At almost 3,000 pages, the chronicle of the middle-ranking bureaucrat Mustafa Naʿīmā that is the subject of Gül Şen's monograph is a behemoth of Ottoman literature and one of the most prominent examples of the official historiography of the empire. Written in the years after 1700, and covering the period 1574–1660, Ravżat ül-Ḥüseyn fī ḫulāṣat-i aḫbār ül-ḫāfiḳayn (The Garden of Ḥüseyn: the Summary of Tidings from the East and the West), usually known today as Tārīḫ-i Naʿīmā, or the Chronicle of Naʿīmā, at last receives the forensic examination it demands. In an admonition to modern readers, Şen writes that the Chronicle would have been read at the time as “a literary text with aesthetic merits beyond its character as a compilation of historical facts”. In exposing Naʿīmā's work to the tools and insights of literary criticism and cultural studies, she invites us into the intellectual world of his contemporaries.
Naʿīmā's Chronicle is complex in construction, and the autograph undiscovered. The many manuscript copies extant in whole or in part indicate that the work was popular. It was among the seventeen books printed between 1729 and 1742 by the Ottoman-language printing press set up by İbrahim Müteferrika, and is recorded in both manuscript and printed form in the estates of the educated deceased of the time. It is still a staple of Turkish high school and university history curricula.
Şen's account of Naʿīmā's life and career expands on the information provided half a century ago by Lewis V. Thomas in his A Study of Naima (New York, 1972). She maps his appointments around the empire, showing the years spent in each post, from his birth in Aleppo, to office in Istanbul, Ankara, Diyarbekir, Bursa, Chania, Edirne, Gallipoli, and Patras, where he died. Among Naʿīmā's most significant patrons were the grand vezirs Köprili ʿAmcazāde Ḥüseyn Pasha, and Nevşehirli Dāmād İbrāhīm Pasha. ʿAmcazāde Ḥüseyn appointed him to be the first holder of the new office of court chronicler, and to complete the now lost work left unfinished at his death by another teller of the empire's history, Şāriḥ ül-Menārzāde Aḥmed Efendi.
Naʿīmā draws upon the works of earlier historians as the foundation of his own: Şen dissects his Chronicle and ascribes to him only those passages where his authorship can be confirmed. He frequently acknowledges Şāriḥ ül-Menārzāde, as “the author”, and typically names the other works he utilizes – which are otherwise identifiable when he quotes them in language close to the original, or rewrites sections, or embellishes their words with additional information.
The mission embodied in court chronicles was the continuity of the Ottoman state, and the introduction to the Chronicle emphasizes this imperative, which is reasserted in Müteferrika's eloquent introduction to the printed versions. Naʿīmā adopts Ibn Khaldun's model of the rise and fall of dynasties but, because the Ottoman state must never fall, proposes immediate action (that Şen does not clearly articulate) so that this fate can be averted.
The topics of Ottoman chronicles were familiar to readers, who could expect them to cover warfare and military matters, happenings at court, government and bureaucracy, and natural phenomena. Transmission of accumulated knowledge was valued in Naʿīmā's time over innovation in narrative technique, and his Chronicle adheres to these overarching themes. However, he clearly felt the model constraining, and asserts that he prioritized readability over the ornate style of earlier histories that obscured understanding. Şen argues that his annalistic narrative set a new standard for the future, establishing a genre original in both structure and content.
A variety of rhetorical devices enrich Naʿīmā's work. Among these the use of exaggeration for the sake of emphasis; comparison of unfamiliar phenomena with known ones to help readers better imagine what the narrator is describing; and vivid depiction of events for the purpose of immediacy – which Şen considers to be “the most significant feature of the narrativity in the Chronicle”. Although she does not make the allusion, these are devices that in the work of Evliya Çelebi, who wrote a generation earlier, were once considered by modern scholars to be mere “fabrication” – Şen's analysis of Naʿīmā's Chronicle demonstrates that they were the currency of the foremost literary works of the era.
Şen dives still deeper, to examine the voices – including tense and person – that Naʿīmā employs to create his narrative. She observes that he usually maintains distance from the events he recounts, and discusses the significance of the ordering of the episodes he narrates and the amount of text accorded any event.
In order to better situate Naʿīmā's project to promote Ottoman legitimacy, Şen returns to more detailed consideration of the intended purpose of the Chronicle. She looks to the mechanisms of titulature and ceremonial that evolved to that end, and examines concepts of time in the work. One stands out: that the past is more influential than the present and offers a pattern to be emulated; this normalization of the past allows a narrator to comment obliquely on his own times, and how rulers measured up. Time never flows as smoothly as we would hope, and Naʿīmā copes with the disruptions – contingencies, as Şen has it – by means of astrological interpretation and divinatory explanation, devices that would have been familiar to his contemporaries. She states that Naʿīmā integrated more astrological material into his work than any other historian.
Şen's formation has been within a German scholarly environment; her reference material reflects this positioning, and she thereby widens the horizon of scholars for whom this is a little-known area of academe. Her analysis is illuminating, and her text is interspersed with copious passages in illustration of the arguments she puts forward. So highly valued was the writing of history in the Ottoman middle period that Şen describes the work of the court historian as an “almost divine mission”. Her exemplary volume is a model for the study of the chronicles of subsequent Ottoman court historians.
