An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play (review)

In the spring of 1622, a political explosion took place in Istanbul so troubling to participants and observers that historians named it henceforth Haile-i Osmaniye—The Dreaded, Terrible Ottoman Event. Four years earlier, Sultan Mustafa I, brother of the previous sultan Ahmed I, had been deposed because of his evident insanity, and the teenaged Osman II, Ahmed's son, was put in his place. At his own initiative and/or with the advice of the chief black eunuch and other imperial councilors, Osman embarked on a set of actions and plans that insulted and enraged the janissaries of Istanbul and other high servants of the imperial palace, a group known collectively as the kul. Rumor had it that Osman planned to replace them with soldiers recruited from Anatolia and Syria—and even to move the capital from Istanbul to Bursa or beyond. In May 1622, the kul rose up in the city, seized Mustafa from among the women in the inner chambers of Topkapi Palace, and reinstated him as sultan with the symbols of office. Osman was turned over to a newly named and hostile grand vizier, who had him strangled. The mad Mustafa reigned for sixteen months, whereupon he was deposed once more and succeeded by the younger brother of the slain Osman.

Gabriel Piterberg takes the reign of the young Osman II and his assassination as the center of this book and uses them to develop a new approach to seventeenth-century Ottoman historical writing and a new conceptualization of the Ottoman state. The recent achievements in Ottoman social and economic history, nourished by rich archives, have not been matched, says Piterberg, by a cultural examination of texts and sources. Historical accounts, existing in some abundance in several genres, are scavenged for evidence and assessed for their reliability, but not examined as literary creations in their own right. Cemal Kafadar has called for such an initiative for an earlier period, and Piterberg here undertakes it for the historical manuscripts of five figures, contemporary with the Dreadful Event or living in subsequent decades.

Present day archival research and interpretation have yielded a strong view of the early modern Ottoman state: it moves from a patrimonial formation— based on the subjects' loyalty to a warrior sultan (a gazi), eager to fight for Islam on its borders and sustained by a dervish sensibility—toward a bureaucratic formation, based on the subjects' loyalty to a dynasty whose rulers are trained at the palace and sustained by their mothers and sometimes a favorite consort. Within this frame, Osman II emerges as a would-be warrior sultan, angry at his janissaries for fighting poorly against the Poles and eager to expand his presence beyond the confines of the palace and Istanbul. While agreeing with this characterization of young Osman, Piterberg raises searching questions about the teleological assumptions underlying the overall scheme, about the need to choose between patrimonial and bureaucratic modes, and more generally about what he calls the reification of the Ottoman state. Here again, alongside important studies of vizier/pasha households as loci for political action and new forms of compensation for state officers, Piterberg sees a role for cultural construction. His five historians, as they integrate the Haile-i Osmaniye into the longer history of the Ottoman dynasty, provide him the examples that he needs.

Piterberg works through his historical accounts and their interrelation with attention to every literary device and mood: elements of oral delivery, the ordering of causes for the kul revolt, shifts from early to late versions by the same author, adjectives chosen or refused, actors and sources present or omitted. Four of the five sources feed, with variants, a classic construction of the Ottoman dynasty, centered in Istanbul around its palace, loyal janissaries, and imperial servants. A fifth gives an alternate view. Authored by a Hungarian who, after a stint in the army, was active in provincial administration in Anatolia and elsewhere, this balanced account leaves space for Ottoman initiative and...