The creation of huge collections of books in different languages characterizes the early modern Muslim world. Manuscript collection was a transnational and polycentric phenomenon taking place in different cities of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. By way of comparison, the largest royal library of Europe, the Corviniana of the king of Hungary Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458–90), contained around 2,500 volumes, while the library of the Ottoman scholar ʿAbd al-Rahman Müʾeyyed (d. 1516) contained 7,000 books excluding the double copies. At the end of his reign, the library of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) in Agra contained 24,000 volumes. Notwithstanding, the history, the role, and the organization of libraries in Muslim societies, as well as their links with other Muslim cultural and political institutions, remain topics still insufficiently studied in recent scholarship. This lengthy work in two volumes provides an important contribution to the study of this field and the ties libraries and collections had with the political power and royal ideology of Muslim monarchs. It focuses on a unique document of its type, an inventory of manuscripts of the personal collection of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) that was kept in the treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The inventory lists more than 5,000 volumes and 7,000 titles which cover almost all religious and rational disciplines. It was made in 908/1502–03 by Hayrüddin Hizir ʿAtufi, the royal librarian of Bayezid II. ʿAtufi descended from a family of scholars from Arapgir, a town in the region of Malatya, and was himself the author of several books. A part of the Ottoman collection has been dispersed and relocated, and ʿAtufi's inventory is now preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest (MS Török F. 59).
The first volume gathers 28 articles that constitute the main contribution of this work and provide an in-depth, multidisciplinary study of ʿAtufi's inventory. These essays look at the content of the inventory, the political and intellectual environment in which it was produced, and the different fields of knowledge it covers. The first volume consists of three sections, the first of which presents the studies of the three editors. Gülru Necipoğlu's article (“The spatial organization of knowledge in the Ottoman Palace Library: an encyclopedic collection and its inventory”, pp. 1–77) looks at the Ottoman palace and the library where the collection was kept, the criteria used by ʿAtufi in his inventory and provides a discussion of several remarkable manuscripts associated with the sultans Mehmed II (r. 1444–46 and 1451–81) and Bayezid II. Cemal Kafadar's contribution (“Between Amasya and Istanbul: Bayezid II, his librarian, and the textual turn of the late fifteenth century”, pp. 79–153), focusing on the commissioner and the writer of the inventory, is particularly important for understanding ʿAtufi's background and textual production. Fleischer's article (“Learning and sovereignty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”, pp. 155–60) looks at the figure of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Bistami (1380–1454) a mystic associated with the Ottoman court of sultan Murad II (r. 1421–44 and 1446–51); Bistami proposed a classification of knowledge that had at its core the esoteric “science of letters” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), and certainly had an influence on the way ʿAtufi organized his work.
The second part presents three contributions that further explore Ottoman manuscript collections. Zeynep Atbaş's contribution (“Artistic aspects of Sultan Bayezid II's Book Treasury Collection: extant volumes preserved at the Topkapı Palace Museum Library”, pp. 161–211) offers a detailed study of the manuscripts associated with the sultans Mehmed II and Bayezid II, nowadays preserved at the Museum Library of the Topkapı Palace. The article by Zeren Tanındı focuses on the illustrated codex of the sultan's collection (“Arts of the book: the illustrated and illuminated manuscripts listed in ʿAtufi's inventory”, pp. 213–39). Judith Pfeiffer's essay (“The Ottoman muse fluttered, but poorly winged: Müeyyedzade, Bayezid II, and the early sixteenth-century Ottoman literary canon”, pp. 241–66) provides an interesting comparative study of the Müeyyedzade collection of ʿAbd al-Rahman Müʾeyyed of which an inventory was made for the sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20).
The third part (“Book titles and their disciplines in the Palace Library inventory”, pp. 267–933) includes 22 contributions by different authors looking at specific sciences and fields of knowledge under which texts are classified in ʿAtufi's inventory. These cover Quranic exegesis and reading (by Mohsen Goudarzi), collections of Prophet Muhammad's ḥadīth (Recep Gürkan Göktaş), prayers and invocations (Guy Burak), rational theology (kalām) (Abdurrahman Atçıl), Islamic jurisprudence (Himmet Taşkömür), Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) (Mürteza Bedir), Sufism (Cemal Kafadar, Ahmet Karamustafa), ethics and politics (Hüseyin Yılmaz), medicine (Nükhet Varlık), agriculture (Aleksandar Shopov), history (Cornell H. Fleischer, Kaya Şahin), wonders and geography (Pınar Emiralioğlu), Arabic philology and literature (Tahera Qutbuddin), Persian poetry (Sooyong Kim), secretarial arts and literary prose (Christopher Markiewicz), Turkish poetry, Turkish and Persian lexicography (Ferenc Csirkés), occult sciences (Noah Gardiner), astrology and astronomical tables (A. Tunç Şen, Cornell H. Fleischer), astronomical and other mathematical sciences (Jamil Ragep, Sally Ragep, Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan, Fateme Savadi, Hasan Umut), arithmetic, geometry, optics, and mechanics (Elaheh Kheirandish), logic (Khaled El-Rouayheb) and philosophy (Dimitri Gutas). The essays of the third part are accompanied by lists of entries providing the name of authors and titles of works according to the different disciplines concerned.
The first volume concludes with five appendices (pp. 937–1080). Three of them (by Zeynep Atbaş, Zeren Tanındı, and Gülru Necipoğlu) deal with the manuscripts stamped with Bayezid II's seal and dedicated to him kept in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library and in other collections in Turkey and Western countries. The last two appendices (by Gülru Necipoğlu and Mohsen Goudarzi) provide the English translations of ʿAtufi's Ottoman Turkish and Arabic prefaces to his inventory. The second volume comprises two parts: the first provides the transliteration of the text of ʿAtufi's inventory, edited by Himmet Taşkömür and Hesna Ergun Taşkömür (pp. 5–239); the second is a colour facsimile of MS Török F. 59 now kept in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In conclusion, the extensive case study presented in this publication will certainly constitute a key reference work for further research on the history of libraries in the post-medieval Ottoman and Muslim world.
