64–95; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘The Serial Portraits of Ottoman
Sultans in Comparative Perspective’, in Kangal, The Sultan’s Portrait, pp. 22–31; Caroline
Campbell and Alan Chong, Bellini and the East (London, 2005).
486
The visual arts
Figure 13.9. Portrait of Mehmed II, attributed to Sinan Bey. Album, 1460–80. (Topkapı
Palace Library, TSM H. 2153, fol. 145v)
the latter’s trainee; their diverse representational idioms combined Persianate

and Italianate conventions of portraiture (Figure 13.9). Such a predilection for
unreserved juxtaposition characterised narrative painting as well. Illustrated
literary and historical works from the 1450s through the early decades of the
sixteenth century ofer a kaleidoscope of visual idioms originating in various
Timurid and Turkmen palaces, the Byzantine art of Constantinople and con-
temporary Italian courts. Diferent styles and representational conventions
may be conined to the individual pages of a manuscript or, more strikingly,
visible within a single page.
Mehmed II’s scriptorium created works in a broad range of topics in
Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Greek, his collection expanding into the Latin
realm. Bayezid II’s keen interest in book culture expanded the production of
illustrated manuscripts of literary and historical subject matter.45 Ahmedi’s
45 Ayşin Yoltar Yıldırım, ‘The Role of Illustrated Book Manuscripts in Ottoman Luxury Book
Production, 1413–1520’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University (2002); Julian
487
İskendername, a fourteenth-century Turkish epic on the exploits of Iskandar

Zulkarnayn of Islamic myth, including also a chronicle of the House of
Osman, was produced in multiple copies during the 1460s and 1470s.
Evoking Mehmed the Conqueror’s self-image as Alexander the Great,
the illustrations of these volumes highlight an interest in historical narra-
tive painting, for they include also images illustrating the Ottoman chroni-
cle inserted into the epic.46 The Şahname-i Melik Ummi (ca. 1495), a chronicle
of the Ottoman house up to the early years of Bayezid II’s reign, partook
in the historiographical reckoning that followed Bayezid’s contested succes-
sion to the throne of Mehmed II. Its text and images addressed the issue of
dynastic descent, a resonant topic during the earlier part of Bayezid’s rule
(Figure 13.10).47
Interest in illustrated manuscripts of Persian literary works continued
into the reign of Bayezid II, as demonstrated by multiple copies of Khusrav
va Shirin manuscripts or the Hesht Bihisht of Amir Khusrav Dehlavi, where
Persianate iconography and visual norms and representational choices speciic
to the Ottoman court were often deployed together. Ottoman architectural
and sartorial details inserted into the illustration of such popular romances
underlined attempts at the creation of a local visual identity inscribed into
the inter-regional and highly prestigious world of Timurid visual culture.
Distinctions of a more structural nature lay in the uses of optical perspective,
often in isolated sections of a given painting, modelling through tonal difer-
ences, and landscape features showing a degree of recession into space and
thus contrasting with the two-dimensional picture plane in the foreground.
The intimate and elaborately decorated interiors depicted in Timurid paint-
ing gave way to images of exteriors relecting contemporary architectural
practices and tastes.48
Paintings from two manuscripts of this period may provide the most tan-
gible and succinct evidence for the remarkable cultural eclecticism of the
Raby, ‘Mehmed the Conqueror’s Greek scriptorium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983), 15–34;
Raby and Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding, pp. 47–104.
46 Serpil Bağcı, ‘Osmanlı Dünyasında Efsanevi Yönetici İmgesi Olarak Büyük İskender ve
Osmanlı İskendernamesi’, in Humana: Bozkurt Güvenç’e Armağan (Ankara, 1994), pp. 111–31;
Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda and Zeren Tanındı, Ottoman Painting (Ankara,
2010), pp. 111–31.
47 Stéphane Yerasimos, La fondation de Constantinople et de Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions
turques: légendes d’empire (Istanbul and Paris, 1990); Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The
Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995); Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 31–4.
48 Ernst J. Grube, ‘Notes on Ottoman Painting in the 15th Century’, in Essays in Islamic Art and
Architecture in Honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn, ed. Abbas Daneshvari (Malibu, Calif., 1981), pp.
51–61; Ayşin Yoltar Yıldırım, ‘A 1498–99 Khusraw ve Shirin: Turning the Pages of an Illustrated
Manuscript’, Muqarnas 22 (2005), 95–109; Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 43–8.
488
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Figure 13.10. Bayezid II meeting with vezirs, Malik Ummi, Şehnâme, ca. 1495. (Topkapı
Palace Library H. 1123, fol. 30v)
Ottoman court as relected in the pictorial arts. An incomplete manuscript

of Nizami’s Khamsa features two paintings, one depicting the Shahnama hero
Bahram-i Gur’s struggle with lions and the other portraying Iskandar and
his retinue in the land of darkness. Atmospheric perspective, foreshortened
igures in dynamic interaction, dark saturated colours and a style of sketch-
ing that privileges the modelled igure evince the hands most probably of
489
Italian painters or their trainees, who were at the same time conversant with
the conventions of the Persianate idiom.49 The intriguing double-folio fron-
tispiece of Uzun Firdevsi’s Süleymanname, presented to Bayezid II around
1490, exhibits, in a radically diferent visual idiom, another instance of stylis-
tic and iconographical juxtapositions from the farthest reaches of Ottoman
cultural horizons. The image represents Solomon and Bilqis, the Queen of
Saba, enthroned, presiding over their divan of fairies, demons, jinns, animals
both fantastic and real, and courtiers. It is thematically connected to a set of
frontispiece paintings favoured in Shiraz during the late 1400s and the 1500s.
Art historians have at the same time linked its unusual registered composi-
tion and the shape of its demons to contemporary Spanish painting, sam-
ples of which may have arrived in Istanbul with the Sephardic communities
after their expulsion from Spain. Venetian sources may also have provided
models for particular igural and architectural renderings.50 Through the ig-
ure of Solomon framed by a towered structure that unmistakeably reminds
the viewer of the Middle Gate (Orta Kapı) of the Topkapı Palace, this broad
range of associations converges at the very heart of Ottoman rule and fore-
shadows the Ottoman appropriation of the kingly image of Solomon as a just
and universal ruler (Figure 13.11).
Richly illustrated and illuminated by artists working in a Khurasani idiom,
the Persian Divan of Selim I (ca. 1515–20) was modelled after the Divan of
Husayn Bayqara, and in turn this volume was the earliest of a series of poetry
collections of Ottoman sultans, always distinguished by their opulent illu-
mination and luxurious bindings.51 Production of luxury manuscripts visibly
declined during the reign of Bayezid’s son Selim I, and the court also employed
fewer calligraphers and scribes. At the same time, these years saw the creation
of a team of artists that would introduce remarkable vivacity, richness and
technical expertise into Ottoman artistic ventures of the following decades,52
49 Zeren Tanındı, ‘Additions to Illustrated Manuscripts in Ottoman Workshops’, Muqarnas 17

(2000), 147–61. For a suggested date from the end of Mehmed II’s reign, see Yoltar Yıldırım,
‘The Role of Illustrated Book Manuscripts’, pp. 509–14, 526–7.
50 Serpil Bağcı, ‘A New Theme of the Shirazi Frontispiece Miniatures: The Divan of Solomon’,
Muqarnas 12 (1995), 101–11; Ernst J. Grube, ‘Two Paintings in a Copy of the “Süleyman-name”
in the Chester Beatty Library’, in Seventh International Congress of Turkish Art, ed. Tadeusz
Majda (Warsaw, 1990), pp. 133–40; J. Michael Rogers, ‘The Chester Beatty Süleymanname
Again’, in Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honour of Basil W. Robinson,
ed. Robert Hillenbrand (London and New York, 2000), pp. 187–200; Yoltar Yıldırım, ‘The
Role of Illustrated Manuscripts’, pp. 440–1.
51 Filiz Çağman, ‘The Miniatures of the Divan-ı Hüseyni and Inl uence of Their Style’, in Fifth
International Congress of Turkish Art, ed. Geza Féher (Budapest, 1978), pp. 231–59; Bağcı et al.,
Ottoman Painting, pp. 61–3.
52 Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 55–67.
490
The visual arts
Figure 13.11. The courts of Solomon and Bilqis, Uzun Firdevsi, Süleymanname, circa 1480.
(Dublin Chester Beatty Library T 406, fols. 2v–3r)
for when Selim I had conquered Tabriz there occurred the most substantial
inl ux of artists, objects and ideas of eastern origin the Ottoman world had
ever experienced. Upon Selim’s orders, artists and objects from Timurid Herat
and the Akkoyunlu court in Tabriz, which had recently fallen to the Safavid
Shah Isma‘il I (r. 1500–24), now migrated to Ottoman imperial and princely
capitals. The words Şükri-i Bidlisi put into Selim’s mouth highlight the actual
and perceived dominance of Persianate cultural forms in the Ottoman courtly
milieu of these decades: “[A]ll the scholars, artists, merchants, and men of
wealth should be taken to Istanbul so that, henceforth, the Ottomans will
have no further need of Persians in such matters.”53
Articulating a new imperial image, ca. 1520–1570

Both within and beyond the court, the 1520s were a time of new vivacity
and explorations in design, relected in the arts of the book, industrial arts
53 Şükri-i Bidlisi, Selīmnāme, quoted in Yoltar Yıldırım, ‘The Role of Illustrated Manuscripts’,
p. 552.
491
and architectural decoration. As we have seen, Selim I’s eastern conquests

and Süleyman’s early military ventures brought to Ottoman courts a wealth
of objects and artists of diverse cultural traditions. In the form of new or
newly perfected techniques in various media and new or newly interpreted
forms, particularly in the decorative arts, these acquisitions bore fruit during
the 1520s. An explosion of new work resulted from the exuberant lifestyle and
tastes of the young Süleyman, bolstered by the ambitious projects at home
and abroad of his deputy and conidante the grand vezir İbrahim Paşa. During
the 1520s, the Topkapı Palace was largely renovated and refurbished, and new
interest in cultural patronage brought numerical expansion, further bureau-
cratisation and professionalisation to communities of court artists and to the
court scriptorium. Universalist iconography focused on world domination
was articulated in diverse media and objects, such as Süleyman’s Venetian
helmet crown, modelled on the papal tiara, and Piri Reis’s geographic and
cartographic works of global expanse.54 Embodying the apocalyptic mood
of the tenth Muslim century and resonant with the messianic identity
and image of Süleyman in the earlier years of his reign, Abd al-Rahman
al-Bistami’s prognosticative text Al-miftah al-jafr al-jami circulated in multiple
copies. Against the backdrop of another surge of eschatological expectation,
a Turkish translation of this text and its illustrated copies would appear at the
end of the 1500s.55
In the later decades of Süleyman’s reign, when universal aspirations ceded
to a focus on the empire as the foremost Islamic state, architectural and insti-
tutional patronage of public works became increasingly central to Ottoman
elite identity. The ceaseless construction activity of those decades rendered
the imperial architectural oice and its chief, Sinan, important agents in the
representation of elite ideals. This was also when arts of public display and
spectacle, particularly architecture and luxury textiles, became loci for artic-
ulating modes of visual distinction. The visual idiom created under courtly
patronage announced the distinctive imperial identity of the Ottoman house
with respect to its Islamic and European counterparts. Arts and architecture
partook of the regionalisation that marked Ottoman culture at large.56
54 Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Suleyman the Magniicent and the Representation of Power in the
Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry’, The Art Bulletin 71 (1989), 401–27.
55 Cornell H. Fleischer, ‘Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court
in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh
Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (Washington, D.C., 2009), pp. 232–43.
56 Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘A Kanun for the State, a Canon for the Arts: Conceptualizing the Classical
Synthesis of Ottoman Arts and Architecture’, in Soliman le Magniique et son temps: actes
du colloque de Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 7–10 mars 1990, ed. Gilles Veinstein
492
The visual arts
A new aesthetic of ornament

The irst extant registers providing ample information on the structure and
workings of the court ateliers begin in 1526; at that time, the court workshops
included 36 communities of ehl-i hıref, or “people of talent”. A document of
that date noted the names of several artists, the famous Şahkulı among them,
who were resident in Amasya but now employed at the court workshops.57
Encompassing handicrafts of a wide variety, the ehl-i hıref included the design-
ers and creators of court-sponsored arts. Certain communities (cemaat)
within this group designed and produced luxury manuscripts and objects of
precious materials, while others created designs for the industrial arts, such
as ceramics, tiles and textiles. Oicially attached to and receiving wages from
the imperial treasurer, who was part of the inner palace organisation, the
workings of the ehl-i hıref evince the dynamic and shifting web of connections
between artisanal production, the collection of luxury objects, book culture
and palace ceremonial. That all these ields of activity ultimately converged in
one locus, the inner treasury (iç hazine), within the third, private court of the
palace underlines the centrality of the treasury to Ottoman cultural produc-
tion both as an institution and as a collection of objects. The belvedere kiosk
at the north-eastern edge of the palace’s third court served as a storehouse
and exhibition space for precious or exotic objects and also as a depot for raw
materials to be used by palace craftsmen. The hazine was a storehouse of
manuscripts but also functioned as a lending library for palace inhabitants,
including members of the imperial household.58
Throughout the sixteenth century, documents relect the highly heteroge-
neous makeup of artisans registered within the “communities of the people
of talent” (cemaat-i ehl-i hıref), their numbers including craftsmen from the
Timurid and Turkmen courts, from the empire’s Anatolian and Rumelian
provinces and beyond, and from Austrian and “Frenk” territories. Through
the following decades, the organisational structure of the court-employed
artisan communities would change little, while the numbers of people
(Paris, 1992), pp. 195–217; Cornell H. Fleischer, ‘The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of the
Imperial Image in the Reign of Süleyman’, in Veinstein, Soliman le Magniique, pp. 159–74.
57 Rıf kı Melûl Meriç, Türk Nakış Sanatı Tarihi Araştırmaları, vol. 1: Vesikalar (Ankara, 1953),
pp. 3–4.
58 On the imperial treasury as a lending library, see Necipoğlu, ‘The Serial Portraits’, p. 44;
Emine Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs: Transitions in Ottoman Manuscript Patronage, 1566–
1617’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (2005), pp. 34–48. On the treasury,
see Cengiz Köseoğlu, The Topkapı Saray Museum: The Treasury, ed. and trans. J. Michael
Rogers (London, 1987).
493
practicing diferent crafts did vary according to the changing priorities and
tastes of the elite.59
Of increasing prominence for Ottoman court arts through the middle
decades of the sixteenth century were the painter-illuminators, who, as mem-
bers of the cemaat-i Nakkaşan, worked in book painting and illumination and
in the decoration of buildings, also creating designs for objects across a vari-
ety of media. Mid-sixteenth-century expansion and perhaps focus on cultural
distinctions led to a short-lived division of the Nakkaşan into the Rumiyan and
the Aceman. The irst, literally “the people of Rum”, referred to artists who
were Ottoman subjects from the central lands of the empire, while the sec-
ond, literally “the people of Acem”, referred generally but not exclusively to
those who hailed from the Persian-speaking world. While primarily artists of
the book, Şahkulı (d. 1555–6) in the early decades of the sixteenth century and
Nakkaş Osman towards its close produced works across media, decorating
ceramic plates or kiosks in addition to the important manuscript commissions
they received. Earlier sixteenth-century documents refer to creators of designs
and igurative images in pen and ink (ressam), specialists in igurative paint-
ing (musavvir) and illuminators (müzehhib). Later on, oicialdom frequently
replaced these diferent terms with the all-encompassing Nakkaş, while doc-
uments pertaining to particular projects, as well as commentaries such as
Mustafa Ali’s Menakıb-ı Hünerveran, attest to the presence of a rich vocabu-
lary of book arts and artists engaged in various modes of calligraphy, igural
representation and ornamentation.60 The court Nakkaşan formed a composite
group employed in a range of projects, including calligraphers (katiban-ı kütüb)
and binders (mücellid). Permanent and temporary workshops within and close
to the Topkapı Palace, including the famed Nakkaşhane outside the palace
grounds close to the Hippodrome, accommodated the painter-illuminators.61
With the creation of royal textile workshops, we encounter further difer-
entiation among the designers employed by the court, a process that began
59 Filiz Çağman, ‘Mimar Sinan Döneminde Sarayın Ehl-i Hıref Teşkilatı’, in Mimar Sinan
Döneminde Türk Mimarlığı ve Sanatı, ed. Zeki Sönmez (Istanbul, 1988), pp. 73–7; Filiz Çağman,
‘Saray Nakkaşhanesinin Yeri Üzerine Düşünceler’, in Sanat Tarihinde Doğudan Batıya: Ünsal
Yücel Anısına Sempozyum Bildirileri (Istanbul, 1989), pp. 35–46; Uzunçarşılı, ‘Osmanlı Sarayında
Ehl-i Hıref ’, pp. 66, 68; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘A Kanun for the State’; Bahattin Yaman, ‘1545 Yılı
Osmanlı Saray Sanatkarları’, Belleten 72 (2008), 501–34 and facsimile.
60 Banu Mahir, ‘İslamda “Resim” Sözcüğünün Belirlediği Tasvir Geleneği’, in Sanat Tarihinde
Doğudan Batıya, pp. 59–64; Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Menakıb-ı Hünerveran (Istanbul, 1926);
Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Mustafa Âli’s Epic Deeds of Artists, A Critical Edition of the Earliest
Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World, ed., trans. and comment.
Esra Akın (Leiden, 2011).
61 Çağman, ‘Saray Nakkaşhanesinin Yeri’.
494
The visual arts
in the 1520s and gathered speed during the middle decades of the sixteenth
century. Designers of textiles (nakşbend) now featured as part of the cemaat of
craftsmen producing luxury fabrics; they were at times also lent out as design-
ers to the tile-manufacturing workshops of İznik.62 As the nakşbend became a
separate group, there occurred an increasingly visible diferentiation between
the public and private visual languages of the Ottoman court. Artists of the
book worked in an idiom that remained in closer contact and dialogue with
Persianate book culture, while the makers of textile and tile designs broke dis-
tinctly free from the conventions and relatively conservative predispositions
of their colleagues.
Early in Süleyman’s reign, Şahkulı, on record as ressam and associated with
Baghdad, left a deinitive mark on Ottoman design through his works on the
“saz” style. Saz re-interpreted an earlier group of ink drawings popular in the
Persianate world from the fourteenth century onwards which were partly
cognate with hatayi designs and in part drew on representational themes of
Central and East Asian inspiration. Intensely energised compositions of long,
feather-like serrated leaves and dramatically bending stems bearing lotus low-
ers and palmettes, sometimes inhabited by fantastic animals and auspicious
igures of Asian inspiration, concurrently entered Ottoman representation
and illumination (Figure 13.13, Figure 13.7c). Single-page ink drawings, rep-
resenting intertwined saz leaves and lotus blossoms, whirling compositions
of fantastic creatures in combat surrounded by foliage, and images of fair-
ies at times inspired by the conventions of portrait painting adorned albums
through the later decades of the sixteenth century.63 Miniaturised in bindings
and illumination or boldly magniied in textile and tile designs, saz proved to
be of remarkable longevity. Its most celebrated application to tile design was
the ive large underglaze painted tiles in blue and turquoise on white, origi-
nally created for a newly built kiosk within the Topkapı Palace’s private third
court and today adorning the façade of the Circumcision Room. Perhaps
designed by Şahkulı, these may have been the work of a group of Tabrizi
masters heading the royal ceramics workshop in Istanbul, whose products in
diverse techniques would adorn buildings in the capital city into the 1540s.64
62 Necipoğlu, ‘L’idée de décor’, pp. 17–18; Bahattin Yaman, ‘1557 Tarihli Ehl-i Hiref Defterine
Göre Osmanlı Saray Sanatkarları’, Kök Araştırmalar 8 (2006), 5–38, fol. 8a.
63 Banu Mahir, ‘Saray Nakkaşhanesinin Ünlü Ressamı Şah Kulu ve Eserleri’, Topkapı Sarayı
Müzesi Yıllık 1 (1986), 113–30; Banu Mahir, ‘Osmanlı Sanatında Saz Üslubundan Anlaşılan’,
Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Yıllık 2 (1987), 123–40. On saz as a form of the “black pen” technique,
see Filiz Çağman, ‘Muhammad of the Black Pen and His Paintings’, in Turks: A Journey of a
Thousand Years, ed. David J. Roxburgh (London, 2005), pp. 148–56 at pp. 148–53.
64 Kırımlı, ‘İstanbul Çiniciliği’; Necipoğlu, ‘From International Timurid to Ottoman’; Atasoy
and Raby, Iznik, pp. 101–4.
495
Figure 13.12. Découpage garden from the “Nishaburi” album F. 1426. (Istanbul University
Library, ca. 1560)
Court and urban ateliers enriched the Ottoman visual vocabulary by

yet other motifs. Variants of the tuğrakeş (or Golden Horn) style, invented
in the court scriptorium and characterised by inely woven and loriated
spirals, soon covered İznik and Kütahya vessels (Figure 13.7b). Within the
same years, the ceramics ateliers of these two cities produced wares bear-
ing popular loral designs, at times merging these with motifs of courtly
origin.65 Due to the larger holdings and greater use of Chinese porcelain
at the Ottoman court in the aftermath of the Safavid campaigns, local pot-
ters adapted a host of East Asian motifs, expanding their vocabulary of
chinoiserie.
A further expansion of the Ottoman vocabulary of ornament is associated
with a former student of Şahkulı, Kara Memi (d. ca. 1570). A master special-
ising in illuminated manuscripts and albums, in the 1540s Kara Memi intro-
duced naturalistic depictions of tulips, hyacinths, carnations, roses, irises,
prunus and pomegranate blossoms in vibrant colours to the Ottoman dec-
orative repertoire. The loral style, known as şükufe (lower), irst appeared
in manuscript illumination, bookbinding and album pages featuring the katı
(découpage) technique, but soon it spread across a variety of media (Figures
65 Atasoy and Raby, Iznik, pp. 101–28.
496
The visual arts
Figure 13.13. The “Nishaburi” album, ink drawings of dragon and lotus blossom in saz
leaves (Istanbul University Library, F. 1426, fols. 47b, 48a, ca. 1560)
13.7d, 13.12 and 13.14).66 Though originating in the work of painter-illumina-

tors, the new motifs were used rather conservatively in luxury manuscripts
and the imperial tuğra, an elaborate calligraphic composition authenticating
documents issued in the sultan’s name. Designers often conined small-scale
delicately rendered lowers within compartments whose divisions followed
the conventions of earlier sixteenth-century illumination and bookbinding.
Less often, they produced loral compositions evoking a paradise-like garden
that occupied a complete page or book cover, again underlining the distinc-
tiveness of this particular mode from the remaining abstract or semi-abstract
decoration adorning the manuscript.
66 Serpil Bağcı and Zeren Tanındı, ‘The Art of the Ottoman Court’, in Roxburgh, Turks, p. 268;
Esin Atıl, The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magniicent (Washington, D.C. and New York, 1987),
pp. 68–71, 105–9; Filiz Çağman, ‘The Earliest Known Ottoman “Murakka” Kept in Istanbul
University Library’, in Majda, Seventh International Congress of Turkish Art, pp. 75–8; Filiz
Çağman, ‘L’art du papier découpé et ses représentants à l’époque de Soliman le Magniique’,
in Veinstein, Soliman le Magniique, pp. 249–64; Necipoğlu, ‘L’idée de décor’.
497
Figure 13.14. Frontispiece of Qur’an transcribed by Ahmed Karahisari, partly attributed to

Hasan Çelebi, ca. 1550, 1584, illuminations 1584–96. (Topkapı Palace Library H.S. 5, fols. 2v, 3r)
Presenting the complete range of Ottoman illumination at the time of

its compilation in about 1560–5 is the “Nishaburi album”, a collection of
mostly Safavid calligraphies of the earlier sixteenth century (including those
of Shah Mahmud Nishaburi), black pen paintings possibly by Şahkulı, and a
decoupage garden in full bloom (Figure 13.12, Figure 13.13). Possibly the chief
Nakkaş, Kara Memi, created this manuscript and its binding for presentation
to Süleyman: the illuminations surrounding selected examples of Safavid
and Ottoman calligraphy as well as igural representation form a sumptuous
and elaborately designed Ottoman frame. Thus the manuscript attests to the
enthusiastic embrace of the book arts of the Persianate world on the part of
Ottoman designers and audiences, who over the decades maintained a dia-
logue with this tradition. In their visual and literary choices, the makers of
another album (murakka) from the 1570s, dedicated to Murad III and known
by his name, largely followed the same model.67 Also completed under courtly
67 Istanbul University Library F 1426; Atıl, The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magniicent, pp. 68–71,
105–9; Çağman, ‘The Earliest Known Ottoman “Murakka”’, pp. 75–8; Dorothea Duda, ‘Das
498
The visual arts
Figure 13.15. Ceremonial kaftan with ogival pattern, featuring tulips and rumis, mid-
sixteenth century. (Topkapı Palace Museum, 13/932)
patronage during Murad III’s reign is the monumental Ahmed Karahisari

Qur’an, partly inscribed by this famed calligrapher, whose re-interpretation of
the cursive scripts attributed to Yaqut was celebrated by his contemporaries.
The manuscript was completed, illuminated, and bound between 1574 and
1595 as a tour de force of Ottoman book arts. Underlining the value ascribed
to the work of Karahisari (d. ca. 1555), the rich and varied illumination pro-
gram encompassed the complete vocabulary of ornament in use by the court
Nakkaşan, executed in varying scales and compositions, while responding to
the work of the calligrapher displayed on the same pages (Figure 13.14).68 In
Album Murad III in Wien’, in Ars Turcica: Akten des VI. Internationalen Kongresses für Türkische
Kunst München, ed. Klaus Kreiser et al. (Munich, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 475–89; Aimée Froom, ‘A
Muraqqa for the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1595): Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Codex Mixtus 313’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University (2001).
68 Filiz Çağman, ‘The Ahmed Karahisari Qur’an in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul’, in
Hillenbrand, Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars, pp. 57–73.
499
Figure 13.16. Detail of tile panel from the mihrab, Piyale Paşa mosque, Istanbul, 1573.
(Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
an additive manner, Ottoman ornament successively assimilated variations

of the medieval Perso-Islamic decorative vocabulary, the saz, and inally the
“lorist’s idiom”.
While artists of the book often kept these various styles neatly framed and
therefore quite distinct, textile and tile designers of the 1550s searched for a
novel scale and syntax, creating an uninhibited fusion of magniied motifs
rendered in bold outlines, coupled with an explosion of colour.69 Textile
design was the motor force in the development of new compositional devices
69 Atasoy et al., İpek, pp. 155–75.
500
The visual arts
and bolder uses of recently introduced or older motifs. Basic compositional

structures, most commonly staggered ogival medallions and undulating
vines, were used as the matrix of myriad motif combinations. Staples of tex-
tile design in Italy, Mamluk Egypt and East Asia, these compositions were
adapted to the vocabulary of Ottoman ornament, while large asymmetrical
saz compositions and the long-favoured çintamani retained their popularity.
Ogival lattices with ine tendrils, inely drawn rumis and hatayis, and delicate
tuğrakeş spirals of the earlier sixteenth century receded into the background
as bold and radically magniied designs strove for immediate visual efect in
the expansive ceremonial spaces of court and city (Figure 13.15, 13.27).70
Surely this transformation in visual idiom beneited from the close proxim-
ity of artists working in diferent media, for in response to inadequate supply
from Bursa and the high costs of foreign imports, the sultan’s court in the
1550s established royal weaving ateliers in Istanbul, with speciic spaces for
velvet and brocade looms. While Venetian and Florentine velvets remained
prestigious, local textile production expanded in the royal karhane-i kemhaci-
yan and in private ateliers active in Istanbul. Due to the growing number of
royal and private ateliers, contacts increased between various loci of design
and production, while as mentioned court and urban ateliers also interacted
more frequently. Court designers (nakşbendan or nakkaşan) now often sup-
plied models for the weavers to follow, and workshops in İznik, Bursa and
Uşak received such designs when courtly commissions were at issue. At times
the court demanded that masters from the provinces be sent to Istanbul to
assist in the founding or improvement of the royal workshops.71 Older centres
of production came to be part of Ottoman commissioning and consumption
networks, as was the case with “Mamluk” carpets produced in Cairo subse-
quent to Selim I’s conquests.72
Ceramic wares, and from the 1540s onwards speciically the architectural
tile industry in İznik, proited signiicantly from such contacts. Towards
the late 1520s, potters introduced the irst saz motifs to İznik as they also
expanded their colour range, adding sage green and purple to the formerly
70 Necipoğlu, ‘A Kanun for the State’; Atasoy et al., İpek, pp. 21–35.
71 Dalsar, Bursa’da İpekçilik, pp. 319–20; Necipoğlu, ‘A Kanun for the State’. On prestige and use
of Italian luxury textiles, see Atasoy et al., İpek, pp. 182–90; Raby, ‘The Serenissima and the
Sublime Porte’, pp. 95, 111.
72 Ernst Kühnel and Louisa Bellinger, Cairene Rugs and Others Technically Related: 15th–17th
Century (Washington, D.C., 1957); Robert Irwin, ‘Egypt, Syria, and Their Trading Partners’,
Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies 2 (1986), 73–82 at pp. 79–81; Oktay Aslanapa, One Thousand
Years of Turkish Carpets, ed. and trans. William Edmonds (Istanbul, 1988), pp. 137–43; Faroqhi,
Artisans of Empire, pp. 80–2.
501
dominant blue and turquoise in decorating the “Damascus wares”. Mid-

century saw a further sweeping change in the local industries as the court-
based “lorist’s style” took root and merged with earlier uses of loral
vocabulary in the İznik ateliers. Compositional devices of textile design,
ogival stacking and undulating vines particularly, now came to be used in
tiles as well, alongside the complete range of Ottoman ornamental reper-
tory (Figure 13.14). Artisans expanded their colour scheme yet further to
include red and, shortly afterwards, emerald green as well. Court design,
elite architectural projects and İznik industries now were linked much more
tightly, while the court endeavoured to bring tilemakers under the direct
control of the chief architect.73
Objects of this period held today in the Topkapı Palace collections are
expressly un-iconic, as is the dominant aesthetic of Ottoman industrial and
luxury arts. Yet İznik and Kütahya ateliers, as well as Bursa and Istanbul silk
manufacturers, did produce objects bearing igural imagery for local and for-
eign markets. Liturgical objects with Christian imagery and symbols catered
to Ottoman non-Muslims as well as buyers beyond the imperial domains.
Particularly in the inal decades of the 1500s, İznik potters used, alongside the
dominant loral designs, a range of animal igures in compositions derived
from the medieval Islamic repertory, from Ottoman and Safavid book paint-
ing as well as from Balkan metalwork.74
Objects of precious metal or rock crystal, often created for ceremonial or
personal use, did not partake of this explosion of new design that revolu-
tionised the ornamentation of tiles and textiles created also, if not exclusively,
for public display. Tight interlocking patterns, variations of rumi-hatayi or saz
designs, covered surfaces and provided the frames upon which precious stones
might be mounted. The vast collection of Chinese porcelains at the Ottoman
court may be mentioned in this regard: Ottoman craftsmen mounted smaller-
scale, mostly blue and white objects with precious stones on patterned gold
frames, imprinting this distinctive style on porcelains in use at the privy
chamber. The diverse and dense designs that characterised the “bejewelled
aesthetic” of such metal, crystal and porcelain objects and the courtly deco-
rative idiom of these decades in general co-existed with what scholars have
73 Arthur Lane, Later Islamic Pottery (New York, 1957); Atasoy and Raby, Iznik, pp. 129–44;
Denny, Iznik, pp. 59–114.
74 Atasoy et al., İpek, pp. 176–81, 331–2, plates 51–7; Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, pp. 40–1; Helen
Evans (ed.), Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New York, 2004), pp. 444–7, cat. nos. 269–
71; Atasoy and Raby, Iznik, pp. 254–70; Athanasios A. Karakatsanis (ed.), The Treasures of
Mount Athos (Thessaloniki, 1997), pp. 374–5.
502
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Figure 13.17. Jewelled gold book binding, last quarter of the sixteenth century. (Topkapı
Palace Museum, 2/2086)
termed the “plain tradition”, characterised by a minimalist regard for the

material and for the object’s sculptural qualities (Figure 13.17).75
Intimately connected to elite identity and representation, the Ottoman
decorative idiom remained multiple and diverse throughout the “classical”
era. Tastes and design priorities difered across media; and a variety of fac-
tors created distinctions in visual idiom. Diferences between the designs
used for architectural tiles and luxury textiles on the one hand and those
favoured in book arts on the other underscored preferences predicated on
public and private uses. Spatial and visual distinctions and hierarchies ordered
the ornamental repertory and relegated the preferred ornamental themes
75 James Allan and Julian Raby, ‘Metalwork’, in Tulips, Arabesques and Turbans: Decorative Arts
from the Ottoman Empire, ed. Yanni Petsopoulos (New York, 1982), pp. 17–48; Julian Raby and
Ünsal Yücel, ‘Chinese Porcelains at the Ottoman Court’, in Krahl et al., Chinese Ceramics in
the Topkapı Saray Museum, pp. 47–51.
503
of the medieval era to less visible parts of decorated surfaces or into fram-
ing devices. Vocabularies of ornament were also tightly connected to media
and technique, as demonstrated by the bounteous use of geometric interlace
in woodwork, whether in architecture or in inlaid objects. Such distinctions
and divisions notwithstanding, the very characteristic of the emergent aes-
thetic, with its magniied motifs and unreserved juxtapositions of colour and
motif, highlighted the ultimate success of the new, which co-existed with, but
often subordinated, a broad and varied range of motifs and patterns formerly
absorbed into Ottoman arts.
Illustrated manuscripts: The primacy of geography and history

A group of artists working in an inter-regional visual idiom left their traces
in books produced in Herat, Tabriz and Istanbul in the 1520s and 1530s, under-
lining the interconnected nature of book painting across this wide expanse,
particularly in a period of rapidly shifting boundaries. Connected to this
group of mostly literary manuscripts illustrated in a Khurasani idiom, and
of signiicant impact, was an illustrated history of Selim’s reign completed
in 1527. The illustrated Selimname of Şükri-i Bidlisi was but one of a series
of histories covering the same years and created under courtly auspices in a
successful efort to re-write the controversial dynastic struggle that preceded
this sultan’s rise to power.76 Textually based on earlier gazavatnames, Bidlisi’s
Selimname in turn informed a host of illustrated dynastic histories of the later
sixteenth century.
If the Selimnames represent a look inwards, aiming to revise a disturbing
episode in Ottoman dynastic history and to demand a more exalted place for
Selim in historical consciousness, Piri Reis’s contemporaneous Kitab-ı Bahriye
and world maps represent a look outwards, a reckoning with the new impe-
rial expanse and its widening horizons. In contrast to the Selimname, whose
illustrated manuscripts are products of the court ateliers, the Kitab-ı Bahriye is
the work of a naval oicer who adapted the well-established isolario genre to
create an Ottoman image of the Mediterranean coastlines, ports and islands.
This was a sea chart to be used by sailors. But, at the same time, particu-
larly the second, visually and textually more lavish, version, initially prepared
through the mediation of İbrahim Paşa for presentation to Sultan Süleyman,
was conceived as a portrait of the Mediterranean from an Ottoman vantage
76 Şehabettin Tekindağ, ‘Selim-nameler’, Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi 1(1970), 197–230; Erdem Çıpa,
‘The Centrality of the Periphery: The Rise to Power of Selim I, 1487–1512’, unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Harvard University (2007); Çağman, ‘The Miniatures of the Divan-ı Hüseyni’.
504
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point. Ottoman cartographic representation of the Mediterranean partook

fully of contemporary developments in naval mapping developed simulta-
neously by Italian, Spanish and Portuguese mapmakers in portolan charts
and isolarios.77
Kitab-ı Bahriye constitutes the earliest example of topographic representa-
tion in the Ottoman realm, a genre that by the mid-1500s had become a well-
established feature of the Ottoman pictorial repertory. In representing port
cities, the mapmakers working for Piri Reis adopted the basic conventions
of the schematic “bird’s eye view”: they depicted the layout and boundaries
of the urban enclosure and main features of its environment while especially
highlighting a number of landmarks within an otherwise uniform urban fab-
ric. While simpler than contemporary Italian views of the same city, Kitab-ı
Bahriye’s double-folio bird’s eye view of Venice betrayed familiarity with the
long-standing Italian tradition of mapping the lagoon. An image of Alexandria
captured the town’s layout in relation to the port and highlighted the ancient
ruins that marked the cityscape (Figure 13.18). The images of Istanbul inserted
into later Kitab-ı Bahriye manuscripts partook of the newly emergent perspec-
tive view, adapting it to the medium of book painting.78
Piri Reis’s book is almost contemporaneous with a major historical proj-
ect conceived in the 1520s and partially realised through the 1540s, namely
Matrakçı Nasuh’s multi-volume history of the Ottoman house, planned as
part of a world history and straddling the intertwined genres of history, con-
quest narrative, geography and itinerary.79 The illustrations of Matrakçı’s
77 Piri Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye, ed. Ertuğrul Zekâi Ökte, trans. into modern Turkish Vahit Çabuk
and Tülây Duran, trans. into English Robert Bragner, 4 vols. (Ankara, 1988); Svat Soucek,
Piri Reis and Turkish Mapmaking after Columbus: The Khalili Portolan Atlas (London, 1996);
Pınar Emiralioğlu, ‘Cognizance of the Ottoman World: Visual and Textual Representations
in the Sixteenth Century Ottoman Empire (1514–1596)’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Chicago (2006), pp. 89–138; George Tolias, ‘Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth
Century’, in The History of Cartography, vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed.
David Woodward (Chicago, 2007), pp. 269–70.
78 İfet Orbay, ‘Istanbul Viewed : The Representation of the City in Ottoman Maps of the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (2001), pp. 117–298.
79 Nasuhü’s-Silahi, Beyân-ı Menâzil-i Sefer-i ‘Irakeyn-i Sulṭân Süleymân Han, ed. Hüseyin G.
Yurdaydın (Ankara, 1976), pp. 3–25; Sinan Çavuş, Süleymanname: Tarih-i Feth-i Şikloş, Estergon
ve İstol-Belgrad, ed. Tevi k Temelkuran, trans. Fuat Yavuz and Ayhan Özyurt (Istanbul, 1998);
J. Michael Rogers, ‘Itineraries and Town Views in Ottoman Histories’, in The History of
Cartography, vol. 2, pp. 228–55; Kathryn Ann Ebel, ‘City Views, Imperial Visions: Cartography
and the Visual Culture of Urban Space in the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1603’, unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin (2002); Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, ‘Osmanlı
Şehir Tahayyülünün Görsel ve Edebi İzleri: Onaltıncı ve Onyedinci Yüzyıl Menzilname ve
Seyahatnamelerinde Şehir İmgeleri’, in Kültürel Kesişmeler ve Sanat: Günsel Renda Onuruna
Sempozyum Bildirileri / Cultural Crossings and Art: Proceedings of a Symposium in Honour of
Günsel Renda, ed. Serpil Bağcı and Zeynep Yasa Yaman (Ankara, 2010).
505
Figure 13.18. Şehr-i İskenderiyye-i ‘Arab (Alexandria), in Piri Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye. (Topkapı
Palace Library, TSM H. 642, fol. 348v)
ambitious enterprise are exclusively topographic (Figure 13.19). Most notably,

these are images of cities but also of the routes followed by the Ottoman
armed forces during campaigns and the major landmarks they encountered.
The most celebrated of these manuscripts, the Beyan-ı Menazil-i Sefer-i Irakeyn
or Mecmua-i Menazil, narrating Süleyman’s Iraqi campaign of 1535–7, marks
506
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Figure 13.19. View of Genoa, Matrakçı Nasuh, Tarih-i Feth-i Siklos, Estergon, ve İstolbelgrad,
ca. 1545. (Topkapı Palace Library, TSM H. 1608, fols. 32v–33r)
the emergence of a speciically Ottoman mode of topographic representa-

tion. The images respond to ifteenth-century Italian city views, but their
conventions merge with those of a largely Persianate mode of spatial repre-
sentation. Hence the draftsmen render urban boundaries in plan, while indi-
vidual monuments and lesser buildings appear in elevation or bird’s eye view.
The established Persianate convention of utilising multiple points of view in
architectural depictions is thus adapted to the representation of urban space.
As opposed to a cartographer’s limited colour spectrum, Matrakçı’s images
often depict towns surrounded by a paradise-like garden. Images of holy sites
and shrine complexes allude to the conventions of medieval pilgrimage itin-
eraries. Matrakçı’s work was possibly the result of a royal commission; his
exact role in the execution of the paintings is unclear. In all, this body of
images and their more practical counterparts, namely a set of siege plans,
render topographic representation one of the constitutive elements of the
Ottoman pictorial repertory. Topographic imagery in turn formed one of
the strands that fed into historical narrative painting, the dominant genre of
Ottoman pictorial representation through the later 1500s.
507
Once again, the political conjuncture of the 1550s brought issues of dynastic
strife and succession to the fore, and with tragic outcomes. Possibly this situa-
tion induced the Ottoman court to launch a new project, a royal commission
involving the creation of an oicial court historiographer (şehnameci or “shah-
nama writer”). Allotted an oice within the palace grounds, the şehnameci
was to collaborate with a team of scribes and painter-illustrators in the pro-
duction of a work covering imperial history. Arii, a poet of Azeri origin and
thus from the Persian-speaking world, received the commission to write a
multi-volume world history, with an entire volume dedicated to Süleyman’s
reign. In Persian, the Süleymanname was conceptually and formally modelled
after Firdausi’s Shahnama. In previous decades, Ottoman translations of this
epic, whose illustrations subtly highlighted aspects of Istanbul’s courtly cul-
ture, had paved the way for local interpretations of this major literary work.80
Through the later sixteenth century, the oice and the atelier of the şehnameci
would create a series of Ottoman dynastic histories whose illustration played
a major role in shaping Ottoman narrative painting.81
Illustrated and illuminated by a diverse group of artists, including mas-
ters from Timurid-Turkmen or Safavid centres but also the empire’s Balkan
provinces, the Süleymanname followed its Persian model only in part. In this
longest and most lavishly and extensively illustrated manuscript among the
extant volumes of Arii ’s series, representations of courtly conduct and mil-
itary prowess take pride of place, mediating Ottoman assertions of legiti-
mate rule. Its paintings include receptions, battle and siege scenes and the
royal hunt, in addition to images of meetings and entertainment in palatial
interiors. While a number of the paintings follow Persianate visual norms
and iconographic conventions closely, others, notably those illustrating epi-
sodes of particular symbolic signiicance, attest to explorations of novel icon-
ographic formulations and compositional devices. In the double-folio image
representing the accession of Süleyman, an event taking place under the por-
tico of the Topkapı’s third gate but involving the palace’s irst two courtyards
80 Serpil Bağcı, ‘From Translated Text to Translated Image: The Illustrated Şehnāme-i Türkî
Copies’, Muqarnas 17 (2000), 162–76; Serpil Bağcı, ‘An Iranian Epic and an Ottoman Painter:
Nakkaş Osman’s “New” Visual Interpretation of the Shahnamah’, in Frauen, Bilder, und
Gelehrte: Studien zu Gesellschaft und Künsten im Osmanischen Reich. Festschrift Hans Georg Majer,
ed. Sabine Prätor and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul, 2002), pp. 421–50.
81 Christine Woodhead, ‘An Experiment in Oicial Historiography: The Post of Şehnameci
in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1555–1605’, Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunde des Morgenlandes 75 (1983),
157–82. On the Süleymanname and the remaining volumes of Arii ’s historic work, see Esin
Atıl, Süleymanname: The Illustrated History of Süleyman the Magniicent (Washington, D.C.,
1986).
508
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as well, a topographic image founded on multiple juxtapositions of plan and

elevation provides the setting to the narrative representation of this tightly
choreographed event. The depiction of a Balkan village during the recruit-
ment of Christian boys (devşirme) adroitly captures the importance of this
institution in its representation of the levied children, dressed in bright red, in
transition between their former and future lives.
Ottoman painters translated the strictly coded conduct and ceremonial
of the sultan’s court, shaped by notions of the ruler’s divine and absolute
authority, into stasis, compartmentalisation and hierarchically ordered picto-
rial space (Figure 13.20). The iconic igures of the Ottoman ruler, dignitaries
and attendants rarely venture out of the elongated frames that correspond
to their symbolic loci within stringent – and constraining – court protocols.
Only their gestures and gazes suggest links and conirm hierarchies across the
frames. Their frozen rigidity imparts an iconic presence to igures, and par-
ticularly that of the sultan, echoing the godlike image of Süleyman relected
in the solemn ceremonial of the court but also in contemporary letters.
Attentive to sartorial and some architectural detail, and to visual distinctions
across the wide geographic expanse of the narrative, the painter-illustrators’
decorative style remains a deining aspect of most paintings.
Outside the framework of historical painting, which was one of the sites
where oicials and artists fashioned an imperial Ottoman image, portraiture
remained a private afair. The sense of intimacy and spontaneity conveyed in
single- or double-page royal portraits of the aged Süleyman in contemplation
or of Prince Selim in the company of his boon companions are in striking
contrast with the royal imagery in histories and chronicles. These paintings
may be the work of Nigari (Haydar Reis), a courtier who practised his art out-
side the ehl-i hıref organisation and who may have also produced a series of
royal portraits inspired by later ifteenth-century Ottoman experiments in this
genre. The remaining evidence for this latter current, a half-length portrait of
Hayreddin Barbarossa, and printed copies preserved among Paolo Giovio’s
portrait collection, suggest that these images were highly formal, unlike the
portraits by Nigari preserved in Ottoman collections. Initially intended for
European collectors, this set of “oicial” images would ultimately inform
another series of royal portraits, produced by Ottoman painters beginning in
the late 1570s.82
82 Jürg Meyer zur Capellen and Serpil Bağcı, ‘The Age of Magniicence’, in Kangal, The Sultan’s
Portrait, pp. 104–5; Julian Raby, ‘From Europe to Istanbul’, in ibid., pp. 145–50; Bağcı et al.,
Ottoman Painting, pp. 85–91.
509
Figure 13.20. Süleyman I presented with the legendary cup of Jamshid, Arii, Süleymanname.
(Topkapı Palace Library, H 1517, fol. 557r)
Architecture in the age of empire

Architecture during the early years of Süleyman focused on the private world
of palatial constructions, in contrast to the explosion in public works that
would mark the middle and later 1500s. After his accession in 1520, Süleyman
ordered a number of changes to the Topkapı Palace. Several sections were
rebuilt in a more monumental manner and refurbished; polychrome tiles
510
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and Mamluk-style marble revetments dressed a number of buildings in a

more lavish idiom. In the 1530s, the women’s quarters of the palace were
renovated and expanded in preparation for the move of Süleyman’s consort
Hürrem into the Topkapı Palace along with her children. Numerous pavil-
ions replaced the multiple towers which once had marked the enclosure wall
of the private courtyard, underlining an overall departure from the medieval
palatial norms that had informed the Topkapı’s original plan.83 The creation
of suburban palaces and gardens for the Ottoman dynasty and elite along
the Bosphorus, particularly on the Asian side, was a new trend in the capi-
tal, which would continue into later periods. For the most part, these were
informally organised gardens with multiple enclosures. Within them, asym-
metrically grouped kiosks, pavilions and belvedere towers, surrounded by a
variety of trees and lowers, served as settings for banquets and royal recep-
tions and for hunts and private retreats.84
Within the realm of the palace, as in public places, the structures of
Süleyman’s early years stand out through their decorative programmes
rather than through innovations in architectural design. In this ield, as in the
ornamentation of books and other objects, the cultural impact of Ottoman
conquests in the east and south was determinant. Thus Mamluk-style marble
revetments decorated the Çoban Mustafa Paşa complex in Gebze, and the
polychrome tile revetments of Selim I’s mosque and mausoleum were in all
probability the work of the Tabrizi masters who had arrived in Istanbul in
the wake of the Safavid wars; within the same years, these artists also created
the celebrated Sünnet Odası tiles for a Topkapı kiosk. The chief architect,
Acem Alisi, or Alaüddin, was the person mainly responsible for this focus on
colourful surface revetments. However, in his architectural designs he was
more conservative: the works attributed to him closely follow earlier models
with regard to planning, the spatial conigurations of individual structures
and compounds, and building materials and techniques.85
Acem Alisi’s successor was Sinan, whose appointment as chief architect
in the late 1530s coincided with a multivalent transformation in Ottoman
political structures and culture. Bureaucratisation and the creation of further
83 Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power, pp. 184–97 and passim.

84 Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Suburban Landscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul as a Mirror of
Classical Ottoman Garden Culture’, in Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires: Theory
and Design, ed. Attilio Petruccioli (Leiden, 1997), pp. 32–71; Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, ‘Das
Kavak Sarayı – Ein verlorenes Baudenkmal Istanbuls’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 38 (1988), 363–76;
Nurhan Atasoy, A Garden for the Sultan: Gardens and Flowers in the Ottoman Culture (Istanbul,
2002).
85 Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 155, 563–4 (Appendix 4).
511
hierarchical administrative structures accompanied the consolidation of a

corporate elite identity; transformations in imperial ideology and iconogra-
phy paralleled the growing centrality of Sunni orthodoxy in imperial insti-
tutions and discourse.86 Parallel to the tighter organisation of the ehl-i hıref
artisans, Sinan’s tenure as head of court architects in turn brought further
bureaucratisation to the corps, closer connections to and control of build-
ing crafts, and an expansion of the functions of the royal architectural oice
at large. The main provider of architectural services to the sultan and his
expanded household at a time when institutional patronage became increas-
ingly central to elite identity and conduct, the corps of architects and its
chief often had to negotiate the various and at times conl icting demands of
their patrons. Apart from being a site of architectural education, the corps of
architects was now a central oice of public works. Its responsibilities ranged
from the building of waterways and military structures to the supervision
of the expansive building industry and related crafts, but also to municipal
duties such as the upkeep of streets and the enforcement of building codes
regarding the public and private buildings of the city’s inhabitants.87 Practical
considerations apart, codes regulating architecture served to maintain and
render visible societal distinctions and ethno-religious hierarchies. The visual
coniguration of non-Muslim houses of worship was tightly monitored; by
contrast, given the largely shared vernacular idiom of various communities
in the centre and the provinces, oicial eforts to impose visual distinctions
often focused on the location, size and colour of residences.88 The regula-
tions by the corps relected deeply entrenched visual codes of hierarchy and
propriety envisioned by the elite at this time, which sought to order the mate-
rial environment down to the interior arrangement and furnishings of urban
dwellings, as relected in Mustafa Ali’s detailed prescriptions for housing and
86 Fleischer, ‘The Lawgiver as Messiah’; Cornell H. Fleischer, ‘Preliminaries to the Study of the
Ottoman Bureaucracy’, Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1987), 135–41; Necipoğlu, ‘A Kanun for the
State’.
87 Erhan Afyoncu, ‘XVI. Yüzyılda Hassa Mimarlar Ocağı’, in İsmail Aka Armağanı, ed. Nejdet
Bilgi et al. (Izmir, 1999), pp. 207–16; Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 153–76 and passim.
88 Information on vernacular architecture of this period is in large part textual rather than
material. See Stéphane Yerasimos, ‘Dwellings in Sixteenth Century Istanbul’, in The
Illuminated Table, the Prosperous House: Food and Shelter in Ottoman Material Culture, ed. Suraiya
Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (Würzburg, 2003), pp. 274–300; Uğur Tanyeli, ‘Norms
of Domestic Comfort and Luxury in Ottoman Metropolises Sixteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries’, in Faroqhi and Neumann, The Illuminated Table, pp. 301–16; S. Akyazıcı Özkoçak,
‘The Evidence of Vakıf-Registers for Residential Dwelling in Sixteenth-Century Istanbul’,
in Aife Batur’a Armağan (Istanbul, 2005), pp. 253–9; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul,
pp. 196–206.
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ittings proper to a given person’s class and status.89 The corps also appointed
and supervised “city architects” (şehir mimarları), who had similar responsi-
bilities in provincial capitals.
Bureaucratisation was in turn intimately connected to the new architec-
tural ventures of the Ottoman court. An outstanding focus on public build-
ing projects within and outside of the capital responded to the articulation
of new representational agendas on the one hand and on the other to the
rapid increase in urban population, particularly in Istanbul. A new architec-
tural image was formulated to correspond to the new imperial image. It is
not coincidental that Sinan’s architectural masterpieces are congregational
mosques built for Ottoman sultans, members of the dynasty and the politi-
cal elite. These buildings broke away completely from the multi-functional
convent-mosque, an architectural marker of the earlier era of close rapport
between centre and frontiers, and a more inclusive notion of religious practice.
Endowing Istanbul with a stronger Islamic identity and conveying an image
of the Ottoman centre to the provinces, these constructions simultaneously
articulated a hegemonic visual regime predicated upon a stratiied system
of architectural representation.90 Hence Sinan and his co-workers articulated
an iconography of mosques, highly speciic to the period between the 1540s
and the 1570s, which visually distinguished sultanic and dynastic structures
through a set of architectural markers such as multiple minarets, marble-
paved forecourts, half-domes and tympana arches referring to the architec-
ture of the Hagia Sophia. Current socio-political hierarchies determined the
locations where individual members of the elite might build their charities,
whether in the capital city or across the imperial territories at large.91 Never
before the Süleymanic age or anytime afterwards would such strictly deined
codes dictate the forms and limits of architectural patronage with such crys-
talline clarity (Figures 13.21, 13.22, and 13.23).
Urban, suburban and inter-city complexes sponsored by members of the
ruling elite relected changing dispositions and new agendas of Ottoman rule
and the growing funds that patrons were willing to allocate to architectural
self-representation. Süleyman’s Istanbul complex (1548–59), built on a site
89 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, The Ottoman Gentleman of the Sixteenth Century: Mustafa Âli’s
Meva’idü’n-Nefais i kava’idi’l-mecalis: “Tables of Delicacies Concerning the Rules of Social
Gatherings”, ed. and trans. Douglas Brookes (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Andreas Tietze,
‘Mustafa Ali on Luxury and Status Symbols of Ottoman Gentlemen’, in Studia Turcologica
Memoriae Alexii Bombaci Dicata, ed. Aldo Gallotta and Ugo Marazzi (Naples, 1982), pp.
577–90.
90 Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 71–124.
91 Ibid.
513
Figure 13.21a. Süleymaniye mosque and mausoleum, Istanbul, 1550–7, architect Sinan:
aerial view from the south. (Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
carved out of the Old Palace grounds, responded to and surpassed that of
Mehmed II in scale and range of institutions. With the magniied and elabo-
rately designed volumes and facades of its mosque and the expansive com-
position of its dependencies on the Golden Horn slopes, the Süleymaniye
announced its primacy among a host of projects that altered the image of the
Ottoman capital in the later 1500s. Its construction coinciding with Ottoman
re-formulations of Sunni orthodoxy that marked the middle decades of the
1500s, the Süleymaniye announced this new emphasis on religion through its
layout, decoration and epigraphic programme.92
The ruling elite remained major sponsors of urban institutions, continuing
patronage patterns that had been established in the 1460s and 1470s. However,
the institutions that these personages founded changed, congregational
mosques replacing the convent-mosques of earlier periods and medreses gain-
ing precedence over the public kitchens and prominently located bath-houses
earlier patrons had chosen to construct. Among the grand vezirs of these
92 For Süleyman’s mosque complex and the consolidation of Ottoman Sunni orthodoxy in the
mid-sixteenth century, see Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘The Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: An
Interpretation’, Muqarnas 3 (1985), 92–117.
514
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Figure 13.21b. Süleymaniye mosque and mausoleum, Istanbul, 1550–7, architect Sinan:
interior view towards the mihrab. (Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
decades, Rüstem Paşa (1544–53) and Sokollu Mehmed Paşa (1565–79) emerged
as highly visible patrons of charities and infrastructural projects through-
out the imperial territories, particularly along major trade and pilgrimage
routes.93
93 Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 315–31, 345–68.
515
Figure 13.21c. Süleymaniye mosque and mausoleum, Istanbul, 1550–7, architect Sinan:
plan. (Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
The architectural patronage of dynastic women in the capital city was a nov-
elty concurrent with a set of transformations in their political roles. Dynastic
women’s works became part and parcel of the visual hierarchies articulated
in Istanbul through the later sixteenth century.94 Beginning with Hürrem, the
beloved and powerful consort and later wife of Süleyman, women of the
dynastic family assumed increasingly salient roles as patrons of urban insti-
tutions and architecture. Hürrem’s complex (1537–40, hospital added in 1551)
is still situated in a somewhat remote spot, to the north of the Byzantine
94 Leslie Peirce, ‘Gender and Sexual Propriety in Ottoman Royal Women’s Patronage’, in
Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (New
York, 2000), pp. 53–68.
516
Figure 13.22. The mausoleum of Süleyman I: (a) interior, (b) section. (Boğaziçi University
Aptullah Kuran Archive; Ali Saim ülgen, Mimar Sinan Yapıları, detail from Plate 34)
517
Figure 13.23. Haseki Hürrem public bath, 1550s, Istanbul, architect Sinan: (a) aerial view
from the south; (b) plan. (Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
Forum of Arcadius (Ottoman Avratpazarı), on the southern branch of the

Mese. It bespeaks the gendered nature of choices Hürrem made regarding
her foundation and her prospects as a patroness of architecture. The more
prominent buildings were a public kitchen and a hospital alongside a medrese,
in addition to a small, single-domed mosque.95 In the following years, such
relatively marginal siting options would give way to increasingly prominent
buildings sponsored by women. In the 1550s, Hürrem was to commission
518
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Figure 13.24. (a) Rüstem Paşa mosque, Istanbul, ca. 1563, architect Sinan, interior view
towards the south. (Photograph Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive)
a double bath designed by the architect Sinan at the very heart of the city,
across from the Hagia Sophia (Figure 13.23). The daughter of Süleyman and
Hürrem, Mihrimah, was able to place her two projects at major points of
entry into Istanbul, irst in Üsküdar (ca. 1544–8) and then in Edirnekapı (ca.
1563–70); the prominence of these sites once again highlights the growing
visibility of women’s works in the Ottoman capital. Both women undertook
expansive charities on sites of religious signiicance in the empire’s Arab-
speaking provinces, Hürrem in Jerusalem and Mihrimah in Mecca.96 Yet in
construction they undertook jointly with their husbands, royal women were
often overshadowed by their prominent spouses, a case in point being the
foundation of Selim II’s daughter İsmihan Sultan and Sokollu Mehmed Paşa
near the Kadırga port in Istanbul.
Drawing upon standardised formal vocabularies and typologies that char-
acterised the uniform and static architectural designs of the earlier sixteenth
century, Sinan and the atelier he directed focused on a number of formal
problems with brilliant efect. The centrally planned sanctuary covered by a
96 Ibid., pp. 301–2; Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneicence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in
Jerusalem (Albany, N.Y., 2002).
519
Figure 13.24b. (b) İsmihan Sultan and Sokollu Mehmed Paşa mosque, Istanbul, 1571–2,
architect Sinan, interior view towards the south. (Photograph Boğaziçi University Aptullah
Kuran Archive)
system of domes and vaults was a constant theme throughout Sinan’s long
career. Modes of massing and architectonic expression, the spatial articula-
tion and lighting of the domed sanctuary, and the manner of relating build-
ings to urban or suburban environments, on the other hand, changed in the
context of particular projects and in response to the altering tastes, demands
and means of the patrons at issue (Figure 13.24).97
97 Aptullah Kuran, Sinan: The Grand Old Master of Ottoman Architecture (Washington, D.C.,
1987); Sönmez, Mimar Sinan Dönemi Türk Mimarlığı ve Sanatı; Seyi Başkan (ed.), 400. Anma
520
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“In proportion to the abundance or paucity of piers, columns, and but-

tresses, [the architect] should close up the domes and half-domes, and bind
the arches together in an agreeable manner, without carelessness”, wrote
Sinan, when he was deining the diicult art of architecture. Following a
note on the importance of sound foundations, this brief remark nevertheless
highlights the primacy of domed construction and the relationship between
the roof and the support system in his designs.98 Sinan explored means of
transmuting the simple geometries of earlier designs into intricately artic-
ulated volumes of a structurally integrated roof system and load-bearing
masonry structure. The pyramidal masses of his earlier sultanic mosques and
the heavily buttressed, strongly grounded smaller sanctuaries all possessed
an evident sculptural quality. As for the major royal commissions of these
decades, the Şehzade and the Süleymaniye mosques each featured a complex
of domes, half-domes, turrets and weight towers, their pyramidal composi-
tion relected also in rhythmic façade compositions. These designs bespoke
a radical breakaway from the additive nature of earlier domed construction,
where an abrupt transition from the wall system of the prayer hall to the roof
created a linear break between the prismatic mass of the sanctuary and the
domical superstructure. A composite mass of domes and half-domes, and the
load-bearing structure composed of walls and free-standing elements now
encircled a uniied interior where space seemed to be in continuous low.
The primary monument Sinan designed for Selim II, the Selimiye in Edirne
(1568–74), announced a re-formulation of the architectural conigurations of
the chief architect’s earlier sultanic mosques. A new emphasis on the verti-
cality of the singular dome and on façade articulations informed the design
of the mosque, whose structural system based on an octagonal baldaquin
uncompromisingly centralised interior space, and bold volumetric massing
were tightly interlocked. Through the 1570s and 1580s, possibly in response
to the increasingly dense urban fabric of Istanbul, Sinan and the architects of
the corps he directed continued to explore accents on verticality. The singular
dome on a high drum, surrounded now with vaults or smaller domes at a
lower level, created a roof system that was once more clearly separated from
Yılı Mimar Sinan Semineri (Ankara, 1988); Doğan Kuban, Sinan’s Art and Selimiye (Istanbul,
1997); Kuban, Osmanlı Mimarlığı, pp. 249–349; Gülsün Tanyeli and Kani Kuzucular, ‘Osmanlı
Mimarlığında Çift Örtü Sistemi’, in Seven Centuries of Ottoman Architecture: A Supra-National
Heritage, ed. Nur Akın, Aife Batur and Selçuk Batur (Istanbul, 1999), pp. 106–11; Jale Erzen,
Sinan, Ottoman Architect: An Aesthetic Analysis (Ankara, 2004); Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan; İ.
Aydın Yüksel, Osmanlı Mimarisinde Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Devri (926–974) (Istanbul, 2004).
98 Tuhfetu’l Miʻmārīn, fol. 13b, in Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century Texts, ed. Howard
Crane, Esra Akın and Gülru Necipoğlu (Leiden, 2006), p. 66, discussed by Erzen, Sinan,
pp. 54–5, 82.
521
the prismatic mass of the load-bearing structure. Façade designs that became
increasingly planar and increasingly transparent, with uniform tiers of win-
dows, further accentuated the dynamic and vertical visual efect of these later
mosques. The composition of the façade was now divorced from the domed
baldachin inside.99
A continuous, highly creative dialogue with monumental architecture across
time and space accounts for a number of visual constants as well as a set of
speciic references in Sinan’s design and highlights the historical-mindedness
that shaped his work and, at the very end of his career, his autobiographies
as well. A lifelong engagement with the Hagia Soia shapes his major sultanic
monuments in the form of re-interpretations, as in the Süleymaniye, com-
petitive response, as in the Selimiye, or direct quotations, as in the Kılıç Ali
Paşa mosque near the imperial gun foundry. The double-domed mausoleums
of Süleyman I and Selim II refer back to the late antique building tradition,
with spatial conigurations and roof structures that hark back to martyria.
Süleyman’s octagonal, double-domed and porticoed mausoleum refers to the
Dome of the Rock. Selim II’s funerary monument, perhaps in response to
the Hagia Soia, in whose enclosure it stands, invokes late Roman building
traditions not only in its double-shell structure and deep exedrae, expanding
the octagonal space under the dome, but also in its marble-faced walls with
highly pronounced mouldings.100
Creative engagement with the past and allusions to monuments or forms
that responded to the status or demands of Sinan’s patrons informed build-
ings in other ways as well. It has been suggested that the Uljaytu mausoleum
in Sultaniyya near Tabriz resonated in the tower-marked octagonal base of
the Selimiye dome; courtyard fountains of the Şehzade and the Rüstem Paşa
medreses formally alluded to medieval tomb towers of Anatolia. Sinan revis-
ited late ifteenth-century experiments with octagonal enclosures in Haseki
Hürrem’s hospital, built in the 1550s, and again in the Rüstem Paşa medrese of
the 1560s. A paradigmatic monument of the earlier ifteenth century, the Üç
Şerefeli mosque in Edirne, informed the design of several projects. Sinan’s
façade compositions of the 1570s and 1580s were increasingly elaborate and
may have been responses to contemporary Italian experiments, particularly
St. Peter’s in Rome.101
99 Jale N. Erzen, Mimar Sinan Dönemi Cami Cepheleri (Ankara, 1981).

100 Kuran, Sinan, pp. 87–91; Aptullah Kuran, ‘Mimar Sinan’ın Türbeleri’, in Mimarbaşı Koca
Sinan Yaşadığı Çağ ve Eserleri, ed. Sadi Bayram (Istanbul, 1988), pp. 223–38.
101 Kuran, Sinan, pp. 48, 136–48, 249; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Challenging the Past: Sinan and the
Competitive Discourse of Early-Modern Islamic Architecture’, Muqarnas 10 (1993), 169–80;
522
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Decorative programmes and preferences varied according to building

types and the status of the patrons: palatial structures and royal tombs were
intensely decorated, and monumental mosques often bore deliberate, if
subdued, decorative programs, but utilitarian structures were accorded few
embellishments. The royal mausoleums of Süleyman and his immediate fam-
ily featured polychrome marble loors and wall revetments, patterned and
inscribed İznik tiles, densely painted and richly gilded stucco surfaces, carved
wood, polychrome voussoirs, muqarnas capitals and transition zones, and
marble cornices (Figure 13.22). Another ornamental layer of luxury textiles
and objects of material and symbolic value further adorned these buildings.
Without doubt, Sinan’s royal mausoleums were among the most lavishly dec-
orated structures of the period.
By contrast, in Friday mosques, with the notable exception of Rüstem Paşa’s
foundation, decorative features selectively accentuated structural or symbolic
foci (Figure 13.24). Polychrome İznik tiles carrying designs of the new loral
aesthetic on a white background harmonised with the textures and colours
of the sandstone masonry and marble details of the interiors. The epigraphic
programmes of these monuments, comprising Qur’anic verses, hadith and
the eight revered names (Allah, Muhammad, the four caliphs, Hasan and
Husayn), were deliberate textual compositions meant to communicate the
intentions of the patrons. Executed in paint or on tiles, monumental cur-
sive scripts re-interpreted by Ahmed Karahisari (d. 1556) sought to augment
their visibility and legibility with bold contrasts of colour.102 The disparity
between the surface embellishments of mosques and mausoleums suggests
that restraint in decoration, often noted in the literature as a deining aspect
of Sinan’s architecture, was highly contextual. The connection between struc-
ture and surface revetments, on the other hand, did remain a constant through
this period, as observed in one of the earlier buildings designed by Sinan, the
tomb of Şehzade Mehmed (1543–4): the sumptuously designed cuerda secca
tiles follow and frame the structural and fenestration lines, foreshadowing
later uses of tile decoration.103 As the solemn and authoritarian orthodoxy of
the 1550s and 1560s gave way to a livelier religious culture, the earlier visual
Kuban, Sinan’s Art and Selimiye, pp. 135, 202–22. On possible inspiration by contemporary
Italian façade designs, see Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 102–3.
102 Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Quranic Inscriptions on Sinan’s Mosques: A Comparison with Their
Safavid and Mughal Counterparts’, in Word of God, Art of Man: The Qur’an and Its Creative
Expressions, ed. Fahmida Suleman (London, 2007), pp. 69–104; Muhittin Serin, Hat Sanatı,
pp. 107–11.
103 Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, Les grandes lignes de l’évolution du programme décoratif en céramique des
monuments ottomans au cours du XVIeme siècle (Ankara, 1985).
523
Figure 13.25. (a) Köse Hüsrev Paşa mosque and mausoleum, Van, 1567–8, 1587–8, archi-
tect Sinan (photograph Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran Archive); (b) Khan al-Gumruk,
Aleppo, interior facade of courtyard, 1560s or 1570s (photograph by the author)
524
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restraint in monumental religious buildings gave way to a more liberal use of

ornament and colour, as the rich decorative programmes of the Selimiye and
other projects of these decades indicate.104
Construction in the capital focused on central arteries, city gates, and focal
points on the seashore, and also on certain residential neighbourhoods. The
orthogonal planning principles that had shaped many complexes beginning
with Mehmed II’s foundation in Istanbul now gave way to subtler uses of
geometry. Like earlier Ottoman patrons and architects, Sinan and his patrons
were not engaged in integrating public squares or broad arteries into archi-
tectural design through uses of linear perspective. Sinan instead created com-
plex and multivalent architectural compositions whereby the hilly terrain of
Istanbul and its dense urban fabric became integral design components. He
expertly manipulated multiple points of physical and visual access to the con-
structed order of the buildings, not only in the prime monument of the age,
the Süleymaniye, but also in relatively minor works such as the mosque com-
plexes founded by Princess İsmihan and Sokollu Mehmed Paşa in Kadırga
(1567–71) and by Princess Şahsultan and Zal Mahmud Paşa in Eyüp (1577–90).
A similar frenzy of construction spread out over the empire as a whole,
as the sultan, the dynastic family and members of the ruling elite undertook
construction along the routes connecting the capital to major cities and the
frontiers. Patrons also sponsored important foundations in provincial cities
of symbolic, political or economic importance. Away from the capital and
its vicinity, the role of the chief architect was mostly limited to the creation
or approval of designs that would then be realised by lesser members of the
corps or by local architects. In this regard, the architectural and urbanistic
elaboration that marked Istanbul and its environs found diverse relections in
the provinces. Urban or inter-city complexes might be conceived in an expan-
sive manner, often elaborating on orthogonal planning principles in use since
the 1460s. But construction usually remained simplistic in comparison to the
intricate structural and spatial displays in Istanbul.
In the vast and diferentiated cultural geography of the Ottoman domains,
the visual idiom of the imperial centre was iltered through a variety of lenses
(Figure 13.25). Regional idioms were selectively integrated into the imperial
visual order. The level of patronage, the agency of local architects, craftsmen
and intermediaries and the cultural politics of the centre vis-à-vis various social
104 Baha Tanman, ‘Edirne Selimiye Camii’nin Hünkar Mahilindeki Bazı Ayrıntılardan
II. Selim’in ve Mimar Sinan’ın Dünyalarına’, in Arkeoloji ve Sanat Tarihi Araştırmaları:
Yıldız Demiriz’e Armağan, ed. Baha Tanman and Uşun Tükel (Istanbul, 2001), pp. 239–45;
Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 247–52.
525
groups and provinces all played a part in determining which architectural and
decorative elements of local origin might enter buildings commissioned by
members of the ruling elite. In the empire’s eastern provinces, where found-
ers of urban institutions had to reckon with extant networks of clients, the
Ottoman visual order readily absorbed the earlier Islamic heritage. Balkan
projects often showed fewer references to local traditions and greater adher-
ence to the basic features of established building types.105
Buildings sponsored by the Ottoman elite might, however, have an impact
on non-Muslim religious architecture in the provinces; thus the use of a hex-
agonal baldachin in the Greek Orthodox church of Daou Pendili near Athens
points to the appeal of a typical Istanbul mosque layout for a non-Muslim
community. Since throughout this period the imperial architectural oice
employed considerable numbers of non-Muslim architects, the agent of this
design may well have been a court-trained master.106 At the same time, such a
use is indicative of the looser architectonic codes and practices of signiication
in at least certain provinces, for no Orthodox patron could have undertaken
such a project in Istanbul. In cities, the regulations of the centre dictated the
small sizes and unambitious architectural layouts of non-Muslim houses of
worship where domes, if constructed, were concealed under pitched roofs.
Monastic establishments of the Greek Orthodox community, on the other
hand, did sponsor larger-scale domed churches through this period. In the
Balkan provinces, monasteries of Mount Athos remained a source for designs
that often followed medieval Byzantine prototypes, while contemporary
Ottoman design and ornamentation on the one hand and itinerant work-
shops on the other did have an impact on several projects of this period.107
Particularly where public structures were concerned, in the later 1500s the
sheer speed and volume of work necessitated a full-ledged organisation of
105 Machiel Kiel, ‘Some Relections on the Origins of Provincial Tendencies in the Ottoman
Architecture of the Balkans’, in Machiel Kiel, Studies in the Ottoman Architecture of the Balkans
(Aldershot, 1990); Machiel Kiel, Ottoman Architecture in Albania, 1385–1912 (Istanbul, 1990);
Irene Bierman, Rifa’at Abou-el-Haj and Donald Preziosi (eds.), The Ottoman City and Its Parts:
Urban Structure and Social Order (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1991); Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh,
The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th
and 17th Centuries (Leiden and Boston, 2004); Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Egypt’s Adjustment to
Ottoman Rule: Institutions, Waqf, and Architecture in Cairo, 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden, 1994);
Julian Raby, ‘Diyarbakır: A Rival to Iznik’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 27–8 (1977–8), 429–59.
106 Robert Ousterhout, ‘Ethnic Identity and Cultural Appropriation in Early Ottoman
Architecture’, Muqarnas 12 (1995), 48–62 at p. 50.
107 Slobodan Ćurčić, ‘Byzantine Legacy in Ecclesiastical Architecture of the Balkans after 1453’,
in The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe, ed. Lowell Clucas (Boulder, Colo., and New York,
1988), pp. 57–83; Slobodan Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans from Diocletian to Süleyman the
Magniicent (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2010), pp. 787–97.
526
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design and construction, procurement of labour and building materials and a

degree of modularisation through standard sizes for frequently needed con-
struction elements. Building materials from diferent sources also needed to be
of more or less uniform quality, and it was the job of the sultan’s bureaucrats
to ensure that artisans complied. Account books documenting royal construc-
tions and related sources relect the complex choreography of orders, objects
and peoples dispersed in distant parts of the empire but converging on a par-
ticular construction site, often in Istanbul. Orders to İznik or Uşak describe
the sizes, colours and motifs of custom-made tiles or carpets that were to
decorate and furnish new buildings. Account books detailing expenses for
materials and workforce, wherever they exist, render tangible this feverish
activity centred on a given building. Workmen collected and transported spo-
lia from antique sites, quarried stone and felled timber, while kadıs and other
oicials searched for masters as well as skilled and unskilled labourers; often
craftsmen came to the building site as deportees. This highly bureaucratised
and centralised system often, but not always, worked smoothly. Conl icts did
occur even between the sultan and his chief architect, as Sinan vividly remem-
bered in his memoirs.108 In other cases, the various urban ateliers preferred to
satisfy market demands and neglected those of the court, for as so often hap-
pened all over Eurasia the administration was a poor paymaster.109
The vague and interchangeable Ottoman vocabulary for design and the
paucity of extant source material allow but partial conclusions concerning the
methods of design and construction. At times, Ottoman oicials attempted
to clarify the malleable term resm by using the elaboration resm-i mücessem
(model); karname could indicate a plan, an elevation or a model. Extant draw-
ings and written documents suggest that builders used gridded ground plans,
which deployed a range of Persianate and Italianate representational conven-
tions of draughtsmanship, and less frequently also elevations and models.
The highly uniform architectural style and typology and standardised build-
ing materials minimised pre-construction design work, particularly in less
ambitious projects.
Through standard measurements, proportional systems and modules,
architects could determine a building’s primary features.110 Masters used
108 Crane, Akın and Necipoğlu, Sinan’s Autobiographies, p. 125.

109 Ömer Luti Barkan, Süleymaniye Cami ve İmareti İnşaatı (1550–1557), 2 vols. (Ankara, 1972 and
1979); Stéphane Yerasimos, Istanbul: la Mosquée de Soliman (Paris, 1997); Necipoğlu, The Age
of Sinan, pp. 176–86 and passim; J. Michael Rogers, Sinan (London, 2006).
110 Aptullah Kuran, ‘Mimar Sinan Yapısı Karapınar II. Selim Camisinin Proporsiyon Sistemi
Üzerine Bir Deneme’, in VII. Türk Tarih Kongresi: Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler (Ankara, 1973),
527
paper or cloth models and stencilled drawings for laying out decorative and
epigraphic programmes; they might also prepare individualised designs, as
well as templates for regularly repeated units. Elaborate architectural models
often served for presentations and ceremonial purposes only.111
Detailed orders and reports on inalised projects survive which may or may
not have been accompanied by drawings. These documents hint at the role
of verbal description in design and planning, for which a highly articulate
vocabulary was available. Residues of a largely oral culture of craftsman-
ship and master–apprentice relations in addition to the highly circumscribed
mode of education within the corps of architects may have led to the contin-
ued relevance of verbal description alongside a range of visual devices. Cafer
Efendi’s expansive tri-lingual dictionary of architectural and related terminol-
ogy appended to his Risale-i Mimariyye, too, indicates the wealth of verbal
representation and its importance in design and construction processes.112
Representing new conigurations of power, ca. 1570–1600

Rapidly changing power dynamics at the sultan’s court through the inal
decades of the sixteenth century impacted Ottoman visual culture in mul-
tiple ways. Profound transformations in the workings of the administrative
apparatus and economy resulted in political turbulence, internecine strug-
gles, massive uprisings and on the whole considerable tension during these
decades when patronage patterns were radically altered. Increasingly, the
more sedentary lifestyle of the monarch allowed members of the inner pal-
ace organisation, including women, court oicials and servants, to take on
more central roles in political decision-making on the one hand and artistic
patronage on the other.
Shifts in the structure of Ottoman rule, together with inancial troubles,
began to have a visible efect on court culture, transforming modes of elite
self-fashioning and representation. These decades saw an expansion in read-
ing and book culture in the urban milieus of the Ottoman realm which
translated into courtly art and visual culture as a remarkable increase in the
vol. 2, pp. 711–6; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Plans and Models in 15th and 16th-Century Ottoman
Architectural Practice’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 45(1985), 224–43.
111 On the use of templates for decoration, see Levenson, Circa 1492, p. 198; Rogers, Sinan, pp.
90–1; Walter B. Denny, ‘Turkish Ceramics and Turkish Painting: The Role of the Paper
Cartoon in Turkish Ceramic Production’, in Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of
Katharina Otto-Dorn, ed. Abbas Daneshvari (Malibu, Calif., 1981), pp. 29–36.
112 For terminology and descriptions, see Cafer Efendi, Risāle-i Miʻmāriyye: An Early Seventeenth
Century Ottoman Treatise on Architecture, ed. and trans. Howard Crane (Leiden, 1987), pp.
76–103; Dündar, ‘Bir Belgeye Göre Amasya II. Bayezid Külliyesi’.
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production of illustrated and illuminated manuscripts. The range of subjects

that appealed to Ottoman elite consumers of illustrated works expanded as
patrons assembled larger and increasingly more prestigious book collections.
During these decades, a wave of bibliophilia at the sultan’s court was concur-
rent with a concern for historiography: visual representations of the recent or
ancient past dominated the iconographic programmes of illustrated manu-
scripts across a range of diverse genres.
On the other hand, by the late 1500s, architectural investments visibly
shrank, not only in number but also in the scale of buildings sponsored, as
patrons adjusted their aspirations to their diminishing means. It is perhaps
emblematic that Mehmed III’s royal mother Saiye was unable to complete
the great mosque complex that she undertook at just that time. Financial
reasons were partly responsible for the – provisional – termination of the pro-
ject, alongside the factional politics at the court that facilitated but at the same
time circumscribed a queen mother’s architectural patronage.
Architecture: The canon reconsidered

The inal decades of the sixteenth century saw a series of parallel changes in the
architectural ield. Novel formal choices and representational agendas emerged
as patronage mechanisms changed and construction industries and the empire-
wide organisation of architectural activity entered a period of critical transfor-
mation. Alterations in the power dynamics of the Ottoman court brought a
new set of patrons, queen mothers, vezirs of the Imperial Council and eunuchs
of the court to the fore of an increasingly diminished architectural activity in
the capital. Even so, the complex founded by Murad III’s mother, Nurbanu, at
the edge of Üsküdar (1571–85) was second only to Süleyman’s and Mehmed II’s
foundations in the city proper. It bespoke the growing power, wealth and inlu-
ence of the queen mother within the rapidly changing dynamics of the court.
Nurbanu’s foundation combined the characteristics of urban and roadside
complexes, with its accommodations and charities including a large caravan-
serai and hospice compound, a school, a dervish lodge and a mosque bearing
the royal sign of twin minarets. A double bath on the Divan artery displayed
Nurbanu’s patronage in the walled city. In the closing years of the century,
Saiye Sultan’s uninished project for a great congregational mosque complex
at Istanbul’s Eminönü waterfront bespoke the – highly contested – reversal of
patronage prerogatives, now claimed by another powerful queen mother.113
113 Kuran, Mimar Sinan, pp. 163–81; Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 280–92; Lucienne Thys
Şenocak, Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan
529
Sinan’s inal works in the capital, built for members of the imperial coun-
cil and two court eunuchs, further relected the reversal of status hierarchies
formulated in the mid-1500s.114 During Sinan’s last years as chief architect and
the decade following his demise, sultans were no longer the major builders
in Istanbul, the institutional priorities of patrons changed, and new formal
trends emerged. Architects responded to the increasingly dense urban fabric
of the capital city when designing public buildings. The vertical masses of
mosques were articulated by façade compositions of multiple tiers of win-
dows, stringcourse mouldings and cornices. The mosque of Nişancı Mehmed
Paşa, attributed to Sinan’s successor Davud Ağa, re-interpreted the octagonal
baldachin system of Sinan’s Selimiye mosque, creating a highly sculpted sys-
tem of supports and screen walls surrounding the space under the central
dome. Vezirs’ and eunuchs’ mosques of the following decades featured varia-
tions of the polygonal domed baldachin, while the Şehzade mosque was to
provide the model for all such sultanic foundations – including the queen
mother’s mosque at the Eminönü waterfront – into the middle decades of
the eighteenth century.115
Lack of available land and the diminished resources of the founders in
an age of recurrent inancial crises explain the smaller sizes and contracted
functional ranges of foundations established by the Ottoman ruling elite in
Istanbul. Its institutional coniguration, reminiscent of the Mamluk founda-
tions of medieval Cairo, a small complex housing a medrese, the mausoleum
of the founder, and a public water dispenser (sebil), became the major form
of foundation patronage. The complex of the grand vezir Sinan Paşa on
the city’s ceremonial axis and that of the chief white eunuch Gazanfer Ağa
abutting the Valens aqueduct represent this trend (Figure 13.26). Sinan Paşa’s
tenure as the governor of Egypt, during which he sponsored an Ottoman-
style congregational mosque in Cairo, may point to the mediation of elite
patrons not only in transposing the imperial style to the provinces but also
in introducing provincial architectural and urban practices to the capital
city.116 Sometimes the classroom of the medrese also served as a mescit; less
frequently, these relatively small complexes also possessed a dervish convent.
(Burlington, Vt., 2006); Nina Cichocki (Ergin), ‘The Life Story of the Çemberlitaş
Hamam: From Bath to Tourist Attraction,’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Minnesota, 2005.
115 Erzen, Mimar Sinan Dönemi Cami Cepheleri; Kuban, Osmanlı Mimarisi, pp. 381–90.
116 Zeynep [Ahunbay] Nayır, Osmanlı Mimarlığında Sultan Ahmet Külliyesi ve Sonrası (Istanbul,
1975), pp. 170–94; Zeynep Ahunbay, ‘Cairene sabil-küttab and Its Reinterpretation in
Ottoman Architecture’, in Déroche, Art turc/Turkish Art, pp. 47–52.
530
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Figure 13.26. Sinan Paşa medrese, mausoleum and sebil complex, Istanbul, 1593, architect
Davud Ağa: (a) view from the west, (b) plan. (Gülru Necipoğlu, Age of Sinan, p. 509)
531
A new, more interactive relationship to the urban context shaped these foun-
dations. While the circular forms of their ornate sebils jutted out into the
street, their window-pierced enclosure walls, often running along a major
artery, prominently displayed the mausoleum and the medrese within. Minor
complexes that engaged the street in their design gave the Divan artery its
contiguous architectural form.117
Novel dynamics of rule also changed the uses of the Topkapı Palace. An
extensive rebuilding of the palace’s harem section in the 1570s and 1580s most
clearly relected the new style of rule of the increasingly sedentary sultan.
Here the queen mother Nurbanu and her son inhabited newly built and fur-
nished quarters. Turning the former privy chamber into a space for exhibiting
holy relics, Murad III moved the royal residence permanently into the harem.
This section of the palace acquired a new spatial organisation, with assem-
blages of rooms organised around several courtyards and opening into hang-
ing gardens. Its complex, hierarchically ordered layout embodied the intricate
hierarchies of the court, including the harem, where the queen mother, the
sultan’s consorts and the eunuchs wielded growing power and inl uence.118
Past looking: Picturing the golden age, negotiating the present

The inal decades of the sixteenth century are marked by an unprecedented
interest in the production of luxury manuscripts on the part of the ruling
elite; this trend was part of an increasingly vivacious Ottoman book culture.
Presumably the love of Murad III for beautiful books helped to set the fashion
for manuscript collecting among his courtiers. In fact, the bibliophile sultan
ruled at a time when transformations in the structure of Ottoman rule com-
pelled members of the ruling elite to articulate or to re-deine their collective
and individual self-image vis-à-vis the broader coniguration of power and to
insert themselves ever more boldly into the rapidly changing political land-
scape. While the most prestigious books were still destined for the sultan’s
private treasury, patronage and ownership of lavishly produced manuscripts
became a prestigious sign of membership in the elite. Manuscript patronage
and collecting was one channel through which an increasingly wider circle
of patrons and intermediaries could negotiate new modes of representation
within a rapidly changing world.119
117 Maurice Cerasi, ‘The Urban and Architectural Evolution of the Istanbul Divanyolu: Urban
Aesthetics and Ideology in Ottoman Town Planning’, Muqarnas 22 (2005), 189–232.
118 Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power, pp. 159–83.
119 On late sixteenth-century transformations and historiography, see Cornell H. Fleischer,
Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafâ Âli (1541–1600)
532
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Multi- or single-volume histories and genealogies of the house of Osman,

accounts of recent and contemporary events and world histories integrating
Ottomans into a venerable ancient and Islamic past were produced in illus-
trated copies. Sokollu, the seasoned grand vezir of Süleyman’s later years,
who remained in power through Murad III’s early sultanate, had a central
role in the initiation of the late sixteenth-century historiographic project.
Other prominent actors in this frenzied production were Feridun Ahmed Bey,
the head of the palace chancery; Seyyid Lokman, appointed to the post of
şehnameci in 1569 and active through the early 1590s; and Nakkaş Osman, a
master painter at the sultan’s court by 1566 and the leading igure in palace-
sponsored projects through the 1590s.120
Histories in the şehname format followed the track opened by the
Süleymanname. Among them was a volume covering the last years of Süleyman’s
reign (Zafername, 1579), a Şehname-i Selim Han (1581) and a Şehinşahname (1581)
on the reign of Murad III up to 1580. In 1579, court artists completed a serial
portrait album of Ottoman sultans, named Kıyafetü’l İnsaniye i Şemailü’l
Osmaniye (“The Human Physiognomy in the Likenesses of the Ottomans”),
which included verbal descriptions of the features, demeanour and endeav-
ours of each individual ruler.
A world history in Turkish, begun during the reign of Süleyman, was com-
pleted in 1583. Focusing on the lives of the prophets, with its inal section
devoted to the Ottoman dynasty, the large-sized and luxurious Zübdetü’t-
Tevarih (“The Cream of Histories”) straddles the genres of historical narrative
and genealogy. Its paintings include scenes from the lives of the prophets and
portraits of caliphs, imams and the Ottoman sultans. Portraits in the Zübdetü’t-
Tevarih partake of the genre of serial portraiture elaborated by the contem-
porary atelier of Nakkaş Osman. On the other hand, the narrative images
present novel interpretations of established norms of Persianate religious and
literary iconography, at times transposing the norms of Ottoman historical
painting into the realms of myth and ancient history. The initial volume of
another dynastic history in Turkish, the Hünername (“The Book of Arts and
Skills”), conceived in four volumes, was completed in 1584. Continuing, like
(Princeton, N.J., 1986); Cemal Kafadar, ‘The Myth of the Golden Age: Post-Suleymanic
Transformations in Ottoman Historical Consciousness’, in Süleyman the Second and His Time,
ed. Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul, 1993), pp. 37–48. On Ottoman manuscript
production in the context of this transformation, see Necipoğlu, ‘The Serial Portraits’, pp.
31–44; Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’. On book ownership, see Lale Uluç, Turkman Governors,
Shiraz Artisans and Ottoman Collectors: Sixteenth Century Shiraz Manuscripts (Istanbul, 2007),
pp. 469–505.
120 Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 113–20, Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’, pp. 83–139.
533
the Zübdetü’t-Tevarih, a project initiated and abandoned during the reign of

Süleyman I, it presented historical biographies of Ottoman sultans from the
founder Osman through Selim I. Completed four years later, the second vol-
ume focused on Süleyman.121
In terms of their thematic range, illustrations belonging to the histories
composed in the 1570s and early 1580s were in part closely related to earlier
Ottoman historical painting: campaign and siege scenes, enthronements
and receptions, and images of the royal hunt predominated. Artists adapted
Shahnama imagery not only to Ottoman settings but also to Ottoman ide-
als, and, as in the Süleymanname, they explored new visual formulations for
signiicant loci and events.122 Numerous images interpreted narrations of
the death and funeral of Süleyman and his succession by Selim II, visually
underlining the role of Sokollu Mehmed Paşa both as a principal actor of the
period and as a patron and intermediary in the production of these illustrated
chronicles.123 Painters also celebrated Selim II’s restoration of the Hagia Soia
with an image of the building that conlated not only elevation and perspec-
tive renderings but also ideal and actual representations of the building’s fab-
ric. City images drew upon models used by Piri Reis or the circle of Matrakçı,
or at times translated prints into the medium of book painting. Siege and
battle scenes often incorporated such topographic representations, such as
the many depictions of the conquest of Szigetvar (1566) or the siege of Malta
(1565) in the Şehname-i Selim Han.
While thematically following earlier Ottoman tradition, these illustrations
mediated transformations of the representational idiom. Relatively more
open compositions of interior scenes supplanted the rigid frames and frozen
formality of the Süleymanname. Such images relected the calculated calm of
tightly choreographed events at court, where the size of a igure, its rela-
tionship to others and its spatial location still conveyed status and power. An
expansive perspective that allowed compelling portrayals of massive military
operations or the restrained grandeur of crowded court ceremonials replaced
121 Bekir Kütükoğlu, ‘Şehnameci Lokman’, in Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu’na Armağan (Istanbul,
1991), pp. 39–48; Serpil Bağcı, ‘Visualizing Power: Portrayals of the Sultans in Illustrated
Histories of the Ottoman Dynasty’, Islamic Art: Studies on the Art and Culture of the Muslim
World 6 (2009), 113–27; Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 113–57; Günsel Renda, ‘New Light
on the Painters of the Zubdet al-Tawarikh in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in
Istanbul’, in IVème Congrès International d’Art Turc, Aix-en-Provence, 10–15 septembre 1971 (Aix-
en-Provence, 1976), pp. 183–200; Günsel Renda, ‘Chester Beatty Kitaplığındaki Zübdetü’t-
tevarih ve Minyatürleri’, in Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu’na Armağan, pp. 458–506; Necipoğlu,
‘The Serial Portraits’, pp. 42–4; Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’, pp. 235–9.
122 Bağcı, ‘Visualizing Power’.
123 Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’, pp. 88–9.
534
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Figure 13.27. Mehmed III returns from the Eger campaign, Ta’likizade, Egri Fetihnamesi,
1596–1600. (Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, Istanbul, T.1965, fols. 68v–69r)
the narrower frames of earlier images. Within highly detailed plan-views of

the Topkapı Palace and its outer gardens, artists set scenes depicting the busy
daily life in the irst two courtyards and the private realm of the third court.
Figures were now smaller in relation to the architectural or natural settings
in which they moved. Tight groupings, multiple axes, a subdued palette of
background colours and a limited use of surface ornament in architecture
and landscapes created images of greater complexity while at the same time
augmenting their legibility. Double-page paintings depicted battleields, pala-
tial courtyards or interiors, or urban plazas or streets, the breadth and com-
prehensiveness of their spaces often emphasised by the horizontal stacking
of planes (Figure 13.27). Such arrangements appeared through the 1580s and
remained a distinguishing feature, particularly of the imperial histories.124
Courtly patrons collaborated with the şehnameci Lokman and the team
of book artists under the direction of Nakkaş Osman in the creation of yet
another novel format, namely the royal portrait album. Tightly connected to
124 Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 112–53.
535
the historical deliberation of these decades in its genealogical focus and pro-
duced within the same years as the Zübdetüt’t-Tevarih, the Kıyafetü’l İnsaniye i
Şemailü’l Osmaniye (1579) derives from multiple Timurid, Ottoman and Italian
sources to create an iconography of royal portraiture. The surviving docu-
mentation concerning this imagery reveals the intricate interconnectedness
of a diverse range of cultural spheres, and particularly the complex webs of
reciprocity between Ottoman collectors and painters on the one hand and
their Italian counterparts on the other. Distinct but related formulations
of the Ottoman royal image emerged in Istanbul manuscript illustrations,
Venetian oil paintings and Basel prints, to name only the primary centres and
media of production.125
Further additions to the historiographic corpus introduced thematic
and visual novelties to courtly painting. Contemporary and recent history
remained the focus of elite patrons, as the writing and illustration of dynastic
history became one of the sites where new power dynamics were negoti-
ated, and artists and patrons conveyed the image of an increasingly sedentary
sultan.126 One of the most lavish productions of the palace ateliers of these
decades, the Surname-i Humayun, is a narrative of the festival celebrating the
circumcision of the crown prince Mehmed in 1582.127 This volume contains
several hundred double-page paintings, the vast majority of which represent
various performances and processions at the Istanbul Hippodrome. Artisan
communities, alongside other – largely urban – professional groups, passed
before the sultan and his entourage of grandees and prestigious guests, dis-
playing their products or enacting aspects of their profession. While music,
dance and theatrical performances had been common to such festivals earlier
in the 1500s, the artisan processions and their representation were novelties,
underlining the new prominence of craft organisations within the social land-
scape. Against the unchanging backdrop of the iconic sultan and his gran-
dees, the successive images of the Surname captured an immensely colourful
show. Taken together, the paintings and the text added up to an imperial self-
portrait of a diferent kind, an ideal construction of the Ottoman social order
as choreographed by the palace, at the ceremonial centre of the capital city.
125 Lokman Çelebi, Kıyâfetüʼl- İnsâniyye fî Şemâiliʼl-ʻOsmâniyye (Istanbul, 1987); Raby, ‘From
Europe to Istanbul’; Filiz Çağman, ‘Portrait Series of Nakkaş Osman’, in Kangal, The
Sultan’s Portrait, pp. 164–87.
126 See Woodhead, ‘An Experiment in Oicial Historiography’, and Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to
Eunuchs’, for diferent interpretations.
127 Nurhan Atasoy, 1582 Surname-i Hümayun: An Imperial Celebration (Istanbul, 1997); Derin
Terzioğlu, ‘The Imperial Circumcision Festival of 1582: An Interpretation’, Muqarnas 12
(1995), 84–100.
536
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Creating visual and textual portraits of Süleyman as the ideal ruler and of
the empire as a sphere of just rule, the second volume of Lokman’s Hünername
(1589) resonated with the mood for historical relection characteristic of the
late sixteenth century. This volume focused on the bravery and power of the
sultan as relected in his skills as a hunter, his military prowess and conquests,
his justice, and his benevolence relected in charitable works; signiicantly,
the latter were situated in the eastern territories, whose institutional and
visual Ottomanisation had been a concern during Süleyman’s reign. In con-
sequence, the book, and the series to which it belonged, has been interpreted
as an Ottoman version of the mirrors-for-princes, where narrative paintings
visualised the abstract qualities attributed to the sultan and to Ottoman impe-
rial ideology at large.128
When preparing the text (1592) and illustrations of the Şehinşahname (before
1597–8) authors and artists adjusted to the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of
the sultan. While military scenes largely repeated the formal conventions
devised in the 1580s, it was now not the monarch who appeared as the com-
mander of his armies but rather one of his vezirs or governors.129 The court
historiographer Talikizade created the last şehnames of the sixteenth century;
their paintings have been attributed to a courtier who would rise to high
administrative posts, namely Nakkaş Hasan or Hasan Paşa.130 Unlike Haydar
Reis, another courtier-painter who worked independently of the palace work-
shops, Hasan followed, and in part transformed, the conventions of courtly
painting that had taken shape, particularly during Nakkaş Osman’s tenure as
master of the ateliers. His topographic representation of the princely capital
of Manisa, and his image of Mehmed III’s urban procession in celebration of
the victorious Eger campaign, develop representational conventions formu-
lated by the painters that had illustrated the work of Matrakçı in the 1530s and
by Nakkaş Osman in the 1580s.
At the same time as patrons and painters transformed the thematic range
of the şehname series, they also created a new sub-genre of illustrated his-
tory, the gazaname, narrating in text and image mostly the military exploits of
vezir-commanders. Mustafa Ali’s Nusretname (1581, presentation copy 1584), a
narrative of the Persian campaign under the command of the author’s patron
Lala Mustafa Paşa, featured images of military confrontations, receptions
and fortress restorations. Scenes from the commander’s eastward journey
128 Bağcı, ‘Visualizing Power’.

129 Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’, pp. 210–30.
130 Zeren Akalay, ‘XVI. Yüzyıl Nakkaşlarından Hasan Paşa’, in I. Milletlerarası Türkoloji Kongresi
İstanbul, 15–20 X. 1973: Tebliğler (Istanbul, 1979), vol. 3, pp. 607–26.
537
included a sumptuous banquet near İznik and a meeting with the sheikh of
the Mevlevi dervishes at Konya.131 Lacking the spatial expansiveness and the
visual economy that marked paintings in the Lokman volumes created under
the direction of Nakkaş Osman, the Nusretname nevertheless shared the late
sixteenth-century pictorial idiom of the sultan’s court. In the process, artists
and patrons created a new image of the commander, deliberately conlated
with royal iconography to imbue the vezir’s public persona with attributes of
sultanic power. While the pictorial idioms of the several illustrated gazana-
mes created in the 1580s and 1590s varied considerably, they all translated the
Ottoman şehname imagery into the accounts of vezirs and their exploits.
In the changing political coniguration, eunuchs of the court gained a hith-
erto unprecedented visibility. Vested with increasing authority and power pri-
marily through their roles as intermediaries for sultans and dynastic women,
eunuchs participated as patrons and intermediaries in artistic ventures. The
chief black eunuch Mehmed Ağa was involved in ambitious projects of the
court workshops, such as the Surname and the Zübdetü’t-Tevarih, and was
the main intermediary for the production of an illustrated gazaname, the
Gencine-i Feth-i Gence. Gazanfer Aga, chief white eunuch of the inner palace
and an important igure in Ottoman cultural patronage at the turn of the sev-
enteenth century, was likewise an intermediary in the production of Mustafa
Ali’s Nusretname. He was also involved in one of the inal Ottoman şehnames,
the Egri Fethi Şehnamesi, which as already noted narrated Mehmed III’s con-
quest of the Hungarian fort of Eger, in an attempt to revive the image of the
warrior sultan of earlier decades. At the same time, Gazanfer contributed to
the new expansion of book culture at the court, sponsoring illustrated copies
of literary and esoteric works such as the translations of Cami’s Baharistan
and al-Bistami’s Miftah al-jafr al-jami. Zeyrek Ağa, another highly inl uential
courtier, a eunuch of the harem who also served as ağa of the inner treasury,
proudly announced his patronage on the gold-stamped and jewel-encrusted
binding of one of the most sumptuous manuscripts of the period, the Divan
of Murad III, a frame of ultimate aesthetic and material value for the sultan’s
poetry.132
Unlike the histories and conquest narratives of earlier decades, which only
existed in single copies destined for the imperial treasury, after the 1580s palace
131 Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 167–71; Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’, pp. 144–62.
132 On the Divan of Murad III, dated 1588, see Roxburgh, Turks, p. 458; Zeren Tanındı,
‘Bibliophile Aghas (Eunuchs) at Topkapı Saray’, Muqarnas 21 (2004), 333–43; Fetvacı, ‘Viziers
to Eunuchs’, pp. 202f. On Zeyrek as ağa of the inner treasury, see Çağman, ‘Mimar Sinan
Döneminde’, p. 74.
538
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workshops at times made multiple copies of particular works, underlining

the growing range, number and visibility of patrons and intermediaries.
Sharing a focus on Ottoman genealogy, the Zübdetü’t-Tevarih and Şemailname
became the property of individuals occupying the highest echelons of the
Ottoman hierarchy; books of literary and esoteric subject matter, too, survive
in multiple copies. Dynastic women also came to act as patrons of illustrated
manuscripts: in 1582, Murad III’s two daughters, Ayşe and Fatma Sultan, each
received an illustrated copy of Suudi’s book on astrology and divination,
translated into Turkish as Matali’us-Sa’ade.
Illustrated works of religious, literary, mystical and esoteric content
attracted courtly attention, particularly from the 1580s onwards. Zübdetü’t-
Tevarih’s world historical framework already had included a life of the
Prophet; an illustrated version of the six-volume Siyer-i Nebi on the same
topic, designed to hold 814 paintings, was completed in 1595.133 It is worth not-
ing that in the contemporary Safavid world there was an obvious interest in
illustrated narratives of Muhammad’s life as well; probably in both realms
religious history was appropriated for current political agendas. The most
extensive iconographic programme narrating the life of the Prophet in the
entire Islamic world, the Siyer-i Nebi, drew on diverse sources to create a
novel religious imagery.134 Visualising Mustafa Darir’s late fourteenth-century
Turkish text, artists placed considerable emphasis on the miracles of the
prophet Muhammad and the actions of his son-in-law Ali. Flaming haloes and
veiled faces underlined the sanctity of the Prophet and his immediate family.
With Safavid paintings depicting scenes from Muhammad’s life, these images
thus shared a degree of iconophobia; however, while in Iranian images Ali
also appeared with a veil, Ottoman artists and patrons did not allow him this
emblem of holiness. Taken together, these images provide a glimpse into new
formulations in pictorial representation across the Shi‘ite–Sunni divide.
Religious and esoteric works and the literature on wonders (acaib) favoured
in courtly circles underlined the increasing preference for Turkish, whether
they were original works or translations from Persian and Arabic. One such
translation was Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami’s Miftah al-jafr al-jami (“The Key
to Comprehensive Prognostication”), a compendium of apocalyptic and pro-
phetic texts in wide circulation in Ottoman courtly circles already in the 1520s
133 Zeren Tanındı, Siyer-i Nebi: İslam Sanatında Hz. Muhammed’in Hayatı (Istanbul, 1984); Rachel
Milstein, Karin Rührdanz and Barbara Schmitz, Stories of the Prophets: Illustrated Manuscripts
of Qisas al-Anbiyā’ (Costa Mesa, Calif., 1999).
134 Karin Rührdanz, ‘The Illustrated Manuscripts of the Athar al-Muzafar: A History of the
Prophet’, in Hillenbrand, Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars, pp. 201–16.
539
and 1530s, resonant with the messianic image that Süleyman cultivated in the
earlier part of his reign. Following perhaps a surge of millennial expectation at
the approaching end of the tenth Muslim century, courtly patrons and artists
turned once more to al-Bistami’s text, of which they commissioned a number
of illustrated copies at the very end of the 1500s.135 Signs of the approaching end
of time, wondrous creatures encountering ordinary human beings, the siege
and conquest of Cairo, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Constantinople, and battles
between the Mahdi and inidels constituted the overarching pictorial themes
of Tercüme-i miftah-ı cifrü’l-cami. Their representations often conlated aspects
of Ottoman history with apocalyptic signs and the image of the Mahdi with
that of Ottoman rulers. A double portrait of Süleyman with his grand vezir
and conidante İbrahim Paşa, with a textual reference to the latter’s demonic
character, resonated with the early years of Süleyman’s reign.136
A related genre receiving considerable attention at the turn of the century
was the cosmographic and geographic acaib. The well-liked “wonders” litera-
ture of the medieval Islamic world, particularly Qazwini’s Adja’ib al-makhluqat
wa ghara’ib al- mawdjudat (“Wonders of Creation and Marvels of Existence”),
originally in Arabic, now appeared in Persian and Turkish versions. In the
1550s, court painters had begun but not completed an illustrated copy; in the
inal decade of the century, their successors inished the project, adapting the
rich iconography of “wonders” to the Ottoman idiom.137
As already noted in the context of the Surname-i Hümayun, urban life
and settings acquired a new visibility in the courtly manuscript painting of
those years. Illustrated works covering a wide range of subject matter and
genres, not always historical in character, betray this new interest. One copy
of the Tercüme-i miftah-ı cifrü’l-cami contains an image of Cairo quite remote
from the apocalyptic theme of the narrative and instead resonates with a
much-favoured topic of the time: boats on the Nile carry men and a woman
enjoying cups of cofee in a serene scene of leisure, surrounded by cofee-
houses on the banks of the river (Figure 13.28).138 A double-page painting
in Suudi’s Matali’üs-Saʽade features under each planet persons and profes-
sions (kimesne ve taife); this series of portraits ranges from sultan to porter,
135 Cornell H. Fleischer, ‘Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences’; Bahattin Yaman, ‘Osmanlı Resim
Sanatında Kıyamet Alametleri’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Hacettepe University
(2002); Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 196–200.
136 Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, p. 198.
137 Karin Rührdanz, ‘Qazvini’s ‘Aja’ib al-Makhlûkât in Illustrated Timurid Manuscripts’, Studia
Iranica 26 (2002), 473–84; Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 200–5.
138 Istanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, TY 6624, fol. 126b. See also Dublin, Chester Beatty
Library, T. 439, fol. 9a, in Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, p. 234.
540
The visual arts
Figure 13.28. Cairo: cofee drinkers in boats and cofeehouses on the banks of the Nile,
Şerif bin Seyyid Muhammed, Tercüme-i Miftah-ı Cifrü’l-Cami, 1595–1600. (Istanbul University
Library, T.6624, fol. 126v)
builder, candlemaker, isherman and farmer. An illustrated copy of Tercüme-i

Baharistan-ı Cami (ca. 1600) contains an abundantly detailed image of a gro-
cer’s shop. Resonant with the rise of street and genre scenes in contempo-
rary Safavid painting, such themes also invite comparison with imagery in
albums prepared in Istanbul primarily for European visitors and readers that
541
feature the capital’s central urban settings and portray its inhabitants across
the socio-political hierarchy. We possess references to a book market at the
Bayezid II complex at the edge of Istanbul’s commercial sprawl, which was
one of the places where artists produced such works for sale. The increas-
ing volume and circulation of single-page paintings and albums containing
images that do not illustrate a particular text also attest to the emergence
of new trends in the production and consumption of pictorial arts in the
Ottoman world.139
A multiplicity of interaction networks informed pictorial representation.
Numerous book production centres with diverse visual idioms relect the
vivacity of contemporary book culture and the intensity of elite patron-
age. Cities in the empire’s eastern provinces, such as Aleppo and particularly
Baghdad, emerged as loci of luxury book production and painting. During
his tenure in Aleppo, Mustafa Ali commissioned illustrated copies of two
of his works, the Nusretname and the Nushatu’s-Selatin; the illumination and
paintings of these works betray an ainity with the visual idiom of Ottoman
court art. In Baghdad, he commissioned a third work, the Cami al-Buhur, nar-
rating the princely circumcision ceremonies of 1582, but the work remained
uninished.140 This mishap notwithstanding, Baghdad, frontier city between
the Ottoman and Safavid realms, with a revered political, intellectual and reli-
gious past, close to Alid sites of pilgrimage, possessed a vastly productive
school of painting. Most popular were literary works of a religious nature;
lives of Ali and his family, stories of martyrdom in Karbala and works on
Islamic history were illustrated with lively narrative scenes. Poetry compila-
tions, including those of Fuzuli and Baki, featured images of courtly gath-
erings.141 Baghdad’s painters also produced a set of silsilenames, genealogies
of prophets, saints and monarchs starting with Adam and closing with the
current Ottoman dynasts. Their portraits based on court products such as the
139 Lale Uluç, ‘Majālis al-ʻUshshāq: Written in Herat, Copied in Shiraz, Read in Istanbul’, in M.
Uğur Derman 65th Birthday Festschrift, pp. 569–603; Leslie Meral Schick, ‘Ottoman Costume
Albums in a Cross-Cultural Context’, in Déroche, Art turc/Turkish Art, pp. 625–8; Leslie
Meral Schick, ‘The Place of Dress in Pre-Modern Costume Albums’, in Ottoman Costumes:
From Textile to Identity, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul, 2004), pp.
93–101; Franz Babinger, Papierhandel und Papierbereitung in der Levante (n.p., 1931).
140 Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, p. 248.
141 Karin Rührdanz, ‘The Role of the Urban Ateliers in Ottoman Miniature Painting since
the End of the Sixteenth Century’, in Aspects of Ottoman History: Papers from CIÉPO IX,
Jerusalem, ed. Amy Singer and Amnon Cohen ( Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 75–83, Rachel Milstein,
Miniature Painting in Ottoman Baghdad (Costa Mesa, Calif., 1990); Filiz Çağman, ‘XVI. Yüzyıl
Sonlarında Mevlevi Dergahlarında Gelişen bir Minyatür Okulu’, in I. Milletlerarası Türkoloji
Kongresi, vol. 3, pp. 651–77.
542
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Zübdetü’t-Tevarih and the Şemailname, the artists’ audiences possibly included

members of the extended imperial household.142
Given such connections between the court in Istanbul and workshops in
provincial capitals, Baghdad emerged as a site of Safavid–Ottoman encoun-
ters and convergences. Partaking in the linguistic re-orientation of Ottoman
court culture in the late sixteenth century, a signiicant portion of the illus-
trated manuscripts produced in Baghdad were written in Turkish, while liter-
ary works in Persian retained their popularity as well. The visual language
of narrative painting, on the other hand, difered sharply from the conven-
tions and visual choices of the court artists in Istanbul. With crowded and
animated scenes of multi-focal action preferably taking place under a high
horizon line, large igures, dynamic compositions that often low into the
margins, bright and saturated colours, rich surface ornament and many archi-
tectural representations, Baghdad painting in the late sixteenth century was
akin to contemporary Shirazi and to a lesser extent Khurasani schools. On
the other hand, some sartorial and architectural details and modes of group-
ing igures underline the images’ connection to the Ottoman centre. The
Baghdad governor Hasan Paşa, Sokollu Mehmed’s son, sponsored at least
three such manuscripts. His involvement underlines the cultural connections
between that city and Istanbul and evinces the growing interest of Ottoman
elites in expanding the thematic and material range of their book collections.
Networks allowing the acquisition of artwork extended beyond the sultan’s
domains, as exempliied by the Istanbul elite’s marked predilection for prod-
ucts of the Shiraz workshops through the late 1500s.143
Created at the turn of the seventeenth century, the wall paintings of a
Christian merchant’s mansion in Aleppo demonstrate the existence of yet
another network of provincial painting ateliers and patronage, connecting the
Ottoman centre to cities within and beyond the sultan’s realm. Here, artists
transposed images of courtly assembly and portrayals of heavenly creatures
from Persianate books onto the densely painted panels of an audience hall,
juxtaposed them with biblical scenes, and immersed this remarkably mixed
iconography into an extraordinary combination of decorative ornament of
Mamluk, Persian and Ottoman derivation.144
142 Serpil Bağcı, ‘From Adam to Mehmed III: Silsilename’, in Kangal, The Sultan’s Portrait, pp.
188–201.
143 Milstein, Miniature Painting, pp. 110–11; Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 253–9; Uluç,
Turkman Governors.
144 Julia Gonnella and Jens Kröger (eds.), Angels, Peonies, and Fabulous Creatures: The Aleppo
Room in Berlin (Berlin, 2002); Rührdanz, ‘The Role of the Urban Ateliers’.
543
Inserting the author into picture and text: An expanding

discourse on the arts
Group portraits depicting the multiple authors of illustrated manuscripts
constitute a signiicant addition to the Ottoman iconographic repertory in
the late 1500s. Prominently placed on the opening or closing pages of the
book at issue, these images are at once unmistakeable assertions of author-
ship and signs of membership in the Ottoman elite (Figure 13.29). At the same
time, such portraits in the setting of a study underline the collaborative nature
of book production, where authorial roles often varied and overlapped.145
The earliest group portrait featuring a painter is the frontispiece of Şükri-i
Bidlisi’s Selimname (ca. 1530); it was possibly inspired by a similar author por-
trait placed on the closing pages of the Divan-ı Husaini, created in Herat. Not
repeated by Ottoman painters of the following decades, such images became
more frequent in the late 1500s.146 Another Selimname, composed by Lokman
for Selim II, contains a group portrait with Lokman himself, in addition to
Ahmed Feridun Bey and Şemseddin Karabaği, a bureaucrat and a scholar,
inl uential in the conceptualisation of the work. Slightly smaller in scale and
hence of lower status, there appear the painters Osman and Ali, who devised
the iconographic programme in collaboration with the author. Copies of the
Şehname-i Selim Han and Taşköprizade’s Şaka’ik al-Numaniye all feature por-
traits of authors and artists. A portrait of the şehname writer Talikizade by
Nakkaş Hasan ends the Şehname-i Humayun (1596–1600), and another work
of Talikizade features a group portrait of author, painter and calligrapher.
Eulogies to the art of the painters Osman and Hasan Paşa on the closing
pages of imperial histories by Lokman and Talikizade attest to the growing
visibility of the men responsible for these most prestigious products of the
court scriptorium.147
It may not be coincidental that Mustafa Ali completed his Menakıb-ı
Hünerveran within the same years that the painter Sai Çelebi collaborated
with Sinan to create the latter’s autobiography. Menakıb-ı Hünerveran is a
biographical dictionary of calligraphers and artists of the book modelled on
Timurid and Safavid treatises and particularly the Risala-i Kutbiya of Kutb al-
Din Muhammad Yazdi, whom Ali had met in Baghdad. Ali may also have
145 Roxburgh, The Persian Album, pp. 85f.; Fetvacı, ‘Viziers to Eunuchs’, pp. 20–1, 121–6; Bağcı
et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 118–19.
146 Şükri-i Bidlisi, Selimname, TSM H 1597–98, ca. 1530; Atıl, Süleymanname, p. 77 n. 43; Bağcı
et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 63–4, 118–19, 182–5.
147 Filiz Çağman, ‘Nakkaş Osman in Sixteenth Century Documents and Literature’, in
Déroche, Art Turc/Turkish Art, pp. 197–206; Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting, pp. 181–4.
544
The visual arts
Figure 13.29. Group portrait of Ahmed Karabaği, Seyyid Lokman, Ahmed Feridun and
the painters Üstad Osman and Nakkaş Ali; Seyyid Lokman, Şehname-i Selim Han. (Topkapı
Palace Library, A. 3595, fol. 9r)
drawn inspiration from Ottoman biographical dictionaries of poets, which,

from the mid-1500s onwards, included short biographies of court artists such
as Şahkulı and Nigari, ofering commentaries on their art alongside samples
of their poetry. The Menakıb closely followed the established genre of the bio-
graphical dictionary to comment on the styles of calligraphy and book arts in
which the subjects had been proicient but also on the various techniques and
modes of depiction that these artists had used.
Ali’s biographies positioned Ottoman calligraphers and artists, estab-
lishing their genealogical links and inter-relationships with teachers and
colleagues from the Iranian and Ottoman worlds and evaluating their
strengths and weaknesses. Ali’s work simultaneously connected certain
artists of Rum to their Persian counterparts, while at the same time dif-
ferentiating them; his wide geographic horizons encompassed Nishabur,
Herat, Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Baghdad, and of course Istanbul.
His portrayal of complex webs of patronage and apprenticeship and his
emphasis on familial links underline the interconnectedness of book art-
ists across temporal and spatial boundaries. Simultaneously, his frequent
remarks on regional and urban distinctions shed a strong light on his – and
545
his contemporaries’ – preoccupation with the shape and lineage of a Rumi

identity.
The set of autobiographical texts composed by Sai in collaboration with
the aged Sinan culminates in two complete works, the Tezkiretü’l-Ebniye and
the Tezkiretü’l-Bünyan. Unlike Mustafa Ali, who wrote within the established
genre of the biographical dictionary, Sai and Sinan straddled a variety of liter-
ary genres in portraying the chief architect.148 These texts and their prepara-
tory versions ofer a biography that underlined the making of the architect’s
professional persona and his relations to sultans and grandees. With com-
ments on design and construction, and with the appended lists of works for
which Sinan claimed responsibility, the autobiographies negotiate norms of
authorship in a world of corporate, collaborative and largely anonymous pro-
duction. While only one surviving inscription carries the name of the chief
architect, Sinan’s and Sai’s focus on authorship was perhaps the response
to an emerging conjuncture: Davud Ağa, Sinan’s successor, would leave his
name on three public and private structures completed before and during his
much shorter tenure. In the inscription he composed for Sinan’s tomb, Sai
summed up the architect’s achievements enumerated and elaborated in the
autobiographies, transposing their authorial exertions from the conines of
the manuscripts onto the street near the Süleymaniye.149
Sharing “declinist” comments on the lack of skill, talent and elite encour-
agement, Sinan’s autobiographies and Ali’s biographies of artists respond
to changes in courtly patronage that had immediate implications for their
careers. These texts at the same time relect an increasingly vivacious world
of artistic consumption and commentary. Sai and Sinan reveal their expecta-
tions for aesthetic and technical appreciation through recurrent references
to discerning viewers and “possessors of skill and vision”. Comparable refer-
ences to a learned and discerning public also imbue the writing of Ali, who
discusses audiences and markets for calligraphies and albums, discerning
connoisseurs of the book arts (ehl-i kalem, ehl-i rakam), ambitious collectors
spending fortunes on albums, and stylistic innovations in calligraphy and pic-
torial representation. Ali also focuses on the personae of certain designers and
on debates regarding the value of the works produced in the lands of Rum
compared to their counterparts in the Iranian realm.150 Alongside texts such
148 Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘Sources, Themes, and Cultural Implications of Sinan’s Autobiographies’,
in Necipoğlu, Crane and Akın, Sinan’s Autobiographies, pp. vii–xvi.
149 Yüksel, Osmanlı Mimarisinde Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Devri, pp. 371–2.
150 Necipoğlu, Crane and Akın, Sinan’s Autobiographies; Mustafa Ali, Menakıb. For parallels in
the Persianate world, see David J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, p. 125; Qadi Ahmad Qummi
546
The visual arts
as Taczade Mehmed’s technical treatise on calligraphy and Cenderecizade

Mehmed’s preface to the album of Murad III, Sinan’s autobiographies and the
Menakıb mark the elaboration of a critical vocabulary and a set of tropes that
captured Ottoman appraisals of and responses to arts and architecture.151
In place of a conclusion
Through the expanding discourse on the arts, Ottoman literati and artists
participated in the broader current of reckoning, with the world and with
the self, which was integral to the late sixteenth-century landscape of change
and re-ordering. In the world to which Mustafa Ali, Sai and Sinan turned their
nostalgic gazes, moments of reinement, equilibrium and relative closure had
been reached. The 1500s created a regional visual idiom distinct from, but
at the same time interconnected to various degrees with, the visual culture
of the larger Islamic and Mediterranean worlds. The enduring yet lexible
architectural and decorative vocabulary of this period would constitute the
basis of explorations and re-interpretations by Ottoman artists and architects
of the following centuries.Towards the end of the 1500s, however, the strict
visual codes formulated by Sinan had begun to dissolve in the face of politi-
cal rearrangements and in response to new formal predilections. Already by
1605, through the insertion of fragments drawn in perspective into otherwise
lat pictorial planes and through radical contrasts in the scales of his igures
and their settings, the painter Ahmed Nakşi had complicated and profoundly
destabilised the established spatial order of Ottoman painting.
b. Mir Munshi, Calligraphers and Painters: A Treatise by Qadī Ahmad, Son of Mīr Munshī (circa
A.H. 1015/A.D. 1606), trans. Vladimir Minorsky (Washington, D.C., 1959), p. 175.
151 Wheeler M. Thackston (ed.), Album Prefaces and Other Documents in the History of Calligraphers
and Painters (Leiden, 2001), pp. 29–31; Froom, ‘A Muraqqa’, pp. 41–59.
547
14
The literature of Rum: The making of a literary
tradition (1450–1600)
SEL I ?M S. KU RU
A literary identity
Rum has pleasant water and air, and due to the extremely pleasurable water and
air, the people of Rum are reined and each has everlasting excellence of charac-
ter and abundant elegance of intellect. As a consequence, a poetic nature governs
the people of Rum and they seek cultural attainment and knowledge. Due to this
natural disposition, they have an inclination to poetry and those among them who
conquer the domains of verse are countless.1
In the conclusion to his biographical dictionary of poets, written around 1538,
the Ottoman bureaucrat and poet Sehi Bey (1470–1549) explained the rise of a
particular poetry in Anatolian Turkish by using the physical nature of its geo-
graphical location, “Rum”. Approximately 30 years later, in 1566, Aşık Çelebi
(1520–72), a scholar and poet, further described Rum as “a target for Arabs and
Persians and a source for Turkish and Deylamite poets”. In his introduction,
he quoted many verses by bureaucrats and scholars of his time to support his
claim that the climate of Rum was so conducive to poetry that even those
Rum elite who lacked interest in poetry would burst into verse when faced
with momentous events.2 For Sehi and Aşık Çelebi, Rum stood for western
Anatolia and Rumeli, with Istanbul constituting its centre.3
1 Sehi Beg, Heşt Bihişt: Sehî Beg Tezkiresi, ed. Günay Kut (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 314.
Translations are mine unless otherwise stated. In this chapter, poets and scholars are cited by
their pen-names instead of full names.
2 Aşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ: İnceleme, Metin, ed. Filiz Kılıç (Istanbul, 2010), vol. 1, pp. 277–9.
3 See C. E. Bosworth, ‘Rum’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al.
(Leiden, 1960–2006), vol. 8, pp. 605–6. For an excellent discussion of the term as it was used
for a particular identity, see Salih Özbaran, Bir Osmanlı Kimliği: 14.-17. Yüzyıllarda Rûm/Rûmi
Aidiyet ve İmgeleri (Istanbul, 2004). For a brief discussion of the use of Rum as a geographical
term in the Turkish biographical dictionaries of poets, see Harun Tolasa, Sehî, Lâtîi, ve Âşık
Çelebi Tezkirelerine Göre 16. Yüzyılda Edebiyat Araştırma ve Eleştirisi (Istanbul, 2002), pp. 13–15.
For an essay on the changing perceptions of the concept of Rum, see Cemal Kafadar, ‘A
I am grateful to Hatice Aynur, Emine Fetvacı, Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, Sibel Kocaer, Aslı Niyazioğlu,
Florian Schwarz, Matthias Scheiblehner, David Wise, the Early Modern Research Group (EMERGE)
at the University of Washington in Seattle and the editors of this volume for their comments on ear-
lier drafts of this chapter.
548
The literature of Rum
Similar examples abound from the sixteenth century that identify Rum as a
realm of poetry. Although Rum poets who composed their poetry in Turkish
are today generally called “Osmanlı” or “divan” poets, this had not been the
case until the nineteenth century. Before that time, they were distinguished
among other local and foreign cultures by the title “şuara-yı Rum” (poets of
Rum). An understanding of what this focus on the term Rum was about, and
how this identity was intrinsically related to literary production in Turkish,
is essential to understanding the birth of the speciic literary tradition in six-
teenth-century Anatolia and Rumeli.
This chapter claims that, from the mid-ifteenth century on, a high form of
literature was consciously crafted by poets of Rum, who were the products
of an intricate and heterogeneous education system, which prepared intel-
lectually elevated state oicers who had an interest in challenging, reforming
and transforming Islamic literary traditions with the intention of distinguish-
ing themselves from the literary production of the dervish lodges, tasavvuf
edebiyatı (mystical literature) and that of urban and non-urban forms of folk
literature – halk and aşık edebiyatları, respectively – which had been produced
for three hundred years in Anatolian Turkish.4
To date, the literature of Rum as the production of a particular group of
poets in this period has been subjected mostly to a philological approach,
as a result of which editions of many texts have been made available. These
editions, however, are rarely subjected to interpretative and contextual stud-
ies that encourage multi-disciplinary perspectives in the study of literature
in Rum. As there are already various general essays on Ottoman literature
of this period, I shall focus in the present chapter on less remarked aspects.5
Rome of One’s Own: Relections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum’,
Muqarnas 24 (2007), 7–25.
4 However much literature of the period was intrinsically correlated with the literary works
developed in dervish lodges and strictly oral urban and rural literary traditions prevalent in
Anatolia during this period, this relationship was not without tension. But this falls outside the
scope of this chapter. On the relationship between elite and folk literatures, see Cemal Kurnaz,
Türküden Gazele – Halk ve Divan Şiirinin Müşterekleri Üzerine bir Deneme (Ankara, 1997).
5 E. J. W. Gibb’s six-volume A History of Ottoman Poetry (London, 1900–9) is still the most detailed
historical account available; see the second and third volumes for the period covered here. For
excellent brief surveys, see the sections on fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Ottoman litera-
ture in Gönül A. Tekin, ‘Othmanli: Literature’, in Gibb et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol.
8, pp. 209–13, and Günay Kut, ‘Turkish Literature in Anatolia’, in History of the Ottoman State,
Society and Civilisation, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (Istanbul, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 27–87. For more
speciic important analyses, see Gönül Tekin, ‘Fatih Devri Edebiyatı’, in İstanbul Armağanı:
Fetih ve Fatih, ed. Mustafa Armağan (Istanbul, 1995), pp. 161–235, for Mehmed II’s reign. Âmil
Çelebioğlu, Kanûnî Sultan Süleyman Devri Türk Edebiyatı (Istanbul, 1994), provides extensive
information on authors of Süleyman I’s reign. For a more recent collection of topical essays,
see Talât Sait Halman, O. Horata, Y. Çelik, N. Demir, M. Kalpaklı, R. Korkmaz and M.Ö.
Oğuz (eds.), Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (Ankara, 2006), vol. 2, pp. 17–237.
549
se l i?m s. k uru
In order to describe the making of a particular literary identity, the chapter

begins with a general historical outline, followed by a discussion of the devel-
opment of a high literary language. The review of literature of the period in
the third section underscores particular developments unique to this period
and to some extent neglected in general studies. The production of literary
tools for poets on the path to professionalisation of their literary activities is
presented in the fourth section. The ifth and inal section covers biographical
dictionaries and presents these as not merely sources for literary archaeology
but irstly as canon-making devices and secondly as literary accomplishments.
Biographical dictionaries represent a culmination point in the development
of a new literary language, the making of new genres and themes, and the
creation of literary tools. They came into being and were competitively pro-
duced in the period under discussion, and they also strengthened the sense
of being a Rum poet, even as the individual biographical sketches in them
functioned as models for their readers. Though there are specialised studies
on these topics, their importance in the making of a Rum tradition has not
been pointed out.
The period of 150 years from the conquest of Constantinople until 1600
is typically deined by scholars as that in which the norms for “Ottoman”
arts and literature – parallel to the state institutions – were established and
which is called the “classical age”. This period witnessed seven sultans,
many vezirs and muftis, countless judges, scribes, accountants, soldiers,
and urban dwellers from all walks of life, who contributed more than a
few verses to the accumulating capital of literary production in Turkish.
Composing literary works in the newly developing literary media and in
a particular form of written Turkish became a signiicant, if not contro-
versial, aspect of being a member of the elite. A member of the Rum elite
was supposed to be well versed enough to compose poetry. A poet of Rum,
however, did not simply compose verses in a particular meter and rhyme
scheme but also composed letters, philosophical treatises and literary texts
in rhyming prose. These litterateurs were working within the system of a
strictly urban literature, which came to be known by many diferent names:
Ottoman Turkish literature, divan literature, palace/court literature and so
on. But in their own day their activity was merely called şi‘r ü inşa (poetry
and prose composition). Today the problem of naming this literary tradi-
tion carries ideological implications, yet it is commonly accepted that by
the mid-ifteenth century a particular layer of Anatolian Turkish literary
tradition had emerged that was patroned by rulers, notables and littera-
teurs of Rum.
550
Relocating Rum, remaking literature

The destruction of the centralised Seljukid rule in Rum in the thirteenth cen-
tury was followed by a period of successive short-lived dynasties and local
governors who patronised the translation of texts from Arabic and Persian
into Turkish. Whatever the reasons for this, whether to compose eulogies
to Turkish tribal leaders who did not know the prevalent written languages
of Arabic or Persian or to compose religious chapbooks to educate Turks
settled in Rum, by the mid-ifteenth century western Turkish had already
evolved into a written language for religious as well as non-religious themes
in Anatolia.6 After the interregnum (1402–13), in parallel to their centralising
policies, Ottoman rulers and their “servants” had fast begun to be inl uential
and competitive patrons of literature. The reign of Murad II (1421–44 and
1446–51) in particular can be considered a germination period, when many
Turkish verse narratives and poetry collections appeared. This Anatolian lit-
erary boom in the western Turkish language laid the grounds for the evolu-
tion of a high literary medium in the following era.7
It may be diicult to understand the relation between the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 and another explosive phase in literary production in
Rum. However, the reorganisation of the education system shortly after the
conquest, along with the restructuring of palace ceremonial, land tenure, and
pious endowments, clearly shifted the balance of the three major languages
of the time, Persian, Arabic and Turkish, in favour of Turkish. The wide-
spread literary activity in Turkish in Anatolian and Rumelian cities would be
centralised and canonised in Istanbul, which was then the newly emerging
centre of a young empire and shifted the borders of Rum farther westwards.
6 For the development of Turkish as a written literary language, see Mecdut Mansuroğlu,
‘The Rise and Development of Written Turkish in Anatolia’, Oriens 7 (1954), 250–64, and for
a description of the multi-lingualism and the distinction between literary and vernacular
Turkish as it developed in fourteenth-century Anatolia, see Lars Johanson, ‘Rumi and the
Birth of Turkish Poetry’, Journal of Turkology 1 (1993), 23–37.
7 It must be noted at this point that the literary culture of Rum was a manuscript culture,
and the printing press did not have much impact on literature in Rum until the early nine-
teenth century. While this aspect of the subject has yet to be explored, İsmail Erünsal’s work
on libraries and book producers provides a basis for research. See İsmail Erünsal, Ottoman
Libraries: A Survey of the History, Development and Organization of Ottoman Foundation Libraries
(Cambridge, Mass., 2008); İsmail Erünsal, ‘Osmanlılarda Sahhalık ve Sahhalar: Yeni Bazı
Belge ve Bilgiler’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları 29 (2007), 99–146. An important bibliographic ref-
erence for Ottoman Turkish manuscript catalogues is Turgut Kut, ‘Türkçe Yazma Eserler
Katalogları Repertuvarı’, Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belleten 1972 (1989), 183–240. For a gen-
eral yet important discussion of readership, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture
and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005), pp. 185–203.
551
se l i?m s. k uru
Patronage, poetics and poets

That a total transformation of the literary scene had occurred is evidenced
by the formation of a new written language, variation and innovation in the
use of literary forms and genres, the re-evaluation of existing literary models,
competition among authors and, as a consequence, an increasing number
of literary works, thanks to the widening range of patronage. This was a
transformation that, gradually developing until the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, provided the coming generations of litterateurs of Rum with a reference
point. As the period between the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries was later
called the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, the literary developments in
the preceding periods, too, were canonised and provided a reservoir of forms,
themes and authorship models for following generations. Many factors played
a role in these transformations, but three major ones can be identiied: politi-
cal transformations as they re-conigured patronage relations, formation of a
particular poetics for poets of Rum and inally a particular form of authorial
agency.
First, socio-economic stabilisation in the lands of Rum provided better
conditions of study and better job opportunities for the educated, attract-
ing waves of scholars from Cairo, Damascus and the cities of the Khurasan
region and of eastern Anatolia, who streamed into Rum, especially Istanbul,
seeking Ottoman dynastic patronage.8 This trend started even before the con-
quest of the Arab lands by Selim I in 1517 and the incorporation, or rather
submission, of educational centres in Syria and Egypt.9 Literary patronage,
on the other hand, shifted and transformed through the decades during the
period 1450–1600, when the major patrons were from among the palace circles.
8 For a seminal article on Persian inl uence and Persian poets who came to the Ottoman
Empire seeking their fortunes, see Hanna Sohrweide, ‘Dichter und Gelehrte aus dem Osten
im osmanischen Reich (1453–1600): Ein Beitrag zur türkisch-persischen Kulturgeschichte’, Der
Islam 46 (1950), 263–302. The literary scene in the other emirates in Anatolia and their claims
for control of Rum until they were absorbed by the Ottomans is a ield ripe for investiga-
tion. See İbrahim Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Anadolu Beylikleri ve Akkoyunlu ve Karakoyunlu Devletleri
(Ankara, 1984), pp. 259–62, for a list of authors who composed high literary works under the
patronage of the rulers of these emirates during the late ifteenth century.
9 For a limited list of the names of scholars who received education in Arab lands and Iran in
the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries, and Arab and Iranian scholars who traveled to Anatolia
in the late ifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see İbrahim Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi
(Ankara, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 520–1. For a statistical evaluation of the spread of higher educa-
tion institutions in Anatolia, see Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, ‘Osmanlı Eğitim ve Bilim Kurumları’,
in Osmanlı Devleti ve Medeniyeti Tarihi, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (Istanbul, 1998), pp. 242–5.
There was a constant low of scholars seeking their fortunes in diferent cities under diferent
dynasties, yet it is clear that the Anatolian educational system experienced a revival as the
Ottoman emirate turned into an empire in this period.
552
Until the mid-sixteenth century, sultans Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I and
Süleyman I not only awarded poets for individual works but also paid them
regular salaries.10 Within this period of approximately 150 years, the intricate
network of patronage reached its peak in the early sixteenth century, making
the Ottoman dynasty the major patron of literature in Rum, if not in the
larger Islamic world.11
Apart from the palace patronage in Istanbul, and until the early decades
of the sixteenth century, powerful patrons of literature remained in Edirne
and Bursa.12 The frontier lords of Rumeli, such as the Evrenosoğulları,
Mihaloğulları and Yahyalılar, who held court in European cities such as
Vardar Yenicesi (Giannitsa)13 and Üsküp (Skopje), remained powerful patrons
of literature until the early decades of the sixteenth century.14 Another centre
of patronage was the Ottoman princely courts, which lourished until the
late sixteenth century in thriving Anatolian cities such as Konya, Amasya and
Manisa. This multi-nodal dynastic system of patronage had, until the 1580s,
a dynamic impact on the formation of literature, while the political shifts
and transformations of the period caused it to develop in various directions.15
During the inal decades of the sixteenth century, as palace bureaucrats and
local governors in the provinces appeared as generous patrons of arts and lit-
erature, shifts in patronage intensiied and spread a Rum literary tradition all
over the empire.
10 See Halil İnalcık, ‘The Poet and the Patron: A Sociological Treatise upon the Patrimonial
State and the Arts’, trans. Arif Nat Riley, Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (2005), 9–70. Here the
issue of patronage is evaluated, with a focus on sultanic patronage of poets, from a socio-
logical perspective disregarding historical and geographical variations of diferent patronage
networks during this period. See also pp. 52–61 of this article for an evaluation of gift regis-
ters previously published by İsmail Erünsal, which included salaries and one-time gifts by the
palace for works presented by poets. In most cases, these were on top of regular salaries for
state positions and/or retirement pensions.
11 However, patronage was changing, and by the mid-sixteenth century there were many com-
plaints about the diminishing resources for poets. For example, İbrahim Paşa’s (d. 942/1536)
patronage would be yearned for by Latii (896/1491–990/1582), another biographer of
poets, in a digression in his dictionary. See Latii, Tezkiretü’ş-Şu‘arâ ve Tabsıratü’n-Nuzamâ,
ed. Rıdvan Canım (Ankara, 2000), pp. 326–7. For an edition of the separately published ver-
sion of this text, see Ahmet Sevgi, Lâtîfı’nin İki Risâlesi: Enîsü’l-Fusahâ ve Evsâf-ı İbrâhim Pâşâ
(Konya, 1986), transcription, pp. 24–6, facsimile, pp. 84–7.
12 See Mustafa İsen, ‘Akıncılığın Türk Kültür ve Edebiyatına Katkıları’, in Varayım Gideyim
Urumeli’ne: Türk Edebiyatı’nın Balkan Boyutu (Istanbul, 2009), pp. 56–69.
13 For Yenice, see Machiel Kiel, ‘Yenice Vardar (Vardar Yenicesi-Giannitsa): A Forgotten Turkish
Cultural Centre in Macedonia of the 15th and 16th Century’, Studia Byzantina et Neohellenica
Neerlandica 3 (1973), 300–55.
14 See İsen, ‘Akıncılığın Türk Kültür ve Edebiyatına Katkıları’, pp. 56–69.
15 For a detailed picture of literary patronage in this period that is gleaned from contemporary
biographical dictionaries, see Haluk İpekten, Divan Edebiyatında Edebî Muhitler (Istanbul,
1996).
553
se l i?m s. k uru
Secondly, through accelerated interaction among wandering scholars and the

natives of Rum and based on the changing medium of written Turkish, a par-
ticular form of poetics came into being. Re-formulated as the written language
of bureaucracy, the Turkish language challenged the long-standing primacy of
Arabic and especially Persian. This was without doubt a continuation of the
casting of Turkish as a literary language by the Rum elite in the courtly cities of
Bursa, Edirne, the Ottoman capitals before the conquest of Constantinople and
Manisa, and the centres of other contemporary beyliks, Amasya and Konya.
The emerging literary written language operated through the continuing
cultural contact and competition with written Persian, Chagatai and Arabic
literatures as much as the emulation and adaptation of traditional, mostly
oral forms of local literary traditions.16 By the end of the ifteenth century,
major epic cycles, such as the Dede Korkut stories, the Saltukname and the
Battalname, had been put into writing for interested Ottoman sultans and
princes.17 The evaluation of classical Islamic texts and local literary forms
and themes enabled poets of Rum to develop a particular form of written
Turkish for poetry and prose in order to distinguish themselves from non-elite
urban and folk poets in Rum and from contemporary Chagatai, Persian and
Arab poets of Eastern lands. Rum poets emulated and reformed classical and
contemporary Islamicate literary models as they distinguished their literary
endeavours more and more from existing local practices, constantly under-
mining available forms and genres and re-coniguring them to signify emerg-
ing new contexts.
Finally, authorship also underwent various changes throughout this period.
During the earlier decades of the period, there seem to have been more
bureaucrats involved in writing literary texts than learned elite (ulema); this
balance shifted gradually in favour of the ulema in the later sixteenth century.18
The increasingly varying professional backgrounds of Rum litterateurs had
an impact on the form and content of their works.19 Under the strengthening
16 For a thorough examination of the earlier period of this evolution, see Tekin, ‘Fatih Devri
Edebiyatı’.
17 For the recording of the Saltukname and Battalname cycle of legends, see Yorgos Dedes,
Battalname: Introduction, English Translation, Turkish Transcription, Commentary and Facsimile
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 43–5.
18 For an excellent analysis of the role of poetry in a high bureaucrat’s life, see Theoharis
Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha
Angelović (1453–1474) (Leiden, 2001), especially pp. 294–326. After Mahmud Paşa, there were
few vezirs who compiled poetry collections, at least until the end of the sixteenth century.
See the discussion later in this chapter about how at least one biographical dictionary author,
Sehi, perceived high-level bureaucrat poets as a distinct group in his work.
19 See Tolasa, Sehî, Lâtîi, pp. 61–118, for the various educational and professional backgrounds
of Rum poets. More prosographical studies are needed to understand the shifting dynamics
554
and gradually centralising rule of the Ottoman dynasty, especially during a

period of conquest and expansion, while Rum was again becoming a uniied
land, the poets of Rum crafted a literary identity that masked the other iden-
tity markers, such as ethnic or occupational, of a given author. Under various
pen-names (mahlas), poets of Rum obtained a distinct identity as “lovers” and
named themselves people of love (ehl-i ‘ışk). They were in love with God,
prophet, patrons and inally with beautiful beloveds, and consequently they
were singing, respectively, eulogies, panegyrics or lyric poems (gazel) for
them.20 However, the descriptions by Rum poets of what love is represented
another culmination point for the Islamic mystical formulations of love. The
concepts of “love” and “lover” were topics for a constant literary and at times
theoretical debate. The spread of literary activity through the changing and
varying levels of education among a re-structured elite created a heteroge-
neous and layered literary identity in Rum that not only became an integral
part of elite Rum identity but also underscored its unstable nature.
A matter of inluence
While western Turkish rose among the many languages spoken in Rum as
the dominant literary written language, it is unwarranted to neglect major
“foreign” inl uences on the development of literature in this period. The
most interesting aspect of this inl uence is its contemporaneity. Molla Cami,
an important litterateur and mystic, and Ali Şir Nevai, a statesman and pro-
liic author, were esteemed poets in the court of Hüseyin Baykara (1438–1506)
in Herat, and they indisputably provided lasting models for the sixteenth-
century Rum patrons and poets, creating the basis for the following waves of
cultural transformation.21 While Cami’s Persian poetry was appreciated espe-
cially by poets with mystical leanings, a fad for Chagatai poetry was ascendant
of authorship in this period. Analytical work is scarce on what it means to be an author
and how the meanings attached to authorship changed. In one illuminating example, Bâki
Tezcan argues that the inal decades of the sixteenth century witnessed the weakening of a
palace-centred historical writing; see Bâki Tezcan, ‘The Politics of Early Modern Ottoman
Historiography’, in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan
and Daniel Gofman (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 167–98.
20 For a detailed exploration of love in the Ottoman and Western literary contexts during the
mid-ifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, see Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı,
The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and
Society (Durham, N.C., 2005).
21 The fact that early models of Rum poets for all kinds of literary works had developed in this
court also testiies to this fact. In fact, “Baykara meclisi” (Baykara gathering), which was used
throughout the centuries as a common term in Rum for literary gatherings, may be seen as
a trace of this inl uence in this period. For an excellent study on the Baykara gathering as a
literary centre, see Maria E. Subtelny, ‘The Poetic Circle at the Court of the Timurid, Sultan
Husain Baiqara, and Its Political Signiicance’, Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University (1979).
555
se l i?m s. k uru
under the inl uence of works by Ali Şir Nevai in the courts of Mehmed II and
his son Bayezid II.22
Fenarizade Muhyiddin Çelebi, (d. 1547), a one-time Şeyhülislam who used
the pen-name Muhyi in his gazels, composed, along with responses to Persian
poems of Cami and Selman, parallels to 57 of Nevai’s poems in his divan.23
The fad for Chagatai poetry would fade away by the second half of the six-
teenth century, being undermined by localisation and an ensuing classicism
that revolved around the classics of Persian literature.
Working with and on the written medium of Anatolian Turkish and con-
stantly developing the possibilities of expression in this language, the poets
of Rum were supplanting and surpassing previous poetic accomplishments
in Anatolian Turkish and expanding their inl uence through their poetry.24
As the Ottoman sultans raised their banners over expanding territories and
stamped their imperial signatures (tuğra) in an increasingly stylised manner
on the documents they issued from the mid-ifteenth century on, the litera-
ture in Anatolian Turkish would also distinguish itself from other traditions
and become stylised as it grew in the form of a refreshing new literary tradi-
tion during the period between 1450 and 1600, the most momentous period
of the Ottoman dynasty. This new tradition, with all its internal conl icts and
creative energies, established one of the components of Rum elite identity
that was re-shaped under Ottoman dynastic patronage.
A new language for Rum

The astonishing language current in the state of Rum, composed of four languages,
[western Turkish, Çagatay, Arabic and Persian], is a pure gilded tongue which, in
the speech of the literati seems more diicult than any of these. If one were to
22 For debates about when and how this inl uence came about, see Mehmet Çavuşoğlu, ‘Kanunî
Devrinin Sonuna Kadar Anadolu’da Nevâyî Tesiri Üzerine Notlar’, in Atsız Armağanı, ed.
Erol Güngör, M. N. Hacıeminoğlu, Mustafa Kafalı and Osman F. Sertkaya (Istanbul, 1976),
pp. 67–73. Also see the third of a series of articles by Osman F. Sertkaya for bibliographi-
cal references on Chagatai poems by Rum poets: Osman F. Sertkaya, ‘Osmanlı Şairlerinin
Çağatayca Şiirleri III’, Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 20 (1972), 157–84.
23 Sehi, Heşt Bihişt, pp. 130, 355. Here Sehi uses the term cevab (response) instead of nazire (paral-
lel) for Muhyi’s parallels to Nevai’s lyric poems. These terms were employed in literary eval-
uations somewhat diferently; see Tolasa, Sehî, Lâtîi, pp. 263–6. For a discussion of Muhyi’s
parallel poems, see Mustafa Arslan, ‘XVI. Yüzyıl Anadolu Sahasında Nevâyi’nin Önemli Bir
Takipçisi: Muhyî ve Nazireleri’, Modern Türklük Araştırmaları Dergisi 4, 1 (2007), 64–86.
24 As early as the mid-sixteenth century, there was a desire in the ield of architecture to
“import” a Rumi style, which is identiiable in important provincial centres of the empire.
See Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, ‘In the Image of Rum: Ottoman Architectural Patronage in
Sixteenth-Century Aleppo and Damascus’, Muqarnas 16 (1999), 70–96.
556
equate speaking Arabic with a religious obligation [farz], and the use of Persian
with a sanctioned tradition [sünnet], then the speaking of Turkish made up of these
sweetnesses becomes a meritorious act [müstahabb], and, in the view of those elo-
quent in Turkish, the use of simple Turkish should be forbidden.25
Writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali
(1541–1600), a bureaucrat and proliic author, speaks conidently about a par-
ticular high literary form of Turkish that is “current in the state of Rum”.
According to Mustafa Ali, by freely using Arabic and Persian vocabulary and
morphological units, Turkish elevated itself to a level of high diiculty, with
the result that speaking this higher register of Turkish became a meritorious
act. He takes pride in the powers of a language that is really composed of four
languages: Turkish, Arabic, Chagatai, or the eastern form of literary Turkish,
and Persian. In contrast with the three classical languages of Islam taken sin-
gly, this language incorporates “obligation” (farz) from Arabic and the tradi-
tion (sünnet) from Persian, making its use a meritorious act (müstehabb) and
hence more “diicult” than the three others taken on their own.26 Unlike what
Mustafa Ali calls simple Turkish, this “language current in Rum” presents a
challenge for the eloquent Rum elite, who have to excel, going beyond the
religious obligation and sanctioned practice represented by the rival tongues
of Arabic and Persian.27 However, Mustafa Ali’s acceptance of Turkish as a
meritorious act also relects an attempt to overcome a predicament for the
25 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, quoted by Cornell H. Fleischer in his excellent biography of the
author, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âli (1541–1600)
(Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 22.
26 By mentioning it without establishing a category for it, Mustafa Ali seems to accept Chagatai
Turkish as a sub-category of Turkish along with western Turkish. It is interesting to note
that Mustafa Ali’s description echoes Ali Şir Nevai’s defence of Chagatai Turkish against
Persian almost a hundred years before in 1499; see Mir Ali Shir, Mukākamat al-Lughatain:
Introduction, Translation [from the Persian and Arabic] and Notes, ed. Robert Devereux (Leiden,
1960). According to a palace library catalogue, Chagatai, the literary eastern Turkish lan-
guage, was also called “Mogoliyye” (i.e., Mongolian), in the early sixteenth century, pointing
to unstable naming practices for languages. See İsmail Erünsal, ‘909/1503 Tarihli Defter-i
Kütüb’, Journal of Turkish Studies 32, 1 (2008), 203–19 at p. 209.
27 From early on, the authors of this period distinguished high literary Turkish from other
spoken and written forms yet difered in naming it. For example, while Mustafa Ali refrains
from naming it in the earlier quotation, almost a hundred years before him the histo-
rian Kemalpaşazade (1468–1534) used “Rumi dili” (the Rum tongue) for Greek but needed
to explain it further by adding “ki lisan-ı Yunanidür” (which is the Greek language); see
Kemalpaşazade (İbn-i Kemal), Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman: II. Defter, ed. Şerafettin Turan (Ankara,
1983), p. 176. In the late sixteenth century, on the other hand, another historian, Talikizade,
would call Turkish “lisan” or “zeban-ı Rum” (the language or tongue of Rum); see Christine
Woodhead, Ta‘līkī-zāde’s Şehnāme-i Hümāyūn: A History of the Ottoman Campaign into Hungary,
1593–94 (Berlin, 1983), p. 137, quoted in Hayati Develi, Osmanlı’nın Dili (Istanbul, 2006), p. 50.
Develi (pp. 28–40) provides more examples and focuses on the ambivalent naming practices
for languages in his short essay on Ottoman Turkish.
557
se l i?m s. k uru
language of Rum, an impasse that occurs as the language of the Qur’an and
the language of mystical literature cast their deep shadows over the younger
written language that is fashioned by Rum poets.
A tale of three languages in Rum

Arabic was established early in the Muslim courts of Rum as the language
of sciences, and Persian was deined as the language of literature; both were
employed for bureaucratic purposes. Until the earlier decades of the ifteenth
century, the Rum elite were ambivalent about employing Turkish in their
works, claiming that it was an obligation in order to reach a Turkish-speaking
audience. By the mid-ifteenth century, there was a growing interest in liter-
ary works in Turkish and the accompanying translation movement. Authors
were, however, apologetic, as they saw the prevalent form of Turkish as dei-
cient for a high literary medium, in comparison with the Persian and Arabic
originals of the texts they had been translating from.28 However paradoxical
it may seem, the development of a high literary version of written Turkish
by the bureaucrats along with the reformation of educational institutions
entailed the advancement of learning in Arabic and Persian during the reigns
of Murad II (r. 1421–44 and 1446–51) and, especially, his son Mehmed II (r. 1444–
46 and 1451–81). While early literary works already contained some Arabic
and Persian loanwords, in particular technical vocabulary imparted by trans-
lations or compositions by multi-lingual litterateurs, the real lood of Arabic
and Persian vocabulary and structures into written Turkish would take place
during the period discussed here, when a new stress on classical knowledge
of Islam and sciences appeared along with a renewed interest in rhetoric.29
Prior to the mid-ifteenth century, in 1424, a judge named Devletoğlu Yusuf
explained the motive behind his verse translation from Arabic into Turkish of
an important text of religious law, the Vikayetü’r-Rivaye i Mesaili’l-Hidaye. He
said that scholars of his time were unable to understand Arabic and that they
were speaking, reading and even teaching in Turkish.30
28 These works relect a particular inluence of Arabic and Persian languages in the form of
loanwords rather than constructions. Kemal Yavuz has recorded in detail complaints that
are found in literary works of Anatolian Turkish authors down to the ifteenth century; see,
Kemal Yavuz, ‘XIII.–XVI. Asır Yadigarlarının Anadolu Sahasında Yazılış Sebebleri ve Bu Devir
Müellilerinin Türkçe Hakkındaki Görüşleri’, Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları 27 (1983), 9–55.
29 The multi-lingual environment in thirteenth-century Anatolia and its impact on the develop-
ment of a literary form of Turkish is explained in Johanson, ‘Rumi’. It must be noted that
the development of literary prose in the mid-ifteenth century was more signiicant than
that of poetry, which had already been following Persian models.
30 Yavuz, ‘XIII.–XVI. Asır Yadigarlarının’, p. 38. The verse translations of theological tractates
would become even more popular in the sixteenth century, pointing to the mnemonic use
of verse translations of basic religious texts for education.
558
The position of learning in Arabic and Persian during this period still needs
further scrutiny, yet an anecdote about Taşköprüzade (1495–1561), a famous
scholar of his time, reveals that diferent levels of competence in languages
were assumed. His biographical dictionary of scholars and mystics who lived
under Ottoman rule, Şaka’iku’n-Numaniyye (Crimson Peonies), which was
written in Arabic, took the learned elite of his time by storm. As soon as it was
published in 1558, several translations and continuation volumes appeared.31
When another scholar, the aforementioned Aşık Çelebi, translated the work
into Turkish and presented it to the author, Taşköprüzade said: “O scholar,
I have written it like Turkish; you bothered [to translate it] in vain.”32 When
Taşköprüzade says that the Arabic he employed was “like Turkish” (Türki
gibi), he reveals the fact that Taşköprüzade distinguished among diferent lev-
els of written Arabic from easy to diicult. But several contemporary trans-
lations of the work bear witness to a need for having it in Turkish.33 On the
other hand, some Turkish translations of the work were done in ornate prose,
making them at times more diicult than the Arabic original, this being per-
haps the reason for the original Arabic version having more copies than any
of its expanded translations.34
The categorical evaluation especially of the Persian language appeared
in a period when some Turkish poets were uncomfortable with the incom-
ing Iranian poets’ inl uence within the court and among elite circles. Mesihi
(1481–1512), an imperial scribe and poet who was a former slave, expressed this
in a famous couplet:
O Mesihi, there is no place for you, even if you descend from the skies
Go away and then come back from Iran or the Arab lands.35
31 For a listing of seven translations and two expanded editions of this work that were com-
posed in the sixteenth century, see Behcet Gönül, ‘İstanbul Kütüphânelerinde al-Şakaik al-
Nu‘mâniya Tercüme ve Zeyilleri’, Türkiyat Mecmuası 7–8 (1945), 136–78. Even though this
important work has been mined by modern scholars for studies of Ottoman intellectual his-
tory, a study of Taşköprüzade’s motives and approach to intellectual history is yet to appear.
For an interesting discussion on Taşköprüzade’s perception of writing, see Ali Anooshahr,
‘Writing, Speech, and History for an Ottoman Biographer’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 69
(2010), 43–62.
32 Gönül, ‘İstanbul Kütüphânelerinde’, p. 150.
33 On another note, Aşık Çelebi praised the knowledge of Arabic of his friend the poet Fevri,
referring to one of his eulogies in Arabic as follows: “Even though Arabic and Rumi vocabu-
lary had become similar by that time, it was conirmed that the eulogy he composed was
sound in Arabic with regard to Arabic versiication and clarity”; see Aşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-
Şu‘arâ, vol. 3, p. 1224. Here Aşık Çelebi asserts that around the 1570s Arabic was an integral part
of Turkish literature; however, a basic knowledge of this language was not highly regarded.
34 The early seventeenth-century scholar Ata’i related that one scribe, Muhammed Şerif (d. 1579),
made a living by merely copying Şakâ’ik; see Gönül, ‘İstanbul Kütüphânelerinde’, p. 138.
35 Mesih, Mesihi Divanı, ed. Mine Mengi (Ankara, 1985), p. 315. This poem seems to be a parallel
to the late ifteenth-century poet Le‘ali’s couplets. Le‘ali was from Tokat, but after travelling
559
se l i?m s. k uru
Using his pen-name, which means “related to Christ”, in a pun, he criti-

cised the attention paid in the land of Rum to those with an educational back-
ground in Persian or Arab lands.
Even though such complaints about the high regard shown to those edu-
cated in the eastern lands abound, most literary works were still composed
in Turkish, and composing a poetry collection in Persian in Rum, supposedly
the esteemed language of poetry, was uncommon.36 Poets generally included
their Persian verses separately at the end of their poetry collections, and those
were much fewer in number compared to those in Turkish.37 The number of
verse narratives in Persian was also few, and it was not common to compose
lengthy poetry in Arabic. Selim I did indeed compile his Persian poems in a
collection during the irst decades of the sixteenth century and, towards the
end of the period, Sultan Murad III wrote Arabic verses and commissioned
poets to write parallels to and interpretations of them, but these seem to
have been idiosyncratic and would not be pursued by Rum poets.38 Literary
and philosophical texts in Persian were less and less frequently produced,
and Arabic was reserved for religious commentaries and scientiic texts. But
Turkish became the major language of literature and historical writing. The
genre-related use of these three languages implies the linguistic competence
and education of the scholar cum poets of Rum. They were interested in
developing the high literary Turkish language rather than composing literary
works in Arabic or Persian.
Tools for language learning

In Rum during the earlier eras, Persian classics, such as Gülistan by Sadi
(1213–92) and Attar’s (1119–90) Pendname, as well as Rumi’s (1207–73) Mesnevi,
in Iran he came back to Istanbul and passed himself of as an Iranian, gaining the favour of
the palace and notables. Later, when his deception was revealed, he was expelled from high
literary circles and composed a poem similar to Mesihi’s quoted here. Telling Le‘ali’s story,
Latii says, “Apparently, there was excessive interest in, respect and attention for Iranian
people”, implying that this was not so by the mid-sixteenth century; see Latii, Tezkiretü’ş-
Şu‘arâ, pp. 473–4.
36 Ahmet Kartal identiies only 23 divans in Persian written between the eleventh and the
seventeenth centuries in Anatolia, some of these by poets of Persian origin. See Ahmet
Kartal, ‘Türk Fars Edebî İlişkileri’, in Şiraz’dan İstanbul’a: Türk-Fars Kültür Coğrafyası Üzerine
Araştırmalar (Istanbul, 2008), pp. 15–95.
37 For example, Ahmed Paşa’s (1426–97) poetry collection includes only 22 pieces of Arabic and
37 Persian couplets that are compiled in a separate chapter against 47 panegyrics, 353 lyric
poems and other Turkish verses. See Ahmed Paşa, Ahmed Paşa Divanı, ed. Ali Nihat Tarlan
(Istanbul, 1966).
38 All Ottoman rulers of this period, starting with Mehmed II, compiled collections of their poems,
which is not true for the preceding and following periods. For information on Ottoman sultans
who composed poetry and bibliographical references, see Günay Kut, ‘Payitaht İstanbul’un
Sultan Şairleri (Seyf ve’l-Kalem Sahipleri)’, İlmî Araştırmalar 9 (2000), 161–78.
560
which was itself a product of Rum as it was composed in Konya, seem to

have been the major sources for learning Persian, while Arabic was studied
through the Qur’an and a wide range of supporting literature. By the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century, a scholarly interest in the Arabic and Persian
languages became manifest in the publications of Kemalpaşazade.39 His
al-Tanbih ‘ala Galat al-Cahil wa’l-Nabih (Notices on Common and Uncommon
Errors) paved the way for a particular genre of dictionaries that present sole-
cisms (galatat), including misspellings, shifts in meaning and derivations from
Arabic or Persian loanwords that are commonplace in Anatolian Turkish.
Galatat dictionaries would evolve into a popular genre: guides for authors
in the reinement of usage.40 Tuhfe-i Şahidi (Souvenir by Şahidi), a rhymed
Turkish-Persian dictionary which was composed in 1514–15 by Şahidi (d. 1550),
a medrese-educated Mevlevi poet, came to serve as a primer for the learners
of Persian.41 A polyglot dictionary of Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Mongolian
which was composed in 1529 by İmadüddin Hüseyinoğlu Hasan Karahisari
(d. 1540) with the title Şamilü’l-Luğa (Comprehensive Vocabulary) testiies to
the growing interest in eastern languages.42 Many dictionaries composed or
translated in this period established the basis of Persian and Arabic language
learning in Rum until the early twentieth century.
Kemalpaşazade was also responsible for the Kava‘idü’l-Fürs (The Rules of
Persian Language), for some the irst-ever grammar of Persian in Arabic.43
39 For information about Kemalpaşazade, who is today appreciated as an historian, and his
works, see İbn Kemal, Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman VII. Defter, ed. Şerafettin Turan (Ankara, 1957), pp.
ix–xix.
40 See Günay Alpay [Kut], ‘Ghalatat-ı Meshhure’, in Gibb et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol.
2, p. 997.
41 For an excellent edition of this rhyming dictionary, see Antoinette C. Verburg, ‘The Tuḥfe-i
Şāhidī: A Sixteenth-Century Persian-Ottoman Dictionary in Rhyme’, Archivum Ottomanicum
15 (1997), 5–87. This edition includes a transcription and English translation of the introduc-
tion of the text (pp. 11–17), an annotated transcription of the dictionary (pp. 17–42), an anno-
tated tri-lingual index of Turkish and Persian vocabulary with their English equivalents (pp.
43–79) and a survey of hundreds of manuscripts and later print editions (pp. 82–7). Şahidi
organised his Tuhfe in order to teach Persian vocabulary “in meter”, employing a diferent
aruz scheme in each section. For more information on Tuhfe-i Şahidi and its inl uence, see
Yusuf Öz, Tuhfe-i Şâhidî Şerhleri (Konya, 1999).
42 For an edition of Şamilü’l-Lüğa with cross-referenced indexes, see Mustafa S. Kaçalin,
‘Hüseyinoğlu Hasan’ın Dört Dilli Sözlüğü: Şâmilü’l-lüğa’, Türk Dilleri Araştırmaları 7 (1997),
55–122.
43 For an analysis of Kava‘idü’l-Fürs, see Éva M. Jeremiás, “Kamālpāšāzāda as Linguist”, in Irano-
Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries, ed. Éva M. Jeremiás (Piliscsaba, [2002] 2003),
pp. 79–110. Jeremiás identiies more than eight extant manuscript copies and employs ive for
her research (p. 83). This text is generally confused with an earlier encyclopaedic work on the
Persian language written by İmam el-Bardahi in 1501. See Şeyh İmam el-Bardahi, Cami‘ü’l-
Fürs: Introduction and Textual Edition with a Facsimile, ed. Hatice Şahin, 2 vols. (Cambridge,
Mass., 2006). Composed in an Akkoyunlu court with a Persian introduction, el-Bardahi’s
Cami‘ü’l-Fürs includes a Persian-Turkish dictionary and a rhetorical manual in Turkish with
561
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However, an Anatolian Turkish grammar that was also composed in 1530–1

for the vezir İbrahim Paşa (d. 1536), an inl uential patron of the arts, must be
cited since it signiies the importance given to the systematic learning of lan-
guages.44 The author, Kadri of Bergama, about whom we do not have much
biographical information, explains his purpose as follows: “This book is in
and on Turkish so that its speakers will beneit from the book by comparing
other tongues to their language and acquire a good knowledge of them”.45 As
Kadri states here, Müyessiretü’l-Ulûm (Teacher of Knowledge) was modelled
after Arabic grammar books to ease learning especially of Arabic and Persian
through a grammatical understanding of Turkish.
The eforts by scholars to prepare tools for learning languages went hand-
in-hand with the development of a particular written form of Turkish through
practice in the scribal oices of the palace. Emulating Persian and eastern
Turkic documents, scribes had been crafting a new bureaucratic language
which involved a hierarchical employment of Persian and Arabic vocabulary
in the appellations and technical vocabulary.46 While translations from mostly
literary and historical texts introduced morphological and syntactic catego-
ries into Turkish, the new written language also became a ground for free
quotations from the Qur’an and hadith in Arabic, and especially from Sadi,
Attar, Hafez and Rumi’s works in Persian. This recalls Mustafa Ali’s descrip-
tion quoted in the epigraph to this section. While the number of dictionaries
and grammar books composed in this period displayed the wide interest in
and need for understanding Arabic and Persian which marked this period, the
development of these linguistic tools was also related to the emergence of a
new form of prose that made Mustafa Ali and his colleagues so proud.
The structure of prose

In the introduction to his anthology of Ottoman Turkish prose texts, Fahir İz
described three types of Turkish prose: plain prose, ornate prose and middle
examples from Persian poetry. One copy of this text was commissioned by Ahmed (d. 1513),
son of Bayezid II; see ibid., p. xli. This and other copies reveal the importance of Cami‘ü’l-
Fürs as well as the interest in such reference works in sixteenth-century Anatolia.
44 For İbrahim Paşa, who was one of the most inl uential patrons of arts, see Ebru Turan, ‘The
Sultan’s Favorite: Ibrahim Pasha and the Making of the Ottoman Universal Sovereignty in
the Reign of Sultan Suleyman (1516–1526)’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago (2007).
45 For a facsimile and transcribed edition of the text with indexes, see Bergamalı Kadri, Müyessiret-
ül-Ulûm, ed. Besim Atalay (Ankara, 1946); the quotation from p. 7 is my translation.
46 For the development of prose in the scribal oices, see Christine Woodhead, ‘From Scribe to
Litterateur: The Career of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Katib’, Bulletin of the British Society
for Middle Eastern Studies 9, 1 (1982), 55–74, especially pp. 60–1. Şinasi Tekin provides a history of
compositional manuals for scribes in his introduction to the edition of a late ifteenth-century
manual in Kırımlu Hafız Hüsam, Teressül, ed. Şinasi Tekin (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
562
prose. Plain prose was a kind of written Turkish closer to the spoken language
(which already included a good percentage of Arabic and Persian loanwords)
bereft of Persian and Arabic-origin morphological and syntactic forms. It had
made its appearance from the fourteenth century on in early compositions
and translations. Ornate prose (inşa) was composed by and for a learned group
in order to display knowledge of Persian, Arabic and Turkish starting with the
reign of Mehmed II. Middle prose was situated between high ornate prose
and plain prose. The introductory and concluding parts of a text, panegyric
sections and epitaphs came increasingly to be in ornate prose, but in anecdotal
or historical parts middle or even plain prose would continue to be employed.
According to İz, the middle prose, a hybrid form where authors switched from
one style to another, was the most commonly employed.47
The relationship between training in scribal oices and an elevated form of
written Turkish is clear from the fact that the irst writers to be famous in the
new medium of high literary prose were from among the state cadres, such
as Sinan Paşa (d. 1486), who was the vezir under the sultans Mehmed II and his
son Bayezid I, and Tacizade Cafer Çelebi (1459–1515), who worked as a nişancı
(imperial scribe) under Bayezid II and kadıasker (chief judge) of Anatolia
under his son Selim I before his execution.48 Sinan Paşa’s lengthy prose hymn
of God, Tazarruname, is a groundbreaking text in the making of ornate prose.
Although it lacked the lengthy Persian constructs that took over high literary
Turkish prose in the following decades, it perfected the rhyme schemes called
seci‘. As his emotions rise, caused by his feelings over the baseness of human
existence and his desire to reach God, Sinan Paşa’s melodic prose bursts into
poetic digressions that assume a discernable meter. His style was so efective
that high literary prose would be called “Sinan style” for decades to come.49
This style, called inşa (composition), a sub-category of nesr (prose), delivered
47 Fahir İz, Eski Türk Edebiyatında Nesir: XIV. Yüzyıldan XIX. Yüzyıl Ortasına Kadar Yazmalardan
Seçilmiş Metinler I (Istanbul, 1964), pp. v–xxii. In his study of Mustafa Ali’s prose style, Andreas
Tietze identiied (a) rhyme and rhythm, (b) internal rhyme, (c) alliteration, (d) homonymy,
(e) homography and near-homographs, (f ) igura etymologica, (g) loose phonological asso-
ciation and (h) thematic association as the language-based building blocks of this author’s
prose. He also analysed Mustafa Ali’s use of particular proverbs and comparisons in Andreas
Tietze, ‘Mustafa ‘Ali of Gallipoli’s Prose Style’, Archivum Ottomanicum 5 (1973), 297–319. While
Tietze’s analysis establishes a discourse analysis of high literary prose, it must be stressed that
this style also relied on history and mythology of the Near East as a reservoir of reference,
and these components established the stylistic and semantic basis for the art of poetry.
48 For Cafer Çelebi, see the excellent biographical essay by İsmail Erünsal in the introduction
to his edition of Cafer’s poetry collection, The Life and Works of Tâcî-zâde Caʻfer Çelebi, with a
Critical Edition of His Dîvân (Istanbul, 1983).
49 On Sinan Paşa and for an edition of the text in transcription, see Sinan Paşa, Tazarru’name,
ed. A. Mertol Tulum (Istanbul, 1971).
563
se l i?m s. k uru
the sound of poetry not only through abounding verse digressions but also
through rhyming noun or verbal phrases that mark diferent parts of the sen-
tences. Embedding Persian and Arabic quotations into Turkish, coming up
with fresh vocabulary drawn from Arabic and Persian, and freely employing
stock images of poetry in prose texts developed in the form of a competitive
game and established diferent codes within the realm of the written.
Even though there had been verse narrations of victories of Ottoman
sultans as well as of warrior lords who served them from the early ifteenth
century, writing stories of the Ottoman dynasty in this particular prose style
only became popular after the conquest of Constantinople. Aşıkpaşazade
(d. post 1484), a learned man from a prominent family, also employed rhym-
ing prose with poetic digressions in his Tevarih-i Ali Osman (History of the
Ottoman Dynasty). Yet his prose must be evaluated under the rubric of plain
prose. It is not comparable with Kemalpaşazade’s extensive history of the
Ottoman dynasty commissioned by Bayezid II, in which this style was devel-
oped into a more sustained narration technique.50 Later, through their texts,
authors such as Latii (d. 1582), Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi and Gelibolulu
Mustafa Ali would perfect the high prose, transforming it into a “path for
the most eloquent”, a closed system that was exclusively for the elite. By the
1600s, even while simpler versions of written Turkish developed in parallel, a
Rum style had fully incorporated two major written languages of Islam into
the canvas of Turkish due to lesser knowledge and/or lack of interest in dis-
playing Persian and Arabic competence.
The development of prose took manifold forms since Rum authors adopted
diferent styles according to their interests, educational backgrounds and/or
the genre they were writing in. Yet clearly, for ambitious writers, merely com-
ing up with a blend of Persian phraseology to it a spine made up of Turkish
word order was not enough. It was also necessary to write on a new theme,
and this is relected by many letter collections that appeared starting in the
early sixteenth century. These collections were compilations of selected let-
ters of an author in which he created new schemes to evaluate a particular
topic. Prepared with the ostensible purpose of providing epistolary models,
they allowed authors to boast of their prowess in prose.51 Indeed, while heated
50 For a detailed assessment of Kemalpaşazade’s Tevarih-i Al-i Osman, see İbn-i Kemal, Tevârih-i
âl-i Osman: II. Defter, pp. xix–xcviii.
51 Mustafa Ali, for example, came up with a “fresh” theme for a prose composition: the ire in
the Jewish district of Istanbul in 1569. He composed this work in the form of a letter about
this incident addressed to his teacher Kınalızade Ali Çelebi (1510–72), where he used the occa-
sion to praise the vezir Sokollu Mehmed Paşa for his handling of the situation; see Fleischer,
Bureaucrat and Intellectual, p. 56. For the transcribed text of the letter, see Gelibolulu Mustafa
564
debates on the value of poetry and prose continued, it had now become dii-
cult to tell prose from poetry unless one looked at the meter.52
Prose versus poetry

Prose or inşa, with its constant references to poetic forms, modes and styles,
marked the period from the 1450s on. Consequently, comparison of poetry
and prose was a popular theme. Latii, a proliic author and a biographer of
poets, stated in the dictionary entry about himself that he had composed in
his youth a poetry collection of 500 lyric poems and 33 eulogies, now lost to
us. Realising that anyone who sang a few couplets could pass himself of as a
poet and that “poets are like l ies, each pretending to be the Phoenix”, Latii
chose the path of prose which was “the seat of the learned”. In this lengthy
manifesto in defence of prose, Latii also claims to have invented an “elo-
quence-manifesting style” by mixing proverbs, sayings and witticisms and,
by comparing his style in prose to that in poetry of the leading poet of Rum,
Necati (d. 1509), to have elevated prose to the level of poetry.53
A defence of poetry appears in poet and scholar Nev’i’s (1533–99) work
Netayicü’l-Fünun (Consequences of Sciences), on classiication of sciences.
When a grand vezir claimed, “A poet can’t be a scholar”, Nev’i developed
a lengthy discourse in response, drawing on the Qur’an and traditions of
the Prophet to claim the superiority of poetry over prose as the convening
of divine wisdom and spiritual knowledge in poetry.54 These are only two
instances of the difering ideas on poetry and prose, even though poetry dei-
nitely constituted a reservoir for the new prose with respect to vocabulary,
imagery and tropes. While these two styles of writing would be employed
in order to express all sorts of emotional or social experience within a frame-
work of an age-old mystical understanding of the universe, it is clearly prose
which made a huge leap ahead in relation to poetry. It set up another challenge
Ali, Menşeü’l-İnşâ, ed. İ. Hakkı Aksoyak (Ankara, 2007), pp. 78–84. One of the earliest compi-
lations by scholar and poet Lamii is available in a transcribed edition and Turkish translation
in Hasan Ali Esir, Münşeât-ı Lâmiî: (Lâmiî Çelebi’nin Mektupları)-İnceleme-Metin-İndeks-Sözlük
(Trabzon, 2006). Lamii provides a lengthy discourse on comparing prose and poetry in his
introduction (pp. 80–101).
52 The irst instances of a rarely used but carefully noted form of prose poetry, bahr-ı tavil,
also appeared during this period. For a description, examples and bibliographical references,
see İsmail Hakkı Aksoyak, ‘Anadolu Sahasında İlk Bahr-ı Tavîl Ahmed Paşa’nın Mıdır?’, in 1.
Klasik Türk Edebiyatı Sempozyumu, ed. Atabey Kılıç (Kayseri, 2009), pp. 4–22.
53 See Latii, Tezkiretü’ş-Şu‘ara, pp. 486–7. Latii reiterates his ideas in the conclusion to his work
(see p. 579). For a discussion of Latii ’s prose style and this particular section, see Walter G.
Andrews, ‘The Teẕkere-i Şu‘arā of Laţīfī as a Source for the Critical Evaluation of Ottoman
Poetry’, Ph.D. thesis, The University of Washington (1970), pp. 40–4.
54 Nev’i, Netâyicü’l-Fünûn, ed. Ömer Tolgay (Istanbul, n.d.), pp. 252–7.
565
se l i?m s. k uru
to Rum litterateurs, forcing out those who did not have a similar educational
background in Persian and Arabic.
Of course, against all the controversy around it, poetry was the core of
literature, as high literary prose was perceived as its culmination. Poetry had
indeed invaded almost all genres of writing, some of which today are in the
realm of prose.55 In recent studies, the rise of ornate prose composition is
overshadowed by poetry. While this may be due to the fact that poetic idiom
determined the rules of the new ornate prose, it could be argued that ifteenth-
century Rumi poetic expression displaced ornate prose insofar as it gained a
lexibility that enabled authors to utilise verse to compose everything from
didactic manuals to dictionaries, from histories to personal conduct manu-
als. The debates around şi’r and inşa were happening in the background of a
vivid literary scene, where new kinds of literary texts were being produced.
Parallel to a more conscious attitude towards language, poetry and prose, a
major change that distinguished the period was an unprecedented relexive
turn that appeared in works of literature.
The development of the language and the discussions and debates around
the concepts of poetry and prose relected the evolving concept of a Rum
poet. The new language, new forms and new themes gave a distinct voice
to the Rum author. The emergence of autobiographical themes in literary
works would alter traditional forms and contents and introduce authorial
contexts into texts, an element that would be integral to the Rumi literary
identity. I would like to look irst into the new forms and contents of this fresh
literary development in the following section and then discuss the literary
tools that enabled them. The literary identity of a Rum poet was shaped by
this amazing literary renewal.
Forms and contents of a new literature

There has been a lot of talk among the people of love
Yet not a word about the hidden states56
55 The number of poetry collections composed in this period alone indicates the extent to
which poetry had expanded its territory. While today we have only ive or six extant poetry
collections (divan) by Rum poets who lived before the mid-ifteenth century, more than 30
were published by the year 1538, the year Sehi completed the irst biographical dictionary
of Rum poets. More than 40 would be produced by the end of the sixteenth century. Even
though the data are drawn from an inadequate source that includes only the copies of poetry
collections in Istanbul libraries [İstanbul Kitaplıkları Türkçe Divanlar Kataloğu 1 (Istanbul,
1947)], it is still impressive, especially when considered along with the rise in the number of
poets in the poetry compilations.
56 Hande Özer, ‘Nev‘î’nin Hasb-i Hâl’i’, M.A. thesis, Marmara Üniversitesi (1994), p. 16.
566
Because poetry is the fruit of the tree of love and it is the light for the
mysteries of love57
In these couplets, poetry and love come together. While Nev’i in the former
expresses a complaint, Aşık Çelebi in the latter deines poetry as love’s fruit,
as well as the key to its comprehension. Aşık Çelebi’s statement from the
introduction to his biographical dictionary closes the section on the function
of poetry. It is a key to understanding poetry, at times as an expression of the
poet’s desire and longing, at times a discourse on the nature of love and at
times a trap for hunting beauties.
In the couplet from his allegorical verse narrative Hasb-i Hal (Discourse on
Current States) about the stages of mystical love, poet and scholar Nev’i, on
the other hand, complains that “people of love” (ehl-i aşk) do not talk about
the hidden states (vakı’-ı hal), which may be simply deined as the divine
nature of existence. He composes his work as the expression of love as a mys-
tical experience that underlies the expression of love in gazel.58 While Nev’i
developed a narrative describing the ideal lover, his work, composed towards
the end of the sixteenth century, can also be read as a critique of the growing
autobiographical story, a popular topic that can be traced back to the late if-
teenth century.
On the surface, not much formal change appeared in comparison to the
preceding era. Poetry continued to evolve around the medium of two lines,
beyt, and three basic forms, gazel, kaside and mesnevi, were distinguished by
rhyme schemes, composition and length.59 Formal limitations of these forms
were manipulated by the available schemes in the intricate metric system of
aruz.60 Kaside, praise poetry, a lengthy composition of up to or even more
57 Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, vol. 1, p. 172.

58 For a discussion of these terms and summaries of lyric romances that tell autobiographi-
cal stories, see Ali Emre Özyıldırım, ‘Sergüzeştnâmeler Üzerine Hasbihâl ya da Hasbihâlin
Sergüzeşti’, in Nazımdan Nesire Edebî Türler, ed. Hatice Aynur, Müjgân Çakır, Hanife Koncu,
Selim S. Kuru and Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul, 2009), pp. 135–65; for the discussion on
Hasb-i Hal, see pp. 136–9.
59 Aşık Çelebi names kaside, gazel, murabba, rubai, kıt’a and mesnevi as the parts (aksam) of
poetry; see Aşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, p. 280. However, in the organisation of a poetry
collection, irst kasides, then gazels and then shorter forms of poems were compiled in sep-
arate sections. Mesnevis were arranged after the kasides along with other lengthier forms,
while murabbas and kıtas, along with other shorter forms, were generally located in the clos-
ing section of the collected poems of a poet in this period.
60 For basic deinitions of Ottoman poetic forms, see Walter G. Andrews, An Introduction to
Ottoman Poetry (Minneapolis, 1976), and Cem Dilçin, Örneklerle Türk Şiir Bilgisi: Ölçüler, Uyak,
Nazım Biçimleri, Söz Sanatları (Ankara, 1983). On the adaptation of classical Persian prosody
to Ottoman Turkish, see Finn Thiesen, A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody, with Chapters on
Urdu, Karakhanidic and Ottoman Prosody (Wiesbaden, 1982), pp. 217–25.
567
se l i?m s. k uru
than a hundred rhymed couplets, was indicative of patronage.61 Gazel, a much

shorter form (generally ive to seven couplets) with the same rhyme scheme,
expressed the wailings and sighs of lovers who were enchanted by a symbolic
world. These two forms established the basis for an author’s poetry collection
called divan. Mesnevi, verse narratives with independent rhyming couplets,
on the other hand, was another popular form in which to compose stories,
essays, satire, praise and complaint. The system of genre was not irmly ixed,
and three basic forms were employed for similar themes; that is, a gazel prais-
ing a patron or a kaside written in a lyric sensitivity, with mesnevi performing
all possible functions. Basically, these forms pointed to diferent contexts; for
example, a gazel would be performed in a gathering (meclis) since its brevity
made for easy recitation.
Gazel: The wails of lovers

Lyric poetry formed the major part of literary production, and the most volu-
minous collections of gazels appeared in this period. Poets were employing
gazel to discuss and re-evaluate poetry, referring to their predecessors and
rival poets in their poems. At the end of the sixteenth century, Gelibolulu
Mustafa Ali, who is responsible for three divans, identiied the masters of the
form as follows:
Hayâlî, Hayretî, Ahmed, Necâtî,
Celîlî vü Mesîhî, Fazlî, Zâtî
Some have more character than fame:
Hayretî and Celîlî and Fazlî
Some, more fame than character:
Mesîhî and Ahmed and Zâtî
And some were famous for their character and respected as they are
renowned:
One of those is eminent Hayâlî reminiscent of
The other master Necâtî62
Mustafa Ali’s list demonstrates a canon of the early sixteenth-century poets.

His preference for Hayali and Necati shows his local leanings since these two
61 For a short essay on kaside, see Mehmet Çavuşoğlu, ‘Kasîde’, Türk Dili 415–16 (1986), 17–77. For
a novel approach to kaside with respect to genre, modes and patronage relations, see Walter
G. Andrews, ‘Speaking of Power: The Ottoman Kaside’, in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and
Africa, I: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, ed. S. Sperl and C. Shackle (Leiden, 1996),
pp. 281–300.
62 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, Dîvânı: Textual Analysis and Critical Edition, ed. İ. Hakkı Aksoyak
(Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p. 178. This edition compiles all three divans of Mustafa Ali in two
volumes. The quotation is from the introduction to the irst divan, which was copied in 1567.
568
poets are known for their use of local expressions and themes. They are also
known for using plain language to mask rhetorical igures accessible only to
educated Rum elite. Apparently, Necati’s and Hayali’s plain sounding intricate
verses were more in fashion at the end of the sixteenth century in some quar-
ters than Ahmed Paşa and Baki’s ornate verses.63
Mustafa Ali’s poem about notable poets mirrored many gazels written in
this vein.64 Distinct from the previous periods, gazels produced from the late
ifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century hosted another signiicant theme,
the gazel form itself:
O my heart, how many gazels you sung, it is impossible
to comply with the demands of the form,
To perform a subtlety in each line
is expected by each and every one
Is it easy in the end
to satisfy all the world?
In these lines Necati, who was recognised as the master poet of Rum,
expresses an awareness of the varying expectations of his readers from gazel.
One issue that polarised readers, the balance between clarity of mean-
ing and plays on words, as discussed, was expressed by Nev’i, who clearly
favoured simple verses over ornate ones:
Even if the masters of arts do not like this plain verse
Don’t worry, Nev’i, your words are a lover’s sighs65
Here Nev’i claims that his words are the pure sighs of a lover, not a crafted
word game. Similar couplets, where poets identiied their poems with their
sighs or their beloveds, abound in this period. The poem becomes a mir-
ror image of emotion, a mirror image of the beauty of the beloved, and a
63 As Walter G. Andrews also stated, “If Ahmed Paşa is the icon of a moment of literary appro-
priation (from Persia via Herat and from the Persian masters via Câmî through Nevâ’î)
Necâtî is the moment at which that appropriation is seen as naturalized in an Ottoman con-
text”. See Walter G. Andrews, ‘Other Selves, Other Poets, and the Other Literary History:
An Essay in Three Movements’, in Intersections in Turkish Literature, ed. Walter G. Andrews
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001), p. 75.
64 For two examples of similar lyrics, see Emine Yeniterzi, ‘Divan Şiirinde Gazel Redil i
Gazeller’, Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 18 (2005), 1–10, especially pp. 9–10.
65 For a treasury of such relexive gazels, see Cem Dilçin, ‘Divan Şiirinde Gazel’, Türk Dili 415–17
(1986), 78–247, especially pp. 119–34. Necati’s verse is on p. 124 and Nev’i’s is on p. 174. Nev’i’s
line is suggestive of a fashion in this period called Türki-i Basit, according to which Rum
poets composed poems employing only spoken Turkish vocabulary. For scholarly discus-
sions of this trend, see Hatice Aynur, ‘Rethinking the Türk î-i Basît Movement in Turkish
Literature’, Archivum Ottomanicum 25 (2008), 79–97.
569
se l i?m s. k uru
mirror image of the lover himself. While poets composed more and more
gazels as symbols of their status as lovers, it is almost impossible to talk about
a homogenised deinition for the lover. Contesting ideas and ideals of love
informed diferent “lover” positions.66 The poet’s identity as a lover had
already been established in the Islamicate literary traditions. Now, however,
the gazel, the basic expression of love, became not only a narration of its
unfolding but also a direct representation of love in the abstract, or a repre-
sentation of its object. In the latter case, a gazel became a mirror relecting the
beauty of the beloved. As the lover-poet materialised his love and his lover’s
beauty in the form of the gazel and assumed a historical dimension through
references to established tradition, the poet’s identity as a lover also appeared
in longer autobiographical narratives of love afairs or discourses on love by
poets of difering professional positions in the state machine.
As the gazel form became more and more inclusive of the poet’s ideas on
poetry and relective of the tradition, beginning in the mid-ifteenth century,
the gazel became increasingly linked to Rumi identity.
Kaside: The wailings of subjects

Poets elaborated on the formal peculiarities of the form and imagery with
respect to the existing models (as explored in the section on parallel poems)
through their gazels; the kaside form, on the other hand, presented them with
diferent opportunities and challenges. Most examples of the form were reli-
giously motivated, to testify to the oneness of God (tevhid), to pray for for-
giveness (münacaat) and to praise the prophet Muhammed (naat) or the four
rightly guided caliphs. However, in this period the kaside as a genre evolved
in parallel to the evolution of Ottoman dynastic rule. While religious kasides
continued to form the initial entries in a divan, they were followed by several
others dedicated to patrons, friends and beloveds.
A kaside took the compositional form of an introductory section that sets
the theme of the composition, followed by praise of the patron, after which
there might be a climax in the form of a gazel. The composition continued
with a short section concerning a speciic request of the poet from his or her
patron and concluded with the poet boasting of his poetic skills. There were
various occasions for composing kasides. In this period, religious holidays,
seasonal changes, an enthronement, a royal death or appointment to a higher
oice motivated the dedication of a kaside to the court, Ottoman princes,
vezirs or scholars. While kaside carried the implication of patronage relations,
66 See Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds.
570
it would be too restrictive to limit it to this function only. Several kasides were
also prompted by a beloved, enemies, new buildings or a book by a friend, or
merely by the joy of inding an interesting repeating rhyme element. Kaside
also carried political messages, such as Taşlıcalı Yahya’s elegy for the execu-
tion of Süleyman I’s son Mustafa.67
While the kaside, like the gazel, established the grounds for a poet to show
his skills, it also implied his network of relations. Indeed, kasides in a Rum
poet’s collection of poems constituted the most telling section about his life
and times. However, there is not much scholarship on how these lengthy
works were composed, and more importantly how they were performed.
There is an interesting short prose work titled Ser-güzeşt-i Esiri-i Malta (The
Account of Slavery in Malta) by Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi, a judge who
fell captive to the Knights of Malta at the end of the sixteenth century on
his way to Cyprus. In this fascinating slavery narrative, Mustafa Efendi, who
is not known as a poet and about whom we do not have any biographical
information apart from this text, also recorded his various verses, including
the kasides that he sent to the court, explaining the context for each poem. In
his kasides, Mustafa Efendi constantly pleads with his patrons, among whom
was Saiye Sultan, the mother of Mehmed III, for ransom money, stressing his
scholarly identity, which he uses as a mark of distinction before his non-Mus-
lim captors as well as fellow Muslims from diferent social groups.68 Along
with these kasides, Mustafa Efendi, using Mustafa as his pen-name, included
verses in Turkish, Persian and Arabic, relecting his skills in composing poetry
in any available form for various occasions, and poems in the text are com-
mented upon in a lowing simple prose.69 However, if Mustafa Efendi were
a “poet”, he would most probably have chosen to describe his ordeal in the
67 According to an interesting interpretation by A. Atilla Şentürk, this well-known elegy, which

was in terkib-i bend form, was a satire targeting Süleyman I. Şentürk’s work includes an
edited, modern Turkish translation and extensive analysis of the work; see A. Atilla Şentürk,
Yahyâ Beğ’in Şehzâde Mustafa Mersiyesi Yahut Kanunî Hicviyesi (Istanbul, 1998).
68 Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi, Malta Esirleri, ed. Cemil Çiftçi (Istanbul, 1996); for the kaside
dedicated to Saiye Sultan, see pp. 41–6. Interestingly, the poet Nev’i also dedicated two kasides
to Saiye Sultan; see Nev’i, Nev’î Dîvanı, ed. M. Tulum and M. A. Tanyeri (Istanbul, 1977), pp.
22–3, 80–2. Saiye Sultan is the only woman that I have come across to whom kasides were
dedicated. It was extremely rare for a kaside to be dedicated to a woman in this period. For
Saiye Sultan, see Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Saiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy’, Turcica
32 (2000), 9–32.
69 There are 15 gazels (2 in Persian), 11 kasides (6 in the form of terci-bends and 3 müseddes),
1 murabba, 5 rubais, 12 chronograms (tarih) and several short verses throughout the text.
Apparently each verse is composed not necessarily for a literary motive but rather as an
expression of the pains of slavery in order to collect ransom money from patrons. The text
relects the important role of poetry in the lives of learned men of Rum.
571
se l i?m s. k uru
mesnevi form, which underwent an astonishing transformation and diversii-

cation in Rum in this period.
Mesnevi: Stories of love

The most important transformation in the literary space showed itself in a
rather drastic manner in the mesnevi form. By this period, it had already devel-
oped as the basic form of narration suitable for expressing ideas, relating his-
torical and current events and developing philosophical and religious tracts
and reference works, such as dictionaries and textbooks. But now it was used
to compose literary works about adventures and – more important for my
argument here – love.70 Mesnevi had in fact been the most prevalent form of
literary writing from early on in Anatolian Turkish literature, due to its for-
mal lexibility in incorporating diferent poetic forms. The common elements
in the initial chapters of these lengthy narratives included praises to God, the
Prophet and the patrons. They were similar to the kaside form, while gazels,
in which were found almost all verse romances in the Rumi style, were occa-
sionally sung by protagonists.71
At the end of the ifteenth century, verse romances became more and more
popular as a high literary art, and the re-interpretations of legendary love
stories became more competitive. By the end of the sixteenth century, there
were many competing versions of Leyla and Mecnun or Yusuf and Züleyha
stories, retold by diferent poets.72 These stories were diferent from popular
epic stories of earlier periods that took place in distant and at times imagi-
nary locations, such as Varka and Gülşah or Hüsrev and Şirin. Not only were
these stories epic adventures, but they also presented thematic diferences, for
example very active and exemplary female characters, who were companions
70 For a detailed bibliography of recent editions and scholarly work on mesnevi literature, see
Ahmet Kartal, ‘Mesnevî Bibliyografyası’, in Ahmet Kartal, Şiraz’dan İstanbul’a: Türk-Fars
Kültür Coğrafyası Üzerine Araştırmalar (Istanbul, 2008), pp. 579–95. For a much-cited classiica-
tion of works in mesnevi form, see İsmail Ünver, ‘Mesnevî’, Türk Dili 415–17 (1986), 430–563.
For a recent classiication and evaluation of mesnevis produced in this period, see Muhsin
Macit, ‘Mesnev’iler’, in Halman et al., Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, pp. 55–72. An analytical study of
the genre and form relationship in verse narratives is yet to appear.
71 About the use of gazel in Turkic lyric narratives, see Robert Dankof, ‘Lyric in Romance:
Use of Ghazals in Persian and Turkish Masnawis’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 43, 1 (1984),
9–25.
72 Before Şahidi’s version composed in 1478, there were no “Leyla and Mecnun” stories told
in the form of a lyrical romance. Even though there were two earlier “Yusuf and Züleyha”
stories, that of Hamdullah Hamdi (1449–1503), Yusuf and Züleyha, established the basis for the
versions that followed and arguably was the best-loved version for decades to come. For an
edition of the text, see Hamdullah Hamdi, Ḥamdu’llah Ḥamdī’nin Yūsuf ve Zelīḫā Mesnevisi:
Giriş, Metin, İnceleme ve Tıpkıbasım, ed. Zehra Öztürk (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
572
of their male lovers in war and love.73 In the new stories of love based on his-
torical legend, female characters initiated discussions of chastity, and in other
kinds of popular stories they totally disappeared.74
While classical Islamicate stories modelled after Nizami and/or Cami’s
works were becoming popular, a remarkable body of works that combined
autobiography and discussions of love appeared in the late ifteenth century. A
poet from Baghdad with the pen-name Halili (1407–85) told his own love story
in a verse narrative entitled Fürkatname (The Book of Separation) (composed
in 1461), in which he inds a true love of God during his trip to Rum through
a worldly passion he had for a boy.75 In 1493, Cafer Çelebi composed his lyric
romance Hevesname (The Book of Desire), which recounts his love afair with
a woman. Cafer Çelebi presented his work as an innovation (ihtira), the clos-
est term to “originality” employed by the poets of Rum. Cafer Çelebi, who,
signiicantly, chose the same title for his work as that used by Paşa Çelebi for
his rhetorical manual, Hevesname, composed his work in reference to many
diferent genres.76 In the sixteenth century, Taşlıcalı Yahya (d. 1575 or 1576),
probably relying on these two works, told of his love for an Istanbul boy in Şah
u Geda (King and Beggar; composed ca. the 1540s). He modiied the Persianate
allegorical “King and Beggar” stories by using King as the nickname of his
beloved and fashioning himself as the Beggar. Yahya did not mention Cafer
Çelebi in his mesnevi. Yet by saying “Do not mention stories of women /
Relate us stories about young boys” in the middle of his discourse on love, he
expressed an indirect criticism of Hevesname, which recounted Cafer Çelebi’s
73 While many poets admire Şeyhi’s (d. 1431) Hüsrev ü Şirin, they also complain about his choice
of story. For examples by many sixteenth-century poets who criticise “Hüsrev and Şirin”
as an outdated story, see Tunca Kortantamer, Nev’î-zâde Atâyî ve Hamse’si (Izmir, 1997), pp.
405–7. Also see how Ahi, an early sixteenth-century poet, decides not to complete his Hüsrev
ü Şirin upon the criticism of his mystical leader that the story tells the adventures of a non-
Muslim king, in Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, vol. 1, p. 393. For extensive information on
individual mesnevis composed in Anatolian Turkish until the sixteenth century, see A. Atilla
Şentürk, XVI. Asra Kadar Anadolu Sahası Mesnevîlerinde Edebî Tasvirler (Istanbul, 2002).
74 For a general survey on the changing role of female characters throughout Turkish literary
history, see Selim S. Kuru, ‘Women, Gender and Representations of Sexualities and Gender
in Poetry and Prose; Pre-Modern, including Courtly Poetry and Prose: Turkish’, in The
Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, ed. Suad Joseph and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Leiden,
2006), vol. 5, pp. 493–8.
75 For a description of the text, see Günay Kut, ‘Fürkat-nâme’, in Yazmalar Arasında: Eski Türk
Edebiyatı Araştırmaları (Istanbul, 2005), pp. 181–98.
76 For an analysis of the references to various genres in Hevesname, see Atay, ‘Heves-nâme’de
Aşk Oyunu’. For an evaluation and comparison of Fursatname and Hevesname with respect to
their diferences from previous lyric romances, see Selim S. Kuru, ‘Mesnevî Biçiminde Aşk
Hali’, in Nazımdan Nesire Edebî Türler, ed. Hatice Aynur, Müjgân Çakır, Hanife Koncu, Selim
S. Kuru, Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul, 2009), pp. 168–83.
573
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adulterous love afair with a woman.77 Yahya claimed women could only be
objects of sexual desire, and he argued that the only way to experience true
love in this world was through the contemplation of the beauty of a boy.78
Biographical writing did exist in Anatolian Turkish before these works
appeared, but autobiographical writing did not exist at all. These works pre-
ceded both the biographical notices in a variety of texts and more straight-
forward autobiographical verse narratives. In this way, what preceded the
narration of a literary biography was in fact the narrative of a love afair.79
Not only did the poet’s self-fashioning as the lover (a major component of
Rumi identity)80 in romance contribute to the development of a particular
elite identity in Rum, but such poets’ realistic descriptions of particular cities
of Rum in verse also introduced a distinct sense of place to literary works.81
Indeed, narrative time and place relected an unprecedented realism in the
autobiographical romances by Halili, Cafer Çelebi and Yahya, unlike adven-
ture stories or classical stories.
Cities of Anatolia, for example, appeared in poetry in connection with
pleasure drawn from the sense of sight. The şehrengiz genre suddenly became
enormously popular in Istanbul with the appearance of Mesihi’s Şehrengiz-i
77 For an edition and English translation of Yahya’s work, see Ralph Jaeckel, ‘Dukaginzade
Taşlıcalı Yahya Bey’s King and Beggar: A Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Allegorical-Mystical
Love Poem’, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles (1980), p. 169, couplet 522.
Yahya’s work attracted an extraordinary number of readers for a mesnevi of this sort in its
time. Jaeckel identiied 103 extant manuscript copies, 35 of which were copied by the end
of the sixteenth century (p. 86), a very large number for copies of a lengthy lyric romance.
However, this work has to date attracted very little scholarly interest.
78 For an evaluation of similar works, titled sergüzeştname, a term which came to refer to
autobiographical narratives in this period, see Özyıldırım, ‘Sergüzeştnâmeler’. A chronolog-
ical list of such works appears on p. 161 of that work.
79 For an example of an autobiography in verse, see Şemsi Ahmed Paşa, Silsilename, in Şehnâme-i
Sultan Murad: Textual Analysis and Critical Edition along with Facsimile of Vaticana Barberiniani
Orient No. 112, ed. Günay Kut and Nimet Bayraktar (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), pp. 25–8. It is
not clear why such short autobiographical verse narratives, reminiscent of today’s personal
statements, were written.
80 It should be noted that gazavatname, descriptions of battles in verse describing heroic acts of
sultans, princes and frontier lords, also experienced wide popularity in this period. And some
poets depicted themselves as warriors as well. Compared to the lover, however, this was not
a common literary identity unless the battles fought were in the name of love. On the gaza-
vatname genre, see Agah Sırrı Levend, Gazavât-nâmeler ve Mihaloglu Ali Bey’in Gazavât-nâmesi
(Ankara, 1956).
81 In this respect, see the aforementioned Lamii’s lengthy description of Bursa, which is also
reminiscent of the description of Istanbul by Cafer Çelebi in Hevesname, as a self-standing
verse narrative. For a transcribed edition, see Mustafa İsen and Hamit Burmaoğlu, ‘Lâmi’nin
Bursa Şehr-engizi’, Yedi İklim 40 (1993), 103–5, and for two diferent interpretations see Michele
Bernardini, ‘Ottoman “Timuridism”: Lāmiʿi Çelebi and His Şehrengiz of Bursa’, in Jeremiás,
Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts, pp. 1–16, and Selim S. Kuru, ‘Lami’i Çelebi’nin Gözüyle Bursa’,
in Osman Gazi ve Bursa Sempozyumu Bildiri Kitabı, ed. Cafer Çiftçi (Bursa, 2005), pp. 215–24.
574
Edirne during the irst decades of the sixteenth century.82 This genre, in which
beautiful boys who roam the streets were presented as the pride of a city, was
concerned with comparisons of a form of worldly love, or more correctly
metaphorical love (aşk-ı mecazi) and true love (aşk-ı hakiki), a much com-
mented-on topic that was formulated in the literature of the period. Şehrengiz
texts were the expressions of metaphorical love, the objects for which were
the beautiful pubescent boys who were not sullied by sexual lust or the social
world of adults.
Mesihi’s text was received as a genre-making work laying out a particular
composition for his followers. After a supplication to God to save him from
the sinful obsession of worshipping boys, Mesihi displayed his skills in the
rhetorical arts by describing the beauties of 47 boys of Edirne and inished his
178-couplet work daring the other poets to imitate his text:
Mesihi managed to praise as much as he could
if you don’t like it, go ahead, give it a try83
Apparently many poets took up Mesihi’s challenge, and within our period of
150 years 78 responses were composed describing the beautiful boys of major
cities of the empire, mostly following the compositional pattern established
by Mesihi.84
What Mesihi accomplished was signiicant with respect to the variation
and diversiication of genres in the literary landscape of Rum. He invented a
new genre, taking a lengthy section from Cafer Çelebi’s Hevesname, making
use of Arabic and the Persian tarifat genre and drawing on the fad of using
boys’ names in gazels sung in praise of their beauty. These shorter mesnevis
not only relect an inter-city rivalry among the poets of Rum through depic-
tions of the beautiful boys of several cities but, more importantly, they also
contributed to the discussions and debates emerging around a particular
understanding of “love”, seemingly one major identity marker among cer-
tain groups of learned elite. Furthermore, in the form of extended lyric nar-
ratives, şehrengiz were personal texts in which the poet talked about real boys
82 For an edition of this work, see Mengi, Mesîhî Divanı, pp. 89–109.
83 Ibid., p. 109.
84 For a detailed bibliographical study of these texts, see Barış Karacasu, ‘Türk Edebiyatında
Şehr-eng îzler’, Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi 5, 10 (2007), 259–313. For a study of
İshak Çelebi’s şehrengiz of Skopje with a focus on how love is deined in the introductory
sections of şehrengiz texts, see Selim S. Kuru, ‘Naming the Beloved in Ottoman Turkish
Gazel: The Case of İshak Çelebi’, in Gazel as World Literature II: From a Literary Genre to a
Great Tradition, Ottoman Gazel in Context, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, M. Hess, J. Pfeifer and B.
Sagaster (Würzburg, 2006), pp. 163–73.
575
se l i?m s. k uru
he had met. They were similar to autobiographical romances in which the

lover/poet extols the beauty of his beloved. Establishing crossroads between
the lyric and narrative, şehrengiz texts, with their rather brief popularity and
later disappearance, represent another instance of a relexive turn in literary
depictions of love that deined sixteenth-century Rum literature.
While the mesnevi form continued to host a variety of topics, the appear-
ance of the narrator as the protagonist was the most striking feature of this
period. This sort of literary autobiography paved the way for various prose
narrations of the self and others that would appear from the late sixteenth
century onwards.85
Prose genres
The autobiographical turn presented itself in prose literature as well. One of
the irst instances is Taşköprüzade’s Arabic autobiography that he added at
the end of his biographical dictionary, and the irst Turkish autobiography
seems to be that of Latii ’s entry in his biographical dictionary of poets.86
Ornate prose, inşa, had trajectories other than autobiograhical or ictional
composition, and the major output of inşa is represented by various letter
collections, which have not yet received the study they deserve.
In addition to letter collections, various original story collections were writ-
ten in inşa. Stories are generally told in straightforward language; however,
some employ a higher literary form of language. Apart from translations of
large compendia of stories, local stories were put into writing in this period.
For example, while scholar and poet Lamii (d. 1531) collected many stories
from Arabic and Persian sources in his Letaifname (Book of Witticisms), he
also added contemporary anecdotes, some about the preceding generation of
poets. Similarly, when poet Gazali (d. 1538) brought together sexually explicit
stories from diferent Arabic and Persian compilations in a mock ethical
treatise, he included many local jokes and witticisms.87 These compilations
classify stories under particular topics, the most common of which include
anecdotes about historical personalities, the wiles of women and the unruly
ways of state oicials.
85 For a seminal essay on autobiographical writing in the Ottoman Empire, see Cemal Kafadar,
‘Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth Century Istanbul and First-Person
Narratives in Ottoman Literature’, Studia Islamica 69 (1989), 191–218.
86 For information on Taşköprüzade’s autobiography, see Eyüp Baş, ‘Dil-Tarih İlişkisi
Bağlamında Osmanlı Türklerinde Arapça Tarih Yazıcılığı’, Ankara Üniversitesi İlahiyat
Fakültesi Dergisi 46 (2005), 103–32, especially pp. 106–7.
87 About this original work, see Selim S. Kuru, ‘Sex in the Text: Deli Birader’s Dâi‘ü ‘l-Gumûm
ve Râi‘ü ‘l-Humûm and the Ottoman Literary Canon’, Middle Eastern Literatures 10, 2 (2007),
157–74.
576
The writing of one story compilation, on the other hand, is relective of

the high demand for these prose works. Apparently Murad III wanted to hear
original stories and commissioned poet Cinani (d. 1595) to compile previ-
ously unheard-of tales. Cinani composed the work under the title Bedayiü’l-
Asar (Most Ornate Stories) and, after having a scribe transcribe it, he gave
it to an artist to illuminate the pages for the presentation copy. One of the
storytellers in Murad III’s court, Derviş Eğlence, being friends with the illu-
minator, read the copy and told the stories to the sultan before the book
was ready. When Cinani presented his work, not only did he not receive
any payment, but he was also shunned by the sultan for merely record-
ing the stories already told by Eğlence instead of telling previously untold
ones. This anecdote, recorded by Nevizade Atayi (1583–1635), points to the
great popularity of tales in this period and the interest in “original” stories
rather than commonly transmitted classical stories found in traditional story
collections.88
Letters and story collections in ornate prose as well as particular historical
texts were accepted as literature. Kemalpaşazade’s aforementioned history of
the Ottoman dynasty was especially praised for the beauty of its language.
While a detailed discussion of this is beyond the limits of this chapter, it
should be noted that some of the histories were also literary in the way they
described real events in ornate language with allusions and similes drawn
from poetic imagery.
The forms discussed in this section represent a fraction of the prevalent
forms and themes that mostly appeared in this period. A new language was
being developed in new genres and forms. There were of course continuities
with the preceding periods with respect to themes. As I mentioned earlier,
what was accepted as literary was always under the inl uence of a set of texts
previously adopted and studied as classics. Attar’s Pendname, a book on moral
conduct, Sadi’s (d. 1291) Gülistan, a treatise on ethics mixing prose and poetry,
Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi’s (d. 1273) Mesnevi, a lengthy verse narrative on
mystical parables, and the lyric poetry collection of Hafez (d. 1390) were con-
stantly mined for vocabulary, imagery and themes. Just as the Qur’an and the
hadith established the basis for learning Arabic and formed a core of liter-
ary themes, these texts were the holy books for the Rum poets, from which
88 Cinani, in his voluminous work, compiled 79 lengthy stories in three chapters: wiles of
women, tales of war and tales about super-natural beings. For a critical edition of the work,
see Cinani, Bedâyiü’l-Âsâr ed. Osman Ünlü (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). For a general list of
story compilations, see Hasan Kavruk, Eski Türk Edebiyatında Mensûr Hikâyeler (Istanbul,
1998).
577
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they learned a particular form of the Persian language that expressed mystical
love.89
Literary tools for poets of Rum

Two select and unparalleled majestic poems by our sultan have been delivered to
me, and I dared to compose two parallels to one of them. However, the opening
verse of this poem, like its other exquisite verses, was composed in a matchless man-
ner, and especially the exquisite line “No wonder that the inidel’s niche is awry”,
is such an innovative verse that, God knows, no parallel poems can outshine it. It
has been a while that both the poets of Iran and Rum have uttered countless words
related to the prayer niche, yet, I have never witnessed such pleasant reinement.90
This quotation is from a letter by one of the most celebrated Rum poets, Baki
(d. 1599 or 1600), written to Süleyman I (1520–66) about the latter’s two lyric
poems (that is, gazels) which the sultan had sent to Baki.91 In a marginal note,
Baki continues his praises:
If it is questioned why I have composed two parallel poems, I would like to remind
you of the famous saying, “The loser wants to play more”: trying to come up with
a better verse, I kept composing more verses. But how is it possible for a base person
like me to compose a parallel to such a grand poem? It naturally ends up being a
mere imitation.
89 There is no systematic study on how these particular texts were deployed by the sixteenth-
century litterateurs, yet it is clear from biographical accounts that most of them learned
Persian from Gülistan, which was also a basic source for learning Islamic mores; mystical
principles from Mesneviî, which brought together many topics concerning divine love; poetic
imagery and topoi from Hafez; and ethics from Attar’s various works. Memorising the whole
or parts of these texts and quoting freely from them was common practice. The importance
of these texts was incomparable to other sources until the end of the Ottoman Empire
and well into the Republican period, as numerous editions, interpretations and translations
testify.
90 From a letter by Baki. The complete letter is published in transcription and modern Turkish
translation in Orhan Şaik Gökyay, ‘Bâk î’, Türk Dili 30, 274 (1974), 44–6. For an English trans-
lation, see Walter Andrews, Najaat Black and Mehmet Kalpaklı, Ottoman Lyric Poetry:
An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Seattle, 2006), pp. 129–30. My translation here is slightly diferent.
Süleyman I’s line reads as “Egrilik olsa aceb mi kâirî mihrâbda”. For Süleyman’s poem,
see poem no. 2427 in Muhibbî Dîvânı, İzahlı Metin, Kanûnî Sultan Süleyman, ed. Coşkun Ak
(Ankara, 1987), p. 708. One of Baki’s parallel poems is no. 450 in Baki Divanı, ed. Sabahattin
Küçük (Ankara, 1994), pp. 378–9.
91 Like Sultan Süleyman I, other sultans of this period also asked famous poets either to write
parallels to or to comment on their poetry. For example, Aşık Çelebi records parallels by six
contemporary poets to a Persian couplet by Bayezid II; see Aşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ,
vol. 1, pp. 196–7. Also, a collection of poetry includes commentaries by Baki and other poets
on Arabic and Persian poems of Muradi, the pen-name of Murad III (1574–95); see Bekir
Kütükoğlu, ‘Murad III’, İslam Ansiklopedisi, İslâm Âlemî Coğrafya, Etnoğrafya ve Biyografya
Lügatî, ed. A. Adıvar, R. Arat, A. Ateş, C. Baysun, B. Darkot (Istanbul, 1960), vol. 8, pp. 615–25,
especially p. 625.
578
The eyebrow of the beloved as the niche in mosques showing the direction
of prayer is one of the central images in Persianate literature, which points
to a disparity between institutionalised religion and mystical conigurations
of it. The poet who turns his face away from the prayer niche in the mosque
to the eyebrow of the beloved boy appreciates God through the beauty of
His creation, neglecting religious obligations. According to Baki, by shifting
this image that relates the curve above the niche of a church to the curve-
shaped eyebrow and using the Turkish word eğrilik, which means both a
curve and dishonesty, Süleyman I has created an unmatched re-coniguration
of the “eyebrow as prayer niche” image, at the same time re-working com-
mon descriptions of the beloved in poetry as an inidel because he seduces the
lover away from strict religious duties.92
Baki’s commentary about the perfection of the poetic image shows how,
after the mid-sixteenth century, litterateurs of Rum distinguished themselves
from other prevalent oral and written literary cultures by focusing on litera-
ture as a peculiar art form deined by intricate rules, referring to a particular
literary tradition, and thereby establishing a constantly developed canon. All
these intentions manifested themselves in the process of producing literary
tools which would also help them curb the bifurcating paths of a constantly
ramifying literary development. While one requirement to accomplish this
control was to set up rules for literary composition, the other was to establish
a canon through a selective recording of poetry.
Behind Baki’s praise of Süleyman I’s poem lie two important aspects of the
literary culture of this period: the importance of composing parallel poems
and of re-coniguring existing tropes in new contexts. A parallel generally fol-
lowed the original poem in rhyme and meter while reorganising the images in
it. Criticising the poet Cemili for his parallels to Nevai’s poems, Latii clearly
states what is expected of a good parallel: “He composed parallels rhyme-by-
rhyme for each poem in Nevai’s three-volume poetry collection. Yet they are
only parallels in meter and rhyme; not in style, imagination and elegance of
exposition”.93 A parallel poem, then, was not only supposed to use the same
rhyme element and poetic meter as the original but also improve the style,
elegance and image.
92 For a list of the basic poetic vocabulary, see Walter G. Andrews, Poetry’s Voice Society’s Song:
Ottoman Lyric Poetry (Seattle, 1985), pp. 43–9. For the best available source in English for expla-
nations of Persian, Turkish, Chagatai and Urdu poetic imagery, see Annemarie Schimmel, A
Two Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992).
93 For comments on parallel poetry by the sixteenth-century biographers of Rum poets, see
Tolasa, Sehî, Lâtîi, pp. 263–6.
579
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By the beginning of the sixteenth century, already one of the basic rules of
taking part in the poetry circles of Rum was the composing of parallel poems
in order to surpass poems written by previous or contemporary poets. 94 In this
way, a growing canonical corpora of poetry was established, re-coniguring
tropes and topoi in a manner that exhausted all possible associations. As the
basic rule of the game of poetry, it was an important practice to develop
poetic skills. But it also cultivated a sense of belonging to a localised tradi-
tion.95 Rum poets might still be combing the works of the classical or con-
temporary poets writing in Arabic and/or Persian looking for inspiration, but
their intent was no longer to translate and adapt but to excel in and develop
further a particular form of Anatolian Turkish poetry. To this end, an array of
diferent educational tools were created. These included poetry anthologies,
rhetorical manuals, and manifestos on poetry, as well as commentaries that
are indicative of processes of compilation, instruction and re-evaluation, all
of which provided an archive of tradition.
Parallel poetry anthologies

Poetry anthologies were among the earliest attested of these educational
tools, and they appeared in the form of compilations of parallel poems. The
evidence for a developing tradition of parallel poems before the mid-ifteenth
century is preserved in a compilation by Ömer bin Mezid, composed in
1437 and including 397 poems by 84 poets, not all of whom were writing in
Anatolian Turkish. Naming his work Mecmu‘atü’n-Nezair (An Anthology of
Parallel Poems), Ömer bin Mezid interestingly did not make any mention
of Rum in his brief introduction, where he explained that his motive was to
94 For a treatment of parallel poems in Anatolian Turkish literary tradition, see M. Fatih Köksal,
Sana Benzer Güzel Olmaz: Divan Şiirinde Nazire (Ankara, 2006). For technical aspects of parallel
poems, see Edith G. Ambros, ‘Nazire, the Will-o’-the-Wisp of Ottoman Divan Poetry’, Wiener
Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 79 (1989), 57–83. For an original approach to parallel
poems within the context of literary history, see Andrews, ‘Other Selves, Other Poets’.
95 By localisation I mean that poets were now responding to their fellow poets’ compositions
in Anatolian Turkish. A parallel poem written after a Persian example was not acceptable
as a parallel poem. The perception of Chagatai as a foreign language becomes problematic
in this context. While there are many parallel poems for Ali Şir Nevai’s gazels before the
sixteenth century, this does not seem to be true for other famous Chagatai poets. For a brief
discussion of parallel poems and language relations, see Yusuf Çetindağ, Ali Şîr Nevâî’nin
Osmanlı Şiirine Etkisi (Ankara, 2006), pp. 26–7. In this respect, a manuscript copy of Nevai’s
divan, which was presented to a boon companion of the Ottoman prince Korkud (1470–1513)
and in which the orthography of Chagatai was changed into Anatolian Turkish, reveals a
glimpse into various attitudes of adaptation and emulation. See Eleazar Birnbaum, ‘The
Ottomans and Chagatay Literature: An Early 16th Century Manuscript of Navâ’î’s Dîvân in
Ottoman Orthography’, Central Asiatic Journal 20, 4 (1976), 157–90; for three plates, see ibid.,
Central Asiatic Journal 21, 1 (1977), n.p.
580
record the dispersed poems of “poet friends and heart-fetching rulers” for
posterity.96 His disregard for distinguishing poets according to the courts to
which they belonged or the kind of written Turkish they employed suggests
that patronage relations, geography and linguistic diference did not inform
his anthology. On the other hand, Ömer bin Mezid’s anthology brought
together themes, forms and rhyme and meter schemes which would be chal-
lenged, appropriated and gradually enhanced by the late ifteenth- and six-
teenth-century poets.
Almost a century later, in 1512, Eğridirli Hacı Kemal published an anthology
including parallel poems by 266 poets in his Cami’ün-Neza’ir (A Compilation
of Parallel Poems), relecting an increase in the number of poets within less
than a century. In the sixteenth century, two further major anthologies of
parallel poems appeared: Mecmua’u’n-Neza’ir (1533–4), the same title as Ömer
bin Mezid’s work, by Edirneli Nazmi, containing poems by 357 poets, and
Cami‘ün-Nezair (1560), titled as Hacı Kemal’s anthology, by Pervane bin
Abdullah, with poems by 430 poets. These gigantic compilations presented a
base poem and then listed several parallels written by diferent poets, estab-
lishing various connections, sometimes faulty, between them.97 The number
of poems in these anthologies went into the thousands.
The interest in these anthologies, which clearly served as educational tools
for literary practice, relects the importance given to the writing of paral-
lels in order to extend the realm of imagination through re-coniguration
of images. More importantly, unlike Ömer bin Mezid’s compilation, the six-
teenth-century anthologies included only base and parallel poems by poets
who wrote in Anatolian Turkish, inadvertently canonising the poets they
included. This tradition would continue with difering foci and interests, per-
haps not as vigorously in the following centuries as was the case in this period
of fermentation, while anthologies of the sixteenth century would continue
to serve as major reference works.
Manuals and commentaries

While such parallel poetry collections provided poets with models to emulate
and conigurations of images to examine, as a translation of a manual of
Persian poetry testiies, there was also a growing interest in technical manu-
als of poetry. Paşa Çelebi composed Hevesname (Book of Desire) in Persian
96 Ömer bin Mezid, Memû‘atü’n-Nezâ’ir, ed. Mustafa Canpolat (Ankara, 1995), pp. 19–20.
97 For a description and analysis of poetry anthologies, see Köksal, Sana Benzer Güzel Olmaz,
pp. 65–90, and for a list of these with references to manuscript copies, see Agah Sırrı Levend,
Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (Ankara, 1973), pp. 167–9.
581
se l i?m s. k uru
in 1487, building on Persian poet Ramii’s (mid-fourteenth century) Anis al-

‘Ushshaq. Paşa Çelebi’s adaptation was a compendium of similes and terms
employed to describe physical aspects of a beloved along with exemplary
couplets.98 This treatise would be followed by a l urry of treatises on poetry,
aruz meter, rhetorical devices, and catalogues of poetic imagery. Most impor-
tant in this line was Sururi’s (d. 1562) Bahrü’l-Ma‘arif (The Sea of Knowledge).
Relying on his notes on sciences of meter and rhyme, Sururi published this
work in 1549 upon Prince Mustafa’s request in the princely court of Amasya.
A perfunctory comparison of Hevesname and Bahrü’l-Ma‘arif indicates a shift
of interest from poetic exemplary into poetics. Sururi’s work became one of
the standard references for poets of following generations, as testiied to by
its many manuscript copies.99
By the mid-sixteenth century, a tradition of commentaries on poetry pro-
vided another set of tools in the professionalisation of poetry, building upon
the developing reference material in the form of anthologies and manuals
of poetics. These commentaries (şerh) were on the Persian classics cited ear-
lier. The irst available commentary on a literary text is on the introduction
of Gülistan by Lamii. Dated 1504, Lamii’s commentary, with its attention to
the vocabulary and syntax of the original along with phrasal translations and
cultural explanation, seems to have set the trend for the following wave of
literary commentaries that would start 50 years later.100
Literary commentaries of the mid-sixteenth century moved from trans-
lation and mystical explanation, as in Sururi’s şerh of Hafez’s divan, which is
98 References to similar works are found in İsmail Hakkı Aksoyak, ‘Manastırlı Celâl’in Hüsn-i
Yûsuf Adlı Eseri’, in Edebiyat ve Dil Yazıları: Prof. Dr. Mustafa İsen Armağanı, ed. Ayşenur
Külahlıoğlu İslam and S. Eker (Ankara, 2007), pp. 301–17. Tropes that symbolise body parts
of the beloved seem to have been categorised and re-deined in a series of texts of difer-
ent genres. For a comparative list of those body parts found in diferent Turkish rhetorical
treatises and literary texts of the period, see Aksoyak, ‘Manastırlı Celâl’in Hüsn-i Yûsuf
Adlı Eseri’, pp. 313–14. For this list, Aksoyak expands on an earlier one prepared in Hakan
Atay, ‘Heves-nâme’de Aşk Oyunu: Tâcizâde Cafer Çelebi’nin Özgünlük İdeali’, M.A. thesis,
Bilkent University (2003). Atay’s study includes more information about Ramii and Paşa
Çelebi’s work; see Atay, ‘Heves-nâme’de, pp. 76–7.
99 This work was organised as an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion, the irst chap-
ter presenting the aruz meter, the second tropes and the third similes and metaphors used
for the beloved’s characteristics. For more information on the author and his work, and
a comparison of its third chapter with Ramii’s text, see Yakup Şafak, ‘Sürûrî’nin Bahrü’l-
Maârif ’i ve Bu Eserdeki Teşbih ve Mecaz Unsurları’, Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 4 (1997),
217–35. For a list of the terminology included in the third chapter, see pp. 223–4 of that
article.
100 Lamii prepared his commentary at the request of a friend who could not understand the
ine points of the Persian original. See Hülya Canpolat, ‘Lâmi’î Çelebi’nin Şerh-i Dîbâce-i
Gülistan’ı’, M.A. thesis, Ege University (2000), p. 83. Canpolat identiies 54 manuscript cop-
ies of the work, attesting to its wide readership.
582
the earliest known commentary in any language, to grammatical explana-

tions and exploration of content, as found in the commentaries on Hafez by
Sudi (d. 1598?). The earliest commentary on a whole poem is an analysis of
a Turkish lyric by trend-setting poet Hayali (d. 1556), provided by the afore-
mentioned Kadri of Bergama as a grammatical example.101 Commentary on
Turkish poetry seems to have discontinued after this initial attempt at inter-
preting poetry, or rather continued in the form of parallel poems and musam-
mat (that is, developing the connotations in an existing poem by adding extra
lines, interpreting and amplifying it). While Kadri’s intention was to analyse
the poem in order to display the workings of the Turkish language, after eval-
uating a morphological analysis of the lines, he also pointed to the rhetorical
devices employed by Hayali.
During mid-century, the commentaries of Sururi, Sudi and another learned
man, called Şem’i (d. after 1603), relect a renewed interest in the analysis of
Persian classics through commentaries on their technique and inner mean-
ings, in a manner similar to the biographical dictionaries.102 Their approach
difered from that of Kadri, who stressed the importance of a grammatical
knowledge of Turkish in order to learn Persian and Arabic. It also difered
from the earlier focus on literary production in Anatolian Turkish. By the
mid-sixteenth century, there was new interest in an even more reined form
of literature that shifted from consideration of the local and contemporary
material to a deeper re-evaluation of classical predecessors, the masters of
Persian poetry. Current scholarship is generally mute about similar cases of
commentary on Arabic literary works in this period.
Discourses on poetry
While poetry anthologies, rhetorical manuals and commentaries constituted
the contents of the toolbox for the craft of poetry, more direct statements
on poetry are developed in the introductions of poetry collections and in the
101 Bergamalı Kadri, Müyessiretü’l-Ulûm, pp. 94–113.

102 Among the three major commentators on Persian classics, Sudi’s work has been highly
regarded throughout the centuries, as a partial edition and a Persian translation also tes-
tify. The Brockhaus edition of Hafez’s divan includes Sudi’s commentaries for the irst
80 gazels. See Hermann Brockhaus, Die Lieder des Hais: Persisch mit dem Commentare des
Sudi (Osnabrück, 1969), vol. 1. For a Persian translation of Sudi’s commentary, see Ismat
Sattar-zadah, Sharh-i Sūdī bar Hāiz, 4 vols. (Urumiyah, 1362 [1983]). Gölpınarlı also praises
Sudi’s commentary in his introduction to his translation of Hafez’s poetry collection. See
Abdülkadir Gölpınarlı, Hafız Divanı (Istanbul, 1944), p. 28. For a discussion and English and
Modern Turkish translations of Sudi’s introduction to his commentary, see Selim S. Kuru
and Murat U. İnan, “Reintroducing Hafez to Readers in Rum: Sudi’s Introduction to his
Commentary on Hafez’s Poetry”, Journal of Turkish Studies 35 (2011), 12–40.
583
se l i?m s. k uru
introductions to biographical dictionaries of poets, both of which appeared

as a novelty in this period. The irst introduction to a poetry collection in
Anatolian Turkish was composed in verse by Ahmed Paşa, and the most
detailed one is found in the aforementioned Lamii’s collection of poems.103
After praises of God and the Prophet, Lamii opens his introduction with
praises of speech and the Qur’an. He then identiies poetry and prose as two
parts of “the magic of speech”. This lengthy text includes a defence of poetry
with quotations from the Qur’an, hadith and many Persian poets who testify
about it. More speciically, Lamii defends a mystical sense of poetry against
verses that merely entertain and invectives that encourage low morals.104
Several decades later, a similar discourse with more detailed information about
the history, meaning and value of poetry was presented by Aşık Çelebi in the
introduction to his biographical dictionary. Aşık Çelebi displays his excellent
command of ornate prose and a detailed knowledge of the history of poetry
from the Creation to the rise of the Ottoman dynasty.105 While Lamii presents
himself in his introduction as the leading poet of Rum without mentioning
any other Rum poet, Aşık Çelebi, as mentioned earlier, makes several refer-
ences to the encouragement of poetry and to the abundance of poets in Rum.
There are similarities in the content of these two texts, pointing to a develop-
ing historical understanding of an Islamicate account of the history of poetry.
Similar to these two, many other discourses on poetry alluded to a shared
legendary history of poetry, the sources of which are yet to be investigated.
On the other hand, individual entries on poets in the biographical dictionar-
ies included comments and evaluations on both the nature of poetry and the
development of poetry in Rum.106
The earliest commentary on Anatolian Turkish literature is found in the
introductory section of the aforementioned Cafer Çelebi’s lyric romance
103 For a compilation of transcriptions and Turkish translations of divan introductions, see
Tahsin Üzgör, Türkçe Dîvân Dîbâceleri (Ankara, 1990). Fourteen out of the 39 introductions,
and deinitely the most detailed ones presented in this volume, were written in the period
considered here.
104 See Üzgör, Türkçe Dîvân Dîbâceleri, pp. 128–255. For an analysis of this introduction, see
Harun Tolasa, ‘Klasik Edebiyatımızda Dîvân Önsöz (Dîbâce)leri: Lâmiî’nin Önsözü ve
(Buna Göre) Dîvân Şiiri Görüşü’, Journal of Turkish Studies 3 (1979), 385–402. For Lami‘i’s life
and works, see Günay Kut Alpay, ‘Lāmiʿī Chelebi and His Works’, Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 35, 2 (1976), 73–93, and the detailed introductory essay in Nuran Tezcan, Lāmiʿī’s Guy
ü Çevgān (Stuttgart, 1994).
105 Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, vol. 1, pp. 2–47. Compare this with Aşık Çelebi, Meşā‘ir üş-
Şu‘arā or Teẕkere of ‘Āşıḳ Çelebi, ed. G. M. Meredith-Owens (London, 1971), 6r–18r.
106 Tolas, in his aforementioned Sehî, Lâtîi, ve Âşık Çelebi, gleans much information from the
irst three biographical dictionaries, those by Sehi, Latii and Aşık Çelebi. For information
on the literary character of poets, see the second part of this important study, pp. 189–370.
584
Hevesname (couplets 514–25).107 In this section, Cafer Çelebi identiies Şeyhi

and Ahmed Paşa as the most famous Rum poets and criticises the former for
lacking in fesahat (couplets 515–17) and the latter for lacking in belagat (couplets
518–20). He also claims that instead of inventing new meanings they excelled
in translating poetry. In this brief section, Cafer Çelebi explains fesahat as not
using strange vocabulary (couplet 517) and belagat as enhancing signiicance
through the use of rhetorical devices. According to Cafer Çelebi, Ahmed
Paşa’s poetry resembles icons in a church, beautiful yet without essence (cou-
plet 520). It should be noted that even though Cafer Çelebi locates his critique
in a romance, he refers to the lyric poems of two of the most famous Rum
poets, one a predecessor, the other a contemporary of his, highlighting the
importance for a professional poet of writing lyric poems.108
A response by Ahmed Paşa is instructive in order to understand Cafer
Çelebi’s short passage as an act of literary criticism. In the inal section of
Ahmed Paşa’s poetry collection, there is the following verse:
The images which abound in your poems may be what is desired
For me your colourful words are better than those109
Whether or not this verse was written in response to Cafer Çelebi, Ahmed
Paşa here clearly favours altering existing imagery through literary craft at
the expense of original imagery. This exchange signiies the discussion about
balancing meaning and form in poetry during the late ifteenth century.
At the end of the sixteenth century, Riyazi complained in his biographi-
cal dictionary Riyazü’ş-Şu‘ara (Gardens of Poets) that one result of the dii-
culty of composing poetry in Turkish was that meaning was sacriiced for the
beauty of expression. While Riyazi defended the early poets, who despite this
diiculty ofered poetry in Turkish “with luster and sheen”, he criticised the
107 Couplet numbers refer to the electronic text published in the Ottoman Text Archives
Project, http://courses.washington.edu/otap/archive/data/arch_txt/texts/a_heves.html
(visited on 22 October 2010).
108 Fesahat and belagat are two terms of rhetoric, which was a major part of medrese education.
It is not very common in modern scholarship to build bridges between this rhetorical edu-
cation and literary texts. For a recent contribution in this direction, see Ali Emre Özyıldırım,
“‘Garîb” Ma’nâlar, “Acîb” Hayaller: Latîf î ve Âşık Çelebi Tezkirelerinden Hareketle Belagat
Terimi Olarak “Garîb” Sıfatı’, in Âşık Çelebi ve Şairler Tezkiresi Üzerine Yazılar, ed. Hatice
Aynur and Aslı Niyazioğlu (Istanbul, 2011), pp. 147–65. In this article, Özyıldırım relates
the use of the term garib (strange) by two major literary critics to the rhetorical textbooks
assigned at the medreses of the time. For a brief discussion of the concepts of belagat and
fesahat, see Andrews, An Introduction to Ottoman Poetry, pp.73–7.
109 See Ahmed Paşa, Ahmed Paşa Divanı, p. 388. I should like to thank my colleague Fatma
Sabiha Kutlar for this reference.
585
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development of poetry in his time, in which the meaning was sacriiced to the
beauty of expression. These, according to Riyazi, should exist together.110
Composed mostly by scholar poets in diferent decades of the period,
parallel poetry collections, lists of tropes and topoi, manuals of poetry and
discourses on poetry often contradicted each other and challenged prevalent
ideas on the nature of poetry. They were written in response to an accumu-
lating body of literary texts in order to understand, deine, classify and ulti-
mately control a literary production which had already turned out a chaotic
mass of forms, genres, themes and imagery. Literature was being deined in
this period by Rum poets through literary tools, and one of the most impor-
tant literary tools was the biographical dictionary. Over time, biographical
dictionaries would combine a variety of forms and themes and provide mod-
els for Rum poets as their authors seized the opportunity to tell their own
life stories, even while providing biographical information for other poets
through gossipy accounts of love and works.
The histories of the poets of Rum

The canon of a Rumi literary tradition was irst deined through a corpus of
texts known as Tezkiretü’ş-Şu‘ara (Reminiscences of Poets), which began to be
composed in the early decades of the sixteenth century.111 These were biograph-
ical dictionaries that compiled anecdotal information on the lives of Rum poets
and gave examples of their poetry. The compilers of biographical dictionar-
ies, by relating what they had read and heard about previous generations of
poets as well as what they themselves had experienced in the literary circles of
Istanbul, gave these scattered items of information the shape of history, using
their individual literary tastes and world views as a guide. Through these bio-
graphical dictionaries, they crafted a sense of solidarity among poets, who com-
posed their poems for the Ottoman sultans or their “servants”. The biographers
were themselves practising poets. They did not call the poets about whom they
wrote “Ottoman poets” or “Palace poets” and never referred to them as “Divan
poets”. They called themselves and others şu‘ara-yı Rum, “poets of Rum”.
The irst biographer of poets in Anatolia was the aforementioned Sehi Beg.
In his biographical dictionary, called Heşt Behişt (Eight Gardens of Paradise),
he mentions as his models Baharistan (Land of Spring) by the Persian poet Jami
110 Riyazi, ‘Riyâz’üş-Şu‘arâ’, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Nuruosmaniye 3724, fols. 3r–4v.

111 For more information on the making of an Ottoman literary canon through an analysis
of one poet’s life and works as recorded in diferent tezkires, see Selim S. Kuru, ‘Sex in the
Text’, pp. 158–61.
586
(1414–92), Tezkire (composed 1487) by Dawlat-shah (d. 1487) in Persian and ‘Ali
Shir Nevai’s (1441–1501) Majalis al-Nafais (Excellent Gatherings) in Chagatai
Turkish.112 His expressed intent was to keep a list of the names and works of
poets of Rum so that these poets would be saved from the forgetfulness of
time. But there was certainly another motive that directed his work: to chal-
lenge the poets of the eastern lands who wrote in Persian and/or Chagatai
Turkish and whose memories were recorded in the biographical dictionaries
of his predecessors, Cami, Devlet-Şah and Nevai.113 While he attempted to
demonstrate the strength of the poetry developed in a new literary language
in Rum, Sehi also started the trend of canonising Rum poets according to a
set of certain criteria. His successors would occasionally shift the focus given
to a poet by Sehi according to their own tastes and approaches to literary
production, but they would still follow him in his goal of demonstrating the
superiority of poets of Rum.
Sehi was probably a slave of Christian origin educated in the palace. The
organisation of his work betrays a bureaucratic bias, probably derived from
his position as a secretary in the palace oices and a tutor to the princes. Sehi
placed bureaucrat poets before the scholar poets, a distinction that would not
be followed by his successors. After grouping particular poets in the irst four
sections according to a hierarchical scheme, namely Süleyman I and other
sultan poets, bureaucrat poets and scholar poets, he followed a chronological
ordering in the remaining four sections of the work.114 By doing so, he was also
112 These sources would be cited as a major inspiration by all of the biographers of poets.
Although Sehi Bey’s is the irst dictionary of the poets of Rum, Selim I had commissioned
Şah Muhammad Kazwini to translate Nevai’s work, interestingly, into Persian. See Ahmet
Kartal, ‘Alî Şîr Nevâî’nin Mecâlisü’n-Nefâ’is İsimli Tezkiresi ve XVI. Asırda Yapılan Farsça İki
Tercümesi’ Bilig 13 (2000), 21–65; for Kazwini’s work, see pp. 28–30. Kazwini added a section
to his translation in which he provided information on poets of Selim I’s court who com-
posed poetry in Persian. Kartal’s article also includes a comparative list of poets included in
Mecalisü’n-Nefa’is and Kazwini’s translation. Later, Lamii would add a section on the mystics
of Rum, some of whom were also famous for their poetry, to his translation of Cami’s bio-
graphical dictionary of saints from Persian into Turkish. See Barbara Flemming, ‘Glimpses
of Turkish Saints: Another Look at Lami‘i and Ottoman Biographies’, Journal of Turkish
Studies 18 (1994), 59–79. For the biographical dictionaries in Persian and Chagatai, see Maria E.
Subtelny, ‘The Poetic Circle’, pp. 19–38. For general information on biographical dictionaries
of poets, see John Stewart-Robinson, ‘The Ottoman Biographies of Poets’, Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 24, 1–2 (1965), 57–74. Mustafa İsen, F. Kılıç, İ. H. Aksoyak and A. Eyduran (eds.),
Şair Tezkireleri (Ankara, 2002), includes contents and manuscript copies of all biographical
dictionaries of poets of Rum that were composed up to the early twentieth century.
113 Sehi Bey’s work is extant in 18 manuscript copies. For information on his life and profes-
sion, and for a critical edition, see Sehi, Heşt Bihişt; see also Günay Kut, ‘Heşt Bihişt’in Yeni
Bir Nüshası ve Bir Düzeltme’, Journal of Turkish Studies 7 (1984), 293–301.
114 In this dictionary, 28 high-level bureaucrats and 17 famous scholars, all of whom lived dur-
ing a 90-year period beginning with the reign of Mehmed II, are noted along with lesser
scholars, students, soldiers and townsfolk.
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Table 14.1. Biographical dictionaries of poets in the sixteenth century
Biographer Focus Life Composition Coverage

Sehi Poetry d. 1548 or 1549 1538–9 1400s–1538
Latii Poetry 1491–1582 1546, 1574 1421–1546
Ahdi Poetry d. 1593 or 1594 1563, 1593 1500–1590s
Aşık Çelebi Poetry 1520–1572 1566 1400s–1560s
Kınalızade Poetry 1540–1604 1586 1400s–1586
‘Ali History 1541–1600 1593–9 1400s–1541
Riyazi Poetry 1572–1644 1609 1400s–1609
emulating the models set by his West Asian predecessors. His models were
composed half a century before him, a sign of how closely the new tradi-
tion of literature in Rum was connected with the Eastern literary traditions.115
Rum biographers’ neglect of earlier biographical models in favour of modern
ones relects a contemporaneous approach to the literature in Rum.
Sehi’s Heşt Bihişt was followed by a l urry of production in the genre of
biographical dictionaries (see Table 14.1). The second known biographer,
Abdüllatif Çelebi, who used the pen-name Latii, was from the well-known
Hatib-zadeler family of Kastamonu, an important centre of dervish lodges in
the Black Sea region. Even though he received some education in Istanbul,
he spent most of his life away from the city. He did not rise in the ranks of
learned men and, like Sehi, worked as a secretary, but in Rumeli and not at
the palace. Latii ’s biographical dictionary Tezkiretü’ş-Şu‘ara ve Tabsıratu’n-
Nuzama (Reminiscences of Poets and Demonstration of Versiiers) was
composed only eight years after Sehi’s in 1546 and arguably in reaction to
his dictionary.116 While it covered more poets than Sehi’s work,117 there was
another signiicant diference: when arranging the poets, Latii disregarded
the hierarchical ordering altogether, and, except for 13 mystic poets and poets
115 Curiously, neither Sehi nor his successors would mention older Persian models such as Lubab
al-Albab (Kernel of Essences, composed in 1220) by Avi. Since another work by Avi, a col-
lection of anecdotes, was very popular, and a copy of it was included in Bayezid II’s library,
biographers must have been familiar with his works. For a study on Bayezid II’s library,
see Miklós Maróth, ‘The Library of Sultan Bayazit II’, in Jeremiás, Irano-Turkic Cultural
Contacts, pp. 111–32. Avi ’s story collection is listed on p. 123. Similarly, biographers should
have known an earlier biographical work, Chahar Makala (Four Discourses, composed in
1156), by Nizami ‘Aruzi. They never, however, mentioned these texts as inl uential.
116 For more information on Latii, see Nihad M. Çetin, ‘Latîf î’, in Gibb et al., The Encyclopaedia
of Islam, vol. 5, p. 693a. For an excellent analysis of Latii ’s biographical dictionary, see
Andrews, ‘The Teẕkere-i Şu‘arā of Laţīfī’, pp. 31–4. Andrews here delineates two renditions
of the work by Latii. Unfortunately, the otherwise good critical edition of Rıdvan Canım
does not relect these two renditions.
117 While Sehi covered 241 poets, Latii covered 334; see İsen et al., Şu’arâ, pp. 30, 36.
588
who were members of the Ottoman household, he listed all poets in alpha-
betical order according to their pen-names.
That this was a radical step can be argued for two reasons. First, the alpha-
betical ordering implied a break with the tabakat system that was the norm
for biographical compilations of the time and was emulated by the Persian
biographies-of-poets tradition and followed as well by Sehi. In the biographi-
cal dictionaries of poets, the tabakat system appeared in the form either of a
hierarchical ordering that implied the importance of the members of a partic-
ular rank or a chronological ordering according to the reigns of particular rul-
ers. By choosing an alphabetical ordering, Latii ignored the social position of
the poets he covered in his work. Aside from breaking away from the tabakat
system and thus modifying an Islamicate genre of biographical dictionaries118
and disregarding the social status of Rum poets, Latii commented exten-
sively on the works of the poets and discussed the role of patronage in the
production of literary works.119
Latii had a strong opinion about poets and their poetry. He believed that
only 13 true poets had appeared in Rum, all were mystics and all had lived
before the Ottoman dynasty emerged. They were true poets because they
sang the songs of true love (aşk-ı hakiki) rather than of metaphorical love
(aşk-ı mecazi).120 We can, perhaps, deduce that Latii was slighting, if not criti-
cising, Ottoman dynastic patronage of his time and the poets who wrote for
their patrons by underscoring the poetry of mystics who did not necessarily
compose poetry for Ottoman sultans. Furthermore, Latii places this section
before the section on sultan poets. In short, Latii displayed a new awareness
of poetry and literature, not only through his critical stance manifested in
his detailed interpretations of the verses he quotes and in his parallel poems
composed after those he most appreciated but also by altering the existing
models of biographical dictionaries.
The third biographer, Aşık Çelebi, composed the most revealing biograph-
ical dictionary, Meşa’irü’ş-Şu’ara (Stations of Poets), which forms the basic
source not only for poets but also for the intellectual circles of Rum through
118 According to Stewart-Robinson, biographical dictionaries as a genre were “launched by the

Arabs, systematized by the Persians, and formalized by the Turks”; see Stewart-Robinson,
‘The Ottoman Biographies’, p. 65.
119 For a translation of a lengthy passage from Latii ’s dictionary on literary patronage, see
Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds, pp. 245–7.
120 For an evaluation of Latii ’s stress on mystic poets and his distinction between poetry of
true love and poetry of symbolic love, see Selim S. Kuru, ‘Latii Tezkiresinde Mutasavvılar’,
in Dünden Bugüne Bursa: Bursa Tasavvuf Sempozyumu (Bursa, 2004), vol. 3, pp. 197–202.
However much he was critical of metaphorical love, Latii praised the works by Halili and
Cafer Çelebi discussed in the previous section.
589
se l i?m s. k uru
an account of 427 poets. Aşık Çelebi claimed to be from an esteemed family

of sayyids, a connection of which he was proud. Even though he was not suc-
cessful in acquiring a position high enough for his lineage, he worked initially
as the overseer of an important foundation in Bursa and later as a secretary
and subsequently as a judge.121
Meşa’irü’ş-Şu’ara was published 20 years after Latii ’s work. Aşık Çelebi’s
entries relate to the developing urban life in Istanbul, the gathering places of
poets and gossip about them. He does not follow the tabakat system but, in
order to be diferent from Latii, follows the ebced system according to the
numerical values of letters rather than ordering his entries alphabetically.122
These two works by Latii and Aşık Çelebi would be major models for the
continuing tradition of biographical dictionaries of poets. The other works,
while at times including supporting information on poets, did not surpass the
irst three dictionaries, by Sehi, Latii and Aşık Çelebi, with respect to organi-
sation and composition.
All biographers of the sixteenth century were very democratic in including
Muslim poets of diferent creeds. They consistently did not, however, include
non-Muslim poets, of whom there must have been many. Since these were
dictionaries reserved for poets who composed in Turkish, it is understandable
that they contain no record of poetry in Hebrew, Armenian or Greek that
eulogises an Ottoman sultan or a vezir. Yet the exclusion of Turkish-speaking
Christians reveals how religious boundaries might have been stronger than
ethnic ones.123
While Sehi, the irst biographer, mentions the poet Basiri, who apparently
stayed on in Istanbul after his arrival there as an ambassador from Iran, he
121 For his life and his other works, see V. L. Ménage, ‘Aşık Çelebi’, in Gibb et al., The
Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, pp. 698a–b.
122 In the introduction of his work, he complains about how Latii had stolen his idea of alpha-
betical ordering: “Scholar Latii of Kastamonu, saying ‘I also have an intention to compose
a book on the topic of the history of poets’, intended to compile a list of poets who lived
during the time of the Ottoman sultans according to the ‘order of reign’. That is to say,
he also chose Sehi Bey’s manner of organization”. Apparently Latii did not keep his word
and instead stole Aşık Çelebi’s idea. Aşık Çelebi’s desire to be unlike Latii reveals the com-
petition among the biographers of Rum poets. See Aşık Çeleb, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, vol. 1, pp.
245–6.
123 Only Aşık Çelebi includes one Mesihi-i Ermeni, who was from the Diyarbakır region and
a Christian. Even though Aşık Çelebi claims that the pen-name of this poet, which means
‘related to Christ’, testiied to the fact that he was a Christian, there was a more famous
Muslim poet with the same pen-name. Mesihi-i Ermeni knew Persian and, “migrating to
Rum”, lived in Istanbul and Edirne. He then went to Venice, where he taught Christian
children Turkish and Persian. Aşık Çelebi provides Turkish verses of Mesihi-i Ermeni in his
Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ; see Aşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, vol. 2, pp. 840–1. No other biographers
included this poet in their works.
590
makes it clear that he includes Basiri because he “became a Rumi, staying

in Rum” and because “he spoke the same language as most of the poets of
Rum, and had conversations and contests with them, and he composed verses
in Turkish.”124 This quotation points to a more linguistically deined literary
identity for the Rumi identity than a geographically deined one, as there were
many other Iranians living in Istanbul, especially in the period in which Sehi
published his work. On the other hand, the third non-Rumi biographer of
poets, Ahdi, would be included in the biographical dictionary of Aşık Çelebi
because “he did not despise Rum and the Rumis like other Persians did”.125
Contemporary scholarship on tezkires is mostly descriptive and, as a result,
fails to understand suiciently the motives behind these texts or to treat them
as critical literary works. Even though their value in evaluating literature of
the period has been appreciated, they are mostly now only used as reference
works. Unfortunately, modern scholarship neglects the question of why these
works should have appeared in the sixteenth century and why only in this
century they would overlap in their coverage rather than establishing supple-
ments. Modern approaches also erase the authorial voices that exist between
the lines of biographical entries, employing them merely as reference works.
However, as explained earlier, each biographer aimed at more than merely
collecting stories of poets. First of all, even though each of them was a poet in
his own right, their backgrounds were diferent. While they at times employed
the same anecdotes about the same poets, such anecdotes appeared in difer-
ent contexts, revealing the author’s individual taste and relecting his ambi-
tion to surpass preceding works in their organisation, approach and coverage.
Through additional entries, the writers constantly increased the number of
poets, thus updating previous biographers’ works.
The criteria by which the biographers selected their poets enable us to
draw a rudimentary portrait of the poets of Rum. Each biographical diction-
ary relected a vivid literary scene and, through his particular critical stances,
each biographer displayed his own tendentious picture of this scene, chal-
lenging any easy description of literature in this period. As the dictionaries
describe them, the poets came from extremely heterogeneous backgrounds
thus resembling the imperial oicials that required their services. The poets
of Rum, according to their biographers, were Muslim poets who composed
in the constantly developing medium of the language of Rum, a particular
124 Heşt Behişt, p. 105b. For Basiri’s Turkish poems, see Ahmet Kartal, Basîrî ve Türkçe Şiirleri
(Istanbul, 2006).
125 Aşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü’ş-Şu‘arâ, vol. 2, p. 1131.
591
se l i?m s. k uru
form of Anatolian Turkish. It was a fresh language given voice through the
pens of the poets of Rum and, from the last decades of the ifteenth century
onwards, it was establishing itself as one of the most extensively used literary
languages of the world. For the poets themselves, it was a source of pride and
often of great material wealth.
In this period of transformation and renewal, discourses developed around
the question of the signiicance of literature. As the rules of the new lan-
guage became settled, there was a conservative process of selection from the
old forms, as a Rum-centered archive began to take shape within a centu-
ries-old cultural heritage. The qualities associated with Rum, of “Ruminess”,
were never stable or ixed. On the contrary, what “Rum” meant was always an
object of debate, questioning and contestation among the writers who wrote
in its language. However important it was for poets and authors to describe
themselves as “poets of Rum”, they did not give the term a strict deinition.
For many, their focus was on the subjective experience of love and desire.
They took themselves as the subjects of their works, and in their exploration
of subjectivity the poets of Rum constantly built up and dismantled ideas
about particular identity developing in relation to the empire.
The 150-year period from 1450 to 1600 saw the creation of a distinct written
language of Anatolian Turkish, the appearance of new forms, genres and
themes based on this language, the development of a literary archive and
literary tools that deined norms and conventions, and inally the genesis of
a biographical and an autobiographical tradition that made models available
for literary production. These were signiicant literary events which already
by the end of the sixteenth century had established this period as the moment
of origin of a literary tradition in Rum for centuries to come.
592
Glossary
acemi oğlan a novice conscript who will later join the janissaries.
adaletname edict addressing speciic complaints by subjects against the exactions and
corruption of oicials.
ağa lord, commander.
ahidname pledge, covenant, agreement.
akçe Greek aspron, Latin asper, silver coin.
akın raid.
akıncı raider; a corps of light cavalry used for raiding.
alatçıyan riggers.
alaybeyi cavalry commander.
amil agent; collector of revenues.
arpalık pensions or income for high oicials of state.
askeri belonging to the military; those who belonged to the military or religious elite
and who were granted tax exemption.
atike manumitted female slave.
avarız extra dues, becoming annual at the end of the sixteenth century.
aylık monthly pay.
azeb (Arabic azab) unmarried young men; seamen or pirates; in Ottoman army
apparently land foot soldiers who were enlisted from the peasants for the duration of
a campaign.
baba elder of a dervish group; head of a Bektaşi lodge.
bailo head of a Venetian colony; Venetian representative abroad; Venetian ambassador
to Istanbul
baruthane gunpowder mill.
başdefterdar head of government inance department.
baştarde bastard, a small war galley.
bender commercial seaport.
bennak peasant with little land, small landholder.
berat patent of investiture, conirmed by the sultan’s special sign (tuğra).
bey ruler of a Turkish state; commander.
beylerbeyi top Ottoman oicial in provincial government, head of a beylerbeylik.
bölük a military unit.
caba bennak landless peasant.
cebeci armourer.
593
Glossary
celep drover, cattle dealer.

celepkeşan see celep.
cemaat division of the janissary corps.
cerehor irregular enlisted warrior.
cihad (jihad) Islamic holy war.
cizye poll tax paid by non-Muslims.
çavuş oicial Ottoman envoy or messenger.
çerakise a cavalry unit created from Mamluk soldiers.
çift a pair of oxen yoked to a plough.
çiftlik landholding which could be worked by a pair of oxen; towards the end of the
sixteenth century, also larger landholdings in the hands of dignitaries.
danişmend an advanced student in a medrese.
darülharb “abode of war”, non-Muslim lands not paying tribute to a Muslim ruler.
darülislam “abode of Islam”, Islamic territory.
defter register, inventory.
defterdar inance oicer, with oversight of the sultan’s treasury.
defterhane the oice of the land registry.
defter-i icmal a summary register of revenue.
defter-i kethüdası local inancial director.
defter-i mufassal a detailed register of revenue.
deli irregular army corps.
devşirme a levy of Christian boys for service in the Ottoman army or in the palace.
dirlik assignment by the state of a salary or an income from land; the assignment of a
landholding such as a timar; income from a has, timar or zeamet.
divan the imperial council, meeting under the presidency of the grand vezir.
divan collection of poetry of a distinguished poet.
diyar-ı Firenc land of the Franks.
diyar-ı küfar land of the inidels.
diyar-ı Venedik Venetian land.
dizdar fortress captain.
ducat Venetian gold coin.
ehl-i ilim men of knowledge, learning.
ehl-i kalem men of the pen, clerks of government oices.
ehl-i örf the governor and his men.
ehl-i seyf men of the sword.
emanet stewardship.
emin agent, superintendent.
esham tax-farm shares.
eyalet province.
faris cavalryman.
ferman sultanic command.
fethname/fetihname poem or treatise describing a conquest; sultanic announcement
of a victory.
fetva a legal opinion issued by a competent authority.
fusta large galiot, a small oared warship.
gaza a raid for plunder, later came to mean holy war fought for Islam.
594
Glossary
gazi ighter in a gaza.

göke cocca, cocha, a ship high in the freeboard.
gönüllü volunteer, mercenary.
guruş see kuruş.
hac pilgrimage to Mecca.
hadis see hadith.
hadith prophetic tradition; sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammed.
haham başı chief rabbi.
Halvetiye order of dervishes.
harac-ı arazi land tax.
has crown lands.
hatib the leader of the community at Friday prayers; he preaches a sermon in which
he mentions the name of the legitimate ruler.
hisar eri fortress guard.
hoca religious scholar.
humbaracı bombardier.
ihtisab oice of the superintendent of markets and guilds.
ilm religious knowledge of Islam.
ilmiye the Ottoman learned establishment, the ulema class.
imam prayer leader.
iltizam tax farm.
irad income, revenue.
irsaliye remittance to the treasury.
istimalet persuasion; Ottoman policy of accommodating the population in newly
conquered territory.
kadı judge, chief administrator of a judicial district.
kadı sicilleri court registers.
kadıasker chief military judge; high-ranking oicial in judiciary.
kadırga oared galleys with single masts and lateen sails.
kalyata large galiot.
kalyon galleon.
kanun Ottoman secular law as distinct from the shari‘a.
kanunname law code.
kapı halkları entourages of bodyguards, slaves and domestic servants of local elites
and grandees.
kapudan naval commander.
kapudan-ı derya admiral of the Ottoman navy.
kapudan paşa admiral of the Ottoman navy.
kapudan paşalık the oice of grand admiral.
kaşif agent of government.
kaza district under the jurisdiction of a kadı.
kethüda Ottoman government oicial or agent.
kile a measure of weight used for grain, a bushel.
kisve cloth covering the Kaaba at Mecca.
kılıç the central, indivisible core of each timar; sword.
köke see göke.
595
Glossary
kul slave; non-ulema member of the Ottoman ruling group.

kuruş silver coin, piaster.
lağımcı sapper.
levend corsair; mercenary soldier.
liva a sancak, sub-division of a province.
mahfeci soldier who placed a frame-like device on army camels for sick and wounded
soldiers.
mahmil palanquin, camel litter.
mahone see mavna.
malikane lifetime tax farm.
martolos/martoloz Ottoman military group operating in the Balkans.
mavna barge, lighter.
medrese school, Muslim theological college.
menakibname text describing the vitas and miracles of famous dervish şeyhs.
menzilhane posting station.
mera grazing lands.
merd-i kale fortress defender.
mevacib salary, pay.
mevlana religious scholar.
mezhep religious denomination; school of thought.
mihr-i müeccel deferred dower, to be paid to a wife if divorced or widowed.
miri belonging to the ruler or the state.
mudd/müd a dry measure, varying according to location, used for grain.
muhasebe defteri account register.
mukataa tax farm; a source of revenue.
mustahfız fortress guard.
mücerred bachelor.
müderris teacher in a medrese.
müezzin the person who gives the call to prayer.
müftü or müfti jurisconsult.
mühimme defteri register of orders issued by government.
mülk freehold ownership.
mülazim candidate for government post.
mültezim tax farmer.
müneccim astrologer.
mürid novice in a dervish order; follower of a religious leader.
müsellem member of a corps of militia performing military service in return for tax
exemption.
nahiye administrative region or district.
naib deputy, representative.
narh oicially ixed price.
navlun/navlun bedelleri freight charges on shipped goods.
nazır superintendent, particularly of a pious foundation/vakıf.
nişan the sultan’s cipher.
nişancı chancellor, responsible for the drafting of documents and oversight of the
sultan’s chancellery.
596
Glossary
ocak infantry corps.

ocaklık revenue source earmarked for the pay of a military corps; imperial enterprise.
oda barracks.
padişah sovereign; the sultan.
para coin, currency.
reaya tax-paying population, who were not members of the askeri elite.
reis head; ship’s captain.
reisülküttab the chief clerk in the imperial administration.
riba usury, interest.
ruznamçe daily register of inancial transactions.
rüsum dues, taxes.
salyane annual salary, allowance.
sancak sub-province.
sancakbeyi governor of a sub-province.
sarıca irregular militia.
sekban military unit.
serasker commander of the army.
serdar military commander.
sipahi mounted soldier holding a timar; a member of the sultan’s cavalry.
subaşı commander; a government agent.
sürsat contributions for the army on campaign.
sürgün deportation.
sürre annual gifts sent by the sultan to Mecca.
şehnameci oicial court poet who wrote pieces glorifying the dynasty.
şehzade son of the sultan.
şeriat (shari‘a) Islamic religious law.
şeriyye sicilleri court registers.
şeyh sheikh, head; popular religious leader; head of a tribe.
şeyhülislam the head of the religious establishment.
tahrir survey of land, population and sources of revenue.
tahrir defteri written survey of a province.
taht kadılıkları judges of the courts in Istanbul.
tapu title deed.
tapu defteri see tahrir defteri.
tarıkat Sui order.
telhis short summary report.
tereke defteri inventory of the estate of a deceased person.
tersane dockyard.
tevki the sultan’s cipher.
tezkere memorandum; oicial certiicate.
tezkereci oicial employed to prepare memoranda.
timar revenue allotment in return for military service. A Persian term meaning care,
forethought, solicitude.
top arabacısı gun carriage driver.
topçı artillery corps.
topçı başı chief gunner.
597
Glossary
tüfenkçi gunner unit.

ulema religious and legal scholars.
ulufeciyan-i süvari cavalrymen.
öşr/öşür tithe.
vakıf pious foundation.
vakiye deed of trust of a vakıf.
vakıfname deed of trust.
vezir a minister of the sultan.
vilayet province.
waqf see vakıf
yaya footman, infantry.
yayla summer pasture.
yeniçeri janissaries, literally the new army.
zaim holder of zeamet.
zaviye dervish lodge.
zeamet land held in return for military service, larger than a timar.
zimmi (Arabic dhimmi) non-Muslim living under Islamic ruler.
598
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Zieme, Peter, ‘Türkische Zuckungsbücher’, in Scripta Ottomanica et Res Altaicae: Festschrift
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663
Index
Abbasid caliphate, 415–16 timar system and, 293–6. See also bureaucracy
‘Abbas I (Safavid shah), 41–2, 53–4, 138–9 in Ottoman Empire
Abdüllatif Çelebi. See Latif í Aegean Islands
Abdülvehhab Efendi, 193–5 Ottoman raids on, 141–8
Abdüssamed Diyarbekri, 29 Ottoman western Mediterranean expansion
absolutism and domination of, 155–70
architecture as relection of, 465 Venetian attacks on, 152
central European dynasties’ adoption of, ağa bölükleri, janissary restructuring as, 282–4
251–2 ağas, architectural projects by, 472
domestic borrowing rejected by Ottoman, age data, population demographics
256–8 based on, 363
Ottoman expansion and role of, 248–52 agriculture
Abu Bakir Darani, 147–8 harvest cycle and, 416
Abu Hanıfa, 339–40 nomad involvement in, 398–401
Abūl-Fidā al-Hamawi, 422 Ahbar ad-duwal wa atar, 449–50
Acem Alisi (Alaüddin), 511 ahi confraternities, 466–70
Aceman, 494 ahidname
action radius, military strategy and importance Ottoman economic policy and granting
of, 279 of, 261
adaletnames (justice edicts), 334–7 trade policies and, 6–7
Addi Quarro, battle of, 184 Ahlak-ı Alâî (Kınalızade), 435–8
Aden, Ottoman control of, 177–9 Ahmad b. Majid, 425, 426–7
Adja’ib al-makhluqatwa ghara’ib al-mawdjudat Ahmed (son of Bayezid II), 30–2, 103–4, 105,
(Wonders of creation and marvels of 207–8
existence), 540–2 Ahmed Bey (nazır-ı emval), 193–5
administrative structure in Ottoman Ahmed I (1603–17), 454–5
Empire judiciary corruption and, 334–7
beylerbeylik of Egypt and Hijaz and, 186–90 Ahmedi, 446
capital formation in Ottoman polity and, Ahmed Karahisari Qur’an, 498–501
262–7 Ahmed Pașa, 32, 114–15, 184
economic policies and ideology and, 258–62 gazel poetry and, 568–70
inancial administrative shortcomings and poetic discourses of, 583–6
collection cost increases, 254–6 Ahval-i kiyamet, 454–5
governance in Ottoman Empire and, 205–40 Aja’ib al-makhluqat, 412–15
institutions of government and, 222–32 Akbar (1542–1605), 348–9
in post-conquest Ottoman regions, 63–4 Akdağ, Mustafa, 116, 384, 385–6
private proit limitations and, 267–9 Akhlaq-i Jalali (Dawwani), 435
sultan’s authority and, 207–18 Akhlaq-i Nasiri (Nasiruddin Tusi), 435
665
Index
Akkerman grain harvests in, 383

Bayezid II and, 27–8, 50–1 internal disorder in 1526–9 in, 228
Ottoman occupation of, 9 Islam’s roots in, 320–1
Akkoyunlu, Turkoman confederation judiciary system in, 328–9
architecture of, 474 Mediterranean coastline seized, 144
decorative aesthetic of, 474–86, 490–1 Mehmed II’s administration of, 74–91
expansion in Anatolia of, 276–7 nomad migration from, 398–401
Mamluks and, 86–91 Ottoman expansion and control in, 74–96
Ottoman expansion in, 10, 26, 79–81, 85–91 in poetry, 574–5
Ak Şemseddin, 324, 343 population demographics in, 375–9, 385–6
Alanya, Ottoman capture of, 144 post-conquest rebellion in, 211–12
Alaüddevle, 28–9, 30–2, 89–90, 92, 94 provincial government in, 225–6
Selim I/Isma’il war and, 108, 110–13 revolt in 1520 in, 115–17
Al-‘Aylam az-zahir i ahwa ‘il wa l’awahir Selim I and, 30–2, 107
(Cenabi), 449–50 Süleyman and, 32–3, 34, 44
Alba Iulia, treaty of, 37–8 See also Rum
Albania Ancona, 261–2, 270–1
migration from, 394–5 Angelović, Mikhail, 23–4
Ottoman expansion into, 25, 28 Angiolello, Giovan Maria, 144n23, 146n40,
Skanderbeg uprising in, 9–10 149n68, 152–3
Aleppo Anis al-‘Ushshaq (Ramii), 581–3
Selim I’s conquest of, 475 Antalya, Venetian attack on, 144
urbanization and population growth in, antinomian beliefs, 343
379–82 of ulemas, syncretism with Islam, 320–1
Alexander VI (Pope), 27–30, 69–70 Arabic
al faraj ba’d al-shidda (relief after distress), 427 inl uence on Rum literary tradition of, 552–5,
Alfonso, D., 199 558n29, 558–60, 559n34
Ali Dede Sigetvarî, 342–3 learning tools for, 560–2
Ali Ekber, 425–6 in Ottoman historical sources, 4
Ali Kuşçu, 415–16 prose structure and, 562–5
Alkas Mirza, 36–7, 123–5 d’Aramon, Gabriel (French ambassador), 161,
Al-Malik al-Ashraf Inal, 347–8 162–3, 163n179
Al-manhaj al-sawi wa l’manhal al-rawi i l-tibb archaeometry, Ottoman historical sources and,
al-nabawī (Suyuti), 432 15–16
Al-miftah al-jafr al-jami (Bistami text), 491–2 archeology, Ottoman historical sources and, 15–16
alum mines, 142–3 architecture
Amasya in Bayezid II’s reign, 8–9
calligraphy and book arts in, 478–9 elites’ patronage and advancement of, 466–70,
palace complex in, 462, 466, 469 472–4, 491–528
poetry in court of, 581–3 imperial aesthetic in, 510–28
treaty of (1555), 38–9, 41, 126–32, 340 monumental cursive scripts and, 480
America, Ottoman knowledge of, 425–6 Ottoman religious architecture, 407–8
Amr ibn Davud, 179–80 political transformation and imperial ethos
Amir Khusrav Dehlavi, 488–90 relected in, 459–74
Anatolia representations of power in, 529–32
architecture in, 474 in Rum, 556n25
auxiliary forces in, 296–7 Armenians
bandit armies in, 386–7 under Mehmed II, 322–5
Bayezid II’s incursions into, 28–9 population data on, 369–70
carpet production and export in, 484–5 army judges. See kadıaskers
666
Index
army of the Ottoman Empire Aulic War Council, 316–17

auxiliary forces in, 296–7 autobiography
deployments in 1453 campaign and, 303 in poetry, 572–6
fortress garrisons in, 297–302 in prose, 576–8, 578n90
historiography concerning, 280–2 auxiliary military forces in Ottoman Empire, 303
janissaries as land force of, 282–4 avariz registers
salaried horsemen in, 284–6 costs of war and conquest and, 13–15
sipahis in, 286–96 population data from, 363–5
artisan production Ayalon, David 117
costs of war and conquest and drafting of, 14 Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia) church/mosque, 324,
decorative aesthetic and, 474–86 378–9, 415–16, 465–6
longevity of Ottoman political economy and, artistic images of, 534–43
272–4 Ayas Paşa, 452
ornament aesthetic and, 493–504 Aydınoğulları, history of, 449
proit limitations on, 267 Aynı Ali, 214–15, 434–5
regional trading and, 6–7 Ayşe Sultan, 539
sürgün migrations and, 391–2 azeb (azab), 307–8
arts
in Bayezid II’s reign, 8–9 Baba İlyas-ı Horasani, 321
imperial image articulated in, 491–528 Baba Nakkaş ceramics, 476–80
Ottoman literary discourse on, 544–7 Baba Zul-Nun, 340
visual arts, 457–60 Babai uprising, 321, 346–7
See also architecture; literary production and babas (spiritual leaders), 321
tradition; visual arts Baghdad, as cultural center, 542–3
aruz metric form, poetry in, 567, 581–3 al-Baghdadi, 325–6
Asafname (Lüti Paşa), 434–5 Baharistan (Land of Spring) ( Jami), 538, 586–9
ashlar masonry, in Ottoman architecture, 469 Bahjatu t-tawarikh (Şükrullah), 449
Asian Mode of Production, imperial revenues Bahrü‘l-Ma’arif (The Sea of Knowledge), 581–3
and expenditures and, 246 Baki (poet), 218–19, 432, 568–70, 578–9
Aşik Çelebi, 445–6, 548, 559–60, 567 Baykara meclisi (literary gathering), 555n22
biographical dictionary of, 589–91 Balastero, Andrea, 151
discourses on poetry by, 559n34, 584, 590n123 Balbi, Nicolò, 166
Aşikpaşazade, Ottoman chronicler, 409 Balbi da Correggio, 164n192, 164–5
on Bayezid II, 113 Balım Sultan, 346–7
historical narratives of, 3–4, 447–8 Balkans
on Mehmed II, 74–5, 75n5, 77–8, 80, 81, 92–3 Catholic population in, 370–2
prose style of, 562–5 cizye payments in, 363–5
askeri. See military administrative class (askeri) forced migrations from, 390–3
Assmann, Jan, 439 gazi architectural projects in, 473
astrology, Ottoman interest in, 416–18 Islamization in, 374–5
prognostications and end of time predictions nomad migration from Anatolia to, 398–401
and, 453–5 in oicial illustrated histories, 508–9
astronomy, Ottoman knowledge of, 415–20 Ottoman expansion into, 249–52, 256–8
Astuacatar, 322–5 population data for, 370, 372
Atayi, Nevizade, 332, 342, 576–8 timar system in, 287
Athar al-bilad, 412–13 See also Albania; Bosnia; Hungary
Atjeh, Sultan of, 243–4 bandit armies, integration of, 386–7
atlases, Ottoman production of, 421–3 Barakat II b. Muhammad b. Barakat (Şerif of
Attar (scholar and writer), 560–2, 576–8 Mecca), 349–50
attraction (mahabbet), Ottoman principle of, 435–8 Barbaro, Giosafatte, 84
667
Index
Barbarossa/Barbaros. See Hayreddin state expansion under, 19–20

Barbera, Benedicto, 150 Sunni Islam under, 11
Barbosa, Duarte, 189–90 Bayındır (Emir), 474
Barendse, René J. 196–7 Baykara, Hüseyin, 555–6
Barkan, Ömer Lüti, 246, 262–3, 267, 361–2, 375–6 Bayrami dervish order, 321, 324, 343
Barkey, Karen, 386–7 illicit branches of, 343–7
Basra, beylerbeylik established in, 181–2, 352–4 Baysungur, 86
Bathori, Stephen, 42, 53–4 Bedayiü‘l-Asar (Most Ornate Stories), 576–8
Battalname, 441–2, 552–5 Bektaşi, 321, 345, 346–7, 372–3, 441–2
Bayezid (son of Süleyman), 38–9, 126, 127–8, belagat poetic technique, 584–5
207–8, 220, 238–9 Bergama, carpet production in, 484–5
Bayezid I (1389–1402), 2, 9, 347–8 Beyan-ı Menazil-i Sefer-i Irakeyn (Mecmua-i
Byzantines and, 395 Menazil), 505–7
Timur’s attacks on, 365–6 beylerbeylik
Bayezid II (1481–1512) of Egypt and the Hijaz, 186–90
administrative legacy of, 239–40 establishment in Basra of, 181–2
anonymous texts concerning, 2–3 establishment in Yemen of, 179–80, 181, 191–3
architecture in reign of, 8–9, 466, 472, 477–69 of Ethiopia, 193–5
art in reign of, 8–9, 487–90 provincial government structure, 225–6
astronomers in court of, 417 beylerbeyis
calligraphy and book arts under, 478–9 architectural projects of, 472–3
collections of art and manuscript in reign governmental duties of, 226–32
of, 476 judiciary as check on, 232–3
colleges founded by, 333–4 biographical dictionaries
Halvetiye religious order and, 342 development in Rum of, 548–51, 559–60
Hanei school of Islamic law and, 234–6 histories of Rum poets as, 586–92
historical writing in reign of, 439 table of, 588–92
history of reign of, 27–30, 45, 173–5 Birgevi Mehmed b. Pir Ali, 341–3, 411, 432–3
janissaries under, 216–17 Bistami, Abd al-Rahman al-, 491–2, 539–40
land and tax laws under, 237 Blackburn, Richard, 191
leadership style of, 219–20 Black Sea
legal system under, 325–6 Mehmed II’s expansion in, 79, 144–5
library of, 409 Ottoman expansion in, 25–6, 52, 57–9
literary patronage in reign of, 552–6, 562–5 piracy in, 74–5
Mamluks and, 91–6 Blount, Henry, 171–2
Mediterranean expansion under, 148–55 Bocskai, István, 63–4
Mehmed II and, 22 Bodrum, 154
as Mehmed II’s successor, 148 body and health, Ottoman knowledge of, 430–3
naval forces under, 304 book arts
periodization in regime of, 50–2 manuscript culture in Rum and, 551n8
population growth under, 375–9 See also calligraphy and book arts
Quaytbay and, 94–6 Book of Dede Korkut, 441–2
religious institutions in reign of, 339–40, 346–7 Book of Forty Questions, 414–15
rivalry with Cem (brother), 27–30, 50–2, 91–6, border agreements, Ottoman terms for, 13
148–9, 149n68, 207–8 border regions in Ottoman Empire
scholarly and literary activities sponsored geographic knowledge and, 421–3
by, 3 migration patterns in, 396–8
Selim’s rebellion against, 444 Bosnian kingdom
Shah Isma’il, 102–4, 105–6 fortress garrisons in, 300
standing army under, 282–4 Islamization in, 374–5
668
Index
Ottoman expansion into, 9–10, 22–3, 49–50 Ottoman development of, 45

as Ottoman province, 225–6 urbanization and population growth in,
Botero, Giovanni, 248–9 379–82
Boxer, C. R., 195–6, 198 Çaldıran, battle of (1514), 19–20, 30–2, 109–10
Brahe, Tycho, 419 caliphate
Branković, George, 22, 23–4 declining status of, 350
Branković, Lazar, 23–4 Ottoman legal theory and, 325–6
Braudel, Fernand, 174–5, 195–6, 197–8, 361 social order and position of, 437–8
Brummett, Palmira, 21, 44–73 calligraphy and book arts, 476–80
Buonrizzo, Alvise, 166–7 ornament aesthetic and, 493–504
Burak Reis, 149–50, 151 Cami’ün-Neza’ir (A Compilation of Parallel
bureaucratization in Ottoman Empire Poems), 580–1
architectural inl uence of, 511–13, 527–8 Campanella, Tommaso, 396
as historical source, 5 canal construction, Selim II’s initiatives for, 39–40
impact of war on, 55–7 Canale, Nicolò da, 25, 144n23
institutions of government and, 222–32 Canatar, Mehmet, 366–7
integration of military and, 65–8 Çandarlı dynasty, 212–13, 321, 337–8
Ottoman capital formation and servile status Çandarlı Halil, 212–13
of bureaucrats, 263 Çandarlı İbrahim, 212–13
Ottoman Red Sea expansion and importance cannon foundries, Ottoman armanents
of, 185–6 technology and, 309–10
post-conquest administration, 63–4 Caoursin, 148
prose structure development and, 562–5 capital formation, Ottoman economic policies
state stability linked to, 20 and, 262–7
structural reforms in, 100 Capsali, Moses, 322–5
See also beylerbeylik captives of Ottoman soldiers, forced migration
Bursa of, 387–90
caravansarys in, 472 Caraldo, Pero, 177–9
economic productivity in, 273 caravansarys, pilgrimages to Mecca and, 352–4
historical sources on, 5 Carlos V (King of Spain), 177–9
kadı hierarchy in, 328, 332–4 carpet production, 484–5, 501
population estimates for, 376 Castaldo, Giovan Battista, 37–8
private proit limitations in, 268 castles, fortress garrisons in, 297–302
slave population in, 370 Cateau-Cambrésis, peace of, 38–9, 121–2
textile production in, 481 Catholics in Ottoman Empire
Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain de (Habsburg Orthodox Christians’ dispute with, 374
ambassador), 121–2, 126–7, 163–4, 248 population data for, 370–1
on plague outbreaks, 365–6 Cavalli, Marino, 156–7
Byzantine Empire cavalry in Ottoman army, 284–6
decline of, 276–7 cebecis in Ottoman army, 285–6
migration patterns in, 395 cebelis, timar system and, 293–6
Ottoman identiication with, 241–2 Celâleddîn-i Rumi, 343, 576–8
celalis, 43, 55, 386–7
Cafer Paşa, 170–1 Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi
Cafa (Kefe), Ottoman capture of, 144–5 administrative legacy of, 239–40
Cairo dynastic rivalries and, 209–10, 223–4
cultural inl uence of, 475 as historical source, 4, 70–3, 100
fortress garrisons in, 301–2 histories written by, 444–5, 452
kadı hierarchy in, 332–4 prose works by, 562–5
Mamluk presence in, 174–5 Çelebi Paşa, 572–6, 581–3
669
Index
celep appointments warfare justiied as defense against,

military provisioning system and, 310 277–80
Ottoman capital formation and, 264–5, See also Orthodox Christianity; Protestants
269–72, 273, 274–5 Chronology of Ottoman history, xvii–xxi
Celvetiye dervishes, 343 çift, Ottoman laws relating to, 236–7
cemaat (artisan communities), 493–504 Ciğalazade Sinan Paşa, 137, 170–1, 215–16
cemaat (janissary corps), 400 Cihannüma (Katip Çelebi), 423
cemaat-i nakkaşan, 493, 494 Cihannüma (Neşri), 449
Cemili (poet), 579–80 Cinani (poet), 576–8
Cem Sultan, 9–10, 45 Ciudadela, 163–4
Bayezid II rivalry with, 27–30, 50–2, 91–6, cizye registers, population data from, 363–5
148–9, 149n68, 207–8, 472 ‘classical age’, Ottoman history in context of, 2
calligraphy and book arts in court of, 476–80 classicism, Ottoman visual arts and, 457–8
execution of sons of, 221 climes (iqlim), Ottoman system of, 420–1, 422
in Italy, 425 cofee trading, Ottoman Red Sea expansion
literature commissioned by, 434 and, 185
pilgrimage to Mecca of, 351–2 collective homage, in Ottoman
Cenabi, 449–50 conquests, 48–9
Cenderecizade Mehmed, 546–7 college system in Ottoman empire, 326–32
ceramics ulema career path through, 332–4
ceramic tile, architectural incorporation of, ‘command economy’, interregional/inter-
470–2, 511 empire trading and, 6–7
decorative aesthetic of, 480–1, 496, 501–4 commentaries (şerh) on poetry, 581–3
faience pottery, 8–9 communication systems in Ottoman Empire,
Çeşme, 152 intermediaries in trans-imperial zone
Chagatai language, poetry in, 555–6, 557n27, and, 61–2
580n96 conquest
Charles V (King of Spain and Holy Roman historial deinitions of, 48–9
Emperor), 12, 32–3, 35–6, 159–64 rhetoric for proclamation of, 70–3
domestic borrowing under, 252–3 territorial incorporation following, 211–12
power aspirations of, 277 Constantine XI, Mehmed II’s alliance with, 22
Süleyman I’s campaign against, 51–2, 67–8, Constantinople. See Istanbul
241–2 Constitution Livornina, 261–2
Charles VIII (King of France), 27–30 Contarini, Paolo, 168–9
China Conti, Sigismondo de’, 145–6
knowledge of astronomy in, 415–16 Cook, Michael A., 385–6
Ottoman travel narratives on, 425–6 Copernicus, 419–20
Chios island, Ottoman capture of, 142n59–148, Coptic Christians, 369–70
142–3, 165–6 Corfu, Ottoman attack on, 149–50, 159–60
Christianity Corinth, Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4
in Ottoman Europe, 65–8 Coron (Korone), 150–3, 155
Ottoman expansion and, 11 Correia, Gaspar, 181
in Ottoman paintings, 543 Correr, Giovanni, 131–2
Ottoman Red Sea operations and, 173–5 corsairs
Ottoman tolerance of, 248–50 Ottoman Mediterranean expansion and,
Red Sea expansion by Ottoman Empire and, 146–7, 149–50, 155–70
176–7 protection in Mediterranean from, 171–2
rhetoric of Ottoman expansion and, 69–70 raids by, 153
tolerance in Istanbul of, 322–5 See also levends in naval ighting force
Uzun Hasan’s relations with, 84 Corsaro, Zuan Monaco, 146–7
670
Index
corvée (feudal obligation), Ottoman abolishment Danişmendname, 441–2

of, 250 Danube river, as Ottoman zone of operation,
Corvinus, Matthias (King of Hungary), 23–4, 28 57–9
cosmography Darir, Mustafa, 539–40
as encyclopaedia, 412–15 d’Aubusson, Pierre, 93–4
geographic knowledge and, 422 Dávid, Géza, 19–20
in illustrated manuscripts, 540–2 David of Trabzon, 75–7
Ottoman historiography and, 440 Davud Ağa, 530, 546–7
timekeeping and, 416 Davud Paşa, 28–30, 93–4
Cossack raids, 398 Dawlat-shah (poet), 586–9
costs of war and conquest in Ottoman decorative aesthetic
Empire, 13–15 deined, 493–504
Counterreformation, 249, 370–2 Ottoman artisan production and,
court culture and politics 474–86
decorative aesthetic and, 474–86 defter (register, inventory)
ornament aesthetic and, 493–504 pepper and spice trade igures in, 200–1
‘courtyard of the eight’ (sahn-i seman/semaniye), in Yemen beylerbeylik, 191–3
324 defterdars (inance oicers)
Couto, Dejanirah, 196–7, 198 governmental duties of, 222–32
Crépy, treaty of, 161 as provincial governors, 226–7
Crete Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa, 434–5
Mehmed IV’s occupation of, 172 Deli Hasan, 43
Ottoman attack on, 166–70 delis (army auxiliary forces), 296–7
Crimea, khanate of, 9, 52, 77–8 Delle Navigationi e Viagi, 423–9
criminal justice, Ottoman law concerning, 235 Demetrios Palaiologos, 22–3, 24, 212
criminals, in naval ighting forces, 307–8 Demirci, Süleyman, 364–5
cultural tradition Derviş Eğlence, (storyteller), 576–8
geography and, 422 dervishes
gift exchange in, 474–86 convents of (zaviye), 462–6
ornament aesthetic and, 493–504 illicit orders of, 343–7
representations of power in, 528–43 literature of, 549n5
visual arts and, 458–9 permitted orders of, 341–3
Cüneyd, 97–8, 100–1 ulema as, 320–1
cursus honorum (legal education), 332–4, See also Mevlevi (whirling dervishes)
348–9, 354. See also legal infrastructure in Derviş Paşa, 381
Ottoman Empire Despina Hatun, 76, 79, 98
customs duties, in Ethiopian beylerbeylik, 194–5 De Venetis, Jacobo, 150
Cyprus devlet el-ebed müddet (perpetual state)
judicial consultations on proposed conquest ideology, 274
of, 330–1 Devletoğlu Yusuf, 558–9
Ottoman occupation of, 39–40, 57–9, 166–70, devşirme (state levy on non-Muslim boys), 46
352–4 cultural and artistic inl uence of elites drafted
sürgün resettlements in, 391–2 from, 459–60, 472
Islamization in Ottoman Europe through,
Dahlak, Ottoman occupation of, 182–3 65–8, 373–4
Damascus in Mehmed II regime, 323–4
textile production in, 481 in oicial illustrated histories, 508–9
urbanization and population growth in, 379–82 physiognomy and recruitment practices
‘Damascus wares’, 501–4 for, 433
al-Damiri, 429 upward mobility through, 216–18, 251
671
Index
disease, population demographics and data on, Cyprus conquest and advice of, 330–1
365–6 heresy trials under, 340–1
Diu campaign, 179–80, 191–3, 196–7, 198 as kadıasker of Rumeli, 233, 237–8
divan (poetry collection) Süleyman’s elevation of, 330
commentaries on, 582–3 ulema rules established by, 332
gazel poetry, 567–70 economic policies in Ottoman Empire
as historical source, 3, 566n56 capital formation and, 262–7
illuminated manuscripts, 490–1, 538, 544 expansion and, 41–2, 185–6, 241–6
kaside (praise poetry) in, 570–2 inancial administration and changing
poetic form and content of, 568 conditions in, 254–6
Divan-ı Hümayun Mühimme Defterleri, 187–8 historical legacy of, 274–5
divan-ı-hümayun (Imperial Council), 222–32, imperial revenues and expenditures and, 246–8
248–9, 328 longevity of Ottoman political economy and,
judicial decisions by, 329 272–4
Divan-ı Husaini, 544 loss of Ottoman supremacy and, 238–9
Divnić, Juraj, 69–70 migrations in search of income and, 393–5
Diyarbakir, provincial government structure, Ottoman campaigns and, 21
225–6 population increase, food shortages and
Djinggis, Khan, 415–16 migration, 382–7
domestic borrowing system private proit accumulation limitations in,
Ottoman delay in adoption of, 256–8 267–9
Ottoman revenue adminstration impacted provisionism, iscalism and traditionalism in
by, 252–3 Ottoman administration, 258–62
Donini, 158 in Yemen beylerbeylik, 191–3
Don Juan of Austria, 167–8, 169–70 Edirne
Doria, Andrea, 35–6, 155, 161, 162–3, 169 economic productivity in, 273
Doria, Antonio, 159 kadı hierarchy in, 328
Doukas, 75–6 mosque in, 465–6
dry-ield agriculture, yield l uctuations in, 5–6 palace complex in, 452, 462, 469, 472
Dukakinzade Ahmed Paşa, 212–13 educational institutions
Dulgadir, 87–8, 90–1 language learning tools and, 560–2
post-conquest revolt in, 211–12 Rum literary tradition and, 554n20–555,
Selim I’s campaign against, 110–13 558n31, 558–60
Dulkadir dynasty, 473–4 See also medreses
Durrës, 152 Eğridirli Hacı Kemal, 580–1
Dürr-i Meknun, 413–15, 432–3, 454 Egri fethi Şehnamesi, 538
Düsturname (Enveri), 449 Egypt
Dutch, cofee trade and, 185 beylerbeylik of, 186–90
dynastic families fortress garrisons in, 301–2
authority of sultans and, 207–18 Ottoman conquest of, 32, 45, 173, 174–5, 322,
history of, 445–9 348–9
kaside (praise poetry) and rise of, 570–2 political, economic and military importance
literary patronage by, 552–5, 553n12 to Ottomans of, 185–6
marriage negotiations and, 210–11 Selim I and conquest of, 113, 276–7
tax registers and population estimates for, 361
ebced numerical system, 589–91 See also Cairo
Ebul Fazl Mehmed Çelebi, 337–8 ehl-i hıref (artisans working for the palace),
Ebul-Hayri Rumi, 434 493–504
Ebu-Muslimname, 441–2 ehl-i kalem (men of the pen), 337–8
Ebussuud Efendi, 132, 166–7, 221–2, 325–6, 329–30 elites
administrative legacy of, 221, 239–40 absolutist regimes and control of, 248
672
Index
architectural patronage and construction by, military revolution in, 315–19

472–4, 491–528 Ottoman economic policy and protectionism
charities sponsored by, 472 in, 260
courtly paintings and portraits commissioned Ottoman expansion in, 44–73
by, 535–6 post-conquest Ottoman administration in,
decorative aesthetic inl uenced by, 476 63–4
elite vs. folk literatures and, 549n5 Evliya Çelebi, 413–15
iscal ineiciencies in policies of, 256–8 Evrenosoğlu family, 212–14, 226–32, 473
gift exchange among, 474–86 executions
government role of, 221–2 dynastic security and practice of, 207–8,
illustrated manuscript patronage by, 532–43 209–10
inl uence on architecture of, 459–60 sultan’s role in, 221
interregional/inter-empire trading and, 6–7 expansion of Ottoman Empire
knowledge production and, 407–8, 415–20 characteristics of, 62–8
military recruitment of, 389–90 conquest and administration patterns in, 63–4
Ottoman capital formation and, 262–7 deinitions and terminology, 46–9
Ottoman legal structure and, 325–6 Eastern expansion and consolidation, 104–25
post-conquest co-optation of, 402 political factors in, 248–52
Rum literature and poetry and patronage of, in Red Sea, 173–201
552–5, 553n12 rhetoric of, 68–73
See also ulema (scholar-oicials) trans-imperial zones and frontiers in, 59–60
encyclopaedias, cosmography and production zones, stages and context of, 57–62
of, 412–15 expenditures. See revenues and expenditures
Enez explosive devices, military development of,
Ottoman possession of, 142–3 285–6
Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4, exports, Ottoman economic policy and role
144n23 of, 259
England eyalet system (provinces), 185–6
cofee trade and, 185
domestic borrowing in, 256–8 Fadullah b Ruzbihan Khunji, 98
economic policy and foreign trade in, 260–1 faience pottery, 8–9
emerging commercial power of, 44, 172, 241, Farah, Caesar, 191
242–3 Fatih socio-religious complex, 462–6
Ottoman trading and, 6–7 Fatima Sultan, 539
revenues and expenditures in, 247 Fenarizade Muhyiddin Çelebi, 555–6
Enveri, 449 Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 32–4, 35–6, 37–8
Eremya Çelebi, 369–70 Holy League and, 159–60
Erünsal, İsmail, 409 Süleyman’s campaign against, 51–2
esham (tax farm shares), 255, 256–8 Ferdinand I, Duke of Tuscany, 261–2
Eskandar Beg Monshi, 121, 130, 214–15 Ferhad Paşa, 41, 137, 221–2
Ethiopia, Ottoman presence in, 174–5, 181, 182–3, Feridun Ahmed Bey, 4, 533, 544
184 fermans (sultanic commands), 187–8
beylerbeylik of, 193–5 Ferrante (King of Naples), 144
Euboea (Negroponte), 142–3 Ferrara, Constanzo da, 486–7
Venetian loss of, 9, 25 fesahat poetic technique, 584–5
Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4 fetvas (legal opinions)
eunuchs, illustrated histories commissioned against astronomy and astrology, 415
by, 538 legal authority of, 234–5, 330
Europe Figueira, Luiz, 181–2
domestic borrowing system in, 252–3 Filarete (Florentine architect), 465
Islamization and, 65–8 Fil Yakup Paşa, 118–19
673
Index
inancial policies of Ottoman regimes free market conditions

capital formation in Ottoman polity and, longevity of Ottoman political economy and,
262–7 272–4
collection cost increases and administrative Ottoman economic policy and role of, 260
shortcomings, 254–6 frontier narratives, Ottoman historiography
economics and, 258–62, 269–72, 274–5 and, 441–2
‘inancial revolution’ in Europe and, 252–3 Fürkatname (Halili), 572–6
imperial revenues and expenditures and, Fuzuli, 440–1
246–8
ineiciencies in, 256–8 galatat dictionaries, 560–2
longevity of Ottoman political economy and, Galateo, Antonio De Ferrariis, 146, 148
272–4 Garcia de Noronha, D., 180
private proit limitations in, 267–9 Garzoni, Costantino, 168–9
ulema involvement in, 337–8 Gattilusio, Dorino, 147
Firdevsi, 488–90 Gattilusio, Nicolò, 147–8
irearms, Ottoman use of, 173, 174–5 Gazali (poet), 576–8
armaments technology development and, Gazanfer Ağa, 538
309–10 gazavatname histories, 537–8, 539, 574n81
army restructuring based on, 284 gazel poetry
artillery units in Ottoman army and, 284–6 form and content of, 567–70
Firuz Ağa, 476–80 by Süleyman I, 578–86
Flanders, domestic borrowing system in, 252–3, Gazi Umur Bey, 146–7
256–8 Gedik Ahmed Paşa, 85
Fleet, Kate, 19–43 execution of, 209–10, 221
Fleischer, Cornell, 450 Mehmed II and, 22, 145–8
Flemming, Barbara, 64–5 mosque of, 466–70
folkloric practices Ottoman expansion and, 26, 149
elite vs. folk literatures, 549n5 gedikli zeamets, 292
Ottoman medical practices and, 432 Gelibolu (Gallipoli), shipyards in, 305
vilayetname folk legends and, 441–2, 443 Gelibolulu, Mustafa Ali, 4, 168, 350,
food supplies 417, 421
migration due to shortages in, 393–5 gazel poetry by, 568–70
population demographics and, 382–7 on Iran-Ottoman relations, 139–40
fortresses Künhü‘l-ahbar (world history) by, 450–1
army garrisons in, 297–302 Menakıb-ı Hünerveran of, 494, 544–6
living conditions for soldiers in, 313–15 Nusretname of, 537–8, 542
Ottoman expansion and role of, 60–1 Ottoman Mediterranean expansion and, 172
Foscolo, Andrea, 153 painting and, 544
Fourth Crusade, 9 prose by, 562–5, 563n48, 564n52–65
Fra Bernardino (corsair), 153 statecraft manual by, 434–5
France on Turkish language in Rum, 556–8, 557n27
armaments technology in, 309–10 Genç, Mehmet, 246, 258–62, 267, 269–72
domestic borrowing system in, 252–3 Gencine-i Feth-i Gence, 538
emerging commercial power of, 242–3 Genoa, public debt in, 252–3
Ottoman alliances with, 32–3, 38–9, 159–64 geography
Ottoman trading and, 6–7 in illustrated manuscripts, 504–9, 540–2
public debt in, 252–3 of Ottoman expansion, conigurations and
revenues and expenditures in, 247 zones of, 57–9
François I, 35–6, 159–64 in Ottoman historical sources, 5
fratricide, dynastic disputes and practices of, Ottoman knowledge, 420–3
207–8 spheres of operation and, 70–3
674
Index
travel and Western culture and expanded hâdim al-haramayn (servitor of the two holy
knowledge of, 423–9 sanctuaries), sultans as, 349–52
Georgia, Ottoman occupation of, 41, 105 Hadım Ali Paşa, 30
Gerber, Haim, 268 Hadım Süleyman Paşa, 177–9, 191
Gerlach, Stephan, 142n59–148, 170 Hadis-i nev, 425–6
al-Ghazālī, 434 Hafez (poet), 582–3
gift exchange, artisan production and inl uence Hagia Sophia. See Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia)
of, 474–86 church/mosque
Giray dynasty, 399–400 hagiographies
girih (decorative interlace), 475–6 Ottoman historiography and, 434
Giustiniani, Gieronimo, 165–6 of poets, 445–6
Göde Ahmed Bey, 85–6 Hakim İshak, 340–1
Godhino, Vitorino Magalhães, 177–9, 195–6, 197 Halife, Hasan, 103–4
Golden Horn aesthetic style in faience, 496 Halife Çelebi, 472–4
governance structures in Ottoman Empire, Halil, Çandarli, 22–3, 97–8, 321
205–40 Halili (penname), 572–6
divan-ı-hümayun (Imperial Council), 222–32 Halvetiye order of dervishes, 342, 443
institutions of government and, 222–32 persecution of, 345
processes of government and, 218–38 Sunni ‘right belief ’ defended by, 342–3
sultan’s authority and, 207–18 Hamdallah Mustawi, 422
grain harvests and shipments Hamon, Moses, 432
beylerbeyis’ duties regarding, 188–9 Hamza Bali, 342–3, 344–5
food supply estimates and, 382–7 Hamza Saru Görez, Müftü, 107, 142–3, 221–2
protection in Mediterranean of, 171–2 Hanbalis, 348–9
grave registration, 334–7 Hanei school of Islamic law, 234–6, 238, 320–1,
Grimani, Antonio, 151 325–6, 348–9
Gritti, Battista, 144–5 Haniwaldanus, anonymous author, 94–6
Gülistan (Sadi), 560–2, 576–8, 578n90, 582 Haremeyn, beylerbeyis’ duties regarding, 187–8
gunpowder mills (baruthane), Ottoman Hasan Bey, 75–6
armanents technology and, 309–10 Hasan Paşa, 43, 542–3
Hasb-i Hal (Nev’i), 567
Habsburgs hass, tax and population data and, 358–60
Counterreformation initiated by, 249–50 Hass Murad Paşa, 212–13
European military revolution and, 315–19 hatayi decorative aesthetic, 475–6, 495, 501–4
Mehmed III and, 42–3 Hayali (poet), 568–70, 582–3
migration patterns in border regions near, Hayat al-hayavan (al-Damiri), 429
396–8 Haydar (son of Tahmasp), 132–3
military parity with Ottomans of, 277 Haydar the Geomancer, 454–5
Murad III and, 42 Hayreddin Bey, 178
Ottoman confrontation with, 45, 50–2 Hayreddin Reis (Hayreddin Paşa), 12, 153, 225–6,
Ottoman Empire rivalry with, 241–2 509
Ottoman Mediterranean expansion and Charles V and, 12, 35–6
conl ict with, 159–64 as naval commander, 306
piracy sponsored by, 14–15 western Mediterranean expansion and, 155–70
serfdom under, 250 hazine (treasury), cultural production and, 493
Süleyman and, 32–3, 38–9 health, Ottoman knowledge of, 430–3
War Council of, 251–2 Heberer von Bretten, Johann Michael, 171–2, 387
See also Holy Roman Empire Heinen, Anton, 412–13
Hacı Bektaş, 346–7, 441–2, 473 heliocentric systems, Ottoman disinterest in,
Hadidi, 100–1 419–20
Hadikatü‘ssu’ada (Fuzûlî), 440–1 Hemden Paşa, 108
675
Index
Henri II (King of France), 38–9, 161–2 holy war doctrine, Ottoman warfare and role
heroic stories, as historical source, 3–4 of, 277–80
Hersekzade Ahmed Paşa, 28–9, 210–11, 212–13, House of Osman, historical narratives of, 451–2
239–40 Hud (Arabian prophet), 440
Heşt Behişt (Amir Khusrav Dehlavi), 488–90 Hülägü (son of Chingiss Han), 415–16
Heşt Bihişt (Bidlisi), 448 humouralism
Heşt Bihişt (Eight Gardens of Paradise) (Sehi Kınalızade’s discussion of, 435–7
Bey), 445–6, 586 in Ottoman knowledge of body and health,
heterodoxy, in Sunni Islam, 338–47 430–3
Hevesname (Book of Desire) (Cafer Çelebi), Hundi Hatun, 210–11
572–6, 584–5 Hünername (Book of Arts and Skills), 72–3,
Hevesname (Book of Desire) (Paşa Çelebi), 572–6, 533–4, 537
581–3 Hungary
Hidaya (al-Marghinani), 327–8 Catholic population in, 370–2
Hijaz cizye payments in, 363–5
beylerbeylik of, 186–90 economic importance of, 67–8
Ottoman relations with, 173–5, 185–6 European military revolution and, 315–19
pilgrimages to, 347–8 fortress garrisons in, 297–302
Hijra (627–28), 330–1 janissary participation in campaign for, 283
hilat (honour robes), 474–86 Mehmed II’s focus on, 144–5, 276–7
historical overview of Ottoman Empire naval river lotillas in, 308
from 1451 to 1603, 19–43 Ottoman expansion in, 23–4, 28, 32–3, 38–9,
1451 to mid-sixteenth century, 22–36 42–3, 51–2
mid-sixteenth century to 1603, 36–43 Ottoman military strategy concerning, 279
historiography of Ottoman Empire population estimates for, 376
archaeometry and, 15–16 serfdom in, 250
army structure and history, 280–2 timar system in, 288–96
coverage of international trade and, 195–201 Hunyadi, John, 22
deinitions of conquest in, 48–9 Hürrem Sultan/Roxelana (wife of Süleyman I),
deinitions of Europe and expansion in, 46–9 37–8, 125, 210–11, 388–9
dynastic history and, 445–9 architectural projects inl uenced by, 511,
in illustrated manuscripts, 504–9, 529–43 516–19
imperial revenues and expenditures, data on, Huruis, 321, 346–7
246–8 Husayn Bayqara, 490–1
oicial court historiographers and, 508–9 Hüsameddin Ankaravi, 344–5
Ottoman concepts of time and, 439–45 Hüseyin Ağa, 472
pepper and spice trade data and, 199–201 Hüseyin (Emir), 174–5, 177–9
rhetoric of expansion and, 68–73 Hüseyin Hezarfen, 331–2, 336–7
stereotyping of Ottoman Empire and, 1 Hüseyin Paşa, 193–5
world history and, 449–53 Hüsrev and Şirin, 572–6, 573n74
zones, stages, and contexts of, 57–62 Hüsrev Paşa, 133, 380–1
Hızır Bey, 76, 193–5 Hütteroth, Wolf Dieter, 385–6
Hoca Sadeddin, 81–2, 101, 112, 419, 448–9, 452
Holy Apostles, Byzantine Church, Ottoman İbn el-Hac Hasan, 333–4
complex on site of, 462–6 Ibn Iyas, 30–2, 112
Holy League including Venice, 35–6, 39–40, 53–4, İbn Kemal. See Kemapaşazade
159–60, 167–8, 169 İbn Khaldun, 450–1
Holy Roman Empire Ibn Taymiyya, 341–3
governance in, 248–9 Ibn ‘Ulayyan, 39–40, 214–15
Ottoman Empire ambitions and, İbrahim (ruler of Karaman), 22–3, 79–81
241–2 İbrahim Cevri, 417
676
Index
İbrahim Gulşeni, 345–6, 443 income levels

İbrahim Müteferrika, 423, 434–5 historical trends in, 259
İbrahim Paşa, grand vizier of Süleyman I, 32, migration patterns and changes to, 393–5
34–5, 114–15, 119–20, 177, 215 timar system and, 288–96
administrative legacy of, 239–40, 504–5 India
execution of, 209–10 Moghuls of, 348–9
geographic knowledge under, 424–5 Ottoman knowledge of, 426–8
imperial imagery in artistic projects of, 491–2 pepper and spice trade and, 199–201
as military commander, 218–19, 278–9 Portuguese expansion into, 196
post-conquest rebellions and, 211–12 textile production in, 481
İdrîs Bidlisi, 214–15, 448 Indian Ocean region
ignorance, Ottoman concepts of, 407–8 Ottoman expansion in, 12, 173, 243–4
Ilkhanid dynasty, 352–4 Ottoman Red Sea protective operations in,
illustrated manuscripts, 476–80, 488–90 175–85
geography and history in, 504–9, 540–2 Portuguese ambitions in, 243–4
multiple copies of, 539 industrial arts, 476–80, 493
ornament aesthetic and, 493, 494 inheritance rights
paintings and biographies of authors of, grave registrations and, 334–7
544–7 Ottoman capital formation and infringement
representation of power in, 528–9, 532–43 of, 263
ilmiye hierarchy, 331–2 Innocent VIII (Pope), 27–30
knowledge production and, 409–11, 418–19 Inquisition, Islamic inquisitions and, 372–3
İmadüddin Hüseyinoğlu Hasan, 560–2 inşa literary prose, 576–8
Imber, Colin, 21, 158n148 inter-empire trading, growth of, 6–7
Imbros, Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4 interest rates
imperial ethos European domestic borrowing system and,
architecture inl uenced by, 459–74 252–3
artistic articulation of images of, 491–528 Islamic prohibitions on interest taking, 256–8
Ottoman European expansion and, 50–1 proit limits and, 268–9
protection of Muslim sanctuaries and, intermediaries, in trans-imperial zone, 61–2
349–52 international trade
in Topkapı Palace design, 459–60 Ottoman economic policy and, 258–62, 275
trans-imperial zone and, 59–60 Ottoman expansion and, 195–201
ulema (scholar-oicials) and, 322–5 Iran
in visual arts, 457–8 fortress garrisons on frontier with, 301
warfare as tool of, 279–80 geography of, 422
imports, Ottoman economic policy and role Ottoman confrontations with, 11, 41–2, 44,
of, 259 53–4, 139–40
İnalcık, Halil, 195–6, 198 Ottoman trading with, 6–7
administrative structure and, 63–4 Selim’s ban on trade with, 114
conquest of Constantinople and, 241–2 Süleyman’s relations with, 34–5, 38–9, 113–25
iscal policies and, 55, 260 treaty of Amasya and, 126–32
on longevity of Ottoman political economy, Iraq
272–3 Jacobites and Nestorians in, 369–70
on Ottoman Balkan expansion, 251 Ottoman provinces in, 225–6, 276–7, 352–4
on Ottoman capital formation and wealth Selim II and, 39–40
accumulation, 263, 264 Isabella of Hungary, Süleyman and, 33–4, 37–8
on population demographics, 361–2 İsa Bey, foundation in Skopje of, 472–3
Red Sea expansion and, 174–5 İsfendiyaroğulları
on rural migration patterns, 385–6 Mehmed II’s conquest of, 75–6
on ulemas, 337–8 Uzun Hasan’s alliance with, 79
677
Index
İshak (Karaman ruler), 26, 80–1, 87–8 Catholic population in, 370–2
İskender Bey-Scanderbeg, 213–14 conquest of, 9, 21, 44, 241–2
İskender Çelebi, 209–10 economic and trade importance of, 142–3
İskendername (Ahmedi), 446, 487–8 empire consolidation and, 45
İskender Paşa, 36–7, 125 European inl uences in, 46–9
Islam Ottoman sources on history of, 2
Christian-Islam confrontations, Ottoman population growth in, 6–7, 377–9
European expansion and, 65–8 religious tolerance in, 322–5
conversions to, 323, 369–75 shipyards in, 305
data on women’s conversion to, 366–9 symbolism in Islam of, 347–8
dominance in post-conquest Constantinople under Mehmed II, 22–3
of, 322–5 istimalet (accommodation/persuasion)
Hanei school of Islamic law and, 234 in Balkan provinces, 251
in illustrated manuscripts, 539–40 decline of, 251–2
institutional polity in Ottoman empire of, 317 Ottoman expansion and role of, 249–50
Iranian-Ottoman conl ict and, 11 Italy
kaside (praise poetry) and, 570–2 domestic borrowing system in, 256–8
Ottoman embrace of, 45 Mehmed II’s campaign in, 145–8
Ottoman legal system and inl uence of, 232 migrations to Ottoman Empire from, 396
Ottoman warfare and role of, 277–80 Muslim slaves in, 14–15
padişah of, 348–9 Ottoman western Mediterranean expansion
slavery and conversion to, 372–3 and attacks on, 159–64
voluntary conversions to, 323–4 Ottoman withdrawal from, 27–30
See also Shi’a Islam; Sunni Islam textile production in, 481
Islamic holy cities trading restrictions in ports of, 261–2
beylerbeyis’ duties regarding, 187–8 Ivan IV (RussianTsar) (1547–84), 53–4
kadı hierarchy in, 328 Iyas, Ibn, 112
Mamluk presence in, 174–5 İz, Fahir, 562–5
Ottoman control of, 45, 113 İznik (Nicaea) pottery, 8–9
Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 173–5
sultans as servitors of, 349–52 Jalalnddin Dawani, 435
treaty of Amasya and protection of, 126–7 Jalayrid dynasty, 352–4
Isma’il (son of Tahmasp), 132–9 Janbirdi al-Ghazali, 32, 112–13, 114–15, 117, 211–12
Ismail Abu Taqiyya, 273, 379–80 janissaries
İsmail Bey (İsfendiyaroğulları ruler), 75–6, 80 as army land forces, 282–4
Isma’il Safavid (Shah), 10, 29–30, 34–5, 44, 97 Bayezid II and, 27–30
ascends Iranian throne, 322 conversion to Islam among, 373–4
Ottoman Eastern expansion and corsair capture of, 153
consolidation and, 104–25 devşirme as route to service in, 215–16, 282–3
posthumous power of, 116 garrisons in beylerbeyliks of, 179–80, 185–6,
religious beliefs of, 339–40 189–90
Safavid ascendancy and, 97–104 living conditions in military garrisons for,
Selim I’s war with, 50–2, 70–3, 106–13, 276–7 313–15
İsmihan (daughter of Selim II), 525 in naval forces, 307–8
isolarii (maps and sailing handbooks), 423–5 raiding parties organized by, 397
as illustrated history, 504–5 revolt of, 41
Issawi, Charles, 380 Safavid war and, 108, 126
Istanbul Selim I supported by, 27–30
Albanian migration to, 394–5 support of sultan by, 216–18
architecture in, 459–74 timars received by, 229–30
678
Index
training and selection process for, 216–18 Mamluk involvement in, 86–91
Jeddah, Ottoman protection of, 175 Mehmed II’s campaign against, 22–3, 82–3
Jerba, 161 rebellion in, 212–14
Jewish population in Ottoman Empire Karamanlı Nişancı Mehmed Paşa, 144–5
data on women in, 369 Kara Memi, 496–7
in imperial Istanbul, 322–5 Kara Yazıcı, 43
tax farming by, 262–7, 270–1 kaside (praise poetry), 567–8, 570–2
restrictions on tax farming, 261–2 Kasım (brother of Pir Ahmed), 82
John IV (Byzantine rule of Trebizond/ Kasım Paşa, 114–15
Trabzon), 76 Kaşşaf (Seyyid el-Şerif ), 333–4
judiciary system in Ottoman Empire, 232 Kastriota, George, 25, 394–5. See also Skanderbeg
consultations on conquest and war and, 330–1 uprising
kadı hierarchy and, 328 Katib Çelebi, 157, 165–6, 168, 170
ulema hierarchy and, 328–32 Cihannüma of, 423, 455–6
venality and unemployment in, 334–7 on Mehmed II, 145
Julius III (Pope), 162–3, 163n179 statecraft manual by, 434–5
juros (Castilian annuities), 252–3 Kitab-i Bahriye (Piri Reis), 427
Kava’idü‘l-Fürs, 560–2, 561n44–562
kadı, 193–5, 222–38 Kaykavus İbn Iskandar, 434
in Bursa, 328 Kazimierz IV (King of Poland), 27–8, 29–30
career mobility of, 332–4 Kemalpaşazade (İbn Kemal), 72–3, 88–9, 92,
in Edirne, 328 277–8, 340–1, 344
hierarchy of, 328–32 on Bayezid II regime, 50–1
judicial independence of, 329–30 on Bayezid II’s Mediterranean expansion, 152–3
politicial activities of, 337–8 historical narrative of, 448–9
sürgün migrations, 391–2 on Mehmed II, 81
system of, 232–8 prose work of, 576–8
venality and unemployment of, 334–7 publications of, 560–2
Kadızadeli movement, 341–3 on Selim-Isma’il war, 107, 111
Kadızade Rumi, 415–16 on Venetian-Ottoman conl ict, 143–4
Kadri of Bergama, 560–2, 582–3 Kemal Reis, 149–50, 159–60
Kafescioğlu, Çiğdem, 20–1 explorations by, 424, 427
Kanizsa, as Ottoman province, 225–6 naval forces reorganization by, 304
kanunname (law code), 186–90, 237 Kemalüddin Mehmed, 409–10
Ottoman legal practices and, 325–6 Kepler, Johannes, 419–20
See also legal infrastructure in Ottoman Khamsa manuscript, 488–90
Empire kharaj muwassaf/kharaj muqasama taxes, 235–8
Kanunname-i Mısır, 114–15 Kharidat al-‘aja’ib, 412–13, 421–2
Kapı Ağası medrese, architecture of, 469 Khayrbak (Egyptian governor), 32, 114–15
Karagöz Paşa, 28–9, 92–3 Khitāy-name (Book of China), 425–6
Karakoyunlu dynasty Khusrav va Shirin manuscript, 488–90
architectural inl uences of, 474 kidnappings by pirates, 389, 397–8
decorative aesthetic of, 474–86 Kilia
Karaman Bayezid II and, 27–8, 50–1
Ottoman incorporation of Karaman, 2–3, Ottoman occupation of, 9
26, 79–81 kılıç (revenue element), timar system and, 288–9
provincial government in Karaman, 225–6 Kılıç Ali Paşa, 167–70
Karaman dynasty Kınalızade Ali, 433–4, 435–8
Bayezid II and, 28–9 Kısas (Ramazanzade Mehmed Paşa), 449
decorative aesthetic of, 475 kisve (Ka’aba covering), 349–50, 352–4
679
Index
Kitab al-Talwih, 333–4 kul (sultan’s servitors), 248

Kitab-ı Bahriye (Piri Reis), 424–5, 504–5 career mobility for, 337–8
Kızıl Ahmed Bey, 75–6, 79 standing army and, 282–4
Kızılbaş tribesmen See also slavery
Ottoman persecution of, 345, 346–7 Künhü‘l-Ahbar (Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali), 450–1
Shah Isma’il and, 339–40 Kuran, Timur, 265–6
Knights Hospitallers, 141–2 Kurdoğlu, Fevzi 156–7
Anatolia attacked by, 144 Kuru, Selim, 20–1
Bayezid II and, 27–30, 221 Kütükoğlu, Mübahat, 269–72
Cem and, 27–30, 50–1, 207–8
corsairs and, 149–50 Lajos II (King of Hungary and Bohemia), 32–3,
on Malta, 164–5 225–6
Mehmed II’s Mediterranean campaign and, Lala Mustafa Paşa, 12–13, 39–40, 41, 42–3, 135–7,
147–8 221–2, 537–8
prisoners of, 14–15 Lamii (poet and scholar), 576–8, 583–6
protection in Mediterranean from, 171–2 land system
Süleyman and, 32–3, 51–2, 155 land surveys in Anatolia and, 116
westward Mediterranean move by Ottomans Ottoman property rights law concerning,
and, 161–2 235–8
knowledge and knowledge production post-conquest annexation practices and, 212
of astronomy, 415–20 sipahi’s duties in maintenance of, 286–96
of cosmography, 412–15 Lane, F. C., 195–6
dynastic history and, 445–9 language
of human body, 430–3 learning tools for, 560–2
importance of, in Ottoman society, 407–8, multilingualism in Rum and, 558n30, 558–60
455–6 in Ottoman historical sources, 4
of maritime geography, 423–9 Rum literary tradition and evolution of, 551,
of natural history, 429–30 552–5, 556–8
Ottoman historiography and, 439–45 See also speciic languages
production and dissemination in Ottoman Łaski, Hieronymus, 278–9
Empire of, 20–1 Latii, 562–5, 576–8, 579–80, 588–90, 590n123
prognostications and end of time and, 453–5 ‘Latin campaign’ of 1204, 9
of social order and politics, 433–8 Latin-Greek divisions, Mehmed II’s exploitation
systematization of, 409–12 of, 147–8
of universal geography, 420–3 la Vigne, Jean de, 163
world history and, 449–53 ‘Law Book of Mehmed II’, 208–9, 224
Koca Sinan Paşa, 42, 221–2 Le’ali (poet), 559n36–560
Koçi Bey, 434–5 Lef kas islands, 145–6, 152
Komnenos dynasty, 75 corsair attacks on, 156–7
Konya legal infrastructure in Ottoman
battle of, 207–8 Empire, 232–8
carpet production in, 484–5 heresy accusations and, 340–1
list of foundations in, 2–3 Islamic schools of law and, 348–9
Köprülü, Fuat, 3–4 Ottoman warfare and role of, 277–80
Korkud (son of Bayezid II), 29, 30–2, 147–8, 155–6 şeri’at and kanun and, 325–6
execution of, 207–8 sultan’s authority and, 207–18, 221, 437–8
Kos island (İstanköy), 142–3, 154 See also cursus honorum (legal education);
Krause, Keith, 317 kannuname (law code)
Kritoboulos, 69–70, 75–6, 77 Le Historie de Europa (Ulloa), 67–8
Krujë, 144–5 Lemnos, 142–3, 147–8
Küçük Kaynarca, treaty of, 350 Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4
680
Index
Lepanto Lubenau, Reinhold, 249–50

battle of, 44, 53–4 Lucano, Giovanni Albino, 148n64
Bayezid’s siege of, 150–3 Ludovisi, Danielle de’, 149–50
Mehmed II’s siege of, 144–5 Lüti Paşa, 111, 118–19, 122, 159–60
Ottoman attack of 1571 on, 167–70 on conquest of Rhodes, 154–5
Lesbos, Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4 on execution of Ibrahim Paşa, 209–10
Letaifname (Book of Witticisms), 576–8 history by, 452
levends in naval ighting force, 307–8. marriage to Şahi Hatun, 210–11
See also corsairs military provision system under, 310
Levni, 8–9 statecraft manual by, 434–5
Leyla and Mecnun, 572–6 Luther, Martin, 248–50
life-time tax-farm (malikane), 255 Lybyer, A. H., 195–6
literary production and tradition
cosmography in, 413–15 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 207, 248–9
discourse on poetry and, 583–6 Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi, 171–2, 571
discourse on the arts in, 544–7 magic, Ottoman study of, 430
dynastic history and, 445–9 Mahdia, 161
elite vs. folk literatures, 549n5 mahmal, mehmel (palanquin sent to Mecca), 351–2
histories of Rum poets and, 586–92 Mahmud (son of Mehmed III), execution of, 209–10
literary tools for poetry in Rum and, 578–86 Mahmud Paşa
manuals and commentaries and, 581–3 appointment of, 190, 212–13
new forms of, 566–78 commercial centre built by, 472
in Ottoman Empire, 20–1 execution of, 212–13
Ottoman historiography and, 439–45 hagiography of, 434
Ottoman travel narratives in, 423–9 Mehmed II and, 23–4, 82
parallel poetry anthologies, 580–1 mosque of, 466–70
poetic form and content and, 566–78 naval skills of, 146–7
prose structure and, 562–5 Ottoman expansion and, 75–6, 183–4
prose vs. poetry and, 565–6 Majalis al-Nafais (Excellent Gatherings) (Nevai),
rare book collections and, 476–80 586–9
of Rum, 548–92 Maksud Ali Bey, 123–5
statecraft manuals and, 433–8 Malamatiyya/Melametiyye mysticism, of
on wonders (acaib), 539–40 ulemas, syncretism with Islam, 320–1
See also illustrated manuscripts Malikis, 348–9
liva kanunnameleri (tax regulations), food supply MalkoçoğIu Bali Bey, 27–8
estimates and, 382–7 Malkoçoğlu family, 473
Livorno, trade with Ottoman merchants in, 261–2 Malta, Ottoman attack on, 21, 164–5
Lokman ibn Seyyid Hüseyin, 72–3 Mamluks
Lokman, 433, 449–50, 533, 535–6, 537, 544 Bayezid II’s war with, 27–30, 91–6, 148–9
long war between Ottomans and Habsburgs cultural inl uence on Ottoman art and
(1593–1606), 44, 53–4, 241 architecture, 459, 469, 511
European military revolution and, 315–19 Egyptian rule of, 349–52
military capabilities and, 276 Karaman and, 80–1
Lopes de Castanheda, Fernão, 177–9 military superiority of Ottomans over, 276–7
Lopes de Sequeira, Diogo, 176 Ottoman expansion and, 11, 26, 50–2, 86–91,
Louis, William (Willem Lodewijk), 284 185–6
Louis XIV (King of France), 245–6, 248–9 Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 173–5, 185
love poetry Portuguese naval blockade and, 175–85, 243–4
form and content of, 572–6 religious ideology as justiication for war
history of, 589 against, 277–80
Lowry, Heath, 360 Selim I and, 10, 30–2, 110–13, 348–9
681
Index
Ma’mun (caliph), 415–16 al-Mawardi, 325

Manisa palace complex, 462 Maximillian II (Holy Roman Emperor), 38–9
manuals and commentaries on poetry and Mazzaoui, Michael M. 106–7
literature, 581–3 Mecca
mapping Ottoman reconstruction of Great Mosque
maritime geography and, 423–4, 426–8 in, 351
Ottoman universal geography and, 421–3 pilgrimages to, Ottomans as protectors of,
Maragha observatory, 415–16 10, 352–4
al-Marghinani, 327–8 Mecmu’atü‘n-Nezair (An Anthology of Parallel
maritime trade, 142n9 Poems), 580–1
Bayezid II’s Mediterranean consolidation and, medical knowledge, Ottoman study of, 430–3
148–55 medical services for Ottoman military, 313–15
customs taxes in Ethiopian beylerbeylik on, Mediterranean region, Ottoman expansion in,
194–5 12, 29–30
geographic conigurations and zones of eastern consolidation from 1481 to 1533, 148–55
operation and, 57–9 eastern expansion, 1451–81, 141–8
impact on geographic knowledge of, 423–9 fortress garrisons in, 300–1
Ottoman eastern Mediterranean expansion post-1574 strategies, 170–2
and, 141–8 western expansion, 1533–74, 155–70
Ottoman expansion and, 11, 45 medreses
Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 195–201 astronomy and mathematics in, 415–20
protection, in Mediterranean, of, 171–2 code of conduct for, 409–10
Red Sea as strategic location in, 175–85 heresy trials and network of, 340–1
Maronite Christians, population data on, 370–1 hierarchy and categories of, 327–8
Marranos (reconverted Jews), 261–2, 270–1 medical training and, 431
marriage muvakkıthane in, 416
as dynastic tool, 210–11 palace schools and, 216–18
of Ottoman soldiers, 313–15 post-conquest system of, 326–32
Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando, 285–6 ulema career path through, 332–4
Martinuzzi, George, 33–4, 37–8 unemployment problems and enrollment
martolos (Christian ighting unit in Ottoman in, 384
service), 397 Meğri, 152
martyrology, 440–1 Mehmed I (1413–21), 321
Marxist ideology Mehmed II (1451–81)
Ottoman capital formation and, 262–7 architectural projects under, 459–60, 472
Ottoman imperial revenues and expenditures art and pictorial representation in reign of,
in context of, 246 487–8
masjid artisan production in reign of, 476–80
elite architectural patronage and construction colleges founded by, 324, 333–4
of, 466–70 conquest of Constantinople and, 241–2, 347–8
in socio-religious complexes, 462–6 cosmography and knowledge in reign of,
Massawa, 182–3 413–15
Maşuk î, İsmail, 344 Crimea khanate and, 9
Masum Sultan Safavi, 130–1 death of, 148
Matali’üs-Sa’ade, 539, 540–2 decline of Venice and, 9
mathematics, Ottoman knowledge of, 415–20 dynastic rivalry in reign of, 207–8, 209–10
Matrakçı Nasuh, 428–9, 505–7 educational institutions in reign of, 558–60
Matthias Corvinus (King of Hungary), 276–7 Eight Medreses of, 233–4, 327–8, 333–4
mausoleums, architectural design and epidemics in reign of, 365–6
construction of, 459–74, 522 executions by, 321, 395
682
Index
expansion and control of Anatolia under, Mehmed Ağa, 538

74–91 Mehmed Aşik
forced settlements under, 401–2 on body and health, 430–1
Hanei school of Islamic law and, 234–6 on cosmography, 413–16, 440, 455–6
historical narratives concerning, 69–70, on geography, 420–3, 428–9
447–8, 537 on natural history, 429–30
Italian campaign of, 9–10 Mehmed, Kemâl al-Dîn, 409–10
judiciary system under, 328–9 Mehmed Paşa, 27–30
Karaman campaign of, 2–3, 79–81 Mehmed Reis ibn Menemenli, 427
as Kayser-i Rum (Caesar of the Romans), 241–2 Meilink-Roelofsz, M. A. P., 195–6
land annexation by, 212 Melami dervishes, 343–7
land and tax laws under, 237 Melheme (Şemsiye), 417
leadership style of, 224 Membré, Michele, 117, 122
legal system under, 325–6 memory, rhetoric of Ottoman expansion and,
library of, 409 69–70
literary patronage in reign of, 552–6, 562–5 Ménage, Victor, 195
Mediterranean expansion under, 141–8, Menakıb-ı Hünerveran (Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali),
144n23 494, 544–6
as military commander, 218–19, 221 Menazıru’l-avâlim (Mehmed Aşık), 413–15, 420–1,
military superiority of, 276–7 423, 430–1, 439, 454
naval forces under, 304 mercantilism
Ottoman historical sources concerning, 3–4 Ottoman capital formation and, 262–7
palace schools established by, 217 Ottoman economic policy and role of, 260
pictorial representation and painting in, 8–9, mercenary soldiers, unemployment trends and
486–91 enrollment as, 384–5
poetry by, 560n39 merchant guilds
population growth under, 375–9 domestic borrowing and role of, 256–8, 275
prognostications and apocalyptic thought in proit limitations on, 267–9
reign of, 454–5 Meşa’irü‘l- Şu’ara (Stations of Poets) (Ȃşik
reign of, historical overview, 22–6, 44 Çelebi), 445–6, 589–91
religious tolerance in regime fo, 322–5 Meşale, battle of, 137
romanticized image of, 1 Mesihi (poet), 559n36–560, 574–6
scholarly and literary activities sponsored Mesihi Divanı, 559n36–560
by, 3 Mesihi-i Ermeni, 590n124
Skanderbeg uprising against, 9–10, 394–5 Mesih Paşa, 26, 29–30, 145, 212–13
state expansion under, 19–20 Mesnevi (Celaleddin-i Rumi), 576–8, 578n90
territorial expansion under, 276 mesnevi poetry, 560–2
ulema structure under, 326–32, 337–8 form and content of, 568, 572–6
Uzun Hasan’s rivalry with, 78–86 Metinsoy, Murat, 259
Mehmed III (1595–1603) mevali oices, 330
death of, 241 mevlas, 320–1
European expansion under, 53–4 Mevlevis (whirling dervishes), 343, 345
fratricide committed by, 208–9 Mevzuatu’l-Ulum (Mehmed, Kemâl al-Dîn),
illustrated history of, 537, 538 409–10
leadership style of, 219–20 Mezőkeresztes, battle of, 283–4, 318–19
military campaigns of, 283–4, 318–19 Michael of Wallachia, 42
prognostication in reign of, 454–5 Michel, Nicolas, 375–6
reign of, 42–3 Miftah al-jafr al-jami, 538, 539–40
son’s execution ordered by, 209–10 Miftah al-sa’ada wa misbah al-siyada
Mehmed IV (1648–87), 172, 267 (Taşköprüzade), 409–11
683
Index
Miftah al-‘ulum, 327 Süleymaniye complex and, 325, 511–13

migration miniature painting, in Ottoman era, 8–9
in border regions, 396–8 Mirando, António de, 177–9
income and security as factors in, 393–5 Mir’âtü‘l-Memalik (Seydi Ali Reis), 425, 426–7
of Ottoman captives and slaves, 387–90 miri land, Ottoman laws relating to, 235–8
population demographics and “push” factors Mirim Çelebi, 415–16
in, 382–7 Mizrahi, Elijah, 322–5
sürgün and service to sultans and, 390–3 mnemohistory, 439
MihailoğIu İskender Bey, 94 Mocenigo, Piero, 144
Mihaloğlu family, 212–14, 226–32, 473 Modon, Ottoman attack on, 150–3
Mihrimah (Süleyman I’s daughter), 8–9, 37–8, 519 Mohács, battle of, 51–2, 277
marriage to Rüstem Paşa, 210–11 Moldavia
military administrative class (askeri), 65–8 Ottoman expansion into, 33–4, 52, 53–4, 144–5
beylerbeylik of Egypt and the Hijaz and, Russian presence in, 53–4
186–90 Molla Cami, 555–6, 586–9
beylerbeylik of Yemen and, 191–3 Molla Kabız, 340–1
Ottoman capital formation and, 262–7, 269–72 Mongols, astronomic knowledge of, 415–16
standing army and, 282–4 Moriscos (Muslims of Granada), 160
ulema structure and, 326–32 Morosini, Giovanni Francesco, 169
military histories (gazavatnames, fethnames), mortality data, population demographics and,
444–5 365–6
military structure mosques
advances after 1453, 49–50 architectural design and construction of,
armaments technology and, 309–10 459–74, 514–21, 523–5
border guards in, 397 elite architectural patronage and construction
enforced enrollment of slaves in, 387–90 of, 466–70
equipment and tactics in, 318 Mozafar Han, 137–8
in Ethiopian beylerbeylik, 195 Müeyyedzade, 409
European military revolution, Ottoman Müezzinzade Ali Paşa (Ali Paşa at Lepanto), 306
military and, 315–19 mufassal registers, tax and population data
increased costs and diiculties of, 19–20 from, 359
living conditions of soldiers in, 313–15 müftü, in Ottoman legal system, 234, 330
Ottoman Empire consolidation and, 45, 185–6 Muhammad Hudabanda, 133
Ottoman sources on, 9–13 Muhammad Shaybani Han, 103
provisioning systems in, 310–12 muhasebe defteri (account register), 298
sixteenth-century Ottoman superiority and, Mutahhar, 184
241–6 Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi. See Muhieddin Ibn Arabi
spying systems in, 312 Muhiddin Karamanî, 345–6
strategic importance of Suez to, 187 Muhieddin Ibn Arabi, 2–3
sultan’s leadership role in, 218–22 Muhyi-yi Gulşenî, 443
technological changes to, 238–9 Müniri Belgradi, 342–3, 344–5
warfare from 1453 to 1603 and, 276–319. Murad (son of Ahmed, grandson of Bayezid II),
See also army of the Ottoman Empire; 105, 105n258, 207–8
janissaries; navy of the Ottoman Empire Murad I, Ottoman ruler (1362–89), 2, 97–8, 105
Miller Atlas, 424 kadıaskers under, 328–9
millet regime, 323 Murad II (1421–51), 79–81, 87–8
Mimar Sinan, 8, 492, 519–22, 530 architectural projects in reign of, 462, 465–6
artisan production and, 391–2 educational institutions in reign of, 558–60
autobiography of, 546–7 literature and poetry in reign of, 551
public architecture and, 525 religious persecutions by, 321
684
Index
Murad III (1574–95) Nagyvárad, pact of, 33–4

architecture in reign of, 529–32 Nahuda Ahmed, 179–80
artisan production in reign of, 498–501 Naima, 260
European expansion under, 53–4 Nakkaş Hasan, 537, 544
irearms used during reign of, 284 Nakkaş Osman, 494, 533–4, 544
fratricide committed by, 208–9 nakşbend (textile designers), 494–5
Halvetiye religious order and, 342 Naples, Ottoman attack on, 162–3
illustrated manuscripts in reign of, 528–9, Nāṣiḥat al-Mulūk, 434
532–43 Nasiruddīn Tusi, 435
Iranian wars and, 132–9 national debt, European adoption of, 252–3
knowledge production in reign of, 425–6 natural history, Ottoman knowledge of, 429–30
land and tax registers in reign of, 359 Navarino, 152
leadership style of, 219 navy of Ottoman Empire
literature in reign of, 576–8 captives enrolled in, 388
naval redevelopment under, 306–7 chronology of Red Sea operations by, 175–85
observatory established by, 418–19 Europeans’ enrollment in, 157–8, 158n148
poetry of, 559–60 illustrated history of, 504–5
prognostication in reign of, 454–5 improvement of, under Hayreddin, 155–70
reign of, historical overview, 8–9, 41–2, 44 Mediterranean expansion and, 141–8, 155
social order under, 437 post-1574 strategy of, 170–2
sürgün recruitments by, 391 relative independence of, 185–6
treaty of Amasya and, 131–2 structure of, 304–8
Murad IV (1623–40), 379 Necati (poet), 568–70
Murad Paşa, 183–4 Neşri, 68, 81, 83–4, 85, 209–10
Murad Reis, 181–2 historical narratives of, 448, 449
Murphey, Rhoads, 67–8 Netayicü‘l-Fünun (Nev’i), 411, 565–6
musammat (poetic interpretation), 582–3 Netherlands
musical therapy, Ottoman use of, 431–2 emerging commercial power of, 172, 241,
Muslihüddîn Efendi, 342–3 242–3
Muslim merchants, European restrictions on, irearm technology developed by, 284
258–62 Nevai, 555–6, 579–80, 586–9
Mustafa (son of Mehmed II), 85, 212–14 Nev’i, 411, 565–6, 567, 569–70
Mustafa (son of Süleyman I), 37–8, 125, 413–15 Nigari (Haydar Reis), 509
father’s execution of, 209–11, 570–2 nişancı, governmental duties of, 222–32
Mustafa Bey (governor of Yemen), 179–80 ‘Nishaburi album’, 498–501
Mustafa Bey (Karmani pretender), 99–100 Nizam al-Mulk, 269–72, 434, 488–90
Mustafa Bey (sancak beyi in Egypt), 193–5 nobility formation, sultanates and prevention
Mustafa Bey (Yemeni ruler), 177–9 of, 263–4
Mustafa Darir, 539–40 Nogay confederacy, 399–400
Mustafa Paşa, 114–15, 164–5, 167, 278–9 nomads
college founded by, 333–4 migration patterns of, 398–401
Müteferrika, İbrahim, 423, 434–5 taxation of, 5–6
muvakkıthane, 416 non-Muslims (zimmis), tolerance in Istanbul
Müyessiretü‘l-Ulûm, 560–2 of, 322–5
mysticism North Africa
in poetry, 583–6, 589 fortress garrisons in, 301–2
Suism and, 341–3 Ottoman expansion in, 12, 45, 160–1, 163,
mythical time, in Ottoman historiography, 441–2 169–70, 173, 322
Ottoman Red Sea operations and, 182–3
Nafplio (Nauplia, Napoli di Romania), 151 urbanization and population growth in, 381–2
685
Index
Notaras, Lucas, 395 Ottoman sources on, 2–5

Nur Ali Rumlu, 105, 108 periodization in history of, 21, 55–7
Nurbanu (mother of Murad III), 8–9, 388–9, 529–32 sixteenth-century global dominance of, 241–6
Nureddinzade Musliheddîn, 342, 344–5 treaty of Amasya and, 126–32
Nushatu’s-Selatin (Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali), 350, Ottoman-Venetian war of 1537–40, 117
434–5, 542 Özal government, modern capitalism and, 274–5
Nusretname, 537–8, 542 Özdemir Paşa, 181–2, 193–5
Nuzhatu’l-qulub (Mustawfı), 422 Özdemiroğlu Osman Paşa, 41, 137, 184
Özel, Oktay, 385–6
observatories, Ottoman construction of, 417–20 Özvar, Erol, 246
ocaklık-revenue source, timar system and, 288–9
ocaks (infantry corps), 398–401 Pacheco, Pietro, 162–3
Olbracht, Jan, 27–8 painting
omens, books of, 454–5 in illustrated histories, 534–43
Ömer bin Mezid, 580–1 Ottoman aesthetic in, 486–91, 509
Ömer Rûşenî, 345–6 wall paintings, 543
oneiromancy, 453–4 palace schools, 216–18. See also medreses
Orhan, Ottoman historical sources concerning, palatial paradigm, in Topkapı Palace
3–4 architecture, 459–60
Orhonlu Cengiz, 182–3, 195–6 Pamuk, Şevket, 46, 259, 270
ornament aesthetic, Ottoman development of, Panaite, Viorel, 48–9
493–504 parallel poems
Orthodox Christianity anthologies of, 580n96, 580–1
acceptance of Islam in, 241–2 composition of, 579–80
in, Aegean Islands, Latin-Greek rivalry paşa elites
and, 152 as beylerbeyis, 186–90
architecture in churches for, 525–6 capital formation and, 263
Catholic disputes with, 374 Patras, Venetian-Ottoman conl ict over, 143–4
data on women in, 369 patrilineal descent, authority of sultans and,
fear of Catholic domination in, 249–50 207–18
hierarchy of, 248 Paul III (Pope), 35–6, 159–60
in Mehmed II’s reign, 322–5 Paul IV (Pope), 162–3, 261–2
Ottoman legal system and, 232 peasants
population data and, 369–75 migration patterns of, 393–5
timar revenue and institutions of, 251 taxation of, 5–6
See also Christianity Peçevi, Ibrahim, 42, 135, 219–20
Oruç, chronicles of, 102, 448 Peloponnese
Osman I (?–ca. 1324) Ottoman expansion into, 22–3, 24, 25, 143–4
illiteracy of, 409 Venetian loss of, 9
illustrated histories of, 533 Pendname (Attar), 560–2, 576–8
Ottoman historical sources concerning, 3–4 pepper trade, Ottoman Red Sea expansion and,
Osman II (1618–22), 351–2 195–201
Osmanşah, 207–8 periodization, in Ottoman history, 21, 55–7
Otlukbeli, battle of, 26, 84, 85–91 Perjés, Géza, 279, 303
Otranto, 148 perpetual almanacs, 417
Ottoman capture of, 145–8, 146n40, 148n64 perpetual annuities, European nations’ sale of,
Ottoman Empire 252–3
historical overview, 1451 to mid-sixteenth Persian culture and language
century, 22–36 decorative aesthetic of, 475
military and political successes in, 9–13 historical narratives in, 448
686
Index
histories of poets of, 586–9 histories of Rum poets and, 586–92

learning tools for, 560–2 literary tools for, 578–86
Ottoman historical sources and, 4 manuals and commentaries on, 581–3
prose structure and, 562–5, 576–8 multilingualism in, 558n30, 559–60
in Rum literary tradition, 552–5, 558n29, parallel poetry anthologies, 580–1
558–60 prose vs., 565–6
statecraft manuals, 434 Rum’s identiication with, 548–51
Pertev Paşa, 167–8 See also speciic poetic forms, e.g., gazel
Pervane bin Abdullah, 580–1 politics
Pesaro, 261–2 architecture inl uenced by, 459–74
Petrović, Peter, 37–8 capital formation and, 262–7
Philip II (King of Spain), 38–9, 162–3, 163n179, 277 governance, administration and legal
Philip of Burgundy, 80 infrastructure and, 205–40
Philip the Good, 84 kaside (praise poetry) and, 570–2
Phokaea, 142–3 longevity of Ottoman political economy and,
physicians in Ottoman Empire, 430–3 272–4
physiognomy, Ottoman study of, 433 Ottoman sources on, 9–13, 433–8
Pickthall, Marmaduke, 333–4 overview from 1451 to 1603, 19–43
pictorial representation, Ottoman east/west ulema involvement in, 337–8
horizons in, 486–91 population demographics
piracy in Arab provinces, 379–82
in Black Sea region, 74–5 cizye and avariz registers and, 363–5
in eastern Mediterranean, 141–2 data sources on, 360–3
kidnapping and, 389, 397–8 food supplies and rural l ight and, 382–7
Ottoman expansion and, 14–15, 57–9, 153, illness and death data and, 365–6
166–70 nomads and settled populations, 398–401
protection in Mediterranean from, 171–2 non-Muslim population data and, 369–75
Pir Ahmed, 26, 81–6, 87–8, 89 scarcity of data on women and, 366–9
Pires, Lourenço, 199 shifts in post-conquest European regions, 64–5
Piri Paşa, 218–19, 337–8 tahrirs as sources for, 358–60
Piri Reis, 156–7 tax registers as source for, 375–9
Basra occupation and, 181–2 transformation in Ottoman Empire of, 20,
as geographer, 5, 424–5, 426–8, 504–5 356–7
illustrated manuscripts and, 491–2, 504–5 urbanization and, 375–9
Mediterranean expansion and, 149–50 See also population demographics
piracy and, 153, 156–7 Porte army
Pir Sultan Abdal, 139–40 Ottoman expansion and, 50–1
Pius II (Pope), 23–4, 84 sipahi rebellion in, 41
Piyale Paşa, 157 porti franchi trade ports, 261–2
Mediterranean expansion and, 163–4, 165–6 portolan maps, 423–9
military expertise of, 164–5 portrait medals, production of, 486–91
provincial governments and, 225–6 Portugal
Selim II and, 39–40, 221–2 chronology of Red Sea operations of, 175–85
plague epidemics, population demographics dominance in Indian Ocean of, 243–4
and, 365–6 impact of pepper and spice trade on, 199–201
poetry Mamluk sultanate threatened by, 11, 29
discourses on, 583–6 naval incursions against, 304
divan poetry, 3, 568 Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 173–201,
elite patronage of, 552–5 352–4
form and content in, 566–78, 567n60 postal service (menzilhane), establishment of, 310
687
Index
power Ottoman inancial administration diiculties

absolutist regimes, Ottoman expansion and, with, 254–6
248–52 Ottoman late adoption of domestic
cultural representations of, 528–43 borrowing, 256–8, 270–1
rhetoric of Ottoman expansion and
projection of, 69–70 Qansuh al-Ghawri, 30–2, 111–13
Prester John, 176 al-Qaramānī, 449–50
Prevesa, battle of, 35–6 al-Qastallani, 432
warships at, 306 Quaytbay, 89, 94–6
price controls, private proit limitations and, Mehmed II and, 26, 98
267–9 Qusayr, Portuguese destruction of, 180
Prioli, Francesco di, 149 Qutbaddīn al-Makki, 428–9
Priuli, Girolamo, 197
private proit, Ottoman limitations on, 267–9 Radu Drakul, 22–3
prognostications, Ottoman interest in, 453–5 Ramazanoğlu family, 473–4
practical application of, 455–6 Ramazanzade Mehmed Paşa, 449
progressive conquest, Mehmed II’s policy of, 147 Ramii (Persian poet), 581–3
property rights rare book collections, of Ottoman elites, 476–80
Ottoman capital formation and infringement Rareş, Petru, 33–4
of, 263 Rasid ibn Makamis, 119–21
Ottoman law concerning, 234 reaya (non-askeri taxpayers)
prophetic chronology, Ottoman historiography Amasya treaty and, 127–8
and, 440–1 Cüneyd supported by, 101
prophetic medicine, Ottoman practice of, 432 exclusion from public inance of, 262–7
prose land holdings of, 116
form and content of, 576–8, 578n90 resistance to Ottomans from, 135, 138–9
poetry vs., 565–6 Safavid alliances among, 98–9, 101–2
structure of, 562–5 Red Sea
Protestants chronology of Ottoman operations in, 175–85
Ottoman tolerance of, 249–50 international trade and Ottoman expansion
population data in Ottoman Empire on, 370–2 in, 195–201
See also Christianity Ottoman expansion in, 173–201
proto-pseudo-socialist political economy model Ottoman naval presence in, 306
legacy of Ottoman economic policy and, political, economic and military importance
274–5 to Ottomans of, 185–6
longevity of Ottoman political economy and, Reformation, Islamization of Ottoman Europe
272–4 and, 65–8
Ottoman capital formation and, 262–7, reisülküttab (chief clerk), 223–4
269–72 religion
provisioning systems, in Ottoman military, architecture as relection of, 462–6
310–12 astrology and, 416–17
provisionism, in Ottoman economic policy, astronomy and, 416
258–62, 269–72, 274–5 freedoms in post-conquest Constantinople,
Ptolemy, Almagest of, 415–16, 420–1, 422 322–5
public architecture, in Mehmed II’s reign, 462–6, heresy charges and repression of, 340–1
525, 527–8 in illustrated manuscripts, 539–40
public baths, architecture and design of, 463 istimalet (accommodation) policy of
public inance Ottomans concerning, 249–50
European domestic borrowing system as, Ottoman legal system and protection of, 232
252–3 Ottoman warfare and role of, 277–80
688
Index
Red Sea expansion of Ottomans and impact elite patronage of literature in, 552–5, 553n12
on, 173 foreign inl uences on literature in, 555–6
role in Ottoman expansion of, 65–8, 354–5 gazel poetry identiied with, 568–70
Selim-Isma’il war and role of, 106–7 histories of poets of, 586–92
şeri’at and kanun principles and, 327 kaside poetry in, 571
of sixteenth-century sultans, 347–8 literary tools for poetry in, 578–86
Sunni ‘right belief ’, heterodoxy and, 338–47 literature of, 548–92
syncretism in ulema beliefs and practices, 320–1 manuals and commentaries on poetry in,
ulema (scholar-oicials) and, 320–38, 354 581–3
usury prohibitions and, 256–8 manuscript culture in, 551n8
See also speciic religions mesnevi poetry in, 568, 572–6
Renaissance, Ottoman architecture and multilingualism in, 558n30, 558–60
inl uence of, 465, 469 new forms of literature in, 566–78
revenue producing units (mukataa), 186–90 parallel poem composition in, 579–80
revenues and expenditures poetry identiied with, 548–51
administrative shortcomings in management prose structure in literature of, 562–5
of, 252–3 prose vs. poetry in, 565–6
Balkan expansion and, 248–52 provincial government in, 225–6
impact of revenue system on naval Turkish language and literature of, 551, 557n28
development, 306–7 Rumeli
imperial budgets and, 246–8 delis (army auxiliary forces) in, 296–7
timar system as revenue source, 288–96 European inl uences in, 46–9, 52
See also speciic taxes, e.g., timar and zeamet fortress garrisons in, 300
revenue system judiciary system in, 328–9
rhetoric of expansion, Ottoman utilization of, population estimates for, 375–9
68–73 post-conquest families’ inl uence in, 212–14
Rhodes prophetic vision and conquest of, 69–70
Mehmed II’s failed campaign in, 145 provincial government in, 225–6
Ottoman attack on, 153–5 Safavid threat in, 105–6
riba timar system in, 286, 288–96
Islamic deinitions of, 256–8 See also Balkans
See also interest rates; usury Rumi identity, 174–5, 177–9
Rıdvan Paşa, 183–4, 193–5 Rumiyan, 494
‘right belief ’ heterodoxy, sultans’ religious Rumlu Dev Ali, 105
policies and, 338–47 Rumlu Hasan, 86, 108
Risala-i Kutbiya (Kutb al-Din Muhammad Yazdi), Rum Mehmed Paşa, 30–2, 42–3, 82, 83–4, 212–13
544–6 Russia
river lotillas, in naval ighting forces, 308 expansion initiatives of, 53–4
Riyazi (poet and scholar), 585–6 Ottoman expansion and, 134–5, 352–4
Riyazü‘ş-Şu’ara (Gardens of Poets), 585–6 as threat to Ottomans, 277
Roman Empire Rüstem Paşa, 36–8, 86, 125, 163, 210–11, 225–6
Ottoman architecture inl uenced by, 459–74 administrative legacy of, 239–40
Ottoman identiication with, 241–2 architectural patronage of, 514–21
royal portrait albums, commissioning of, 535–6 history by, 452
Rum Rüstow, Alexander, 248
architectural patronage in, 556n25 rüsüm (tax), 194–5
‘Baykara meclisi’ (literary gatherings) in,
555n22 sacred history, Arabic and Turkish literature
decorative aesthetic in, 475–6, 484–5, 501–4 on, 440–1
discourses on poetry in, 583–6 Sadi, 560–2
689
Index
Sadreddin-i Konevi, library of, 2–3 in Ethiopian beylerbeylik, 193–5

Safavids geographic conigurations and zones of
Bayezid II and, 29–30 operation, 57–9
cultural inl uence on Ottoman art and judiciary as check on sancak governors, 232–3
architecture, 459, 469 post-conquest administration and, 63–4
decline of, 41–2 in Yemen, 191–2
holy war ideology as justiication for sanitary conditions for Ottoman military, 313–15
Ottoman warfare with, 277–80 Sanudo, Marino, 102, 177–9, 195–6, 197
Iranian wars and, 132–9 sappers (miners), in Ottoman army, 285–6
Islam and, 11 Sara Hatun (mother of Uzun Hasan), 83–4
Mamluks alliance with, 173–5 Satırcı Mehmed Paşa, 209–10
military superiority of Ottomans over, 276–7 ‘saz’ ornamental aesthetic, 495, 501–4
Murad III and, 132–9 Scholarios, Georgios (Gennadios II), 322–5
Ottoman conl ict with, 11, 19–20, 21, 44, Schweigger, Solomon, 106–7, 139–40
339–40 science in Ottoman Empire
religious ideology and Ottoman conl ict astronomy, 415–20
with, 339–40 cosmography, 412–15
rise of, 97–104 maritime geography, 423–9
Selim I’s campaign against, 10, 30–2 natural history, 429–30
Shii religious practices of, 106–7 universal geography, 420–3
Süleyman and, 34–5, 113–25 security concerns, migration patterns linked
treaty of Amasya and, 126–32 to, 393–5
Saiye Sultan (mother of Mehmed III), 529, 571, Sefer Reis, 181–2
571n69 Sehi Bey, 445–6, 548, 584–5, 586–9, 590–1
Şahbudak, 28–9, 87–8, 94 Şehinşahname, 533, 537
Şah Cihan, 97–8 şehname histories, 451–2, 533, 537
Şahi Hatun (daughter of Selim I), 210–11 Şehname-i Selim Han, 533, 534, 544
Sahih al-Bukhari (Taşköprüzade), 333–4 Şehrengiz-i Edirne (Mesihi), 574–6
Şah Kalender, 340 şehrengiz poetry genre, 574–6
Şahkulı, 488, 493, 494 Şehsuvar, 88–9, 110, 111–13
Şah Kulu, 29–30, 103–4, 115–17, 129–30, 132–3 Şehsuvaroğlu Ali, 30–2, 110, 112–13, 117
Şahname-i Melik Ummi (chronicle), 487–8 Selaniki, 41–2, 132–3, 157, 170–1
Şahsultan, 525 Selim (son of Bayezid II), 103–4
Şah u Geda, 573–4 Selim I (1512–20)
Şah Veli bin Celal, 115–17 accession of, 10
Sai Çelebi, 544–6 artistic images of, 491–2
saints, legends of, Ottoman historiography and, calligraphy and illluminated manuscripts in
441–2 reign of, 490–1
Şakaik al-Numaniyye, 544, 559–60 conquest of Syria and Egypt by, 276–7, 322,
Salahuddin Yazıcı, 417 325, 348–9, 552–5
Saldanha, António de, 178 cultural inl uences in reign of, 475
Şalih (Arabian prophet), 440 death in 1520 of, 154
salt mines, 142n9, 142–3 defeat of Isma’il by, 339–40
saltpetre pits, Ottoman armaments technology deposition of Bayezid II by, 207–8
and, 309–10 Eastern expansion and consolidation under,
Saltukname, 552–5 104–25
Şamilü‘l-Luğa, 560–2 as Hadimül-Haremeyn-i Şerifeyn (servitor of
Şamseddin III, 118–19 the two holy sanctuaries), 349–52
sancak (sub-province) Hayreddin and, 12
duties of sancak governors, 226–32 historical narrative concerning reign of, 70–3
in Egypt, 186–90 history of reign of, 30–2
690
Index
illustrated history of, 504–5 serfdom, Ottoman Empire as escape from, 250
janissaries under, 216–17 Ser-güzeşt-i Esiri-i Malta, 571
Kurdish tribes’ allegiance to, 214–15 şeri’at (shari’a), 323
leadership style of, 221–2 Ottoman legal practices and, 325–6
library of, 409 Ottoman warfare and role of, 277–80
literary patronage in reign of, 552–5 şeril ik, Ottoman inl uence over, 173
Mamluks and, 173–5 Şerifs of Mecca, surrender to Selim I
Mediterranean expansion under, 153–4 of, 348–9
as military commander, 218–19 Serjeant, R. B., 195–6
periodization in regime of, 50–2 Setton, Kenneth, 162–3, 163n179
poetry in court of, 559–60, 587n113 “seven modes” (haft asl) design vocabulary,
provincial governments created by, 225–6 475–6
religious persecutions under, 346–7 Seydi Ali Reis, 181–2, 421, 425, 426–7, 428
standing army under, 282–4 Seyi Çelebi, 101, 425–6
state expansion under, 19–20 Şeyh Ahmed, 109–10
sürgün recruitments by, 391 Şeyh Bali Efendi, 123–5
territorial expansion under, 276 Şeyh Bedreddin, 321, 344, 345–6
trade interruptions of, 6–7 Şeyh Cafer, 97–8
ulema structure under, 326–32, 337–8 Şeyh Edebali, 321
war with Shah Isma’il and, 106–13 Şeyh Hamdullah, 478–9
Selim II (1566–74) Şeyh Haydar, 98–9, 100–1, 103–4
art and architecture in reign of, 8–9, 521–2 şeyhülislam
artistic images of, 534–43 in Ottoman legal system, 234–5, 330
biography of, 444 political inighting and, 419
dynastic disputes under, 207–8 protocol concerning, 331–2
European expansion under, 53–4 religious persecutions by, 345–6
governing style of, 221 Seyyid Ali Sultan, 434
Iranian wars and, 132–9 Seyyid el-Şerif, 333–4
janissaries under, 216–17 Seyyid Gazi, 473
leadership style of, 219 Shaf ’îs, 348–9
North African campaigns of, 322 Shahnama, 445, 448, 451–2, 488–90, 508–9
Ottoman expansion under, 50–2 Al-Shaqa’iq al-nu-maniyya i ‘ulama’ al-dawlat
pilgrimages to Islamic Holy Cities and, 352–4 al’Uthmaniyya’ (Taşköprüzade), 445–6
protection of Muslim sanctuaries by, 350–1 Shaw, Stanford, 186–90
reign of, 39–40 Shefer, Miri, 432–3
Russian threat to, 277 Shi’ism
succession intrigues of, 38–9 Ottoman unease concerning, 277–80, 322
sürgün resettlements by, 391–2 pilgrimages to Mecca and, 352–4
treaty of Amasya and, 126–32 sacred history in, 440–1
Selimnames (illustrated histories of Selim’s Sunni clash with, 106–7
regime), 444–5, 504–5, 544 syncretism of ulema religious practices with,
Seljuks, Babai revolt against, 321 320–1
Selman Reis, 174–5, 177–9 shipbuilding
Şemailname, 539 Ottoman Mediterranean expansion and
Şem’i, 583 importance of, 150
Şemseddin Karabaği, 544 Ottoman naval forces development and, 305
Şemsi dervishes, 343 Ottoman Red Sea expansion and importance
Şemsiye (Melheme), 417 of, 177
Serbia, Ottoman incursion into, 23–4 strategic importance of Suez shipyard and,
Şeref Han (IV), 118–19 187
Şerefname, 118–19 Venetian skills in, 157–8
691
Index
Şiblizade Ahmed, 486–7 Ottoman knowledge of, 433–8

Silif ke, Ottoman capture of, 144 socio-religious complexes, architectural design
silk trade of, 462–6
Iran as source of, 6–7 Sokollu Mehmed Paşa
textile production and, 481 administrative legacy of, 239–40
silsilat al-mukarrabin wa manakib al-muttakin architectural patronage of, 514–21, 525
(Müniri Belgradî), 342–3 artistic images of, 534–43
Silsilenames (genealogies), 542–3 historiography projects of, 533
Sinan (architect), 511, 512, 513, 514, 521, 522, 523, marriage and family of, 210–11, 374
524, 525, 527, 530, 546, 547 Murad III and, 135
Sinan Bey (painter), 486, 511–14, 521–5, 527, 530, murder of, 225
546, 547 Ottoman expansion and, 37–8, 165–6,
Sinan Paşa (the author; d. 1485), writings by, 562–5 167–8
Sinan Paşa (grand vizier under Selim I), pilgrimages to Islamic Holy Cities and, 352–4
30–2, 112 Selim II and, 39–40, 221
Sinan Paşa (grand vizier under Murad III), 40, Süleyman and, 36–7, 207–8
161–2, 184, 191 as vezir, 225
Sinan Paşa (admiral in 1551; brother of Rüstem soothsaying, 454
Paşa), 226 Soranzo, Giacomo, 135, 138–9
sipahis Sorrento, Ottoman attack on, 163–4
administrative reforms and, 100 South-east Asia, Ottoman alliances
army structure and duties of, in, 12, 243–4
286–96 sovereign identity in Ottoman Empire,
in Ottoman cavalry, 284–6 European identity and, 46–9
Porte rebellion of, 41 Spain
suspicion of new military technology among, African expansion of, 12, 35–6, 177–9
317–18 European enemies of, 241
tax and population data on, 358–60 migrations to Ottoman Empire from, 396
timar awarded to, 229–30, 247–8 Ottoman conl ict with, 14–15, 159–64
Sitti Hatun, 87–8 revenues and expenditures in, 247
Siyasatname, 434 spheres of operation
Siyer-i Nebi, 539–40 in Ottoman trading relations, 45
Skanderbeg uprising, 9–10, 394–5 rhetoric of Ottoman expansion and, 70–3
slavery spice trade
forced migration due to, 387–90, 402–3 Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 195–201
Islamic conversion of slaves, 372–3 taxes on, 194–5
Istanbul population growth due to, 377–9 spying in Ottoman military system, 312
Mediterranean expansion and, 142n9 statecraft in Ottoman Empire
narrative of, 571 bureaucracy and, 20
in naval ighting forces, 307–8 Ottoman knowledge of, 433–8
of Ottoman subjects, 14–15, 390 trade, military and political consolidation
physiognomy and, 433 and, 45
in post-conquest European expansion, Steensgaard, Niels, 199
64–5 Stefan III (ruler of Moldavia), 27–8
Tatar traicking in, 399 stereotypes in Ottoman historical research, 1
See also kul (sultan’s servitors) Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 196–7
Smith, Adam, 268–9 Şücâ (Şeyh), 342
Soarez, Lopo, 175 Sudi (poet), 581–3
social conditions and society Suez, strategic importance to Ottomans of,
evolution of Rum literature and, 552–5 189–90, 352–4
692
Index
Suism territorial expansion under, 276

cosmography and, 414 treaty of Amasya and, 126–32
dream analysis in, 453–4 ulema structure under, 337–8
hagiographies in, 443 western Mediterranean expansion and, 155–70
permitted orders of, 341–3 Süleymaniye complex
Şükri-i Bidlisi, 448, 486–91, 544 architectural design of, 477–69, 511–13
Şükrullah, 449 construction and organization of, 325, 327–8,
Sulaiman al-Mahri, 425, 426–7 388, 393
Süleyman Bey (Dulgadiroğlu ruler), 87–8 Süleymanname, 444–5, 488–90, 494, 508–9, 534
Süleyman Çelebi (son of Bayezid I), 91 ‘Süleyman’s ofer’, Ottoman Hungarian
Süleyman I (1520–66) expansion and, 279–80
absolutist regime of, 248 sultans
artistic images of, 491–528, 534–43 absolutist rule of, 248–52
Baghdad occupied by, 348–9, 352–4 architecture as monuments to, 462–6
Baki’s elegy to, 218–19 astronomers hired by, 417–20
biography of, 444 governance processes and role of, 218–22
colleges founded by, 327–8 histories of, 444, 445–9
dreams and prognostications of, 454–5 legal authority of, 207–18, 221, 437–8
dynastic disputes under, 207–8 poetry by, 560n39
eastern Mediterranean expansion under, 154–5 sürgün resettlements and, 390–3
eastern expansion under, 113–25 Sunni Islam
European expansion under, 67–8 architectural inl uence of, 466–70
execution of son by, 209–11, 570–2 in Mamluk Empire, 10
foundation complex of, 8–9 Ottoman expansion of, 11, 13–15
governing style of, 220, 221 Ottoman warfare as defense of, 277–80
as Hadimü’l-Haremeynü’-l Şerifeyn (servitor of pilgrimages to Mecca and, 352–4
the two holy sanctuaries), 352–4 ‘right belief ’ in, 338–47
Halvetiye religious order and, 342 Shii clash with, 106–7
Hayreddin and, 12 sultans as champions of, 322
heresy trials under, 340–1 ulemas and syncretism with other beliefs and
historical overview of, 32–40, 44 practices, 320–1
illustrated history of, 505–7 sürgün (deportation)
Irakeyn campaign, 339–40 migration patterns due to, 390–3, 401–2
janissary corps under, 283–4 nomads in, 398–401
judiciary system under, 330 Surname-i Hümayun, 536, 538, 539, 540–2
legal system under, 325–6 sürre, 173–5
literary patronage in reign of, 552–5 sürre-i hümayun (alms), 349–50
as military commander, 218–19 sürsat supply arrangement, 245–6
military successes and failures of, 20–1, 276–7 Süruri (translator and scholar), 413–15, 581–3
naval forces under, 304 Su’udi, 539
North African campaigns of, 322 ‘sympathetic qualities’, Ottoman concept of, 430
nostalgia for reign of, 1, 238–9 Syria
Ottoman historical sources on, 3, 4 Jacobites and Nestorians in, 369–70
periodization in regime of, 50–2 Ottoman conquest of, 32, 173, 211–12, 276–7,
poetry by, 578–86, 587–8 322, 348–9
population growth under, 375–9 See also Aleppo
provincial governments created by, 225–6 Szápolyai, John ( János), 32–4, 122, 225–6, 278–9
religious institutions in reign of, 339–40, 345–7 Szápolyai, John Sigismund ( János Zigmond),
Spanish expansion in Africa and, 35–6 33–4, 37–9
state expansion under, 19–20 Szigetvár, conquest of, 53–4, 342
693
Index
tabakat biographical compilations, 589–91 comparative analysis of, 247–8

Tacizade Cafer Çelebi, 562–5, 572–6, 584–5 costs of war and conquest and, 13–15
Taclu Hanım, 109–10 in Ethiopian beylerbeylik, 193–5
Tacü‘t-Tevarih (Hoca Sadeddin), 448–9 food supply estimates and, 382–7
Taczade Mehmed, 546–7 governing structure for collection of, 230–1
tafakkur and tadhakkur (contemplation and as historical source, 2–3, 5
retelling), 412–13 judicial corruption concerning, 335–6
Tahmasp (Safavid Shah) (1524–76), 34–5, 36–7, maritime trading and, 142–3
38–9, 41–2, 117, 118–22 for naval redevelopment, 306–7
Alkas Mirza’s revolt against, 123–5 Ottoman law concerning, 235–8
Süleyman I’s defeat of, 339–40 Ottoman Red Sea operations and, 182–3
treaty of Amasya and, 126–32 peasants and nomads as taxpayers, 5–6
tahrir (tapu tahrir) population estimates based on, 375–9
food supply estimates and, 382–7 private proit limits and, 268–9
limitations of data from, 360–3 progressive conquest and use of, 147
population data from, 358–60 tahrir registers and, 358–60
sheep registrations and, 401 in Yemen beylerbeylik, 191–3
urbanization and population growth in Arab Yemen occupation by Ottomans and, 183–4
provinces and, 379–82 tax farming (iltizam)
taht kadılıkları (judgeships of the throne), 328, administrative diiculties in costs and
332–4 collection of, 254–6
Takiyüddin, 418–19 capital formation and, 266, 269–72, 275
Talikizade, 537 judicial corruption concerning, 336
portrait of, 544 life-time tax-farm (malikâne), 255
al-Tanbih ‘ala Galat al-Cahil wa’l-Nabih, 560–2 Ottoman elites’ dislike of, 256–8
Tansel, Selahattin, 145–6, 152–3 in Ottoman Empire, 185–6
Tanzimat reforms, 323 Ottoman revenues and expenditures and,
Taqw‘īm al-buldan (Abu ‘l-Fida al-Hamawi), 247–8
422, 423 sale of shares in (esham), 255
Târgovişte, battle of, 296 Tazarruname, 562–5
tarifat (Persian poetic genre), 574–6 Tekelu tribe, 118–19
Tarih-i Ebu’l-Feth (Tursun Bey), 448 telhis (summaries, reports), 330
Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, 425–6, 427 Tercüme-i Miftah-i Cifrü‘l-Cami, 454–5, 539–42
tarikats (religious orders), 341–3 Tevarih-i Al-i Osman narratives, 446–7, 448–9,
Tarikh al-Shihri, 177–9, 181 451, 562–5
Al-Tariqa al-Muhammadīya (Birgivi Mehmed), textiles, decorative aesthetic of, 481, 494–5, 501
432–3 Tezkire (Dawlat-Shah), 586–9
Tartaglia, Nicolò Fontana, 318 Tezkiretü‘l-Bünyan, 546–7
Taşköprüzade, 320–1, 333–4, 409–11, 544 Tezkiretü‘l-Ebniye, 546–7
on astronomy and astrology, 416–17 Tezkiretü‘ş-Şu’ara (Reminiscences of Poets),
autobiographical prose of, 576–8 586–92
on cosmography, 412–13 Tezkiretü‘ş-Şu’ara ve Tabsuratu’n-Nuzama
dynastic history by, 445–6, 455–6 (Reminiscences of Poets and
language competency of, 559–60 Demonstrations of Versiiers), 588–9
Taşlıcalı Yahya, 570–2, 573–4 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 423–9
Tatars, nomadic migrations by, 399–400 Thessaloniki, 152
taxes and taxation Thomas Palaiologos, 22–3, 24, 212
administrative diiculties in costs and Thomaz, Luis Felipe, 199
collection of, 254–6 Tietze, Andreas, 563n48
Arab provinces population data and, 379–82 tiles. See ceramics
694
Index
timar revenue system, 55, 99–100, 116, 185–90 trans-imperial zone

absence of treasury data on, 247–8 intermediaries in, 61–2
administrative reforms and, 100 Ottoman frontiers and, 59–60
Balkan Christian nobility and, 251 post-conquest Ottoman administration in,
Christian participation in, 286 63–4
food shortage data and, 383–4 role of fortresses in, 60–1
governing structures for, 226–32 Transylvania
population data from, 358–60 Counterreformation efort in, 249–50
sipahis as part of, 286–96 Ottoman expansion into, 53–4
time and timekeeping Trapezuntios, Georgios, 241–2
dynastic history and, 445–9 Triplex Coninium (Triple Border) region,
importance of, 416 59–60
Ottoman concept of history and, 439–45 Tripoli, Ottoman attack on, 161–2
Ottoman geographic system and, 420–1 Tuhfe-i Şahidi, 560–2
prognostications and end of time and, 453–5 Tumanbay, 30–2, 112–13
Timur, 395, 415–16 Turahan, 22–3
attacks in Anatolia by, 365–6 Turahanoğlu family, 212–14, 226–32
Timurid culture Turcomans
decorative aesthetic and, 474–86 Beyazid II’s conl icts with, 28–9
historical narratives in, 448 decorative aesthetic of, 474–86
inl uence on art and architecture of, 458–9, Mehmed II and, 82, 89
470, 473–4 migrations by, 122
omen books and, 454–5 ornament aesthetic and, 493–504
ornament aesthetic and, 493–504 Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 174–5
Ottoman poetry and, 3 pictorial representation in culture of, 486–91
pictorial representation in, 486–91 religious beliefs of, 106–7
rare book collections and, 476–80 revolts in Anatolia by, 29–30, 34, 99–100, 116
Tokmak Han, 132–3 Selim I and, 109–10
Tomašević, Stefan, 22–4 Shah Isma’il and, 98–9, 100–1, 109–10
Topçular Katibi, 315 in Syria, 92–3
topçus in Ottoman army, 285–6 Uzun Hasan and, 78, 115–17
Topkapı Palace Turgud Reis, 157, 161, 164n192, 164–5
design and construction of, 459–60 Turkish language
renovation and rebuilding in, 532 ascendancy in Rum of, 552–5, 556–8, 557n28,
Süleyman’s changes to, 510–28 559–60
Trabzon creation of, 20–1
Mehmed II’s siege of, 75n5, 75–7 discourses on poetry in, 583–6
timar revenue system in, 286 histories of poets of, 586–9
trading relationships learning tools for, 560–2
artisan production and, 6–7 manuals and commentaries on poetry in,
between Mamluks and Ottomans, 174–5 581–3
European expansion and, 55–7 in Ottoman historical sources, 4
Mediterranean expansion and, 141–8 parallel poetry in, 580n96, 580–1
Ottoman economic policy and, 258–62, 275 prose in, 562–5
Ottoman Mediterranean expansion and, 141–8 Rum literature and, 551
Red Sea expansion and, 175–85, 195–201 Türki-i Basit (Turkish poems) and, 569n66
spheres of dominance in, 45 Tursun Bey, 91
traditionalism, in Ottoman economic policy, chronicles of, 81, 444–5, 448, 452
258–62, 269–72, 274–5 on Mehmed II, 145, 451–2
Tragurio, Georgio de, 146–7 on Ottoman architecture, 465–6
695
Index
Tursun Bey (cont.) rebellion in Karaman and, 212–14

on sultanate leadership and authority, 219–20,
221, 437–8 vakıf (pious foundation)
Tuscany absence of treasury data on, 247
domestic borrowing system in, 252–3 capital accumulation and, 265–6
Ottoman trade relations with, 261–2 data on women connected with, 366–9
libraries of, 409
Üç Şerefeli Cami mosque, 465–6 revenues from, 187–8, 205, 246–7
Uğurlu Mehmed, 85–6 tax and population data and, 358–60, 366–9
Ulama Han, 118–19 Varka and Gülşah, 572–6
ulema (scholar-oicials), 248 Vasco da Gama, 196
career path for, 332–4 Vatin, Nicolas, 149–50
iscal ineiciencies in policies of, 256–8 Veinstein, Gilles, 20
in imperial capital, 322–5 Veledi dervishes, 343
importation from outside the Empire, 320–1 venality in Ottoman judiciary, 334–7
literary patronage by, 552–5 Venice
Ottoman capital formation and, 263 Albanian migration to, 395
Ottoman legal system and, 348–9 Bayezid II’s war with, 149–53
political involvement of, 337–8, 354 Cyprus as possession of, 166–70, 330–1
religious institutions and, 320–38 Mehmed II’s war with, 143–5
şeri’at and kanun principles and, 327 Ottoman Red Sea expansion and, 177–9, 196
venality and unemployment issues for, 334–7 Ottoman threat to, 9, 12–13, 25, 29–30, 39–40,
See also elites 49–50
Ulloa, Alfonso, 67–8 public debt in, 252–3
Uluğ Bey, 415–16 revenues and expenditures in, 247
Umur Paşa, 434 trade with Ottoman merchants in, 261–2
unemployment Uzun Hasan’s relations with, 84
migrations due to, 393–5 vezirs (ministers)
in Ottoman judiciary, 334–7 administrative reforms and, 100
universalist iconography, imperial artistic individuals from conquered elites appointed
images and, 491–528 as, 212–13, 215
urban ateliers, 474–86, 493–504 constraints on sultans’ appointment
urbanization of, 211–12
in Arab provinces, 379–82 executions of, 209–10
architectural projects and, 525 governing activities of, 221–2, 239–40
decorative aesthetic and expansion of, 474–86 Imperial Council and, 222–32
population demographics and, 375–9 marriages to sultans’ daughters of, 210–11
Uruç (brother of Hayreddin), 155–6 military advice from, 153–5, 164–5, 167, 219–20
Uşak, carpet production in, 484–5 sultans’ relations with, 221
Uskoks, 14–15, 57–9, 166–70, 171–2, 397–8 Vikayetü‘r-Rivaye i Mesaili’l-Hidaye, 558–9
Üsküdar, growth and development of, 8–9 Vilayetname, 441–2, 443
Ustajalu Muhammad Han, 108 ‘Virtuous Polis’, Kınalızâde Ali’s concept of,
usury 435–7
domestic borrowing as alternative to, 252–3 visual arts, 457–60
Islamic prohibition against, 256–8 calligraphy and book arts, 476–80
Uzun Hasan, 26, 34 decorative aesthetic in, 474–86
Cüneyd and, 97–8 imperial image articulated in, 491–528
marriage to Katherine (Despina Hatun), 76 literary discourse on, 544–7
Mehmed II’s expansion in Anatolia and, 75–6, multicultural inl uences on, 458–9
78–86 pictorial representation in, 486–91
696
Index
Timurid-Turcoman decorative aesthetic, Yani (shipbuilder), 150

474–86 Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bican, 432–3, 454
Vlad III Drakul, 22–3 Yemen
Vladislas II (King of Bohemia and Hungary), beylerbeyilik established in, 179–80, 181, 183–4,
29–30 191–3
volleys, iring of, military development of, 284 fortress garrisons in, 301–2
Ottoman presence in, 173
Wake, C. H., 196–7 Ottoman Red Sea operations and, 175–85
Wallachia, Ottoman expansion into, 22–3, 52, Selim II and, 39–40
53–4 Yunus (commander under Mehmed II), 142–3
warfare, Ottoman military structure from 1453 yürük (nomads), 398–401
to 1603 and, 276–319 Yusuf and Züleyha stories, 572n73, 572–6
warrior-sultan, Ottoman concept of, 218–22 Yusuf b. Abi Bakr al-Sakkâki, 327
wealth accumulation
data on women and, 366–9 Zabid, 179–80
Ottoman capital formation patterns and, Ottoman control of, 177–9
262–7 Zafername, 533
weapons technology, Ottoman military Zaganos Paşa, 22–4
structure and, 309–10 Zakariyā al-Qazwini, 412–15, 427, 540–2
Wild, Hans, 372, 387 zarar-ı kassabiye (tax), 264–5
Winter, Michael, 186–90 Zaydis (Yemen), revolt by, 39–40, 183–4, 352–4
women Zayla, Portuguese protection of, 177–9
architectural patronage of, 516–19, 525, 529 zeamets (land held in return for military
data from vakıf (pious foundations) service), 230
on, 366–9 gedikli zeamets, 292
in military garrisons, 313–15 tax and population data on, 358–60
in Ottoman dynasties, authority of sultans timariot compared with, 291–2
and ineligibility of, 207–18 Zen, Pietro, 166–7
as palace slaves and concubines, 388–9 Zenbilli Ali, 221–2
as patrons of illuminated manuscripts, 539 Zeynel Mirza, 474
religious and charitable eforts of dynastic Zeyniyye order, 342
women, 8–9 Zeyrek Ağa, 538
scarcity of population data on, 366–9 zones of operation, Ottoman expansion and,
world histories, Ottoman production of, 449–53, 57–9
533–4 Zrínyi, Miklós, romanticized image of, 1
Zsitvatorok, treaty of, 21, 42–3, 53–4
Yakub (son of Uzun Hasan), 86, 98 Zübdetü‘t-Tevarih, 449–50, 533–4, 536, 538, 539, 542–3
Yakub Şah bin Sultan Şah, 466 Züli kar, 118
697

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What is the scope of the book?

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTOR Y OF

Sur ai ya N . F aro q hi is Professor of History at Istanbul Bilgi

Kat e Fl eet is Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman

The Cambridge History of Turkey represents a monumental

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-521-62094-9 Hardback

. 2 . The Ottomans, 1451–1603: A political history introduction 19

. 3 . Ottoman expansion in Europe, ca. 1453–1606 44

. 4 . Ottoman expansion in the East 74

. 5 . Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean 141

. 6 . Ottoman expansion in the Red Sea 173

. 7 . Government, administration and law 205

. 8 . The Ottoman government and economic life: Taxation,

. 9 . Ottoman armies and warfare, 1453–1603 276

. 10 . Religious institutions, policies and lives 320

. 11 . Ottoman population 356

. 12 . The order of knowledge, the knowledge

. 13 . The visual arts 457

. 14 . The literature of Rum: The making of a

13.1 The Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, aerial view page 460

13.20 Süleyman I presented with the legendary cup of Jamshid, Arii,

I Ottoman expansion in Europe page xxii

EBRU BOYAR is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations,

PALMIRA BRUMMETT is Visiting Professor of History at Brown University and

MURAT ҪIZ ? AK Ҫ A is now a professor at the International Centre for Education in

G É ZA D ÁV ID is a professor of Ottoman Studies at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest,

S URAIYA N. FARO Q HI has taught at Middle East Technical University, Ankara,

GOTTFRIED HAGEN is an Associate Professor of Turkish Studies in the Department

S E L İ M S. K U RU is Associate Professor of Turkish Studies in the Department of Near

S AL İ H Ö ZBARAN was until his retirement Professor in the History Department of

G ILLES VEINSTEIN is a professor at the Collège de France in Paris. His numerous

1444–6, 1451–81 Mehmed II Fatih

1546 Ottoman conquest of Basra

Ottoman Turkish has been transliterated using modern Turkish orthogra-

Ottoman writing about the Ottoman world

time.4 Whichever approach a given historian may favour, it is quite obvious

Furthermore, the sixteenth century was the period in which Ottoman

The taxpaying subjects: Peasants and nomads

Mediterranean world during the 1500s, a certain number of former nomads

Trade and artisan production

Istanbul newly emerged as a major centre with a population of several hun-

9 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Les capitulations franco-ottomanes de 1536 sont-elles encore controvers-

Florescence of the arts

Military and political successes

also came to an end, and Saraybosna (Sarajevo), previously an insigniicant

Ordinary people: The struggle for survival

mid-sixteenth century onwards, and particularly from the 1580s, increasing

Ottoman military ability. Süleyman’s inal campaign, in which he died while

1451 to the mid-sixteenth century

8 Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul, 1990), p. 195.

Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512)