Introduction: Ottoman Identity and the Development of an Imperial Culture in the Fifteenth Century

Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1:1-2 (2014): 53-55 Linda T. Darling  Introduction: Ottoman Identity and the Development of an Imperial Culture in the Fifteenth Century The first four articles of this inaugural issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association originated in a panel at the Middle East Studies Association Conference of 2005 whose purpose was to stimulate interest in the Ottoman fifteenth century. This introduction benefits from the comments of Douglas Howard on that panel. Our hopes for “quick and dirty” publication were disappointed, and in the interval one panelist published her paper elsewhere.1 We have replaced it with an intriguing paper by Hasan Karataş that fitted nicely with our theme. Also in the intervening time some new works on the fifteenth century have appeared that promise to revise the standard narrative of this period. These new works are few in number, however, so the stimulus our panel aimed to provide may still be useful a decade later. With the rethinking of Ottoman origins in the fourteenth century, and despite the ongoing interest in the classical heights of the sixteenth, the decline narrative of the seventeenth, and the modernization of the nineteenth, the fifteenth century remains relatively neglected. Major biographies of the great sultans Mehmed II and Bayezid II are decades old, and new studies of many historical issues are sorely needed. Current historiographical topics such as identity, state formation, and the impact of social and institutional change on individuals and groups are conspicuous by their absence from the narratives of this period, which saw the definitive establishment of the Ottoman state and the development of an Ottoman identity and historiography, as well as the need to choose directions for the unfolding empire amid a multitude of possibilities. The century that began with Timur and ended with Shah Ismail also raises significant issues for our understanding of the Ottoman Empire’s place in world history. Through the extraordinary careers of the gifted warrior kings Murad II and Mehmed II, the house of Osman renewed its political prestige among the lords of Anatolia and the Balkans. The economic and strategic power it gained with the capture of Constantinople in mid-century enabled the dynasty to break free of the periphery of the Central Eurasian steppe system and establish a new empire in the lands it controlled. By the end of the century the new empire was involved in a struggle for control of the ports and commercial routes of the eastern Mediterranean and their revenues.  Linda T. Darling is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ; email: ldarling@email.arizona.edu 1 Tijana Krstić, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51:1 (2009): 35-63. Linda T. Darling 54 These four papers try to comprehend the effect of this evolution on the populations of the region by exploring aspects of the linkage between imperial culture and Ottoman identities. The authors treat the problem of identity in three related senses. They have in mind first of all the evolving identity of the empire itself and of the Ottoman imperial household with its clients and allies; second, they examine the identities of other populations and communities living within the lands controlled by the Ottoman dynasty; and third, by implication each of the papers comments on the identity of the Ottoman Empire in the works of the empire’s modern historians. As a group the papers take up a very large number of literary works in several genres, showing both the wide range of literary production that survives from the period and our still very tentative and inadequate understanding of it. Linda Darling describes texts loosely termed political, especially works of nasihat and ahlak, and how their production reflects the empire’s changing identity as a state. Hasan Karataş and Gottfried Hagen examine narrative strategies for the establishment of individual and group identities in diverse religious genres. Christine Isom-Verhaaren’s paper takes a somewhat different approach, using prosopographical methods to analyze...