Can a compiler have a style? Can his work bear a distinct, personal stamp? This paper approaches the issue of “style” in one of the earliest Ottoman chroniclers, Neshri (d. ca. 1520), author of the Kitab-i Cihannüma, or Cosmorama. We know little about Neshri himself. He is often depicted as a skilled compiler rather than a true historian, curating and harmonizing earlier sources with little mark of his own. As Victor Ménage says, “in general he [was] content—as indeed is to be expected of the author of a vast world-history—to reproduce his sources with little modification” (Neshri's History of the Ottomans: the Sources and Development of the Text, 13-14). But even simple compilers leave something of themselves as they choose, omit, shape, and texture material. The result can arguably tell us not only about the individual but also his temperament, assumptions, and even wider social world. Style in Ottoman history writing is little-studied. What work exists on the topic most often examines authors' use of rhetoric: tropes, imagery, figures, or other literary devices. This paper seeks to explore style beyond just the aesthetic, however, and to locate in text and form deeper traces of human and social meaning. In a classic article from 1965, Paul Wittek described how a ghazi legend in the work of Ashikpashazade, the capture of Aydos castle, was transformed in Neshri's hands through small, nearly imperceptible changes to the text (“The Taking of Aydos Castle: a Ghazi Legend and its Transformation”). I here extend Wittek's close reading to other parts of Neshri beside his main source, Ashikpashazade. There is a “certain logic” to a compiler's choices, as Cemal Kafadar has said (Between Two Worlds: the Construction of the Ottoman State, 107). The result of these choices—changes, word selection, addition, omission, magnification, and patterning—can in fact suggest a good deal beyond just the literary. Despite a close similarity in accounts, Neshri's changes shed light among other things on his background and social milieu, his categories of thought and view of the empire, and also his personality—in other words, on his style. The paper thus offers further ways in which attention to literary style can thicken our appreciation of historical texts and their authors.

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.

Compiled and written by the bureaucrat and historian Mustafa Na'ima (1655-1716), the Ottoman court chronicle Tarih-i Na'ima belongs doubtlessly to the most prominent reference sources for historians of Ottoman studies. Covering the period from 1592 to 1659, this voluminous work provides valuable data especially for the political history of the seventeenth-century Ottoman State. As a general desideratum for well-known chronicles, Tarih-i Na'ima too, has attracted little scholarly attention regarding its literary value and characteristics despite its popularity and significance. However, I argue that literary criticism is crucial for understanding the premodern genres of Ottoman-Turkish historiography. The self-conscious literariness is already indicated by the original poetic title given by the author: The Garden of Hüseyn. The Summary of the Tidings from the East and the West. The paper aims to investigate the bulky chronicle from a literary and narratological perspective and to provide a new and innovative view of a well known source. By means of literary criticism and narratological tools, an approach borrowed from literary studies, I aim to delineate the elaborate literary and narrative structures of the text and point out its stylistic and literary characteristics. The findings will then be embedded into the literary genre of the court chronicle and premodern historiography. Thus we will be able to understand the ways and procedures of the historian to integrate records of historical facts within a literary narrative framework.