Published simultaneously by Indiana University Press, these two books are companion pieces in that they share not only paired titles and an author/editor but also a focus on recent scholarship concerning Ottoman artistic and intellectual production, principally in the sixteenth-century heyday of the empire.
Full of fresh discoveries, Picturing History is a comprehensive study of Ottoman illuminated histories and their readers, makers, intended meanings and political uses. The intricate interplay between historical writing and image making is a core preoccupation of Fetvacı's study. Its principal argument is that the boom in production of elegantly illustrated books in the second half of the sixteenth century was sparked by a broad range of patrons and artists whose individual purposes coalesced to “codify” a shared imperial vision. This is a book for the specialist as well as the intelligent undergraduate, as its exceptional clarity of organization and exposition makes complex and overlapping dynamics readily meaningful. The lavish illustration (102 colour plates) and the author's interest in comparative imperial practices add to its depth.
The introduction could be read with profit as a stand-alone essay, its chapter summaries far more than the usual perfunctory list. The substance of the book falls into two parts. The first two chapters discuss the audience for illustrated books and the far greater circulation of these precious volumes than has hitherto been assumed, as well as the ways in which their actual production involved a far more extensive and varied nexus of agents than previously understood. What unifies this section is the emphasis on how the myriad stages by which illustrated books were produced and the channels through which they circulated among a wide range of courtly readers (including harem women) combined to produce social cultures and hierarchies at the Ottoman court and among courtiers.
The subsequent four chapters focus on four sixteenth-century patrons: two grand vezirs, Sokollu Mehmed and Koca Sinan, and two imperial eunuchs, Mehmed Agha and the Venetian-born Gazanfer Agha. Fetvacı deploys the differences of emphasis and intent in the book patronage of these powerful individuals to argue that it was not, as has often been asserted, only or primarily the agendas of the sultans that gave rise to luxury books. Koca Sinan, for example, sought to promote his own military victories and denigrate his nemesis Osman Pasha. Posterity – future generations of courtiers – were another audience for such publications.
The seven essays in Writing History are the product of a conference at Indiana University whose participants finalized papers in conversation with each other. As a result, this volume is more successful than some conference publications in exploring and nuancing a shared theme; at points, however, some essays feel slightly constrained to conform to the programmatic conception of the volume. As the preface explains, the overall aims of the essays are to break down the notion of a uniform “Ottoman” consciousness and identity among authors of historical works, and to probe questions of audience, genre, and evolving definitions of Ottomanness as the empire expanded.
In an essay concerning the civil war of 1402–13, Dimitris Kastritsas shows how the narrative of The Tales of Sultan Mehmed legitimated the victor by employing the epic genre of the “book of exploits” and highlighting the vaunted values of “justice, humility, self-sufficiency, bravery …, and pious acceptance of the divine will” (p. 17). Baki Tezcan destabilizes early Ottoman identity by arguing that the depiction of the Mongols in early historical narratives reveals an original Turco-Mongol self-definition that would give way only in later histories to the familiar accounts of the first rulers' Rum Seljuk lineage. In his analysis of the chancellor and historian Celalzade Mustafa's magnum opus, Kaya Şahin explores the strategies through which this uniquely important history of the reigns of Selim I and Suleyman I forged a vision of a righteous Ottoman imperialism for elite consumption.
The next two chapters focus on texts ostensibly written by outsiders. Tijana Krystić argues that narratives by Christian converts to Islam in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries opened up space for writing the history of converts into debates about Ottoman identity; these texts demonstrate shifting notions of what constituted “a good Muslim and a good subject of the House of Osman” (p. 58). The Mappamundi of one Hajji Ahmed from Tunis is, in Giancarlo Casale's study, not the forgery it was once assumed to be but the product of an intellectual circle of European-born translators at the Ottoman court working at a time when “new men” could argue for a European Alexander the Great whose contemporary heir was Suleyman I.
F. Sinem Eryılmaz's comparison of text and image in the court eulogist ʿArif's Stories of the Prophets and his dynastic history (Shahname) of the Ottomans argues that the two texts work together to construct an image of Suleyman as a prophet-king and the last individual who could “combine prophetic authority with the political in human history” (p. 125). A neat coda to the volume, Hakan Karateke's contribution delineates the (uneven) shift in eight nineteenth-century histories away from a classical periodization situating the Ottomans as “a chapter of Islamic history” to a world-historically orientated model of a tripartite past: Ancient–Medieval–New; factors in this development included new sources and a new “universalist” consciousness.
Word limitation does not permit this review to do justice to the complexity of the two books and the ways they work individually and together. Both are unabashedly imperio-centric, that is, interested primarily in texts and images that articulate pro-dynastic ideologies; only occasionally do conflicts or tensions among the intellectual or personal motivations of patrons, writers and artists feed into the outcomes emphasized in both books – the variety of voices and hands that publicized the history and present aspirations of the Ottoman court. On the other hand, it is the rich and nuanced exposition of the wide range of texts and images explored in these two books that constitutes their valuable contributions to scholarship.
