This paper will describe the patrons, employers, and career pathways of Yazıcı Salih of Gelibolu, astrologer and scribe for minor Ottoman frontier lords in late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as well as those of his two more famous sons Mehmed Yazıcızade and Ahmed Bican, whose monumental works of popular religious philosophy, partly written in vernacular Turkish, are key texts of Ottoman lay piety. Although the careers of Salih, Ahmed and Mehmed occur in a period scarcely lit by documentary evidence, it becomes possible, by reading clues scattered throughout their works and elsewhere, to dimly discern the patterns of a local patronage network centered on the naval frontier city of Gelibolu and its local gazi leaders during the pre-conquest decades. Importantly, the “Ottoman” character of this network evolves over time, as the set of the Yazıcızades' patrons transforms from self-sufficient clique of frontier warlords to men who bear distinct Ottoman pedigrees by 1450. The sultanic center at Edirne and Bursa, with its wealth and ideology, makes no appearance in this story. Cross-generational affiliations with Gelibolu's local military elite allowed the Yazıcızade brothers to acquire a certain conventional hadith and fiqh training which was perhaps constrained by resources, connections, or ambition. This middling education, combined with their study under the Anatolian Sufi master Hacı Bayram, guided the brothers to subsequent careers centered on zaviye and not medrese, and to a freely popular rather than classically academic literary orientation. Yet despite these limitations, the writings of both father and sons were remarkably enduring, though perhaps provided them only with posthumous fame. As such, the patronage patterns enjoyed by the Yazıcızade brothers and their father acquire a double importance, first because they describe the material basis of non-elite literary activity in a period and place about which almost nothing is known, and secondly for the centrality of the Yazıcızades' works themselves, which transcended the marginal circumstances of their production and within a century were read in the palace, in janissary barracks, and in lodges and classrooms across the empire's provinces. The roads that led to the success of these non-elite scholars may thus illuminate some aspects of the capabilities and career-making tastes of writers and audiences in the early Ottoman centuries.

Although there is a substantial literature on the institutional and administrative history of the Ottoman madrasas as well as the intellectual achievements of certain “big” scholars, we know very little about the basic social realities of life around madrasas from different levels and still lack nuanced studies on the personal reflections of individuals from various ranks of Ottoman ilmiyye as regards to the promotion and patronage system they engaged in. The aim of this presentation is to explore the autobiographical writings of a sixteenth century petty ‘alim, Zaifi (d. 964/1557), as a window into the personal lives, anxieties, and reflections of hapless and ill-fated scholars during the so-called golden age of the Ottoman enterprise. Zaifi’s career, which - as a student of the shaykh al-islam and a graduate of the leading educational institution of the time - had started quite promisingly soon turned non-thriving. Often he struggled to find a decent teaching position and was exhausted by the financial difficulties that exacerbated during especially the longer waiting periods for appointments (mülazamet). Throughout his career he could only held posts in low to mid-range madrasas and had to get involved, for his livelihood, in other activities that range from translating Persian works to Turkish, copying manuscripts, and even participating in military campaigns. We are very lucky indeed to have significant amount of autobiographical portions in Zaifi’s oeuvre that include original and translated poetry as well as treatises as to ethics and politics. Based especially upon his autobiographical narrative (sergüzeştname) and the private letters that he sent during his ill-starred career to the sultan Süleyman (r. 1520-1566), the leading statesmen, and fellow scholars/littérateurs, this paper intends to bring in a personal perspective for a more accurate understanding of the actual workings of the madrasa-mülazemet system and the patronage culture in the Ottoman world during the first half of the sixteenth century.

This paper examines the role of the middling and non-elite ulama in the social and intellectual life of eighteenth century Ottoman Damascus. The scholarly class of eighteenth century Damascus has often been treated as a contiguous social category and as a somewhat homogeneous community of social actors. Our knowledge of Damascene scholars is limited to a few elite scholars who have so far received the vast majority of attention. It is their history that has come to define the history of the scholarly community as a whole. However, the Damascene scholarly community of the eighteenth century was far from homogenous. The majority of scholars did not belong to, or identify with the elite. This paper therefore aims to reveal the intricate social and identitarian divisions that constituted the Damascene scholarly community in the eighteenth century. These divisions are examined through a careful linguistic and prosopographic analysis of biographical and autobiographical literature. While such biographical literature has been mined for the information and statistics it affords for specific individuals and social groups, only rarely has it been used as a historical artifact in itself. This paper approaches biographical dictionaries and autobiographies as social as well as literary spaces in which one can glean new insight into the implicit social ordering of society. As such the paper categorizes the ulama in the sources according to their career trajectory, their socioeconomic status, their reputation among other scholars, the manifest effects of their intellectual production, and the language used to identify them. The picture that has emerged is that of a scholarly community that was segmented according to a complex combination of social, economic, regional, and intellectual factors. More importantly this method has helped shed light on the collective lives of the often forgotten middling, impoverished, and failed scholars whose minimal achievements and reputation has excluded them from studies on the period.

By the turn of the 17th century, the concentration of the ulama's upper echelons in the hands of several powerful families and their associates was already well underway. This process had created resentments both within the ulama and between the ulama and members of other administrative groups, who interpreted this change as a deviation from the supposedly ideal system of the mid-16th century. Owing partly to such resentments, the 17th century's initial decades saw a proliferation in the number of poems of personal invective being produced and consumed by and against members of the ulama. In this paper, several examples from this invective corpus are examined so as to elucidate what such works reveal about how authors from both within and without the ulama reacted to the changing environment around them, and particularly how they used invective as a tool to navigate this era's increasingly insular patronage networks. Though Ottoman invective has received little scholarly attention, it is a mode of writing that, if approached with a full awareness of its rhetorical strategies, has much to tell about the subjectivities of its practitioners. These poems were, to a great extent, composed with eventual oral dissemination in mind, and as such, this paper uses the tools of discourse analysis to unpack how invectives by authors both known – like Nev'îzâde 'Atâyî, Riyâzî, and Nef'î – and anonymous operated as performative acts of aggression and defense within the context of contemporary patronage networks. At the same time, the paper highlights the broader social and cultural context through comparison with similarly engaged texts of the same period, such as the advice literature of Mustafâ 'Âlî and Koçi Beg and Üveysî's "Admonition to Islambol" (Nasîhat-i İslâmbol). Based on the terms of the discourse animating all these works and the concerns that they evidence, the paper argues that the changing composition of the Ottoman ulama and udaba in the early 17th century was felt, by both the winners and losers of the newly emerging structure, as a crisis of Ottoman identity itself, one often linked to an anxiety about the growing power and influence of "outsiders" from a periphery both geographical and cultural in nature. Ultimately, by examining the hitherto neglected corpus of Ottoman personal invective poetry within its historical context, this paper sheds new light on how the learned classes of the time experienced and responded to the tumultuous period in which they found themselves.