This paper examines the process of composition of some of the most enduring and characteristic products of fifteenth-century Ottoman popular intellectual life: the vernacular oeuvre of the brothers Mehmed and Ahmed Yazıcızade (Bican), written between 1449 and 1466 in Gelibolu. The most famous of their works is the Muhammediyye, a poem written as a pious history “from Creation to Judgment Day”. Close behind in popularity is the Envarü'l-'Aşıkin, a prose rendition of the same content, as well as the Dürr-i Meknun and Kitabü'l-münteha, which are, respectively, a complex encyclopedic work and an expansive Turkish commentary on the theoretical Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi. In this study I explore the Yazıcızades' sources and methods. They faced the unenviable task of attempting to write comprehensive summations of Islamic religious knowledge and practice in a novel Turkish expression, while having at their disposal the limited intellectual resources of their frontier region. Accordingly, the two brothers worked cooperatively: the older Mehmed often wrote in Arabic, abridging and interpreting his modest library of Arabic and Persian source-texts, while the younger Ahmed translated these into a simple Turkish, adding elements of contemporary interest of his own. The resulting corpus involves adaptive translations from a particular body of Arabic and Persian classics, the incorporation of certain local oral histories, as well as the continuous refinement of this material in response to political circumstances, including the conquest of Constantinople. This is synthesized in such a way as to reflect a particular early Ottoman mentality – a concern with the boundaries between Islam and Christianity, a focus on the upright lives of the prophets that is matched by a fascination with the wonders and marvels of distant lands, an obsession with the imminence of war and apocalypse, and an ambivalent regard for the Ottoman state.

Rāwandī’s Rāhat al-sudūr wa āyat al-surūr (“The Comfort of the Hearts and the Sign of Happiness”) is an early Thirteenth Century history of the Great Seljuq Empire giving a detailed account of its dissolution into minor local dynasties. This particular work is full of interjections of poetry and after almost every episode of historical events, Rāwandī includes a couplet or sometimes even a whole block of poetry to summarize these events or give a word of wisdom through poetry. Two centuries later, the Ottoman historian Yazıcızāde ‘Alī, who served twice as an envoy to the Mamluks during the first reign of Murād II (1421-1444), is today mainly famous for his five-volume work Tevārīkh-i Âl-i Selçūķ (“The History of the Great Seljuqs”) which gives a detailed genealogical account of the Ottomans, tracing the histories of the Oghuz Turks, the Seljuqs, the Ilkhanids, as well as later Anatolian principalities. The second volume of this work is devoted to the history of the Seljuqs of Hamadān and Kermān, and is a word-for-word translation of Rāwandī’s Rāhat al-sudūr. Interestingly, Yazıcızāde ‘Alī omits most of Rāwandī’s poetic interjections from his translation of Rāhat al-sudūr; and in some cases, he rewrites them according to the Ottoman cultural context. This essay will explore what possible functions these poetic interjections actually serve within the context of these two historical works and later argue that Yazıcızāde ‘Alī’s perception of poetic interjections is that the use of poetry in historical texts is “culturally specific.

In this paper I explore the role of talent and education in fifteenth century rhetorical manuals and sixteenth century Ottoman biographical dictionaries of poets, and evaluate those with references to the art of poetic composition that appeared during the turn of century in Ottoman lyric poems. Ottoman lyric poems often contained direct references to the act of poetic composition, thus allowing the poet to boast about his inherent talent and/or his mastery and education in the arts of poetry. I aim to advance the premise that education vis-à-vis talent functioned as a central element in explaining literary merit, as much as it revealed a form of social critique. I focus on different instances of lives of renowned poets as depicted in the three major biographical dictionaries of poets, namely, those written by Sehi Beg, Latifi and Ashik Chelebi. These biographical dictionaries shared and reproduced biographical stories of Anatolian poets with a particular stress on their education and/or talent as a decisive element in defining literary excellence. Furthermore, education or talent, expressed as a characteristic of the poet’s craft, represented the necessary quality for both literary and political success. In the discussions regarding the role of talent or education in the making of a successful poet, rhetoric and literary arts took place as a part of a larger debate concerning the expected qualities of a bureaucrat or a learned man involved in court politics. Even though it has been neglected in Ottoman historiography, literary merit, attained either through talent or education, signified the power of writing in Ottoman court and represented a mark of social distinction. Discussions surrounding the most valuable forms of attaining literary merit were at the same time discussions regarding the corruption of the ruling class, for natural talent was taken as a substitute for education. While it is difficult to fully explain the role of composing poetry in Ottoman politics with our current knowledge, it was indeed crucial for the public exercise of the intellectual’s skills, as well as a it enabled a display of his political and diplomatic education. This paper investigates how discussions in rhetorical manuals regarding talent and education were first incorporated into a subgenre of lyric poetry and then formalized in biographical sketches as an integral part of nascent Ottoman politics and governance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, a few Ottoman intellectuals began writing instructions to hopeful authors as to how to write a book. These treatises explained to authors all the necessary components of a book from providing the identity of the author and title of the book to including a table of contents. Over time, these instructions were translated from Arabic into Turkish and began circulating in the margins and ends of notebooks as useful reminders for future writers. In this paper, I survey and examine the relatively rare phenomenon in which authors, readers, and copyists began to reflect explicitly on the formal components of a book. It focuses on what components of a book were deemed absolutely necessary to the act of writing. In particular, it examines the emphasis on identifying authorship and attempts to tie this development to a crisis in authorship in the seventeenth century as a growing vernacular lay-reading culture led to a large number of falsely attributed or anonymous works. Authors and readers attempted to establish authorship by emphasizing the formal components of books, writing new bibliographies, and new writing practices. Scholars have often defined manuscript cultures negatively, as a simple lack of print. This paper is an initial examination of some of the practices and techniques of writing, authorship, and book production that allowed manuscripts to flourish in the Middle East until well into the nineteenth century. Through a finer grasp of these practices, we can better understand or question the singularity of print.