Christopher Markiewicz's The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam is an admirable biography of a major scholar and scribe as well as a rich study of intellectual activity in the 15th- and 16th-century Near East, especially in the field of political thought. Told through the life of Idris Bidlisi (1457–1520), Markiewicz's readable account will not only interest historians of the Ottoman Empire but also of the wider Persianate world.

The book advances a straightforward point. Markiewicz argues that new vocabularies of sovereignty and alternative claims to political rule arose and took hold across west Asia from the mid-14th century on. The “crisis” in his title refers to the vacuum left after the collapse of earlier dispensations, most notably the Abbasid and Mongol (pp. 6–7, 176), which had tied universal rule to divine sanction through juridical and genealogical claims. In the first instance, the Abbasids cited their position as caliphs and descent from the Prophet's tribe of Quraysh; in the second, the Mongols claimed a sacral charisma and prestige inherent in the line of the great conqueror Genghis Khan. An innovative new mode of kingship began to emerge when these claims ceased to be viable, says Markiewicz, after the dissolution of the Abbasid line in 1258 and the Chinggisid Ilkhanate the next century. It coalesced first in Timurid lands, spreading over the 15th and 16th centuries to the major polities of west and central Asia, including the Aqquyunlu, Mamluk, and Ottoman realms. The book explores the development of this discourse largely through the person of Idris Bidlisi and is structured into two parts—the first on his life and career, and the second an extended inquiry into his ideas.

The Crisis of Kingship joins a recent body of work on “post-classical” Islamic political thought and sovereignty during this era, by scholars like İlker Evrim Binbaş, Jonathan Brack, A. Azfar Moin, and Hüseyin Yılmaz. Like them, Markiewicz presents the features of this new discourse as broadly mystical and often messianic. He ties its vocabulary in part to sufi and other religious movements, some with radical millenarian casts, which drew heavily on “theosophical” cosmologies and ideas of world or cosmic order. Titles like ṣāḥib-qirān (lord of the auspicious astral conjunction), khalīfa-yi ilāhī (vicegerent of God) and mujaddid (centennial renewer) proliferated especially with rulers who lacked robust pedigree; they signaled divine sanction, universal rule, and cyclically recurring messianic figures. Some readers may note parallels between the book's ideas and notably those of Yılmaz, whose recent Caliphate Redefined (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the concept of the caliphate and its mysticization in Ottoman thought of a similar time period. Markiewicz's treatment, however, is ultimately more focused and satisfying.

What The Crisis of Kingship adds, for one, is a human element. Markiewicz has chosen Idris Bidlisi as a vessel to tell his larger story, and he has chosen him well. Bidlisi's life paralleled the political, intellectual, and religious trends then reshaping the Islamic world. Born in 1457 in a messianic community in northern Iran, he spent his early years immersed in mystical study under his father Husam al-Din ʿAli. As an adult Bidlisi crisscrossed the Islamic world. Starting his career in the Aqquyunlu chancery in Tabriz, where he honed a divinely ordained image of his patron in letters and official documents, he fled to Ottoman lands in 1502 after the disintegration of Aqquyunlu power and the rise of the Safavids. Bidlisi, among other émigrés, found a congenial environment at the court of Bayezid II and began to compose the work Hasht Bihist (The Eight Paradises), a lavish history in Persian of the Ottoman line. This work remains neglected by Ottomanists, perhaps partly due to its consciously rhetorical, “hyperliterate” style and because it fits awkwardly across modern disciplinary lines (see p. 192 f.). Markiewicz tells us how, stymied at court and disappointed at his work's tepid reception, Bidlisi made the pilgrimage to Mecca and considered a return to Iran. He instead accepted an invitation back to Istanbul from a new sultan, Selim I. Bidlisi spent his final years as Selim's envoy, advisor, and ideologue before again falling out, revising his opus and writing a laudatory Salimshahnama (History of Sultan Selim). These works formed the staging point for Bidlisi's political ideas, especially his notion of khilāfat-i raḥmānī (vicegerency of God), or what Markiewicz calls “a coherent vision of kingship embodied in the Ottoman sultans” that merged Bidlisi's commitments to astrological, mystical, and philosophical discourses (p. 22). Bidlisi died shortly after in 1520.

More than adding human color, this biographical approach also allows Markiewicz to ground his study in individual agency and attempt, as he puts it, a “connected history” (pp. 15, 291). His study is less about texts and abstract ideas, nor is it an exclusively Ottoman story. He instead focuses on the people—itinerant scribes, chancery officers, émigrés, scholars, travelers, and other go-betweens—who formulated, deployed, moved, and spread the new political vocabulary across a geography spanning the Balkans and Egypt to South Asia. The book thus places Ottoman developments in much wider context. As Markiewicz notes, a biographical approach permits him “to explore kingship in the intellectual and cultural constellations in which it is formulated while still preserving the messiness of individual lived experience and the broader intellectual entanglements they produce” (p. 18). He is indeed successful in this aim.

The Crisis of Kingship contains some minor typos, e.g., “Chinggisied” (p. 6), “innovate” (p. 22), “Selime” (p. 142 n. 153), and “twentieth criticisms” (p. 169). Mostly, though, the reader is simply left wishing for a fuller picture of Bidlisi himself. Sections on the subject's early life, while rich in context, can be spare in real detail. Information is fuller for his later years, as he gained prominence and wrote prolifically, and for Bidlisi's political and historical thought. But we come away with much less sense of the subject's character and personality, or inner life. To be sure, this is no fault of Markiewicz's. It is a challenge faced by all would-be biographers in the field, who run up against sources that are scant and rarely speak to subjective experience. That said, however, the study is an invaluable addition to the small but now growing study of Ottoman lives.

Overall, Markiewicz has produced an intellectually sophisticated, empirically rich, and well-written book. The Crisis of Kingship makes important contributions to Islamic political thought, as well as to the nexus between patronage, literary culture, and intellectual output, especially in historical writing. It is also an excellent biography.