TAR 303 - Chronicles and History Writing

This course is aimed at providing the students with a basic knowledge on the Ottoman chronicle tradition, which is one of the most important types of sources on Ottoman history writing and historiography. During this course, the students will develop their research skills with these textual sources, apply the techniques of source criticism and gain insights in how to use the chronicles as a source in a research. This course will also introduce the students with the state of the art of Ottoman historiography and encourage them to engage critically with the existing knowledge produced by various historians.

A developed tradition of Ottoman chronicle writing is only available to us from the beginning of the fifteenth century. Apart from hagiographical writings and orally transmitted legendary epics, the early Ottoman literature had not yet produced a written and learned  historiographical tradition. Writing of comprehensive chronicles began in the second half of the fifteenth century, one and a half centuries after the establishment of the Ottoman beylik. Comprehensive Ottoman chronicles, which we discuss during this course, emerged as a series on History of the House Osman by Ahmedî (1412), Şükrullah (1458), Enveri (1466), Oruç (1467), Aşık Paşazade (1484) and Neşrî (1495), etc. In this course, students will learn to read these Ottoman historical texts by situating them within the political and cultural environment in which their authors lived and wrote. They will consider how the shaping of early Ottoman advice literature and chronicles is entangled with the trajectory of Ottoman state building. These texts were written by scholars and courtiers, who were themselves involved in the politics of their own time. Some of them endorsed the political centralisation, while others strongly opposed to it. In any event, they all discursively constructed the past events within the specific path of Ottoman state formation.  Students will develop skills to analyse several political and social concerns within the variety of rhetorical and discursive registers, which are encoded in these texts. 

This course is intended to acquaint the students with the rich variety of voices and concerns in the early Ottoman historiographical tradition and lift the veil on the central ideas and concepts informing early Ottoman political thought. As such, it seeks to demonstrate that early Ottoman history and historiography are not an impenetrable ‘black hole’, as many have claimed before, but rather a vast and unfamiliar land that, while reading with care, can gradually be revealed and appreciated.