The Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Lawgiver (1520-1566) was not only an outstanding ruler with an extraordinarily powerful army but should also be noted for his cultural achievements. Central to this cultural input was poetry. Sultan Süleyman himself created thousands of poems under the pseudonym Muḥibbī (the lover or God lover) and surpassed in quantity all other Ottoman ruler poets. Evidence is given for eighteen poem collections, the so called divans. This is remarkable because normally, one divan represented the poet`s complete work of life. The discovery of the Third Divan of Muḥibbī in Hamburg is extraordinary, because accomplished in 1554, it represents the oldest of Muḥibbī`s dated divans hitherto known. Furthermore, it contains a large number of unedited and therefore, unpublished poems along with poems also used in later poem collections. Recent research on poetry has been focused on terminological analysis of single poems and the socio-cultural significance of the gazel-genre in the sixteenth century. This resulted in great advances in gazel research. However, research on poem collections, the making of divans and their organisation has gone out of focus. With my research I intend to fill this gap and to provide a contribution to the research on the genesis of royal divans. In the following paper I will shed light on text-external conditions and text-internal phenomena relevant to the unpublished poems. Two main questions therefore, will be outlined. First, who had access to the court and might have been involved as editor? The role of the poet Baki is here of special concern. Second, on the basis of their location, genre and central tropes the unpublished poems will be contrasted with those poems which were also used in later poem collections. On the grounds of a contrastive analysis through digital inquiries, it will be argued that an editor was involved in the making of the royal divan. Moreover, it will be underlined that the creation of the divan was related to pragmatism as well as shifting trends.

The power of poetry and its intricate relationship with patronage networks becomes a topic of discussion during the reign of Süleyman I. Two rival high bureaucrats, Iskender Çelebi (d. 1535) and Ibrahim Pasha (d. 1536), whose executions established an epilogue for the first part of Süleyman I’s reign, would be remembered by poet-biographers as the greatest patrons of poetry by 1540s. Two other Pashas, Ayas (d. 1539) and Rustem (d. 1561), on the other hand, would be criticized by the same poets for their disinterest in poetry and poets. These bureaucrats’ interest in poetry differed from that of Suleyman I, the ultimate patron of literature. Unlike Suleyman who himself was a prolific poet, and whose correspondence with poet Baki is extant, none of the four bureaucrats composed poetry and, except for the biographical writing and praise poems dedicated to them, there is not much documentary evidence about their relationship with poets. Recent work on literary patronage in the Ottoman Empire defines a central role to it for the development of poetry. Relying on limited archival sources and selective reading of biographical dictionaries, these studies fall short to elucidate the larger question of relationship between poetry and readership. Distinct and divergent taste in poetry, the attendees of literary salons established around particular patrons, and the prevalence of gazel genre among the state elite and scholars, brings to mind an environment that engender and encourage poetic expression. By formulating patronage as a stagnant relationship between the poet and the patron in an empire where composing and/or appreciating poetry was an inevitable norm of being an elite, secondary literature obscures the essential association of Ottoman classical poetry to the ecology of the imperial organization in which it flourished. By casting an inquisitive eye on four important statesmen’s attitude towards poetry as readers and drawing on literary production under Suleyman I, the paper argues that patronage was a function of a wide interest in poetry and commentary, rather than the other way around, and investigates the reasons behind the heated discussion around the patronage in biographical dictionaries of the sixteenth century drawing on the representations of Suleyman I era as a “Golden Age” of poetry.

Ottoman literary texts reflect the transformation of Istanbul after 1453, when Istanbul became the subject of prose (tezkires) and three poetry genres (histories in verse, encomia to the city, and poems such as eulogies, gazels, musammats, kıt'as and mesnevis). While the corpus of Ottoman texts relating to Istanbul includes mundane depictions of the city, including overviews of its social structure, streets and people, the literary tradition concentrates also on landmarks old and new, which functioned as fixed coordinates. Indeed, some texts recount the myths and fables that were associated with various monuments, thus mapping those structures within the city. During the Kanuni era all literary genres proliferated most of them generated within Istanbul, with some relating directly to the city, such as Latifi’s Letâif-iEvsaf-ıIstanbul, which was the first book on the metropolis. This paper shows the influence of the Sultan Kanuni's imperial image, and of the reconstruction of Istanbul, on an ever-greater number of literary works that reflected the vital interactions between the city and its courts. It demonstrates the creation of literary spaces for new genres, and the attempts on the part of the literature to re-invest the city with 'imperial' significance and meaning. Giving detailed and sustained analysis of the spatial content in narratives across the range of works of the period, it relates that to optical concepts, making use of recent theory on the 'production of space'.

This paper analyses the list of entries found in Latifi's (1491-1582) biographical dictionary of poets (tezkire) and problematizes the inclusions and exclusions through comparison with near-contemporary tezkires and anthologies of response poetry (nazire mecmuası), a genre that shares the tezkires' concern to cover the entirety of the Ottoman/Turkish poetic field. The preliminary results of such a comparison include the following: The completion date of the work gives a slightly misguiding impression of the actual contents which center on the times of Bayezid II and Selim I. This may suggest that the tezkire was conceived years or even decades before 1546. This impression is corroborated by Latifi's seeming ignorance of Sehi Beg's 1538 biographical dictionary and his assertion that he is the author of the first Ottoman tezkire, a statement that has escaped researchers' attention due to textual problems in the printed editions. Secondly, Latifi seems to be somewhat more distanced to Ottoman officialdom, the high ulema in particular, than other tezkire authors. Considered along with his penchant for mystics and mystical poetry, this may suggest a critical attitude vis-à-vis the ongoing cooptation and of elites by the imperial center. Thirdly, the underrepresentation of the Istanbul poetic scene is very striking. In fact, Latifi's tezkire is a veritable saga of the provinces, although certain Anatolian and Balkan cultural centers seem to be far more foregrounded than others. This raises the question whether one major factor that shaped the contents of work was Latifi's own trajectories in life as an individual. In other words, would it be possible to read the tezkire as an autobiography of sorts? If this can be shown to be true, we will need to formulate an understanding of the inclusion/exclusion criteria in this and other early tezkires that goes beyond the aesthetic and the political/ideological. In fact, the assumption that tezkire authors had unlimited access to the life stories and poems of all Ottoman poets and fashioned their works by making selections at their will, purely guided by their poetic and political preferences, seems to ignore the physical limitations of a biography writer operating in sixteenth-century manuscript culture. The paper will conclude with remarks on the problems with overemphasizing the "courtly" nature of poetry in Süleyman's times and projecting the political notion of "Ottoman patrimonialism" directly onto the field of literature.