Chaos, Order, Power, Salvation: Heroic Hagiography’s Response to the Ottoman Fifteenth Century

The extent of violence and human suffering involved in the origins of states, such as the Ottoman, is often trivialized or normalized in state-centric accounts such as chronicles. In this paper, other sources, especially hagiography and religious advice, is used to provide a different perspective on the fifteenth century as the formative period of the Ottoman Empire. It argues that the human experience of the time was one of meaningless suffering and chaos, and draws attention to representation of power as arbitrary (and as such illegitimate), and to an image of man as weak, greedy, and corrupt. Redemption from such a world was only possible through radical world renunciation following the heroic saints of Anatolia.