Introduction to Entangled Literatures and Histories in the Premodern Ottoman World

On Mehmed II's Gaze and the Performance of History

When Sultan Mehmed II entered the Hagia Sophia on 29 May 1453, having just overthrown the city of Constantinople after a protracted siege, he exercised his authority in a seemingly unlikely way. After surveying the wondrous interior of the Christian cathedral, which had been the largest in all of Byzantium, he began a slow outward ascent to the dome, pausing on the way to gaze upon the dilapidated annexes and chambers around him. According to the fifteenth-century historian Tursun Bey, an eyewitness who reports this scene in his Tārīh-i Ebü'l-fetḥ, this tableau of ruin set Mehmed II in a contemplative mood. Reflecting on the transience of all worldly things, the sultan parted his lips and proceeded to recite, in Persian, a line of poetry:

The spider serves as chamberlain at the Palace of Khusraw,The owl sounds the hours at the castle of Afrasiyab¹

Mehmed II, who composed a divan under the pen name Avni, was in good company in choosing this theme. Roughly a millennium before Percy Bysshe Shelley would lament the bygone glory of Ozymandias, others such as the Abbasid poet al-Buḥturī (d. 897) and the Persian poet Khāqānī (d. 1190) composed famous poems on the Palace of Khusraw, a Sasanian architectural marvel. Generally, these poems served as complex meditations on the vicissitudes of Time, which has no regard for kings, bringing even the greatest of empires to their knees. In this case, Mehmed II also visualizes the formerly mighty Palace of Khusraw, now devoid of human attendants. Here, only spiders are left to carry out the work of the chamberlain (more literally "veil-bearing," which, not coincidentally, also describes the web-weaving of spiders). A similar craftiness in word choice is found in the next hemistich: only the owl, a metonym for desolation, serves at the castle of Afrasiyab, the legendary archenemy of Kay Khusraw in the Shāh-nāma, keeping watch for the benefit of no one.² On the most basic level, as the verse implies, all people will meet the fate of Khusraw and Afrasiyab in the end.

From the context of this poetic recitation, it is clear that Mehmed II has more on his mind than aesthetics, or reworking well-tread poetic ground. Rather, the scene of his performance is a site where disparate histories and cultures, lingering outside the semantic range of his literal words, inexorably begin to converge. Most prominently, we find the ruin of the Sasanians, who in the end had been antagonists to the expansion of Islam, now mapped onto (and, indeed, actively used to interpret) the present downfall of the Byzantines and their sacred spaces.³ At the same time, the line also showcases the prestige of a Persianate literary past, represented by the allusion to the Shāh-nāma and this poetic tradition of ruin-gazing, now marshaled to demonstrate the literary acumen of a conquering Ottoman sovereign. And finally, there is the very theme of the poem, which appropriately concerns temporality and its many layers. By gazing at the "ruins" around the cathedral, Mehmed II performatively consigns them to the past, as past, temporally severing the Hagia Sophia-as-church from its Muslim present and future. This, too, is a kind of conversion—though one more subtle than Mehmed II's order for the Islamic profession of faith to be declared at the pulpit inside.⁴ Of course, Mehmed II cannot communicate all this, or tell us of his ability to separate one epoch from another, only by staring at the scene around him. For this, he also needs poetry.

Tursun Bey found these words so moving, he says, that they were instantly impressed on the "tablet" of his heart. In fact, Mehmed II's poetry was not alone in making a strong impression on Tursun Bey, whose history is enriched by many lines of verse composed in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, seamlessly woven into...