Who was an Ottoman? This question of identity has shaped a number of recent papers, panels, and even conferences, and it forms the topic of Emine Fetvacı's study of the illustrated histories of the late 16th century. The image of Sultan Selim II in his court with which she opens the book portrays the vertical hierarchy of power through which the sultan conferred authority to represent him on not only his political subordinates, but also his artistic staff. It also depicts the process by which the sultan's image and representation, his very identity and authority, were imaginatively constructed by those under him. According to Fetvacı, these illustrated histories—patronized and produced by soldiers, bureaucrats, and household servants of the sultan—were both informed by and instrumental in shaping hierarchies of power and social identities at the Ottoman court. The poets and bureaucrats who authored these works, as well as the artists who illustrated them, blended illustration and text to convey a vision of the ideal sultan and his relationship to court and state.
Well written, beautifully produced, and even affordable, this interdisciplinary book masterfully blends Ottoman history and art history to study the history of art and the art of history. Fetvacı describes the creation and illustration of historical texts, clarifying the background of book culture at the Ottoman court in terms of both production and circulation. She then turns to the issue of patronage, comparing two groups of patrons: grand viziers, with their military and bureaucratic backgrounds; and chief eunuchs, the leading servants in the imperial household. Singling out two individuals from each group whose patronage of illustrated histories was most extensive, she details their contributions to the creation of the Ottoman dynastic image and its slow transformation in the last quarter of the 16th century.
Fetvacı situates her work as a sequel to the recent explosion of dissertations and articles on Ottoman culture and ideology in the Süleymanic era, leaning on the work of Gülrü Necipoğlu in the visual arts and, for literature, Cornell Fleischer and his students. These studies have emphasized image creation, identity production, and cultural development at court but have spared little attention for the vast social and economic changes, especially late in the century, that necessitated those efforts. Within those constraints, however, these studies have enormously increased our understanding of the mentality of the Ottoman palace elite and the processes that welded recruits of diverse origins together into a stable buttress for the Ottoman throne.
The argument of the book is that as conditions changed in the late 16th century, altering the roles of sultans, viziers, officials, bureaucrats, and military forces, those who produced books and illustrations patronized by the palace modified their styles of representation to convey to the elite these new relationships and the images of the sultanate and its servants that they wished to promulgate. Divergences over time in the paintings’ styles and subjects correlated with the messages of the texts and the demands of imperial politics to reshape and refashion the portrait of the Ottoman dynasty. Transfers of power, the apotheosis and fall of Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokollu, the seclusion of the sultans in the harem and rise in power of their agent, the chief black eunuch, and the changing personalities of the sultans themselves all called for the rethinking of imperial ideology and the revising of its representation. Moreover, the new styles of representation and their meanings as encapsulated in the illustrated histories were not locked away in a cupboard but were circulated, borrowed, viewed, and read aloud by the palace elite, contributing to their recasting of the ideologies of Ottoman rule. These works, then, did not merely record Ottoman history but helped to make it. They aimed to persuade their viewers and readers that the period's changes in official roles, alterations in the relative importance of religion and warfare, and transfers of power were not accidental but deliberate, not out of character but inherent from the first (and thus not changes at all), not decline but maturation. They thus countered the “sky is falling!” panic of the advice writers.
Fetvacı allots a formative role to the tension between the glorification of the sedentary sultan through Islamic imagery in histories patronized by the chief black eunuch and the aggrandizement of the viziers and bureaucracy in works written by scribes and court historians. The embodiment of the bureaucracy's voice in war narratives celebrating the military elite, she argues, attests to an alliance between these two groups and an attempt to assert their viewpoint against that of the chief black eunuch, who patronized works highlighting the sultan's personal household and his religious interests. On the other hand, works produced under the patronage of the chief white eunuch mainly catered to Sultan Mehmed III's preference for clear and simple stories and pictures. Oddly, the review of compositions during his reign subordinates attention to the political struggle to discussion of his personality traits instead of continuing the historical analysis at least until his death in 1603.
Fetvacı meticulously traces the personal relationships and activities of the authors, subjects, and patrons of these books and shows how they both shaped and responded to the intellectual and political currents of the moment. Her cast of characters is not large, and despite their importance, the extent to which they represented the empire as a whole may be questioned. Her consideration of the Ottoman elite does not go outside the palace. With respect to the sultanate, the illustrated histories served to depict and justify the movement from the sultan as general and legislator to the sultan as political figurehead legitimized by religion and then to the sultan as an individual whose personal tastes had political and cultural significance because of his ancestry and position. With respect to the men around the sultan, the histories worked to legitimate the presence, promotion, and participation in decision making of fluctuating groups with varied origins. The book's claim is that this constitutes identity creation, “of the state and dynasty, and their own identities as members of the Ottoman court” (p. 238). This claim, it seems to me, is not substantiated; there is no argument here that exercise of power constitutes identity or that shifts in power among courtiers altered the identity of the dynasty or the state. Nor is there evidence of how much weight the illustrated histories or their meanings carried beyond the artist and patron, still less beyond palace circles. What these illustrations appear to reflect is not identity, fashionable term though that may be, but political relevance. Having one's political participation legitimized by the interests and concepts behind these cultural shifts did not make anyone more or less Ottoman, but it could at least temporarily affect the acceptability of their promotion to high office or their exercise of its privileges and powers.
Beyond changes in the power of certain men, however, these illustrations do testify to changes in the power of certain ideas and images to legitimize, particularly at the level of the sultanate. This may indeed have contributed to a change of identity for the empire—that is, if it spread wider and lasted longer than a few individuals at court in a particular decade or two. The procedure followed in this book shows promise for detecting subtle changes in what at least a few powerful people thought the empire was about, and it should be pursued on the literary as well as the artistic level. With the caveat that its conclusions must be tested beyond the palace walls and beyond the end of the 16th century, Fetvacı's study will be as useful to historians as to art historians through its incorporation of historical method as well as historical texts.
