The biographical dictionary tradition is one of the best-researched of Islamicate genres; the origins and flowering of Arabic tabaqat have been documented thoroughly and thoughtfully, and Ottoman Turkish tezkires are increasingly being approached not as mere mines for data, but as complex cultural products with their own intellectual and political agendas. However, rarely have these different strands been examined together. This paper will place the Ottoman biographical tradition in its synchronic and diachronic contexts, showing how it grew out of and responded to its Persian, Arabic and Turkish-language counterparts. Premiered in the sixteenth century, the Turkish-language Ottoman tezkire had its immediate predecessor not in the Arabic tabaqat, but in works produced in the fifteenth-century Persianate lands. However, with the maturation of Ottoman imperial claims and the increasing influence of the Arabic tradition, the target audiences, models and aims of Ottoman biographical compilations changed significantly. This paper will examine how this biographical literature altered its language, form and content in response to shifting cultural and political constellations. In the complexity of its roots and routes, the biographical tradition is typical of the Ottoman written corpus. The paper thus opens up onto a number of larger issues surrounding Ottoman participation in the Islamic intellectual tradition in an age of imperial expansion. How did Ottoman scholars use biographical compilations both to locate themselves within a wider Islamic tradition, and to distinguish themselves from it? How did they alter the genre selectively in order to profile themselves to various groups within and outside of the empire’s borders? How did these texts emerge from and help to constitute certain communities? Placing the Ottoman written tradition within the longue durée of Islamic thought shows it to be both more idiosyncratic, and more indebted to a larger intellectual world than often assumed.