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Poetry, Propaganda, and Panegyric in Tului’s Pashaname: A Poetic Expression of History
Abstract
The Pashaname was composed in the first half of the seventeenth century by a not very well-known Ottoman poet/panegyrist named Tului. The work is a 2180-couplet mesnevi, which is a versified account of Kenan Pasha’s (qaymmaqam and grand vizier of Murad IV) military expeditions in Rumelia and the northern Black Sea region. It is also involved local campaigns meant to restore the “justice” of the reigning Ottoman sultan, Murad IV (r. 1623–40). Through cross-referencing other historical primary sources, I argue that the Pashaname may be used to help better understand the history of the relevant regions and the period, but only within specific limits and with a cautionary/critical reading that can extract potentially reliable historical information from this heavily panegyrical text. At the same time, this paper also demonstrates the potential of the Pashaname for literature studies, specifically Ottoman court poetry employed to bolster legitimacy and morale during a period of relatively acute political troubles compared to the previous century, which was remembered as the Ottoman golden age. This being said, the Pashaname is a significant work not only for its potential supplementation of the information provided by heretofore-accepted historical sources, but also for the window it opens into the Ottoman culture of propaganda. The aim here is to demonstrate how the events narrated in the Pashaname not only connect this genre to other Ottoman chronicles such as the Tarih-i Naima and Topçular Katibi Abd ul-Qadir Efendi Tarihi, but also links the Ottoman literary tradition and its descriptive language and style to historiography and to what is being identified as more factual.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries