Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

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Citation Quinn, Meredith Moss. 2016. Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

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Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

A dissertation presented

Meredith Moss Quinn

The Department of History

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

History

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

May 2016

Dissertation Advisor: Cemal Kafadar Meredith Moss Quinn

Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

Abstract

This study contributes to the cultural and intellectual history of the early modern

Middle East by analyzing how books were produced and circulated, and which audiences existed for various types of books in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. Focusing on the 17th century, I draw upon the material evidence of manuscripts, statistical and network analysis of archival sources, as well as upon narrative and biographical texts. My analysis shows the limitations of conventional socio-economic categories for writing Ottoman cultural history, and argues for a new approach to writing cultural history.

Because almost all of the books in Istanbul were produced by hand, this research offers a counterpoint to the much-explored narrative of printed books. In early modern

Istanbul, book-making was highly decentralized. Readers could and did create their own books, sometimes for reasons of economy and sometimes to achieve a special closeness to the work. In fact, the quintessential book in early modern Istanbul was not a fancy volume, but a humble personal notebook created from folded leaves of paper and filled with excerpts or short treatises. Because it was possible to copy and own just the portion of a book that was of interest, fragmented and partial texts were the norm. As a result, libraries that collected reliable and complete texts were an essential part of book circulation. These libraries were set up for copying as much as for reading. I introduce an exemplar manuscript that was held for this very purpose.

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Ownership of books was most highly concentrated among those who bore the title of efendi. Men, especially wealthy men, were also more likely to be bookowners than others, but book ownership was not widespread. However, people from every segment of society came into contact with books and the texts they contained, often as listeners rather than readers.

This dissertation inverts a common paradigm for writing cultural history. Rather than map cultural currents onto predetermined social groups, I begin with clusters of books that anecdotally or statistically belong together. I then use manuscript evidence such as reading statements, as well as probate inventories, to suggest their audiences.

Each book had its natural ecology: the texts with which it naturally belonged because of how it was used and by whom. Books had affinities that crossed traditional subject boundaries. For example, the constellation of medrese books most frequently owned together includes law, grammar, and lexicography. Less rarified books also had their own ecologies. A single title might appear both as a deluxe book intended for display in a refined home and as a scrappy storybook meant to be read aloud in a boisterous coffeehouse setting. In such a way, some texts could transcend social categories altogether.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………..………………vi

Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………...x

A Note on Usage………………………………………………………………………….xi

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One: Manuscript Production and Circulation…………………………………...35

Chapter Two: Books and Their Owners…………………………………………………84

Chapter Three: A Book-Centered Approach to the Social History of Books…………..119

Chapter Four: Peering Over Readers’ Shoulders — Note-Taking as a Reflection of Reading………………………………………………………………………155

Conclusion: An Ideal Bookshelf…...…………………………………………………...180

Appendix One: Creating a Database from Seventeenth-Century Court Records………182

Appendix Two: Overview of Five Bookowner Segments……………………………...188

Appendix Three: Micro-Libraries………………………………………………………189

Appendix Four: Frequently Owned Books……………………………………………..191

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………194

Acknowledgments

This dissertation ends with an ideal bookshelf, but it began with an ideal committee. I am fortunate to have been advised by three scholars whose considerable erudition is matched by kindness and humanity. Cemal Kafadar’s inspiring, tour-de-force seminars – majālis, really – were a highlight of my graduate studies. I am especially grateful to have studied under someone who models and encourages creative lines of inquiry and an appreciation for unconventional sources. Ann Blair gave generously of her time and expertise to guide me at every stage of graduate school. I can count on her for pragmatic advice, frank commentary, and unfailing good cheer. Despite all the guidance she has given me over the years, I am still wondering how she manages to accomplish and serve as much as she does. Khaled El-Rouayheb remains for me a model of scholarly integrity and refined purpose. I am humbled by his engagement with my work and grateful for his timely responses to it. I deeply respect all three of these scholars and thank them for the time they invested in me.

Many others have generously advised me. Since I met Halil Berktay twenty years ago, he has proven a steadfast source of encouragement, humor, and hilarious stories. I first encountered Selim Sırrı Kuru when I was an undergraduate and he was a teaching fellow in Engin Sezer’s Turkish A class. It was a turn of great fortune to be his student again among the cats on Cunda island. Meeting İsmail Erünsal, the distinguished scholar of Ottoman libraries and booksellers, was, for me, like encountering a rock star. Despite his many accomplishments and obligations, he welcomed me with a hospitable generosity that I will not soon forget. Himmet Taşkömür helped me to glimpse the worlds that lie behind each word of Ottoman Turkish. He, too, gave his time selflessly to answer many

of my questions. Hatice Aynur offered encouragement and opportunities to share my work with others. Derin Terzioğlu listened carefully, challenged my assumptions, and provided assistance in many ways. All of these advisors offered guidance that improved my work, but the many imperfections that remain are entirely my own.

Over the past eight years, I enjoyed and benefitted from countless discussions in

Cambridge, Istanbul, and beyond. Conversations with each of the following individuals had a specific impact on my work for which I am grateful: Berat Açıl, Zeynep Altok,

Sami Arslan, Tülay Artan, Ekin Tusalp Atiyas, Patricia Blessing, Hülya Canbakal, Alex

Csiszar, Ahmet Kaylı, Hannah Marcus, Elias Muhanna, Aslı Niyazioğlu, Helen Pfeifer,

Dana Sajdi, Karin Scheper, Jan Schmidt, Yavuz Sezer, Nir Shafir, Amy Singer, Daniel

Lord Smail, Arnoud Vrolijk, Jan Just Witkam, Ali Yaycıoğlu, and the late (but still inspiring) Shahab Ahmed. Colleagues in the Book History Writers Group and fellow travelers in Ottoman studies and history at Harvard have been boon companions and exacting readers. In particular, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Deniz Türker, and Rowan Dorin were there from the beginning to the end — and Rowan, along with Avigail Noy, made sure that I reached the end. Alex Bevilacqua offered insightful and genuinely helpful responses to drafts. And Hilal Uğurlu came to Harvard as a visiting scholar and left as a treasured friend. I also wish to thank Kathleen Dillon for her unstinting encouragement, and Neyyir Berktay for being a model of integrity, independence, and fun. My life is richer for their presence.

This study focuses on books, and it is an honor to acknowledge the librarians and archivists who preserve the manuscripts studied here. Staff at the Center for Islamic

Studies (İSAM), the Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, the Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü Arşivi,

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the Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi, the Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi of İstanbul Üniversitesi, and the Leiden University Library allowed me many months of pleasant and productive study. Librarians at Harvard University were equally supportive, especially Susan Halpert and András Riedlmayer. Without the efforts of these librarians and archivists, and those of their predecessors, this would not have been much of a study at all. Theirs is a purpose which transcends generations.

Several centers at Harvard University provided me with critical training and consulting help as I learned new methodologies for this study. Programming support was provided by Steven Worthington of the Research Technology Consulting team at the

Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Scott Walker of the Harvard Library Map

Collection and Sumeeta Srinivasan of the Institute for Geographical Analysis assisted with GIS analysis. Nancy Cooke Smith refreshed my SPSS skills and admonished me to finish what I had started. The staff of Harvard’s History Department brought professionalism and good humor to the many problems I presented to them. It was a wonderful place to be based. In addition, Ahmet Arslantürk patiently taught me to read terekeler, Juan Taborda assisted in map production, and Henry Shull corrected many inconsistencies and typographical errors. I thank them all for their help.

I gratefully acknowledge the fellowships I received from the Turkish Cultural

Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the U.S. Department of State

Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Harvard GSAS Graduate Society, and the

Rare Book School Mellon Fellowship program.

The last year of working on this dissertation overlapped with my first nine months working in Massachusetts Hall. I am grateful for the support of my colleagues there. Alan

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Garber and Peggy Newell told me to take as many days off as I needed so that I could finish; they may have reason to regret that offer now.

There is a story told in my family about my great-grandfather, Carlos Badger, and his bibliophilia. One day, his pregnant wife, Rose Jenkins Badger, sent him out with money to buy a baby blanket for the expected infant. Carlos walked by a bookshop and saw a volume that he could not pass up. He returned home with the book, but no blanket.

The baby was born that night.

One of the greatest blessings in my life was to be born into a family that loves books and the ideas and history that they contain. My mother, father, and stepmother gave me every educational opportunity and valued my love of learning. My father read this dissertation in its entirety and tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to purge it of jargon.

My in-laws, Gary and Fran Whaley, accepted my quirks and went out of their way to support this project and my family (including flying to the Netherlands to help me there).

Both families have been patient about the many holidays I have spent with my nose in books. But no one has been more patient than my husband Jason. His constancy and confidence in me made every page possible.

Since beginning graduate school, I have given birth to two beautiful children,

Rosalia Clair Whaley and John Milton Whaley. They have taught me more than any library of books could, and I love them more than they will ever know. John’s baby quilt, started four years ago after his birth, is still unfinished. I am looking forward to finishing it now.

Abbreviations

Ar. Arabic

B.U. Leiden Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden

Cod. Or. Codex Orientalis (a manuscript classification at B.U. Leiden) d. defter

H. Hejira, hijra

KA Ḳısmet-i ʿaskeriye

Kashf Kâtip Çelebi, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʻan asāmī al-kutub wa-al-funūn. Edited by Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Kilisli Rifat Bilge. [Istanbul]: Maarif Matbaası, 1941.

TDVİA Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi

Tr. Turkish

A Note on Usage

Citations: I cite probate inventories according to the following format: Court, d. [defter], f. [folio] (v___). The final element in parenthesis refers to the page (varak) assigned to the image in the file name of digital versions available at İSAM in Istanbul. The numbers in the file names do not match the folio numbers, so I cite them separately for ease of reference.

Translations: All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

Transliterations: There is no satisfactory, consistent way to transliterate Arabic and

Ottoman Turkish together. My approach is to transliterate each according to the rules observed in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). However, I make the following exceptions:

• When I quote from a published transliteration, I do not edit it to meet IJMES

style.

• When including extended quotations in the footnotes, I generally transliterate

Ottoman Turkish, but transcribe Arabic.

• When a word is commonly found in English language dictionaries (e.g., imam,

hadith), I use the common English spelling.

Introduction

The Süleymaniye Library — one of the most important repositories for Islamic manuscripts in the world — could not occupy a more atmospheric location. It is housed in one of the sixteenth-century colleges built by Süleymān the Magnificent as part of his grand mosque complex. One enters the library’s courtyard through a portal in a large stone wall. On one side of the courtyard stands a quietly murmuring fountain which has, for centuries, accompanied scholars in their thoughts. Inside the small reading room, light filters through iron fretwork windows — to reveal tables crammed with computer monitors. The monitors leave no space to examine manuscripts, and, in fact, manuscripts are only rarely seen in the reading room of this great manuscript library. Turkish authorities wholeheartedly embraced the possibilities of digitization as a tool for preservation many years ago. As a result, almost every manuscript in the library is digitized and available via in situ computers. This impressive digitization program has been a boon for scholars and the public. Tens of thousands of manuscripts can be accessed instantaneously. Digital copies can be purchased and read in the comfort of home. Reading room hours stretch into the night, since one security guard suffices to protect the bank of computers.

Meanwhile, the original manuscripts remain securely locked in another building, and seeing one of them requires special permission. The Süleymaniye policy assumes that, for most readers, the object on which a text is inscribed does not matter. As long as readers can make out the script on the screen, it is thought, they have what they need.

Images of pages can be cropped to display the main text all the more clearly, and

researchers should not require access to the original manuscript. This policy stems from an admirable concern with preservation.

The policy also accurately reflects the way that Ottomanist scholars have usually treated manuscripts: as incidental vehicles for the texts that we use. The texts that manuscripts contain — covering the full range of Ottoman literary, political, medical, scientific, and historical writing — are central for historians and literary scholars of the

Middle East. Yet scholars all too often treat these books as disembodied texts, using the contents while paying scant attention to the material and social context of their circulation. We have not acted as though the physical object matters. Yet when we read manuscripts only for the text, transcribing the words or reading a published transcription, never considering the artifact or paratext, we miss a wealth of clues about how the text was intended, received, and used.

This study focuses on the material and social context for Ottoman books. Taking the case of seventeenth-century Istanbul, I analyze how books were produced and which audiences existed for various types of books, in order to illuminate the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern Middle East. It is virtually impossible to study the history or literature of the premodern Middle East without recourse to manuscript sources. This study provides scholars with a material and social perspective on the manuscripts that they encounter in rare books libraries: as artifacts that were created and traded, and as texts that were embedded in a web of social relations.

In analyzing who owned what kinds of books, I found that neither familiar

Ottoman social groupings nor familiar generic groupings explained the patterns I found.

The notion of matching types of books with groups of people dissolved when I examined

the evidence. It turned out that the categories I expected to use, categories describing social position, occupation or class (for people), and subject matter or genre (for books), yielded only partially meaningful results. Indeed, one of the distinctive contributions of my dissertation is to invert a common paradigm for writing cultural history. Rather than map cultural currents onto predetermined social groups, I begin with clusters of books that anecdotally or statistically belong together. I then use manuscript evidence such as reading statements, as well as probate inventories, to suggest their audiences.

Beyond the borders of Middle Eastern history, this study contributes to the field of book history by analyzing a thriving book culture based entirely on manuscript technology. My study has been inspired by the work of book historians who have demonstrated, mostly for Europe, the importance of material and social context for understanding intellectual and cultural currents. However, my research offers a counterpoint to the much-explored narrative of printed books. Almost all the books in the early modern Middle East were produced by hand. (This is particularly true of those in

Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.) Many readers and writers knew of print, but manuscript remained predominant until the nineteenth century. By explaining how and why manuscript technology worked so well for these readers and writers, I offer a new perspective on debates about how the technology of book production affects the circulation of ideas.

The questions I ask in this study are familiar from the field of book history (now sometimes called the history of communication, information, or media).1 The types of

1 As in so much when it comes to book history, Robert Darnton was at the forefront of the movement from book history to communications history: “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” The American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 1–35. See also Paul N. Edwards, et al., “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical

evidence I use are also familiar. I rely upon qualitative analysis of chronicles, travelogues, and biographies, statistical analysis of probate inventories, and, most importantly, the material and textual evidence in manuscripts themselves. In approaching these sources, I have also made use of relatively new methods enabled by digital technologies. I examined the contents of personal libraries using social network analysis in order to determine which kinds of books were likely to appear together (in effect, similar to the Amazon.com recommendation engine). I also deployed geographical analysis to determine whether some parts of the city were more “bookish” than others. In short, I have taken a catholic approach in evidence and method in order to discover the original textual, social, and economic ecology of the manuscripts that today line the shelves of the Süleymaniye Library’s back vault.

Using this combination of methods and sources, I demonstrate that the circulation of books operated in a way completely unfamiliar to those who are accustomed to twenty-first-century book production and circulation. In early modern Istanbul, making everyday books was highly decentralized. Readers could and did create their own books, sometimes for reasons of economy and sometimes to achieve a special closeness to the work. In fact, the quintessential book in early modern Istanbul was not a fancy volume, but a humble personal notebook created from folded leaves of paper and filled with

Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1392–1435, and John-Paul A. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). My goals for this dissertation remain more limited than the ambitions articulated by historians who try to describe entire communications systems and the circulation of information for the societies they study. While a history of communication in early modern Istanbul would be desirable, it is not yet feasible at scale (though Ghobrial’s recent book represents an inspiring attempt). Only after properly contextualizing the formal written record can we understand where and how literacy shades off into rumor and other means of communication. As I describe in Chapter One, my choice to isolate books from other objects or forms of communication is not ahistorical. Contemporaries clearly saw books as a distinct category, albeit somewhat different from what we might include in our “book” category. For example, they included “miscellaneous papers” among books.

excerpts or short works. Partly because it was possible to copy and own just the portion of a book that was of interest, fragmented and partial texts were the norm. Medrese students studied portions of books, often beginning in the middle of the text. Finding a complete set of a multi-volume text was challenging. As a result, libraries that collected reliable and complete texts were an essential part of book circulation and stood as proud monuments to their founders. These libraries were set up for copying as much as for reading. I introduce an exemplar manuscript that was held for just this purpose.

Ownership of books was most highly concentrated among those who bore the title of efendi. Men, especially wealthy men, were also more likely to be bookowners than others, but book ownership was not widespread. We might assume that literacy (strictly defined as the ability to read a text by oneself) followed a similar pattern. However, people from every segment of society came into contact with books and the texts they contained, often as listeners rather than readers. Manuscripts provide ample clues to the social uses of books. I argue that the clearest perspective into the question of who engaged with which kinds of books comes from beginning with the books themselves.

Each book had its natural ecology: the texts with which it naturally belonged because of how it was used and by whom. Books had affinities that crossed traditional subject boundaries. For example, and not surprisingly, the constellation of medrese books most frequently owned together includes law, grammar, and lexicography. I argue that less rarified books also had their own ecologies. A single title — such as the history of al-

Ṭabarī (d. 1058 / H. 450) — might appear both as a deluxe book intended for display in a refined home and as a scrappy storybook meant to be read aloud in a boisterous coffeehouse setting. Consequently, I argue for an understanding of genre that depends not

only upon the text itself but also upon the physical qualities of its manuscripts and the social context of its use.

Scope of Study and Relationship to Previous Studies

The history of books in the Ottoman Empire has traditionally focused on the first

Arabic-type printing press in Istanbul, established in 1727–29 by İbrāhīm Müteferriḳa, and on the explosion of print in the nineteenth century.2 In other words, this has been a history of print, often told through a teleological lens of modernization, and because print came “late” to the Ottoman realm, the historiography has focused on the modern period.3

Scholarship on the economic, social, and material dimensions of premodern

Ottoman manuscript culture remains limited.4 Studies of paleography and the material

2 See, for example: Johann Strauss, “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th centuries),” Arabic Middle Eastern Literatures 6, no. 1 (2003): 39–76 and Orlin Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika ya da ilk Osmanlı matbaa serüveni, 1726–1746: Yeniden değerlendirme (Istanbul: Yeditepe, 2006). Sabev has authored a number of other studies on Ottoman book history, many based on probate inventories, including: “Private Book Collections in Ottoman Sofia, 1671-1833 (Preliminary Notes),” Études Balkaniques 1 (2003): 34–82; “Rich Men, Poor Men: Ottoman Printers and Booksellers Making Fortune or Seeking Survival,” Oriens 37, no. 1 (2009):177–90; “18. yüzyıl Diyarbakır’ında kitap sahipliği,” in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Diyarbakır, ed. Bahaeddin Yediyıldız and Kerstin Tomenendal (Ankara: Diyarbakır Valiliği ve Türk Kültürü’nü Araştırma Enstitüsü, 2008), 153–58; “Balkanlarda Osmanlı kitapçılığı: 18. yüzyılda bir sahafın kitapları,” in XV. Türk Tarih Kongresi, vol. c. iv, iii. kısım (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2010), 1809–53; and “Bulgarian Historiography on Ottoman Written Culture in Bulgaria,” Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi 8, no. 15 (2010): 245–62. I am grateful to Esra Karayel Muhacir for sharing many of Sabev’s articles with me.

3 In fact, the first printing press in Ottoman territory was set up in the 1490s by Jewish migrants from Spain. This Hebrew-language press was followed by Armenian-language and Greek-language printing presses. The Müteferrika press of Istanbul was not the first Arabic-type press in the Ottoman realm, which was established to print Christian texts in Aleppo in 1706. The impact of all of these presses, however, remained rather circumscribed, and in each of the linguistic communities, manuscript technology remained a widely used method of circulation of texts for centuries. For a thorough reexamination of the historiography of print in the Middle East and the introduction of print in nineteenth-century Egypt, see Kathryn Schwartz, “Meaningful Mediums: A Material and Intellectual History of Manuscript and Print Production in Nineteenth Century Ottoman Cairo” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015).

4 However, on the social history of Ottoman books, see the three studies by Derin Terzioğlu, Nelly Hanna, and Dana Sajdi mentioned below. I do not detail here studies that touch on Islamic book history in other periods. These include, most prominently, George N. Atiyeh, ed., The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995);

dimensions of texts have focused on archival sources.5 Any notions we have of how

Ottoman manuscripts were “published” are based on flimsy evidence at best. Even the market for paper, the most basic component of a manuscript, remains little understood.6

Ottomanist art historians provide perhaps the best example of what might be discovered when a concern for the content and formal qualities of a work is married to sensitivity to historical context. The robust literature on Ottoman miniature paintings and albums, for example, features multi-dimensional analysis of patronage, aesthetic appreciation, material constraints, and institutional context.7 Scholarship on less rarified

Ottoman manuscripts — workaday chronicles, textbooks, biographies, even poetry — remains rather one-dimensional. Despite the steady production of critical editions of these sources, or perhaps because of the existence of these editions, historians have tended to treat them as disembodied texts, paying little attention to their intended audiences, or how they were circulated and received.

The major exception to this bleak picture of Ottoman book history is the work of

İsmail Erünsal, who has painstakingly cataloged a mountain of evidence relating to two of the axes upon which early modern Ottoman book culture turned, endowment libraries

Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Konrad Hirschler, “‘Catching the Eel’: Documentary Evidence for Concepts of the Arabic Book in the Middle Period,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 224–34; and Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, ed. Robert Hillenbrand, transl. Geoffrey French (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984).

5 Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı belgelerinin dili (diplomatik) (Istanbul: Kubbealtı Neşriyatı, 1998).

6 Please see Chapter One for an extended discussion of the paper used in seventeenth-century Ottoman manuscripts.

7 See, for example, Emine Fetvacı, “The Production of the Şehnāme-i Selīm Ḫān,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 263–316, Emine Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and Zeren Tanındı, “Bibliophile Aghas (Eunuchs) at Topkapi Saray,” Muqarnas 21 (2004): 333– 343. Perhaps it is to be expected that one of the most exciting studies of book readership in Istanbul was written by an art historian: Tülün Değirmenci, “Bir kitabı kaç kişi okur?: Osmanlı’da okurlar ve okuma biçimleri üzerine bazı gözlemler,” Tarih ve toplum, no. 13 (2011): 7–43.

and booksellers.8 Anyone with an interest in Ottoman books owes a tremendous debt of gratitude for Professor Erünsal’s generosity, not only in dedicating his career to Ottoman books, but also in sharing his evidence in great detail. Thanks to Professor Erünsal’s exhaustive compilation of evidence from endowment deeds and court records, we can discern trends in how endowment libraries were established and what uses their donors envisioned for the books.9 His study of the inventories of booksellers crosses many centuries and provides an encyclopedic account of these important actors.

There are vast swathes of unknown territory in the early modern Ottoman book world, but I have preferred here to write an in-depth study of one slice in time, the mid- seventeenth century. Unfortunately, this narrow focus precludes any significant discussion of how book cultures changed over time. Manuscript production and reception in seventeenth-century Istanbul differed from that in previous and subsequent centuries.

Although there is a regrettable tendency to view manuscript-based book cultures as static,

8 İsmail E. Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri: Tarihî gelişimi ve organizasyonu (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2008); İsmail E. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar (Istanbul: Timaş, 2013); İsmail E. Erünsal, “Osmanlılarda sahhaflık ve sahhaflar: yeni bazı belge ve bilgiler,” in Türk kitap medeniyeti, ed. Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2008), 133–180. İsmail E. Erünsal, “Fetihten sonra İstanbul’da kurulan ilk vakıf kütüphânesi ve vakfiyesi,” in Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu’na Armağan, ed. Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Bölümü, 2006), 391–403; and İsmail E. Erünsal, Ottoman Libraries: A Survey of the History, Development and Organization of Ottoman Foundation Libraries, Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures 84 (Cambridge, MA: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 2008). For a glimpse of the broad reach of Professor Erünsal’s influence, see Hatice Aynur, ed., Kitaplara vakfedilen bir ömre tuhfe: İsmail E. Erünsal’a armağan, vol. 1–2 (Istanbul: Ülke, 2014).

9 Professor Erünsal dates a major transformation in endowment libraries to the late seventeenth century, with the establishment of the first independent library not attached to an institution such as a medrese or a dervish lodge. The number of independent libraries subsequently exploded in the eighteenth century. He speculates that this development might be a result of the diminished availability of funds for major endowments, but he has acknowledged that it remains to be explained in a satisfactory way. I hope that my dissertation research into Istanbul’s readers might shed some light onto this question. Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 172.

the technology, available materials, and social context all changed over time.10 My hope is that a many-layered portrait of this slice of time, drawing upon every available type of source, provides a standpoint from which other slices of time might be explored and compared.

The Seventeenth Century

This study focuses on seventeenth-century Istanbul for both pragmatic and intellectual reasons. The seventeenth century is the earliest period for which archival evidence allows the study of book ownership at a large scale because very few Istanbul probate inventories have survived from previous centuries. It overlaps with the lifetime of

Kātib Çelebi (d. 1657 / H. 1057), the great Ottoman bibliophile, whose own scholarly projects provide many precious clues to how books were made and circulated. The seventeenth century was also a particularly dynamic period in Istanbul. Ottoman society experienced economic and political disturbances that paralleled the “seventeenth-century crisis” ascribed to other polities.11 As the capital city swelled under the pressure of migration from the countryside, Istanbul was roiled by disputes over the direction

Ottoman society would take. New forms of sociability flourished alongside fierce debates about proper social order.

10 For evidence of the rise of new forms of binding, see: Karin Scheper, The Technique of Islamic Bookbinding: Methods, Materials and Regional Varieties (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 262–351; and Jake Benson, “Satisfying an Appetite for Books: Innovation, Production, and Modernization in Later Islamic Bookbinding,” in Persian Language, Literature, and Culture: New Leaves, Fresh Looks, ed. Kamran Talattof (London: Routledge, 2015), 365–94. Uğur Derman argues that even the method of making black ink changed over time: M. Uğur Derman et al., Masterpieces of Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Museum (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi, 2004), 22. See below for hypotheses in changes due to “vernacular” readership.

11 Jonathan Dewald, “Crisis, Chronology, and the Shape of European Social History,” American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (October 2008): 1031–52. The issue contains other articles debating the topic of the global seventeenth-century crisis.

Scholarship on the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire has struggled to emerge from the shadow of a declinist narrative, which sees this period as the beginning of a three-hundred-year-long slide toward dissolution after the glories of the Suleymanic age.

Under the influence of Cemal Kafadar’s work, Ottomanist historians have come to see the seventeenth century less as an era of general malaise and more as a period of

“constitutional struggles” in a society undergoing many of the transformations associated with the early modern era elsewhere.12 Relevant transformations include urbanization and the concomitant rise of new cultural activities, monetization, revolts and realignment of political power, and religious renewal. While all these currents are visible for Istanbul, in-depth scholarship has been largely confined to two struggles: the contest for political power at the highest levels and the fierce debates occasioned by the puritanical

Kadızadeli movement.13

Without questioning the significance of these developments, my research is not framed by their historiographies. Seventeenth-century Istanbul was complex and dynamic enough that it promises many profitable veins of inquiry. For example, microhistories focusing on two very different residents of seventeenth-century Istanbul

12 See, especially, Cemal Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels without a Cause?,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 12 (2007): 113–134; Cemal Kafadar, “The City That Rålamb Visited,” in Sultan’s Procession: The Swedish Embassy to Sultan Mehmed IV in 1657-1658 and the Rålamb Paintings, ed. Karin Ådahl (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2006), 59–73; and Cemal Kafadar, “The Question of Ottoman Decline,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 4 (1997-98): 30–37. Baki Tezcan’s recent work represents a recent attempt to articulate an alternative narrative for seventeenth-century Ottoman politics. Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

13 English-language treatments of these two topics include: Rifaʻat Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Tezcan, Second Ottoman Empire; Derin Terzioğlu, “Sufi and Dissident in the Ottoman Empire: Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (1618–1694)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999); Semiramis Çavuşoğlu, “The Ḳāḍīzādeli Movement: An Attempt at Şerīʿāt-Minded Reform in the Ottoman Empire” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1990).

— a dervish and a British consul — have illuminated networks of loyalties and social relations that cannot be captured by grand narratives focusing on ideology or politics.14

By taking as my starting point the history of a material artifact, the manuscript book, I offer a fresh perspective on the city’s cultural and intellectual life, especially regarding the social and geographical location of ideas in the city.

“Vernacular” Readership

Recently, several historians have hypothesized that the number of non-scholarly, non-elite Ottoman readers, particularly in vernacular languages, rose over the course of the early modern period. In an article on Ottoman catechisms, Derin Terzioğlu argued that the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries witnessed the emergence of “a new reading public in major cities like Istanbul.” Fueled by urbanization and the availability of Qurʾānic primary schools, non-scholarly groups such as craftsmen, merchants, and soldiers became readers and consumers of books to an extent not previously seen.

Terzioğlu perceived the presence of this new reading public in the content of contemporary texts, which reveal the reactions of the literati to these “lay” readers.

Confronted with a new reading public, literati alternately lamented the newcomers’ gauche tastes, or tried to guide them in preferred directions, often by producing simplified or translated versions of canonical texts for their consumption.15

14 Cemal Kafadar, “Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth Century Istanbul and First- Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature,” Studia Islamica 69 (January 1989): 121–150; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “A World of Stories: Information in Constantinople and Beyond in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010); Ghobrial, Whispers of Cities.

15 Derin Terzioğlu, “Where ʻİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization,” Past & Present 220, no. 1 (August 2013): 84–85, and Terzioğlu, “The Debate on Vernacular Literacy” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Washington, DC, December 2, 2011).

Earlier, in a path-breaking book for Ottoman book history, Nelly Hanna argued that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the strengthening of Cairo’s “middle class,” which resulted in higher literacy and increased consumption of books. Loosely defining “middle class” against a scholarly elite, Hanna claimed that the new “middle- class culture was more inclusive in its concerns and in the way those concerns were expressed” than was the existing scholarly culture.16 She also argued that there was an increase in book output as a result of higher demand and lower prices.17 Hanna’s book remains the most in-depth study of Ottoman readership to date. It examines an important city’s manuscript culture from every possible angle. She includes rich anecdotal evidence from later periods on how scribes worked and paints an inclusive picture of the many ways literacy might have been acquired.

Most recently, in a book on eighteenth-century Damascus, Dana Sajdi has discerned the emergence of non-scholarly authors who enjoyed “several and diverse

16 Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 2.

17 This part of Hanna’s argument might be ripe for reconsideration. Hanna uses manuscript survivals (more from the eighteenth century than from the seventeenth century) as evidence for increased output, but one would naturally expect more eighteenth-century manuscripts to survive. Not only do higher demand and lower prices rarely go together, but Hanna’s assumption of lower cost of paper is not borne out by studies of the European paper market. After paper was introduced to Europe in the twelfth century, Italian paper mills did introduce a number of innovations that decreased the cost of production, but these innovations took place by the fourteenth century, long before the period under consideration. Paper mills spread throughout Europe in subsequent centuries, so that the supply of paper increased steadily for at least two centuries, but because demand also increased sharply, the price implications of the increased supply are not clear. By the eighteenth century, paper mills in some places faced a dearth of rags, their main input. This crisis led, for example, to a well-documented rise in the price of paper in France in the early eighteenth century. Pierre Mackay has made reference to a “continual paper shortage of eighteenth-century Istanbul” (Pierre Mackay, “The Manuscripts of the Seyahatname of Evliya Çelebi,” Islam 52 (1975): 290). I have not been able to find other references to this shortage, though if most paper in Istanbul was imported from France in this period (as is argued in Vsevolod Nikolaev, Watermarks of the Ottoman Empire (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1954), 4), then shortages would not be surprising given the French paper crisis. Timothy Barrett, “Early Modern European Papermaking Techniques,” Presentation given at Radcliffe Institute (12 February 2010); Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (London: N.L.B, 1976), 36 and 40–42; David T. Pottinger, The French book trade in the ancien régime, 1500-1791 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 303, 307, 309.

audiences.” Sajdi sees the authors as “regular people” who were enabled by more than mere “technical literacy,” which she believes had always existed to some extent among non-scholarly groups. Instead, Sajdi identifies in these authors a newfound “cultural literacy,” which enabled them to appropriate genres to their own ends and assume that they had the authority to do so.18 Her close, contextualized readings of the resulting chronicles offer an unusually well-rounded examination of the conditions of Ottoman authorship, made all the more significant by the fact that she focuses on authors previously considered marginal at best.

These fascinating hypotheses and findings are difficult to translate into ground- level observations for Istanbul, given the current state of research. One challenge is conceptual: “vernacular,” like its cousins “popular,” “everyday,” or even “middle-class,” tends to conflate several distinct meanings. Even the narrowest definition of “mother tongue” remains complex given the polyglot nature of seventeenth-century Istanbul.

There was a multiplicity of vernaculars in seventeenth-century Istanbul: Turkish, but also

Armenian, Kurdish, Albanian, Circassian, Ladino, Hebrew, and Greek. Some residents had first learned Arabic or a Slavic language and had later migrated to the city.19

Alternatively, “vernacular readers” might refer to the people who are using the books, defined as the opposite of something like “elite” readers. In this sense, the term depends on an implied but usually unstated vision of the social structure (“popular” or

“vernacular” in contrast to “elite” or “cosmopolitan”; “ḫalḳ” or “ʿavāmm” in contrast to

“ḫāṣṣ”). Finally, “vernacular” might refer to the content of the books, so that vernacular

18 Dana Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 6, 8, 113–4.

19 See Chapter Three for a brief discussion of the meaning of a book’s language.

books would be those that address themes of “everyday concern.”20 There is a tendency to roll all three meanings into a vague package: supposedly non-elite readers like craftsmen, merchants, or soldiers (or others not of the scholarly or administrative elite) who read, in certain registers of Turkish, texts that reflected their everyday concerns and featured people like them.

Assuming that Ottoman readership did expand in the early modern period, I believe that these generalizations do not do justice to these readers’ interests or activities.

One red flag is that it is very difficult to identify the people who make up this amorphous group. Put concretely, when one is reading probate inventories, which individuals should be considered candidates for a popular/vernacular/non-elite group? 21 But a broader conceptual problem is that in searching for members of a new reading public, we reify the existence of this public and treat it as a monolithic entity. We begin with a hypothetical social structure and then try to map cultural currents onto it, instead of looking directly at cultural history as it was lived.22

20 Historians of music and architecture, among others, have wrestled with the intertwined definitions of “vernacular.” Kingston Wm. Heath, “Defining the Nature of Vernacular,” Material Culture 35, no. 2 (2003): 48–54, and Archie Green, “Vernacular Music: A Naming Compass,” Musical Quarterly 77, no. 1 (1993): 35–46. Hakan Karateke explores the adjacent problem of defining “popular” in “Seyahatname’deki Popüler Dinî Kitaplar,” in Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi’nin yazılı kaynakları, ed. Hatice Aynur and Hakan T. Karateke (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2012), 200–239.

21 Robert Darnton describes an analogous circularity in the hunt for bourgeois readers in eighteenth-century France: “Of course Enlightenment literature could still be interpreted as ‘bourgeois’ because one can always attach that term to a set of values and then find those values expressed in print. But that procedure has a way of spinning around in redundancies — bourgeois literature is literature that expresses the outlook of the bourgeoisie — without making contact with social history.” Darnton, “A Bourgeois Puts his World in Order,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 113.

22 In this approach, I am indebted to Roger Chartier’s writings about the relationship between social groups and cultural manifestations. In writing about early modern France, he disputed, for example, the notion that “the category of ‘the people’ or ‘the popular’ has sufficient coherence and stability to define a distinct social identity that can be used to organize cultural difference in past ages according to the simple opposition of populaire versus savant. . . .I instead found evidence of fluid circulation, practices shared by

Even while we probe for evidence of expanded readership and examine its causes and consequences, it is productive to go back to books themselves. Examining groups of books that belong together because of the way they were used allows us to observe the tides and eddies of cultural currents that broad generalizations obscure. As discussed in

Chapter Three, some texts are “popular” not because they are confined to non-elites but because they transcend social class and even literacy itself, serving as part of the common cultural fabric across society. Other groups of books have a much tighter social reach, and even hew closely to contemporaries’ notions of subject and genre.

Sources and Methods

This study rests on a variety of sources. In addition to analyzing the clues in manuscripts themselves, I have drawn on accounts from biographical dictionaries, travelogues, and chronicles. I also present findings from a large sample of probate inventories from seventeenth-century Istanbul. Because each of these types of sources has limitations, I triangulate among different types of evidence wherever possible.

Manuscripts as Evidence: Beyond the Text

Extant manuscripts, of course, constitute the most precious resource for understanding Ottoman book culture. I consulted hundreds of seventeenth-century

Ottoman manuscripts in the course of this study, especially titles that emerged frequently in probate inventories and narrative sources. Comparing many manuscript instantiations of a single work shows how much a book’s material qualities (paper, handwriting, various groups, and blurred distinctions.” Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 3.

rubrication, dimensions, binding, etc.) could vary according to the means and the needs of the user. I rely on manuscript evidence to demonstrate that copying for oneself was common. Close “readings” of the physical properties of specific manuscripts also yield clues about how users interacted with their books. For example, Chapter One introduces an exemplar from one of Istanbul’s endowment libraries that was lent out for copying, and Chapters Three and Four draw upon two reading notebooks kept by an Istanbulite in the early seventeenth century.

One of the central goals of this dissertation is to encourage and facilitate the return to manuscript evidence in the practice of Ottoman history. Preceding generations of scholars have published valuable critical editions of hundreds of Ottoman texts. Many of us rely on these editions to find our way around manuscripts and for ready consultation when we are away from manuscript libraries. However — as has been the case in many historical and literary fields — the predominant goal of these editions has been to find the single “ur-text” that best captures the author’s first copy. Accordingly, manuscripts are used to establish genealogies with the aim of approximating a single original text. One problem with this originalist approach is that many Ottoman authors issued multiple recensions of their works. Later recensions not only incorporated new material but also included rewritings and omissions. These changes in the early textual history become apparent only by closely reading manuscript variants.23 Longer manuscript histories,

23 For two especially inspiring examples of what can be learned from a text’s history, see Walter G. Andrews, “The Teẕkere-i Şuʿarā of Latifi as a Source for the Critical Evaluation of Ottoman Poetry” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1970); and Baki Tezcan, “The History of a ‘Primary Source’: The Making of Tûghî’s Chronicle on the Regicide of Osman II,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 1 (February 2009): 41–62.

documenting the reception and use of a text over time, have much to offer historians.24

Doing this kind of history requires attention to the unique characteristics of each manuscript copy.25

Drawing upon codicological evidence presupposes a common vocabulary for describing the features of manuscripts. I have relied upon the work of Adam Gacek and

François Déroche, as well as upon the codicological terminology developed for the

European tradition.26 Ottomanists are also very fortunate to be able to learn from catalogs written by Barbara Flemming, Manfred Götz, Evyn Kropf, Günay Kut, Jan Schmidt, and

24 Take Ahmed Kaylı’s extraordinary study of the reception of Birgīlī Meḥmed. By studying hundreds of copies of Birgīlī’s works, Kaylı has established how Birgīlī’s popularity changed over time, and how subsequent generations reinvented him, even attributing texts to him that were not his. The result is a properly historicized, fresh look at one of the central figures in Ottoman intellectual history. Ahmed Kaylı, “A Critical Study of Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s (d. 981 / 1573) Works and Their Dissemination in Manuscript Form” (master’s thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2010). Kaylı’s thesis traces reception over time on a grand scale. Other scholars have looked at the reception and use of specific manuscripts, drawing on the full range of codicological evidence. Among these inspiring studies are Tülün Değirmenci’s research on the reception and circulation of storybooks, based on reading notes (discussed in Chapter Three, below), Elif Sezer’s examination of a single manuscript of the story of Fīrūzşāh, Sami Arslan’s forthcoming article on Molla Luṭfī (d. 1495 / H. 900), based on evidence in colophons, and the recent volume on the marginalia in books owned by Cārullāh Efendi (d. 1738 / H. 1151), discussed in Chapter Four. In addition to studies of reception and use, manuscript evidence can shed light on the very creation of texts. Pierre Mackay, Eleazar Birnbaum, and Gottfried Hagen have used manuscript evidence to discern the writing process of Evliyā Çelebi (Mackay, “The Manuscripts of the ‘Seyahatname’”) and Kātib Çelebi (Eleazar Birnbaum, “Katib Chelebi (1609–1657) and Alphabetization: A Methodological Investigation of the Autographs of His Kashf Al-Ẓunūn and Sullām Al-Wuṣūl,” in Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen-Orient, ed. François Déroche and Francis Richard (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1997), 235–63, and Gottfried Hagen, “Kâtib Çelebi and Sipâhîzâde,” in Essays in Honour of Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, ed. Mustafa Kaçar and Zeynep Durukal Abuhusayn, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 2006), 525– 42).

25 Fortunately, many critical editions include a survey of the surviving manuscripts, across dozens of repositories. When these surveys include detailed bibliographical descriptions, they can be invaluable. For example, I have learned much from Āșiḳ Çelebi, Meşâʻirüʼş-şuʻarâ: Inceleme, metin, ed. Filiz Kılıç (Istanbul: İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 2010), 70–87, and Jan Schmidt, Pure Water for Thirsty Muslims: A Study of Muṣṭafā ʻĀlī of Gallipoli’s Künhü l-Aḫbār (Leiden: Het Oosters Instituut, 1991), 363– 416.

26 François Déroche et al., Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Script (London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2006); Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Adam Gacek, The Arabic Manuscript Tradition: A Glossary of Technical Terms and Bibliography, rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Adam Gacek, The Arabic Manuscript Tradition: A Glossary of Technical Terms and Bibliography—Supplement (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

Hanna Sohrwiede, each of whom pays careful attention to physical and paratextual evidence.27 I have drawn upon their catalogs in order to train my own eye, identify manuscripts of interest, understand what is unusual, and describe what I see.

Ottomanists who work with manuscripts still face a significant challenge in interpreting the material qualities that we see and describe. This study documents the tremendous variety in manuscripts. But what does a given type of paper, or format, or handwriting, tell us about the milieu in which the manuscript was made, or for which it was intended? As I examined manuscripts, I was humbled by the knowledge that it is difficult to view them with a “period eye” (to borrow the term developed by Michael

Baxandall in his studies of Renaissance art).28 Although scholars who have spent their careers looking at manuscripts have developed, through connoisseurship, an instinct for the meanings of many physical characteristics, our field would benefit from explicitly studying and articulating these meanings.29 In this dissertation, I have noted how seventeenth-century Ottomans described manuscripts and what qualities seem to have

27 Barbara Flemming, Manfred Götz, and Hanna Sohrweide, eds., Türkische Handschriften, Verzeichnis Der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Bd. 13, pts. 1-5 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1968); Günay Kut, Supplementary Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: With Reprint of the 1930 Catalogue by H. Ethé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Günay Kut, Kandilli Rasathanesi el yazmaları: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Kandilli Rasathanesi ve Deprem Araştırma Enstitüsü astronomi, astroloji, matematik yazmaları kataloğu (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2007); Günay Kut, Tercüman Gazetesi Kütüphanesi Türkçe yazmalar kataloğu (Istanbul: Tercüman Gazetesi, 1989); Evyn Kropf et al., “Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan,” http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic/; Jan Schmidt, A Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the John Rylands University Library at Manchester (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and Jan Schmidt, Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in the Netherlands, Codices Manuscripti 30, 34, 39, 41 (Leiden: Legatum Warnerianum in Leiden University Library, 2000).

28 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 29.

29 Nir Shafir has proposed a study that would do much to systematize this knowledge: comparing the detailed late seventeenth-century inventory of Şeyḫülislām Feyżullah Efendi’s endowed library—which contains detailed descriptions of the manuscripts’ physical characteristics—with the extant manuscripts themselves. (Personal communication.)

been drivers of value (Chapter One). I also try to make explicit my own assumptions about what a given physical characteristic means. Where possible, I present digital reproductions so that readers can draw their own conclusions about mise-en-page, handwriting, embellishments, and other characteristics visible in a reproduction.

A proper codicological treatment of a manuscript includes its paratextual elements.30 Spectacular recent scholarship in Middle Eastern history has revealed the usefulness of inscriptions such as endowment testaments, certificates of transmission, and reading and ownership marks. For example, as discussed in Chapter Three, Tülün

Değirmenci and Elif Sezer use brief notations made by readers in storybooks to bring to life the occasions on which the stories were read and to trace the manuscripts’ movement from one part of the city to another. Konrad Hirschler has found extensive attendance records for study circles in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Damascus and used these to argue for the broad social reach of scholarly texts.31 In comparison with the systematic study of probate inventories, described below, my treatment of book inscriptions such as endowment testaments and reading and ownership marks is qualitative and opportunistic.32

There is one other noteworthy aspect of my use of manuscripts. Most of the manuscripts informing the study (as well as most of the narrative and archival evidence

30 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

31 Değirmenci, “Bir kitabı kaç kişi okur?”; Elif Sezer, The Oral and the Written in Ottoman Literature: The Reader Notes on the Story of Fîrûzşâh (Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2015); Hirschler, Written Word. Hirschler is also the co-editor of a collection of studies that treats the notes in manuscripts—almost entirely those on the opening folio—as a kind of archive. Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources, ed. Andreas Görke and Konrad Hirschler (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2011).

32 I believe these inscriptions do not lend themselves to large-scale statistical study, mostly because the conventions for when they were used (certainly not on every manuscript) are still unclear.

that I cite) date to the seventeenth century. The mythology of print sometimes assumes that manuscript production and circulation comprised a static set of practices that remained unchanged over the course of centuries. I fear that many studies of Ottoman book culture mix evidence from earlier and later periods to describe such a single, unchanging culture. In reality, the Ottoman case by itself proves that there is no such thing as a single, unchanging “manuscript culture.”33 It is true that bookmakers and readers were conscious of participating in a tradition. Superficially, an eighteenth-century

Ottoman manuscript could resemble a fifteenth-century one. But much had changed in the intervening centuries. The eighteenth century had new styles of binding, a wholly different social context of literacy and education, and new institutions for accessing books.34 This study focuses on a slice of time to provide a properly historicized and contextualized description of its book culture. As a result, it would be inappropriate to use manuscripts from earlier or later periods as evidence.

Like many scholars, I am concerned about how difficult it can be to access original Ottoman manuscripts. Some things can only be perceived in the original.

However, it is up to us as scholars to articulate why and when access to the original object is useful, recognizing the legitimate and important concerns about security and

33 Pre-print Europe provides another example of a written culture based on manuscript technology that nonetheless changed considerably in almost every dimension. European book history demonstrates how book cultures based on manuscript technology could and did evolve. See, for example, Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).

34 On novel aspects of eighteenth-century libraries, see Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 171 and the forthcoming dissertation by Yavuz Sezer: “Architecture of Bibliophilia: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Libraries” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in process). On bindings, see Scheper, Technique of Islamic Bookbinding, and Benson, “Satisfying an Appetite for Books.”

preservation that inform current guidelines. I hope that our field will soon have a large collection of studies that show how useful physical evidence can be. In my experience, librarians and relevant officials are receptive to the notion that some scholarly questions require direct manuscript access. I am grateful for their flexibility.

Probate Inventories as Evidence

Data derived from probate inventories (terekeler) are central to this dissertation.

Probate inventories are particularly rich sources for social and cultural history, since they provide an intimate look into the material lives of individuals and households, the structure of families, and the web of credit transactions within which many people lived.

It is therefore not surprising that many other studies have drawn upon probate inventories, including several that deal with the history of books.35 Since my approach to these inventories differs from many, I will dwell here on my methods for sampling and analysis, and highlight the kinds of inferences that these inventories can provide when aggregated. The historian using probate inventories must make many choices when

35 For an overview of tereke-based studies, and their shortcomings, see Hülya Canbakal, “Barkan’dan günümüze tereke çalışmaları,” accessed at https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/17249/1/CANBAKAL_BARKAN.pdf on 9September 9, 2014. Boğaç Ergene offers a spirited defense of tereke-based research in “On the Use of Sources in Ottoman Economic History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 3 (August 2012): 546–548. Tereke-based studies that focus on books include: Colette Establet and Jean-Paul Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas vers 1700,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no. 87–88 (September 1999): 143–175; Hanna, In Praise of Books; Sabev, “Private Book Collections”; Henning Sievert, “Verlorene Schätze: Bücher von Bürokraten in den Muĥallefāt-Registern,” Buchkultur im Nahen Osten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 199–263; Ali İhsan Karataş, “Tereke Kayıtlarına göre XVI. yüzyılda Bursa’da insan-kitap ilişkisi,” Uludağ Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi 8, no. 8 (1999): 317–328; Bernard Heyberger, “Livres et pratique de la lecture chez les chrétiens (Syrie, Liban) xvii–viii siècles,” Révue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no. 87–88 (1999): 209–223; and Klaus Liebe-Harkort, Beiträge zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Lage Bursas am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: 1970). Said Öztürk includes a brief analysis of book ownership in his study of askeri probate inventories from Istanbul. Said Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait onyedinci asır İstanbul tereke defterleri: Sosyo-ekonomik tahlil (Istanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1995), 174–184. Hakan Karateke also provides an overview of tereke-based studies that focus on book ownership in “Seyahatname'deki popüler dinî kitaplar,” 233–239 (Ek 3).

selecting, reading, and interpreting the data. What we choose is, in my opinion, less important than being transparent about those choices and our reasoning.

I estimate that there are approximately 7,000–10,000 extant probate inventories from seventeenth-century Istanbul.36 The inventories typically comprise a brief introduction (which often gives the deceased’s name, neighborhood, title, gender, and heirs), followed by a detailed list of assets and their values, any debts and taxes to be deducted, and the legally determined division of the estate.37 These records were entered into elongated notebooks, typically approximately 15 x 40 cm, which were formed by folding paper length-wise into folios. These records, then, are books of a sort, but their dimensions signaled to contemporaries that they were “defters” or registers. The elongated defter was associated with official records, including those of the court. The probate court kept its own notebooks. In addition to estate inventories and divisions, the notebooks contain other probate-related decisions, such as the assignment of guardians to newly orphaned children.

The records studied here are drawn from two parts of the city, Istanbul and

Galata. Each region had a chief probate judge (ḳassām, from the root meaning “to

36 I base this estimate on the list of extant court records in Ahmet Akgündüz, Şer’iye Sicilleri (Istanbul: Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1988). Akgündüz lists 400 extant registers (defterler) containing probate court (kassam) records dating to this period from the greater Istanbul area (including Galata, Üsküdar, Eyüp, Yeniköy, and Beşiktaş, as well as the Kismet-i ‘Askeriye, the division focused on those who had “military status.” Istanbul proper is only represented by records in the second half of the seventeenth century.) Some registers comprise only probate inventories, while many include other probate-related court records.

37 The shares of each type of surviving relative were strictly mandated by Islamic law. This area of the law – ferāʾiż – was a mainstay of Ottoman legal handbooks. Surviving legal responsa (fatwas) from the period dwell on how an inheritance is to be divided up in unusual situations, for example, when the deceased’s sister is a Christian but the sister’s children are Muslims. (Feyzullah Efendi, Fetâvâ-yı Feyziye, ed. Süleyman Kaya, (Istanbul: Klasik, 2009), 479.) An individual could only bequeath or endow up to one- third of the value of his or her estate. This rule prevented the disenfranchisement of the legally mandated heirs. For more on the law of inheritance and bequests, please see articles on “Mirath” and “Wasiyya” in the Encyclopedia of Islam 2.

divide”), a positions that, in Istanbul and Galata, was a patronage appointment by senior members of the religious and scholarly hierarchy.38 As was typical in a time of frequent judicial transfers, a ḳassām might serve for only a short time before being appointed to another position.39 The appointment of a new judge was duly noted in the probate register, which then continued as before.

Despite the abundance of probate records, we know very little about how the court was structured or how the process worked in practice. In theory, these inventories were created by a judge or his representative only under certain circumstances: when one or more of the deceased’s heirs was a minor (in order to protect the minor’s interests); when there were no known heirs; when the deceased was from out of the city (in order to establish a record of the portion of goods that were with him at the time of death); or when there was a dispute or likelihood of a dispute about the inheritance. When an estate was reviewed and divided by the court, the judge or his representative extracted a tax, so there was certainly an incentive to resolve the matter without recourse to the court. The records themselves are spare and do not explain how any given case ended up in probate.40

38 For example, when ʿİṣmetī Efendi (d. 1665–1666 / H. 1076) became chief judge (kaḍiʿasker) of Anatolia, he appointed his secretary (mektūbcı), Ḥasan Efendi, as ḳassām of Galata. Ḥasan Efendi was evidently an important member of ʿİṣmetī Efendi’s household, since he also served as the tutor to ʿİṣmetī Efendi’s son. Ali Uğur, The Ottoman ʿUlemā in the Mid-17th Century, 532–33.

39 For example, in the probate register Mülga Beledī defter 1, records spanning three years (1656–1658 / H. 1066–1068), bear at least three different seals.

40 For the classic description of how the Ottoman probate court functioned (derived from regulations and law codes), see Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “Edirne askerî kassamı’na âit tereke defterleri (1545–1659),” Belgeler 3, no. 5–6 (1966): 1–23 and 74–78. See, also, Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait onyedinci asır İstanbul tereke defterleri, 74–75. Studying provincial court records from this period, Boğaç Ergene found that fees charged were generally higher than those officially prescribed: Boğaç A. Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society, and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 84–97.

The procedure followed by the court remains opaque. There are many relevant questions to which we do not have clear answers: How did an individual initiate a probate case? How was the inventory of belongings prepared? Who, besides the main probate judge, staffed the court? How did the court determine the value of the items? How much time passed between the person’s death, the probate court’s involvement, and the final record? Although there exists among Ottomanist historians some common wisdom to answer these questions, much of it probably derived from the better-documented nineteenth century, no one (to my knowledge) has trawled the documents for clues to probate procedure.41 Although determining how the process of the probate court worked was not my purpose, I have found that the inventories that appear in the court records have been copied from now-lost drafts.42 Also, the registers seem to contain entries in multiple hands, though one scribe’s handwriting appears to account for the majority of entries, even as one probate judge’s tenure ended and a new one began.43 This implies that there was at least one scribe “on staff” at the court who remained in place even as the lead judge changed. Perhaps this person developed an expertise in taking inventories and other aspects of the process and was relied upon by successive judges.

Probate inventories suffer from several layers of bias. Most importantly, not all estates were automatically inventoried, so the ones that were are unrepresentative of the

41 A model for this archival detective work is offered by Uriel Heyd’s treatment of the imperial reigsters known as mühimme defterleri. Through a close reading of the entries, Heyd was able to reconstruct the chain of petitions and bureaucratic processes that yielded the extant archival records. Uriel Heyd, Ottoman Documents on Palestine, 1552–1615; a Study of The Firman According to the Mühimme Defteri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 3–31.

42 For example, the entries are broadly chronological, but not strictly so: not infrequently, a record with one date will be followed by a record with an earlier date. The inventories also have remarkably few corrections.

43 See, for example, Mülga Beledī d. 1.

population as a whole in several key respects. The deceased in these records are more likely to be older (naturally enough), male, and, undoubtedly, wealthy.44 In addition, the survival rate of the records themselves is uneven. For example, there are only 22 extant seventeenth-century registers (notebooks filled with inventories) from central Istanbul, most from the end of the century, while there are 66 from Üsküdar, 66 from Eyüp, and 87 from Galata.45

Given these significant sources of bias, it is critical that the sampling strategy be valid in that the findings at least reflect the population of extant estate inventories (if not the true population of Istanbul). I selected 886 inventories at random from the Mülga

Beledī, Ḳısmet-i ʿaskeriye (hereafter: KA), and Galata ḳassām defterleri dating from

1650 to 1669 (H. 1059–1079).46 My goal was to provide a snapshot of a particular time rather than to trace change over time. This twenty-year period was chosen in order to maximize the available records for Istanbul intra muros (since the records thin considerably as one moves back toward the beginning of the seventeenth century), as well as to overlap with the lifetime of Kātib Çelebi, who provides an invaluable perspective on the book culture of seventeenth-century Istanbul.

I read each of the inventories in the sample line by line and tracked them in a database. Translating from the archival source to a database is an act of interpretation.

Please see Appendix One for details of how I accounted for the entries, particularly in cases where the records were ambiguous.

44 However, Establet and Pascual argue that the Damascene probate inventories they studied were in fact representative of the population as a whole: Establet and Pascual, “Livres des gens,” 144.

45 It is not clear why some survived and others did not.

46 Appendix One describes the sampling strategy in detail.

I wish to emphasize that the sample reflects the larger set of extant probate inventories for each of the archival funds, but it cannot possibly accurately reflect the actual population of Istanbul. For this reason, the data I derive from the inventories are not robust enough to make statements about the population as a whole (i.e., it is impossible to determine the actual book ownership rate in the city from probate inventories), but it is valid to make comparisons between groups (e.g., to compare book ownership of men versus women), because there is no reason to believe that appearance in the archival records is selectively biased on the question of book ownership.

One of the ways in which this study differs from most other studies of Ottoman book ownership is that I created my sample without regard to whether an individual was a bookowner or not. The resulting sample features far more non-bookowners (83.5%) than bookowners (16.5%) and makes meaningful comparisons between those two groups possible. In any case, it would be cumbersome to build a sample comprising just bookowners without some selection bias. Books were conventionally listed first in

Ottoman probate records, so researchers assembling a sample of bookowners might be tempted to read the first few items and skip the inventory if the first line does not contain books.47 However, in practice, many scribes listed books elsewhere in the inventory (i.e., not only in the first line), perhaps more often when the collection was small and inexpensive. As a result, studies that focus on bookowners and find them in the first line of the inventory are not only undercounting the number of bookowners but also are

47 On the veneration of the Qurʾān, al-Zarnūjī (fl. early thirteenth century), author of Instruction of the Student (Taʿlīm al-mutaʿallim), a book which appears in several probate inventories in this sample, wrote, “The required veneration [of the Book] includes the obligation not to stretch out one’s foot toward the Book, [nor] to place books of interpretation above other Books, and not to place anything else above the Book.” Al-Zarnūjī, Instruction of the Student: The Method of Learning, ed. Gustave E. von Grunebaum and Theodora Mead Abel (New York: King’s Crown, 1947), 35.

biased toward larger or more costly collections. Accurately identifying books and their owners requires reading every line of the inventory.

As important as statistical analysis is to this study, I emphasize (in Chapters Two and Three) that probate inventories cannot be relied on to accurately reflect all the books in a given individual’s library; the usefulness of statistics is limited by what can be counted. Individuals could endow books at any point before a terminal illness, and these endowed books would not appear in the inventories at all. I address this shortcoming in detail in Chapter Two. Many books were not identified by title, being called simply

“books” (kütüb). The unidentified books are given values, and from the entries we learn that they are cheaper than the average book, and more likely to be in a language other than Arabic. Compounding this problem, cheap books are probably less likely to survive or, if they are extant, to be properly cataloged. I draw upon many other sources, including more detailed inventories of booksellers, to identify these otherwise invisible books.48

This study makes use of the monetary values given for individual titles as well as the total sum of a person’s estate. These figures result from a process for assessing values that we do not fully understand. Although historians often assume that belongings were auctioned off, and therefore that the prices reflect market prices, there is plenty of evidence that goods were kept and divided among heirs. In other words, the values given in the inventories sometimes reflect estimates rather than market prices. Almost every inventory includes a fee for an auctioneer (dellāl), but it may be that this person was an expert broker who could assist with estimates even when items were not actually sold at

48 On the other hand, I do not believe that complete omission of books was common. This stands in contrast to the case of contemporary European probate records, where cheap books were apparently often omitted. Istanbulite inventories do contain extraordinarily cheap items, including very cheap books. Perhaps the difference can be explained by the strictness of Islamic probate law, according to which every single possession of the deceased was to be included in the total value of goods.

auction.49 In this study, I take the values given in probate inventories at face value. I feel comfortable making this assumption because statistical aggregation irons out any anomalies contained within a particular inventory. I am more interested in the relative worth of different types of books (or the relative wealth of different individuals) than I am in their “true” value. I assume that even if the value of any particular item is incorrectly estimated, the court official’s perception of the relative worth would be directionally accurate — especially when aggregated over many inventories and many different court officials.

The methodological considerations discussed above and in Appendix One are all intended to construct a sample that can be used to analyze book ownership. However, establishing ownership is only a first step for most book historians (including this one).

One of the questions that bedevils studies of book ownership based on probate inventories is the relationship between ownership and reading. After all, many of us know all too well that it is possible to own a book without reading it! Conversely, ample evidence indicates that Istanbulite bookowners lent their books to others and, as in the case of the epics treated here, that many people came into contact with the contents of a book by hearing it read aloud.50 Ultimately, most cultural historians are interested not in ownership of a book, but in engagement with a text. Ownership is only a proxy for intellectual and cultural engagement. I address the methodological leap from ownership to engagement in Chapters Three and Four.

49 Though the dellāl certainly did also facilitate sales. For example, the broker who worked with Levinus Warner asked him for 5 gurüş to pay the dellāls (note: more than one!) for a book (now Cod. Or. 379). See Cod. Or 1122, f. 8.

50 Not to mention the access to books provided by endowment libraries. See Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri. See Chapter One for a discussion of book borrowing.

Chapter Overview

In Chapter One, “Manuscript Production and Circulation,” I treat the material dimension of the Ottoman book world by offering a bird’s-eye view of manuscript circulation: the economic conditions of book creation and trade, what determined the value of a manuscript, and the institutions that enabled access to books. I argue that the standard model of book production, based on print technology, is insufficient to explain the contours of a manuscript-based culture. Istanbul’s sophisticated book market co-existed with extensive personal copying and coterie publication. The evidence of extant manuscripts confirms that many readers copied their own books and heard parts of a book read aloud before they copied it.

Chapter Two, “Books and Their Owners,” uses statistical analysis of probate inventories to place manuscripts in their social context. Before this study, it was not possible to state with confidence what kinds of people in the Ottoman capital were most likely to own books or which books of any genre were most commonly owned (for any period). Bookowners were almost entirely male, and they were likely to be wealthy.

Although probate inventories have many shortcomings, they offer a particularly good reflection of the intellectual background of scholars and judges educated in religious colleges (medreses) who bore the title efendi. Imperial medreses played a central role in training the judges who adjudicated disputes, notarized transactions, and served as local and imperial administrators. However, specific details of the curriculum that this influential group studied have remained elusive. Probate inventories allow us to peer into efendis’ private libraries and approximate their intellectual milieu from a fresh perspective. By analyzing co-occurrences of books across private collections, using

network analysis, I have identified a constellation of books that were commonly owned together. This constellation of co-occurring books most likely reflects the texts that the owners found most useful as they moved through their careers. My analysis suggests that the textual world of this key Ottoman social group centered not on religious sciences, but on practical jurisprudence.

Chapter Three, “A Book-Centered Approach to the Social History of Books,” builds on the constellation of medrese books to introduce the notion of implicit taxonomies. I consider other networks of books that empirically belonged together, even if they do not conform to the subject categories used in contemporary library catalogs or bibliographies. A bookseller’s inventory of inexpensive tales reveals a genre of epic- historical works that enjoyed exceptionally high demand. I show that this genre depended not only on the qualities of the texts themselves but also on the way that the text physically appeared and how it was meant to be used. Genre was constituted by these mutually reinforcing elements: the object itself, the text it contained, and the use to which it would be put.

The manuscript that best typifies the book world of seventeenth-century Istanbul is not an elaborately illuminated codex from the court, or a weighty work of Qurʾānic commentary, but a humble and tattered personal notebook. Chapter Four, “Peering

Over Readers’ Shoulders: Note-Taking as a Reflection of Reading,” focuses on personal miscellanies, books that served as key vehicles for text circulation. Personal notebooks contain an astonishing diversity of works: treatises, excerpts from longer books, fatwas, recipes, letter templates, and personal notes. For a historian of reading, these idiosyncratic collections offer an incomparable opportunity to peer over the

shoulders of Ottoman readers and discern what they found important enough to write down and keep.

After an overview of Ottoman note-taking, focusing on marginalia, I use two personal notebooks from early seventeenth-century Istanbul to show how a reader combined fragments from multiple texts to create something suited to his own purposes.

The resulting picture of a reader’s textual world is more nuanced than that which we see from probate inventories. However, personal notebooks present many methodological challenges. It is difficult to generalize from them, and they are full of quotations that are not easily identified. The fragmentary nature of notebooks replicates the fragmentation apparent in book market as a whole. Incomplete texts were a fact of life for Ottoman readers.

Desiderata

Although focusing on seventeenth-century Istanbul, and, particularly, on Muslim communities, was necessary to make the study feasible, the narrow focus results in several shortcomings that I would want to address in an expanded study.

First, the study does not discuss the significant circulation in Istanbul of books in languages other than Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Unfortunately, the approach taken in this dissertation perpetuates the lamentable fragmentation of Ottoman history along ethnic and religious lines. Histories that only focus on one subset of the population — as this study does — offer a distorted perspective. In fact, multilingual Istanbul had many book cultures which intersected and overlapped.51 One need only mention the writings of

51 See Chapter One for a brief discussion of the adoption of print technology in these linguistic communities.

the Armenian Eremya Çelebi Kömürcüyan (d. 1695), whose verse tale about the love between an Albanian Christian man and a Jewish woman, “The Jewish Bride,” was written in the Turkish language, using the Armenian alphabet.52 Even if linguistic differences might have created boundaries (however porous) between book communities, bookmakers faced similar material constraints no matter their language. And they looked to each other. Although Ottomanist scholars have been reluctant to find local Jewish and

Christian influences in manuscripts created by Muslims, the scholars of both Hebrew and

Armenian manuscripts have noted distinct Ottoman Istanbulite styles in the early modern era.53 Although the choice to focus on books in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian was a pragmatic necessity, it results in an incomplete picture of book circulation in Istanbul.

Similarly, restricting this study to a single Ottoman city artificially isolates

Istanbul’s readers, writers, and bookmakers from the inter-city networks of which they were a part. While it would be impossible to understand Ottoman book culture without studying book circulation in the imperial capital (and the lack of such studies motivated this one), it is equally impossible to understand Ottoman book culture by only studying

52 Eremya Çelebi also composed a distinct Armenian-language version of the story. “The Jewish Bride” is an abbreviated name given to the text by catalogers in the New York Public Library. The full title-cum- summary is, as given by the text’s editor, Andreas Tietze, “The Story of the [Albanian] baker Dimo who fell in love with the Jewish maiden Mrkada and preached Christ to her with holy inspiration, and the maiden consented to accompany the youth wherever he wished to go.” The tale was probably an interpretation of an earlier Greek-language story (39). Eremia Kʻēōmiwrchean, Eremya Chelebi Kömürjian’s Armeno-Turkish Poem “The Jewish Bride,” ed. Andreas Tietze and Avedis K. Sanjian (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981), 39–40.

53 For example, Christina Maranci describes a distinctive “Constantinopolan style”— in this case, pictorial — in seventeenth-century Armenian manuscripts. In a miniature depicting the Annunciation in a seventeenth-century Armenian gospel, “the architectural setting behind the figures in not typical of earlier Armenian scenes of the Annunciation and, scholars suggest, may be informed by Ottoman book arts or the urban landscape of Constantinople itself.” Christina Maranci, gallery notes to the Global Flows exhibit (Tufts University Art Gallery: September 6–November 18, 2012), notes on Lewis O 116 (Free Library of Philadelphia). Yael Zirlin argues that Jewish diaspora scribes participated in a “reciprocal” exchange of influences; by the mid-sixteenth century, a distinctively Ottoman style of Hebrew paleography had emerged. Yael Zirlin, “Scribes et copistes juifs émigrés dans l’empire Ottoman,” Turcica 33 (2001), 287.

Istanbul.54 The capital was only one of many centers of book production, which included not only other major cities but also rural areas. For example, Florian Schwarz’s fine study of the circulation of Ḥaydarānī’s (d. 1669–70 / H. 1080) gloss on another commentary demonstrates that the borderland area where he and his descendants lived remained an epicenter for study and reproduction of his text, copies of which traveled along an axis from Baghdad to Istanbul.55 Travel was a requirement for any serious Ottoman bibliophile; witness the great bibliographer Kātib Çelebi’s decision to begin his bibliography when he encountered the rich inventory of volumes held by booksellers in

Aleppo. Although focusing on Istanbul was necessary for the depth I hoped to achieve in this study, especially through the use of many different kinds of sources, it comes at the risk of tunnel vision. I have tried to minimize distortion by making reference to studies of book production and consumption elsewhere in the empire, but a truly integrated account of Ottoman book culture is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

* * *

If it was incumbent upon an Ottoman author to begin his book with an invocation to God and the Prophet, the historian of Ottoman books must invoke Kātib Çelebi, as I have already done several times in this introduction. Kātib Çelebi was not his real name.

Born Muṣṭafā bin ʿAbdullāh, he was known to scholars as “Ḥacı Ḥalīfe” (roughly, a

54 One could also argue that Istanbul has received more than its share of scholarly attention, with other Ottoman cities and rural areas being ignored.

55 Florian Schwarz, “Writing in the Margins of Empires: The Ḥusaynābādī Family of Scholiasts in the Ottoman-Ṣafawid Borderlands,” in Buchkultur im Nahen Osten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Tobias Heinzelmann and Henning Sievert (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 151–98. Schwarz demonstrates the significant yet subtle conclusions yielded by painstaking study of many manuscripts of the same text.

deputy who has been on a pilgrimage) and to other bureaucrats as “Kātib Çelebi” (a gentleman scribe). He seems to have relished his place as an honorary but distinctive member of both groups. One of history’s great bibliophiles, Kātib Çelebi knew books better than anyone else of his time. He consulted with book dealers in every city he visited to identify previously unheard-of books. When he received an inheritance, he eagerly spent it to build his own collection. And he wrote prolifically. Among his eighteen extant works on many subjects is Kashf al-ẓunūn (Lifting doubts) a massive bibliography comprising more than 14,000 items, organized alphabetically and interspersed with essays on various branches of knowledge. To this day, Kātib Çelebi’s bibliography remains a standard reference for catalogers and historians.

However, there is much that Kātib Çelebi must have known about the book culture of his time that he did not record so systematically. In this city of about half a million inhabitants, what sort of person knew how to read? What books were available, and how did someone get their hands on them? Who read which types of books? And what were the limits of books, the places where the written shaded into the oral?

This dissertation reconstructs some of what would have been obvious, if tacit, knowledge for Kātib Çelebi and his peers, in order that we might better understand the books that they left behind.

Chapter One

Manuscript Production and Circulation

The eighteenth-century historian Şehrīzāde relates a story about the bibliophile

Kātib Çelebi’s books. One day, according to Şehrīzāde, Şeyḫülislām (Chief Mufti)

Yaḥyā Efendi asked Kātib Çelebi if it was true that he owned more than one thousand history books. Kātib Çelebi affirmed that he did, but he sensed that those present did not believe him. So, the next day, he loaded ten mules with 1,300 bound history books, each one different, and brought them to the home of the Chief Mufti. “I have even more that are unbound at home,” he told the amazed onlookers.56

About a decade later, another mule was laden with books to prove a point. Tatar

Imam (d. 1662 / H. 1073), a preacher at the Mehmed Ağa Mosque in Istanbul, was threatened with execution for a book he had written refuting a popular manual of piety,

Al-ṭārīḳe al-muḥammediyye (The Muhammedan path) by Birgivī (d. 1573 / H. 981). The historian Naʿīmā describes Tatar Imam’s response: “He went home, loaded a mule with books of hadith (prophetic traditions) and manuscripts related to that discipline, and went

56 “Gayr-ı mücelled bundan ziyāde hatā mevcūddir deyü cevāb virdikde, ḥāżir b’il-meclis olanlar engüşt ber-dehān ḥayrān oldılar.” Şehrīzāde Meḥmed, Tārīḫ-i Nevpeydā (İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi, TY 3291), fol. 20b. I first encountered this anecdote in Bekir Kütükoğlu, Vekayiʾnüvis: Makaleler (Istanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1994), 28n4. Even if the number seems exaggerated, it is worth noting that Kātib Çelebi elsewhere claimed he had examined 1300 history books to create his massive bibliography:

ﻭو ﺍاﻣﺎ ﺍاﻟﻜﺘﺐ ﺍاﻟﻤﺼﻨﻔﺔ ﻓﻲ ﺍاﻟﺘﺎﺭرﻳﯾﺦ ﻓﻘﺪ ﺍاﺳﺘﻘﺼﻴﯿﻨﺎﻫﮬﮪھﺎ ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺍاﻟﻒ ﻭو ﺛﻠﺜﻤﺎﺋﺔ...

Kâtip Çelebi, Kitāb kashf al-ẓunūn ʻan asāmī al-kutub wa-al-funūn, ed. Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Kilisli Rifat Bilge, ([Istanbul]: Maarif Matbaası, 1941), 271.

to the mosque of Mehmed II” to challenge his opponents to a debate.57 (They never showed up.)

Whether or not these incidents took place exactly as recounted, the anecdotes draw attention to the materiality of Ottoman books as things. In these stories, books are not just incidental vehicles for texts; they are objects that can be hauled and displayed en masse. The physical bulk of Tatar Imam’s mobile library symbolizes the weight and substance of his learning. Similarly, the specific contents of Kātib Çelebi’s history books are less important to the story than the fact that they are massive and plentiful enough to require ten mules to lug them.

This chapter focuses on the material and economic dimensions of Ottoman books.

It treats books as things that were created, handled, sold, and stored. One of the purposes of this chapter is to offer a succinct overview of manuscript production and circulation in the Ottoman capital. I emphasize three distinctive aspects of the Ottoman book market.58

First, Ottoman books exhibited a wide range of values, with many gradations between the finest books and the cheapest ones. Second, book production was extremely decentralized; there were many hundreds, even thousands, of people in Istanbul who could (and did) create books. The barriers to bookmaking were access to education,

57 “Menziline varıp bir katıra kütüb-i ehâdîs ve ol fenne müteʿallik nüshalar yükledip Câmiʿ-i Sultan Mehmed’e gelip.” Naîmâ Mustafa Efendi, Târih-i Naʿîmâ (Ravzatü’l-hüseyn fî hulâsati ahbâri’l-hâfikayn), ed. Mehmet İpşirli (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2007), 3:1436. I first learned of this incident in Çavuşoğlu, “Kadizadeli Movement,” 139. By truly random chance, Tatar Imam’s probate inventory surfaced in the sample of approximately 900 inventories which I read for this study. Dovetailing with the anecdote reported by the historian Naʿīmā, the inventory reveals that Tatar Imam’s library, comprising well over fifty titles, was unusually concentrated on the subject of hadith. The inventory can be found in KA defter 5, f. 124b (v. 129).

58 I use “Ottoman” as an imperfect and inaccurate shorthand for Arabic, Turkish, and Persian books, or the books of the Muslim community in Istanbul. Ideally, Istanbul’s book history should include all of the religio-language communities who resided there in substantial numbers. However, as discussed in the Introduction, the history of Hebrew/Ladino, Greek, and Armenian books remains outside the scope of this study.

paper, and book exemplars — not access to capital. I demonstrate that the major driver of a typical new manuscript’s cost was the labor of copying, and not the expense of materials. As a result, readers often copied books for themselves. Third, the survival of texts was an enduring concern to authors and users of books, who worried that works could be corrupted or lost altogether unless sufficient high-quality copies were made. In this struggle against loss, libraries were key bulwarks, places that not only stored books but made them available for copying. The chapter closes with a case study of the Köprülü

Library and its manuscripts, a time capsule of a collection that sheds light on what made a book valuable and how books circulated.

Before proceeding to analyze the production of books, it is worth asking whether

“book” is an appropriate category of analysis. The word for “book” used in Turkish,

Arabic, and Persian today (kitāb) was widely used in seventeenth-century Istanbul, including in the anecdotes above. However, we should be wary of unconsciously projecting our own sense of what a book is, informed as we are by our experience with mass-produced objects acquired or accessed through twenty-first-century institutions.

What did early modern Istanbulites mean when they called something a “book”?

Probate inventories from the period can help us to understand what belonged in the “book” category. When the deceased person owned a Qurʾān, the probate scribes almost always listed it first among all items, out of respect, and then immediately after the Qurʾān they listed the other books the individual owned.59 Sometimes the values of

59 As noted in the Introduction, there are many examples of inventories containing books that do not come first. Usually, these people did not have a Qurʾān listed among their possessions. Even then, however, books are usually grouped together.

books are even summed separately from other goods into their own subtotal.60 The contents of these distinct sub-inventories make it clear that “book” was a category referring to written texts, usually codices constructed from quires (Tr. cüzʾ/eczāʾ, Ar. juzʾ/ejzāʾ) of paper.61 Books encompassed Qurʾāns, bound volumes, miscellanies

(mecmūʿa), and single unbound quires. They crossed many genres. The book category also included evrāḳ-i perişān (“miscellaneous papers”; literally, “scattered sheets”), which were sometimes counted in “volumes.”62 Indeed, “volume” (cild) seems to have referred either to a bound volume or to a unit of measurement, so that a person’s possessions might include “two volumes of Qurʾānic commentary” (meaning two bound volumes) or “five volumes of scattered papers” (most likely meaning five unbound quires).63 A variant of the same root, mücelled, as used by the seventeenth-century author Evliyā Çelebi, seems to refer exclusively to bound books and to imply the book had attained a certain quality, of the kind befitting the expense of binding.64

60 For an example of an inventory with books summed into a separate subtotal, see Tatar Imam’s inventory, cited above.

61 Konrad Hirschler gives several definitions of cüzʾ (A. juzʾ; “part” or “portion”) from the Levant in an earlier period: “a collection of 20 folia gathered into a quire, one of several quires bound together, or a volume consisting of several quires.” It seems to have carried a similar multiplicity of meanings in seventeenth-century Istanbul, with a broadened notion of how many folia could be in a quire. It should be noted that cüzʾ also sometimes referred specifically to a portion of the Qurʾān, e.g., eczā-yı şerīf (“sacred/noble portions”). Hirschler, Written Word, 128.

62 For an example of an inventory in which the court clearly treated miscellaneous papers as part of the book collection, see the inventory of Es-seyyid Aḥmed Efendi bin Es-seyyid Ṭāhir Çelebi (KA d. 4, f. 47b (v49). There are many similar examples in the sample studied here. See Chapter Four for further discussion of “scattered sheets.”

63 For two examples (of many) of evrāḳ-i perişān counted in terms of cild, see Mülga Beledī, d. 4, f. 80a (v81) and Galata d. 100, f. 28a (v39).

64 I thank Cemal Kafadar for this observation (comment at the Mahindra Humanities Seminar on the History of the Book, November 20, 2013). For examples of Evliyā’s use of “mücelled,” see Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi: Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304 Yazmasının transkripsiyonu, dizini, ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay et al. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları Ltd. Şti, 1996), 87, 173.

Seventeenth-century Ottoman documents such as probate inventories and book endowment deeds do not refer explicitly to printed books. Printing technology was well- known in seventeenth-century Istanbul, but not used for Arabic- and Turkish-language books. The first press in the city had been established at the end of the fifteenth century by Sephardic Jewish refugees from Iberia.65 By the seventeenth century, small presses printed books in Hebrew, Greek, and Armenian, but there is some indication that they struggled financially and relied on patronage to survive.66 The seventeenth-century

Armenian Istanbulite Eremya Çelebi, for example, founded a press that lasted for just a few years.67 The first Greek press failed despite support from the patriarch.68 Even in these language communities, manuscript persisted as the predominant technology of written communication in Istanbul.

65 For English-language accounts of Jewish printing in Istanbul, see Minna Rozen, A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453–1566 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 250–263; and Yaron Ben Na’eh, “Hebrew Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire,” in Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, ed. Gad Nassi (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2001), 73–96. The date of the first Hebrew press is uncertain: it is sometimes given as 1493, sometimes as 1504.

66 Exceptionally, Hebrew printing seems to have become commercially viable by the late sixteenth century. Rozen, History of the Jewish Community, 262. One reason for the financial sustainability of Hebrew presses might be the development of innovative sales models. For example, in Salonika, readers could acquire books on an installment plan, purchasing one quire each week. Emile G. L. Schrijver, “The Transmission of Jewish Knowledge through MSS and Printed Books,” in The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael Felix Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 104. The first Armenian press in Istanbul was established in 1567; for a comprehensive overview of Armenian printing, see Vrej Nersessian, Catalogue of Early Armenian Books, 1512–1850 (London: British Library, 1980), 9– 40. Armenian and Greek presses struggled to stay afloat.

67 See the introduction to Kʻēōmiwrchean, Kömürjian’s “The Jewish Bride,” 18.

68 On Greek-language presses, the first of which failed despite Patriarchal support, see Alexis Politis, “The History of the Book in Modern Greece, c. 1453–2000,” in The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael Felix Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 441; K. Staikos and T. E. Sklavenitēs, The Publishing Centres of the Greeks: From the Renaissance to the Neohellenic Enlightenment: Catalogue of Exhibition (Athens: National Book Centre of Greece, Ministry of Culture, 2001), 91–95; and Molly Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: The Ottoman Empire, Edinburgh History of the Greeks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 141.

Arabic-script books printed in Europe made their way into Istanbul, along with

Latin works of geography and history. Kātib Çelebi himself worked with a European convert to Islam to translate several printed Latin works, including Jodocus Hondius’s version of Atlas Minor by Gerardus Mercator.69 Although one motivation for Arabic- language printing in Europe was export to the Ottoman Empire, printed works found only limited demand there.70 The founder of the first Ottoman Turkish- and Arabic-language press in Istanbul, İbrāhīm Müteferriḳa, noted that Arabic-script books printed in the West

“are full of misspellings and mistakes, and the letters and lines are not easily read. There is no one, finding in his hands a book in Western letters and style, who will see in it any semblance of beauty and decoration or correctness in spelling and orthography.”71

İbrāhīm Müteferriḳa’s own press, established in the 1720s, did not survive long after his death. Ottoman printing is a nineteenth-century phenomenon.72 In other words, when we

69 For more on the Latin works translated by Kātib Çelebi, see Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit: Entstehung und Gedankenwelt von Kātib Čelebis Ğihānnümā (Berlin: Schwarz, 2003), 185. Gottfried Hagen gives a brief account in English in “Kātib Çelebī,” Historians of the Ottoman Empire, 2007, https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu.

70 Even those European printers who had seen the Ottoman Empire as a possible market for Arabic-type books quickly refocused on European scholarly audiences. For discussion of European printing in Arabic type, see: Robert Jones, “The Medici Oriental Press (Rome 1584–1614) and the Impact of Its Arabic Publications on Northern Europe,” in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth- Century England, ed. G. A. Russell (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 88–108; Geoffrey Roper, “The Export of Arabic Books from Europe to the Middle East in the 18th Century,” in BRISMES Proceedings of the 1989 Annual Conference on Europe and the Middle East (Oxford: British Society for Middle East Studies, 1989), 226– 33; V. L. Ménage, “‘The Map of Hajji Ahmed’ and Its Makers,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 21 (1958): 291–314. For further context on the European engagement with Islam and Arabic, see Alexander Bevilacqua, “Islamic Letters in the European Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014), and Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

71 Atiyeh, ed., Book in the Islamic World, 291.

72 See the Introduction for a discussion of the historiography around the adoption of print by the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking community. For a recent treatment of the historiography of Middle Eastern print as well as the development of presses in nineteenth-century Cairo, see Kathryn Schwartz’s dissertation, “Meaningful Mediums.”

speak of books in seventeenth-century Istanbul, and, specifically, books in Turkish,

Persian, and Arabic, we are speaking of manuscript books. The predominance of manuscript technology helps to explain the wide range in book values, the decentralized nature of production, and a distinct anxiety about the survival of texts.

What a Book Was Worth

In seventeenth-century Istanbul, each book could theoretically be designed and created according to the needs of a unique user. As a consequence, books exhibited a wide range of values, especially when the market for used books is taken into account.

At the top end were the luxury illustrated manuscripts that constitute the best-studied category of Ottoman book. Originally associated with the palace workshop, which drew calligraphers and miniature painters from Tabriz and beyond, these books stand among the greatest achievements of Ottoman art. Qurʾāns, too, could receive elaborate illuminations, featuring expensive paints, calligraphy of the highest quality, and gilding.

One of the most expensive books of the sample studied here, an illustrated copy of the Book of Kings (musavver şehnāme) valued at 13,500 aḳçe, clearly belonged to the luxury book category.73 To put this value in perspective, a typical book was worth 150 aḳçe, almost 100 times less than the illustrated book.74 A skilled laborer could make 30 aḳçe per day in mid-seventeenth-century Istanbul; an unskilled laborer earned about 20 aḳçe per day. One aḳçe could buy almost a half-kilogram of bread at wholesale prices.75

73 KA, d. 6, f. 71b (v75). Book of Kings, written by the tenth/eleventh-century poet Firdawsī, tells the epic story of Persia’s kings. Since its composition in the late tenth century, it remained a perennial classic.

74 The median book value for the sample studied here was 150 aḳçe.

75 Labor wages are based on contemporary expenditures by charitable foundations, as recorded in their account books. A kīle of rice (equivalent to about 37 liters) was worth approximately 60–90 aḳçe; the same

The illustrated Book of Kings mentioned above was owned by a certain Zırhī

Mustafa Ağa, who died in 1667 (H. 1078). Zırhī Mustafa’s title, ağa, indicates that he held a significant position in the military or palace administration. He was also extremely wealthy, with a total estate size of 1.4 million aḳçe, putting him in the top 2% of all individuals represented in the probate records. Although I have not yet been able to learn anything else about him, he seems to have been a connoisseur of luxury books, since he was the owner of the only two books that were explicitly identified as

“illustrated” in the inventories I examined.76 Alternatively, he might have invested in these books as a convenient way to lock up wealth. I have not been able to identify any of Zırhī Mustafa Ağa’s books in extant collections (relying on catalogs and spot- checking), though luxury books such as his Book of Kings would have high odds of survival relative to other books.

In contrast, the least expensive books mentioned in the inventories were valued at less than 20 aḳçe and were usually not identified by title, being listed instead as “a series of books” (alāy-i kütüb).77 These cheap books were most likely made of inexpensive materials and were well worn by the time of the inventory. Indeed, one scribe specified

amount of flour was approximately 70–100 aḳçe. An oḳḳa (equivalent to about 1.3 kilos) of bread cost 3.1 aḳçe in 1657. Şevket Pamuk, İstanbul ve diğer kentlerde 500 yıllık fiyatlar ve ücretler (Ankara: T. C. Başbakanlık Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 2000), 70, 118, 122. Separately, İsmail Erünsal estimates that librarians at the newly established Köprülü Library earned 10–20 aḳçe per day for the three days they worked per week. While it seems odd that librarians would earn the equivalent of an unskilled worker, these salaries might have been supplemental to other income (e.g., income earned as a teacher), since the work was apparently part-time.

76 The other book was an illustrated volume of tales about the prophet worth 5600 aḳçe (cild-i s̱ālis̱ -i siyeri'n-nebī muṣavver 5600).

77 For one example (of many) of the use of alāy-i kütüb, see KA, d. 5, f. 7b (v10).

that the thirteen books he valued at 70 aḳçe in total (or 5–6 aḳçe per book), were

“shabby” (köhne kitāb ʿaded 13).78

The wide range of values for books holds even for a single title. Gülistān (The

Rose Garden), a popular collection of Persian stories penned by Saʿdī (d. 1292 / H. 691), ranged in price from 40 to 1700 aḳçe.79 Similarly, the least expensive copy of Dürer ü

Gürer (Pearls and [Shinings]), a book on jurisprudence by Molla Ḫüsrev (d. 1480 / H.

885), was valued at 500 aḳçe (not an insignificant amount since the median title in the sample was worth approximately 150 aḳçe), while the most expensive copy was ten times higher, at 5,000 aḳçe. A brief look at extant manuscripts suggests the full range of material qualities and likely value of Ottoman books. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 show two copies of Dürer ü Gürer made within a single generation. Figure 1.1 (Süleymaniye

Library Yazma Bağışlar 1012) is a workaday manuscript with plain red rule-borders, basic rubrication, and legible — if undistinguished — handwriting.

78 KA, d. 4, f. 66a (v67). The adjective “shabby” or “old” (köhne) was not usually used with books in the inventories; it appears frequently to qualify clothing and household materials. I know of one other instance of “shabby” as applied to books, which is given by Said Öztürk, İstanbul tereke defterleri, 179. My translation of köhne as “shabby” is inspired by Daniel Lord Smail’s translation of late medieval household inventories in Lucca. Smail has observed that in a pre-industrial context, goods were used and re-used until they fell apart. As a result, “shabby” (debilis) is one of the words most frequently encountered in the Luccan inventories. Similarly, the adjective köhne is probably the single most frequently used word in the Ottoman probate inventories I examined. Daniel Lord Smail, “Material Culture in Marseille and Lucca,” draft chapter circulated to his class “Culture and Belief 50: Making the Middle Ages,” Fall 2012; Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 37–45.

79 Antoine Galland, a Frenchman who collected manuscripts during extended visits to the Middle East, reported that he bought a “small Gulistan” in Istanbul for 60 aḳçe, a figure that corroborates the values found in the probate inventories. Antoine Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland: Pendant Son Séjour à Constantinople, 1672–1673 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1881), 185.

Figure 1.1: Dürer ü Gürer. Opening folios of Yazma Bağışlar 1012 (Süleymaniye Library), copied 1627 / H. 1036.

Figure 1.2: Dürer ü Gürer. Opening folios of Hafid Efendi Ek 2 (Süleymaniye Library), copied 1640 / H. 1050.

Figure 1.2 (Süleymaniye Library Hafid Efendi Ek 2) presents a very different instantiation of the same title, with careful page design to separate the commentary from the main text, gilded rule-borders, and, unusually, illuminated headpieces (decorations at the beginning of the text) for both the commentary and the main text. Even the elongated shape of the book suggests a certain refinement. The second manuscript was clearly commissioned of a skilled copyist and illuminator. It suggests a level of investment that would have certainly been reflected in the value attached to it by a probate court,

especially in the context of a quick examination in which other considerations (reliability of the text, provenance) might have played a minor role.

Every genre exhibited a wide range of values, with the upper end often worth several hundred times what the cheapest books in that genre were worth (see Table 1.1).

This implies that no genre was out of reach for someone of sufficient means to purchase or copy a book. Nonetheless, some genres were more likely to be expensive than others.

The Qurʾān, rhetoric (beyān), prophetic traditions (Tr. hadīs̱, Ar. hadīth), and principles of jurisprudence (Tr. uṣūlü’l-fıḳh, Ar. uṣūl al-fiqh) were on the more expensive end of the spectrum, with median values of 400 aḳçe or more. The least expensive genres overall were literature, medicine, poetry, and grammar (ṣarf), which exhibit a median value of less than 200 aḳçe.80

80 See Appendix One for an explanation of how genres were assigned to books in this sample. İsmail Erünsal has demonstrated that books associated with religious subjects continue to command higher values into subsequent centuries, though he also notes that diverging physical qualities made possible a wide variety of values. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar, 171–198.

Table 1.1: Value of books from probate inventories (in aḳçe)81

Subject Minimum Maximum Average (Turkish/Arabic translation) value value value Qurʾān82 50 8750 1169 Qurʾanic commentary 20 13,70083 1226 (tafsīr / tefsīr) Stories, epics 50 13,50084 1101 (ḥikāya / ḥikāye) Lexicography 27 10,00085 868 (luğa / lugha) History (tārīḫ) 10 15,00086 825 Principles of jurisprudence 20 5000 740 (uṣūlü’l-fıḳh / uṣūl al-fiqh) Traditions of the Prophet 10 7000 731 (hadīs̱ / hadīth) Positive law 20 6550 680 (furūʿl-fıḳıh / furūʿ al-fiqh) Rhetoric 35 3000 591 (beyān) Theology 20 7000 567 (kelām) Literature 30 3400 557 (edebiyāt / adabiyyāt) Mysticism 30 2400 526 (taṣavvuf / taṣawwuf) Syntax 20 4000 450 (naḥv / naḥw) Medicine 20 2000 405 (ṭıbb / ṭibb) Poetry/Divān 15 1400 281 Grammar 30 1000 176 (ṣarf)

81 This table only includes genres for which I could identify at least a dozen books in the inventories.

82 Out of respect for the Qurʾān, some inventories did not indicate a value for it.

83 The next-most-valuable commentary was valued at 12,000 aḳçe.

84 This is an outlier. The next-most-valuable epic was valued at 2200 aḳçe. Note that these data do not include the storybooks found in the inventory of the bookseller discussed in Chapter Three.

85 The next-most-valuable lexicographical work was worth 7,350 aḳçe.

86 This is a single entry with two works: “Mirḫānd ve Ḫvace tārīḥi.” (Galata d. 100, f. 28b (v40).) This deluxe set should be considered an outlier. Leaving it aside, the most valuable book in this genre was worth 3,000 aḳçe.

What factors lie behind the demonstrated wide range of book values? Without a doubt, the physical properties of the manuscript must have been decisive in the probate assessment of any given work. Beyond wear-and-tear, material qualities such as number of pages, quality of paper, rubrication, illumination or illustrations, presence of a binding

(and its quality), and the elegance of the script would all have been readily visible and easily evaluated by the court official. It was extremely rare, however, for a scribe to describe the condition of the book or any qualities about it other than a title or author, and, sometimes, the number of volumes. One exceptional scribe noted the physical qualities of the books he inventoried, remarking that two books were “in a good hand”

(bā ḫaṭṭ-i ḫūb) and others were “deficient” (nāḳiṣ).87

We do not know to what extent non-material properties of a book were taken into account in the probate assessment.88 Certainly, some titles were in greater demand than others. The reliability of a manuscript or illustriousness of its provenance could be highly valued in the market at large. We will return to what made a book valuable toward the end of this chapter, as part of a case study on the Köprülü Library.

Book Production

The way that books were created, distributed, and accessed in seventeenth-century

Istanbul differs substantially from book markets in early modern Europe. In an article that

87 KA d. 6, f. 157a (v160).

88 Please see the Introduction for a discussion of whether prices from probate inventories reflect actual market prices. Although it is an open question, I believe that the prices cannot have been significantly far off true market value, especially if a large enough sample is considered. Booksellers were sometimes involved in the probate assessment; for example, one inventory includes a fee paid to a bookseller as part of the probate process (Galata d. 100 f. 28a (v39)). If goods were auctioned before the record was created, the values would also have reflected a market price, incorporating both material and non-material sources of value.

served as a founding document for European book history, Robert Darnton presented a diagram summarizing the broad range of actors involved in the publication, distribution, and reception of early modern printed books (Figure 1.3). One of the insights of

European book history was that conditions and choices early in the supply chain could affect the final product in ways that made a difference in which ideas circulated, and to whom. Books should not be understood as a frictionless means of communication between author and reader.

Figure 1.3: Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit.” Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” Daedalus 111, no.3 (July 1982): 65–83.

Ottoman book production and circulation bears very little resemblance to the

European book markets distilled in Darnton’s diagram. Even in Europe, of course, the on- the-ground realities of publication, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival would have included irregularities that such a diagram cannot capture. In general, however, the economics of movable-type printing, with its high fixed costs, necessitate role specialization that was not necessary for Ottoman manuscripts. In a print-based

system, manufacture takes place at a dedicated place and with people trained in specialized skills. The technology, which requires a minimum-level print run in order to make the “first-copy” (upfront, fixed) costs worthwhile, militates toward a marketing and distribution system involving multiple players.89

The highest-value Ottoman manuscripts also required specialized skills. A manuscript like that owned by Zırhī Mustafa Ağa would have probably been created by an expert calligrapher working with an illuminator and illustrator.90 It would have then been bound by a master binder.91 For some, fine manuscripts might have served as investments or at least a stable way to lock up wealth. They were probably re-sold through a high-end bookseller.

89 This is not to say that manuscript cultures cannot have the same level of specialization. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European cities, for example, did see division of labor in some manuscript production, which could be easily represented on Darnton’s diagrams with a few superficial changes. Furthermore, manuscript production persisted well into the age of print in Europe. My point here is that metal movable type technology makes this division of labor necessary, rather than one of many options. The case of premodern China, in which woodblock printing (xylography) predominated, offers a useful contrast. The particular technology of textual reproduction implied a completely different set of economic constraints and market structure. See, for example, Cynthia J. Brokaw, “On the History of the Book in China,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia Joanne Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 8–10.

90 We do not know much about production of luxury manuscripts outside the palace, but it is probably the case that they were created on commission. Patrons provided the artists with the necessary supplies. Zırhī Mustafa Ağa, for example, owned 20 sheets of very high-quality paper at his death. These are specified as ābādī paper, with 20 sheets worth 400 aḳçe.

91 Fine calligraphers, in particular, were sought after, and their reputation could enhance the value of a manuscript considerably. Even one of the probate inventories, which were usually laconic in their descriptions of books, noted that a copy of the Qurʾān was copied by “Dervīş ʿAlī”: KA d. 5, f. 95b (v100). Similarly, the account of an early eighteenth-century festival specifies the calligraphers who executed the fine books that were exchanged (Sûrnâme: Sultan Ahmet’in Dügün kitabı, ed. Mertol Tulum (Istanbul: Kabalcı, 2008), 82–90. Gülzār-i savāb (Garden of Merit), an early seventeenth-century book on the book arts by Nefeszāde İbrahim (d. 1650 / H. 1060), pays tribute to the craftsmanship required for luxury books. It begins with biographies of 47 calligraphers, including some of his contemporaries, and then presents two essays on technical details for dyeing and sizing paper, making ink, and using the tools of a calligrapher. It was published by Kilisli Muallim Rifat, Gülzārı Savab (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi, 1938). There are well over a dozen copies of this work in Istanbul libraries. See TDVİA 32: 523 for more information.

Workaday books, however — certainly the bulk of manuscript production — could be created by a single person working alone. A reader could acquire a book through a bookseller, but he could also see it in a friend’s home or at an endowment library and have it copied — or copy it for himself. Rather than printed on speculation,

Ottoman books were copied on demand.92 Because most Ottoman book production was decentralized and informal, a diagram of book production and circulation in Istanbul depicts a spaghetti-like set of relationships, made all the more complicated by the fact that one person could play several of the roles (Figure 1.4):93

92 Chapter Three presents evidence for speculative copying of popular storybooks by entrepreneur- booksellers. One would assume that common textbooks enjoying perennial demand would also be subject to copying on speculation. However, it must be said that there is little evidence for pre-market copying of this kind.

93 I leave aside here the issue of initial publication, which merits a significant study of its own. Many authors continued to modify their texts over time; as a result, it is impossible to identify a single moment of publication (though publication – making a text public and releasing it into the world – certainly existed). Daniel Hobbins’ description of publication in early fifteenth-century France is applicable here: “We tend to think of publishing as a single moment and to associate it with financial risk because of the investment that it requires. But publishing before print meant something very different: less drama, more complexity and variety, and a much longer time scale.” Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity, 153. Yet Ottoman publication, whether at salons (majālis) or through presentation of a book to a patron, could be dramatic! See, for example, Helen Pfeifer’s description of a literary salon celebrating al-Ghazzi’s completion of teaching a commentary he wrote to his students: Helen Pfeifer, “Encounter After the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 2 (May 2015): 226–228.

Author Copyist

Readers (also patrons)

Bookseller

Figure 1.4: Roles in Ottoman manuscript circulation

Instead of the unidirectional supply chain necessitated by print technology,

Ottoman manuscript making was fragmented, informal, and on demand. As others have remarked, there was no Ottoman scribal guild.94 In fact, there is no evidence of mass production. Even the role of booksellers in production could be marginal, since readers could create their own books from other readers’ copies. Anyone who had a certain level of literacy and decent handwriting, access to exemplar books, and the ability to procure paper could create a book.95

94 In a thought piece, Christoph Neumann made the point quite forcefully that scribal production was more decentralized than many had assumed. His point of view has informed my thinking in this chapter, though I place more emphasis on readers serving as their own copyists. Christoph K. Neumann, “Üç tarz-ı mütalaa: Yeniçağ Osmanlı dünyası’nda kitap yazmak ve okumak,” Tarih ve Toplum: Yeni Yaklaşımlar 1 (2005): 59– 61

95 This study will not focus on the role of authors and the publication of new books. Ottoman authorship and the role of patrons both merit substantial studies of their own.

Literacy

Of the three requirements for book production (ability to write, access to exemplars, and access to paper), literacy constituted the highest barrier to entry. We do not know what percentage of Istanbul’s population was literate.96 The sources that have been used to estimate literacy rates in early modern Europe — signatures on oaths or wills, for example — are simply not available for Ottoman society.97 In any case, studies of both contemporary and historical literacy now tend to approach literacy as a range of skills that serve different purposes in different contexts.98

96 William Harris’s Ancient Literacy, which attempts to determine literacy levels in ancient Greece and Rome despite a paucity of numerical evidence, provides a useful model for assessing the Ottoman case. Harris reviews the worldwide literature on literacy and argues that certain conditions — universal schooling, the presence of an ideology associated with literacy — must be met in order for a society to reach given levels of literacy. Although early modern Ottoman literacy merits an extensive study of its own, it seems clear that these preconditions were not met; it is unlikely that the majority of the population, even in Istanbul, could read easily. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Some cite the known (low) literacy rates of the nineteenth century as evidence of low rates in earlier centuries, but these arguments are undermined by their blithe assumption that literacy rates cannot go down, only up. Another desideratum for Ottoman intellectual and cultural history (in addition to an analysis of which kinds of people were more likely to be literate, and why) is a study of the meaning of literacy for contemporaries. In this vein, Derin Terzioğlu has teased out some of the implications of ümmī (“illiterate”), which, she shows, could be a positive attribute not necessarily linked to an inability to read. Derin Terzioğlu, “Sufi and Dissident,” 77–79. (Konrad Hirschler has asserted that, in earlier centuries, ummī indicated in Arabic someone who could read but not write. Hirschler, Written Word, 16.) When endowers of books said they should be made available to “all who were able to read” or when a group of people is specified as being “those who can read and write” (“okur-yazar kısmından vāfīr”), what did they mean? What did literacy in all its broad manifestations signify to contemporaries? (For the latter quotation, see Naîmâ Mustafa Efendi, Târih-i Naʿîmâ (Ravzatü’l-hüseyn fî hulâsati ahbâri’l-hâfikayn), 3:1436.)

97 A survey of classic means of quantifying early modern European literacy is given in R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: 1500–1800 (London: Longman, 1988). Carl Kaestle also offers a useful, if dated, overview of histories of literacy. Carl F. Kaestle, “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers,” Review of Research in Education 12 (1985): 11–53. Although many scholars have used signatures to calculate historical literacy rates, this methodology suffers from a serious shortcoming: in many societies, individuals might learn to read without learning to write. See, for example, E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” in Reading in America, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 53–80. In the Ottoman case, signatures were, in any case, important for high officials and judges, but were apparently not important for everyday transactions or even contracts between individuals.

98 For a summary of the literature, see Patricia Crain, “New Histories of Literacy,” in Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 467–479. Michael Clanchy has documented the rise of “practical literacy” in medieval England and described a spectrum of ways that individuals might relate to or make use of the written record, even if they could not

At a minimum, we must distinguish between the ability to read and the ability to write. Comparative studies of literacy make it clear that, in most societies, more people learn how to read than to write; the latter skill is necessary to produce and not just to consume texts.99 Some clues suggest that reading rates were rising in the seventeenth century, perhaps as a result of the spread of religious primary schools.100 It is unclear whether writing was also becoming more widespread.101 In fact, with the exception of fine calligraphic styles, we do not know much about how handwriting was taught.102

Those who knew one of the recognized hands well enough (usually, nesiḫ, taʿlīḳ, or one of their variants) could supplement their income or even make a living out of

themselves read or write. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). In a programmatic article specifically dealing with the Islamic world, Nelly Hanna has encouraged a broad interpretation of literacy, including those who heard books read aloud, or those who could read but not write. Nelly Hanna, “Literacy and the ‘Great Divide’ in the Islamic World, 1300–1800,” Journal of Global History 2, no. 2 (2007): 175–93.

99 For an indication that this was true for some parts of Ottoman society, see Boris Liebrenz, “The Library of Aḥmad al-Rabbāṭ. Books and their Audience in 12th to 13th/18th to 19th Century Syria,” Orientwissenschaftliche Hefte 32 (2013): 41. Liebrenz discusses readership marks left by a seventeenth- century reader and a nineteenth-century reader, both of whom must have been much more comfortable readers than they were writers.

100 See the Introduction for a discussion of vernacular readership. Terzioğlu, “Where ʻİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism,” 84–85, and Terzioğlu, “Debate on Vernacular Literacy.”

101 When I started this research, I hoped to discern differences in literacy among various groups by tracking the incidence of writing-related implements in probate inventories. I kept track of writing implements as they appeared in the probate inventories studied in this sample. However, I found that reed pens and ink were hardly ever mentioned, even when it was clear that the person was highly literate. Perhaps these were considered nearly disposable and therefore of no value. Pencases (devāt) do appear, but they seem to have served as valuable accessories rather than necessary tools for writing. Writing tables (peştaḫta) were so ubiquitous that I decided they could not serve as a proxy for any dimension of literacy. Nonetheless, it makes sense that they would have an association with writing. For example, the notes of Asiye Ḫātūn (fl. mid-17th century) were found in her writing table. Cemal Kafadar, “Mütereddit bir mutasavvıf: Üsküp’lü Asiye Hatun’un rüya defteri, 1641-43,” Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Yıllık 5 (1992): 194.

102 For evidence that handwriting was taught in primary schools (mektebs) in the sixteenth century, see Mefail Hızlı, Mahkeme sicillerine göre osmanlı klasik döneminde ilköğretim ve Bursa sıbyan mektepleri (Bursa: Uludağ Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1999), 78–79. However, it is not clear whether this constituted basic handwriting instruction or fine calligraphy.

copying books.103 This is a significant group of people, since it probably includes most of those who received a medrese (religious college) education or its private equivalent, as well as those trained in governmental offices. However, many more people would have had an instrumental skill in handwriting, and therefore the ability to copy texts well enough for themselves, if not for the market.

Handwriting that was “good enough” is prevalent in both archival records and extant manuscripts. It may not have conformed to the well-known and well-defined styles, but neither was it purely chicken-scratch. The more informal hands, sometimes called “broken” (şikeste) versions of the major styles, nonetheless reveal a certain standardization in handwriting practice (and, therefore, in handwriting instruction). While many different hands are evident in the probate records, for example, the formation of words nevertheless displays a basic consistency. For example, as in Figure 1.5, the word

ṭancere (pan) appears practically as a logograph in the records. Three distinct hands are evident, and the words are written slightly differently (the last two letters are joined in one version; only one of the versions in dotted), but their similarities should not be underestimated. The cascading letters and common ligatures testify to a system that successfully imparted conventions for how words ought to be written, even in an entirely instrumental context.

103 For a discussion of the major hands seen in Ottoman documents and books, see Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı belgelerinin dili, 55-68.

Figure 1.5: The word ṭancere (pan) written in three different hands. Left to right: Mülga Beledī d. 1, f. 10b (v12); KA d. 4, f. 65b (v67); KA d. 6, f. 162b (v166).

Many people in Istanbul had this instrumental level of skill in handwriting, which obeyed certain conventions but did not conform to one of the recognized styles. Each scribe in a government office, every vakıf (charitable foundation) record-keeper, all judges and their assistants, the students and professors at medreses, pages trained at the royal schools — all these people, numbering in the thousands, were not only potential readers but also potential copiers of books.104

Paper

Besides the labor of the copyist, the most significant input to a manuscript was the paper. The cost of standard black ink, which could be made from household soot, was apparently negligible.105 For a newly commissioned, ordinary manuscript (i.e., not

104 For the number of imperial scribes, see Ekin Emine Tusalp Atiyas, “Political Literacy and the Politics of Eloquence: Ottoman Scribal Community in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013), 96–99.

105 Kātib Çelebi wrote that making and using ink was something everyone knew about: “You can’t call things like making ink ‘a science’ or the number of sciences will stretch to a thousand.” Kashf, 401. Many personal notebooks contain recipes for ink jotted in the margins (e.g., Leiden Cod. Or. 841 f. 77b). For more details on inks used in Islamic manuscripts, see Déroche et al., Islamic Codicology, 111–119. The quotation from Kātib Çelebi on “the science of making ink” from Kashf al-ẓunūn reads (Kashf, 401):

ﻭو ﻻ ﻳﯾﺨﻔﻲ ﺍاﻧﻪﮫ ﻣﻦ ﻗﺒﻴﯿﻞ ﺗﻜﺜﻴﯿﺮ ﺍاﻟﺴﻮﺍاﺩد ﻭو ﺗﻀﻴﯿﻴﯿﻊ ﺍاﻟﻘﺮﻁطﺎﺱس ﻭو ﺍاﻟﻤﺪﺍاﺩد ﻻﻧﻪﮫ ﺍاﻣﺮ ﺻﻨﺎﻋﻲ ﺟﺰﺋﻲ ﻻ ﻳﯾﻌﺪ ﻣﺜﻠﻪﮫ ﻋﻠﻤﺎ ﻭو ﺍاﻻﻟﺒﻠﻎ ﺍاﻟﻌﻠﻮﻡم ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺍاﻟﻮﻑف

illuminated), the paper accounted for less than one-third of the overall purchase price.106

Istanbul had a huge appetite for paper, which was used not only in the capital’s governmental offices but also forwarded on to the provinces to support record-keeping there.107 The vastness of the Ottoman archives testifies to the prevalence of paper, particularly by the end of the sixteenth century.

106 My estimate for the paper cost is based on Antoine Galland’s description of the cost to commission a copy of Sūdī’s commentary on the Gülistān, his commentary on the Bostan, or on Ḥāfiẓ’s divān. According to Galland, exemplars of these three books were held at the Ḥāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa mosque in Istanbul and were available to rent for the purpose of copying. Each title comprised seven booklets which could be rented separately. Galland reported that it would cost 14 “piastres” (guruş) to commission a copy of one of the books “in a good hand.” Antoine Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland, 234–6. I discovered that one of the exemplars is still extant in the Ḥāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa collection: Süleymaniye Library Hafız Ahmed Paşa 33 is a portion of Sūdī’s commentary on the Gülistan, copied by a certain İsmaʿīl in 1606 / H.1015. I discuss this exemplar in detail in the following section of this chapter. For the purpose of estimating the economics of manuscript production, I ascertained that this exemplar of 45 folios (misfoliated as 55 folios) contains approximately 14.5% of the commentary’s text, which is approximately one-seventh — confirming Galland’s report of seven exemplars per title. (I confirmed this by referring to complete manuscripts of the commentary and measuring what portion of the overall text the sections from this exemplar formed.) Although extant manuscripts of this text vary in length (depending on handwriting, size of paper, and page ruling), I assumed for the purpose of this calculation that the exemplar’s 45 folios would be replicated exactly when commissioned, requiring 23 sheets folded in quarto for the copy. (The placement of watermarks — as well as the dimensions of the manuscript — make it clear that it was a quarto fold, so that a single sheet of paper was cut in half and folded to make four folios, or eight pages.) As a result, 11.25 whole sheets of paper would be needed. The 1640 price list (see below for discussion of this) provides prices for many types of paper; the most likely kinds are ay ve ʿalem damgalı and İstanbul kağıdı, which ranged from 10 to 43 aḳçe per deste (packet of 25; see footnote below for my interpretation of deste). This yields a paper materials cost per complete seven-volume manuscript of 32 aḳçe to 135 aḳçe, in terms of 1640 aḳçe. Converting to 1673 aḳçe (to approximate Galland’s stay in Istanbul and match the currency of his reported price) according to the price index given in Şevket Pamuk, İstanbul ve diğer kentlerde 500 yıllık fiyatlar ve ücretler, 1469–1998 (Ankara: T. C. Başbakanlık Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 2000), yields a range of 44 to 188 aḳçe for the paper cost of a manuscript that, Galland reported, would cost 1400 aḳçe to commission (or 3%-13% of the price). (I have converted his 14 piastres (guruş) to 1400 aḳçe, not only because this was said to be the exchange rate, but because a contemporary probate record shows that this was the rate used when guruş were converted to aḳçe; see KA d. 6, f. 62a (v64).) The lower end of the range seems exceptionally low given the distribution of book prices in probate inventories. It is also very possible that Galland was quoted an inflated price, but even if the price given him were twice as high as the price for a local, the paper would account for only approximately one-quarter of the purchase price of a new manuscript. Given the uncertainties and the many assumptions involved in this calculation, it seems prudent to underscore that the paper cost for a newly commissioned manuscript accounted for a small part of the price; labor accounted for most of the cost. This fact made copying for oneself all the more attractive.

107 Kütükoğlu and Velkov discuss the workings of the eighteenth-century kağıt emini (chief stationer), who fielded regular requisitions from the divisions of the imperial bureaucracy and the households of its leading officers (after all, these households were not easily distinguished from offices). Although similar records from the seventeenth-century are missing, the volume of archival records speaks for itself. One clue is provided in the published 1681 register of Podolia (now Ukraine), which indicates that the paper for the register was sent from Istanbul. Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı belgelerinin dili, 29–36, and Asparouh Velkov,

Many different types of paper were available on the Istanbul market. A 1640 register of maximum prices for various goods includes a list of eight types of paper and the price ceilings for each, including multiple sizes for some kinds of paper.108 Several prices refer to a deste (“handful,” or a bunch/packet) of paper, which might have been a ream comprising 25 sheets, if following standard European units for paper.109 Some of the types of paper mentioned, such as ābādī and sulṭānī, are clearly very high-end paper, with prices set at 35 and 16 aḳçe per sheet.110 These are the sorts of paper that Mustafa

‘Āli described in the late sixteenth century as being suitable for fine calligraphy;111 in the eighteenth century, they were far more expensive than other types of paper, and their purchase sometimes required special permission from the grand vizier’s office.112 Other

“Quelques matériaux de chancellerie, qui étaient en usage dans l’empire ottoman du XVIième jusqu’au XVIIIième siècles,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des morgenlandes 82 (1992): 421–438.

108 Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu, Osmanlılarda narh müessesesi ve 1640 tarihli narh defteri (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1983). See also Yaşar Yücel, ed., Osmanlı ekonomi, kültür, uygarlık tarihine dair bir kaynak: Esʻâr defteri [1640 tarihli] (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1992), 19.

109 This would make sense, given the fact that most paper was imported. On the other hand, a “handful” also seems to imply just five sheets, one for each finger! Halil İnalcik translates deste as “packet” and notes that it was used in around 1500 to measure felt, knives, handkerchiefs, girdles, and hats (which, other than felt, would not seem to lend themselves to comparison with paper). Osman Ersoy asserted that a deste must be 24 sheets because a price control notebook of 1600–1601 / H. 1009 set the price of three sheets at one aḳçe and one deste at eight aḳçe (i.e., 3x8=24 aḳçe per deste). However, if one assumes that there must have been a volume discount at work, the figure of 25 sheets per deste remains logical. Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, 34; Halil İnalcık, “Introduction to Ottoman Metrology,” Turcica 14–15 (1982–3), 326–7; Osman Ersoy, XVIII. ve XIX. yüzyıllarda Türkiye’de kâğıt (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1963), 17.

110 The real value might have been higher, given that these were price controls.

111 Muṣṭafa ‘Āli, Menāḳıb-i Hünerverān (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿa-i ‘Āmire, 1926), 11.

112 According to the chief stationer’s office records, the Ottoman administration used at least nine different types of paper in the eighteenth century. Kütükoğlu and Velkov have demonstrated that the use of paper in chancery documents was governed by an elaborate protocol similar to that of the elkabs (salutations) and prayers used in the texts themselves. A vizier would receive a berat (letter or warrant) written on ābādī paper which cost upward of 80 aḳçe per sheet (prices from the second quarter of the eighteenth century), while fortress troops would deserve merely “Istanbul paper” costing 3 aḳçe per sheet. In one case, a dīvān clerk sent back a paper delivery, noting that, “This paper won’t do at all. Have him take these away and send two sheets of clean Samarkand paper.” Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı belgelerinin dili, 31–35. The quotation,

kinds of paper were most likely not intended for writing; for example, çarçupe kāġıdı (or

çerçeve kāġıdı) might have been used to wrap goods or to cover windows.113

Much of the writing paper used in Istanbul by the seventeenth century was imported from Europe, mostly Italy, and bears the watermarks of its makers. This is probably referred to in the 1640 price register as ay ve ‘alem damgalı paper (“marked by a moon and sign,” most likely a herald), though the paper known as “Istanbul paper”

(varaḳ-ı İstanbul or İstanbul ṭabaġı) may also have been imported.114 A third type of

dated 1724, reads: “Bu kâğıdlar olmaz. Bunları alıkoyup Semerkand olmak üzere iki tabak pâk kâğıd gönderesin” (32n108; transliteration by Kütükoğlu).

113 “Çarçupe kāġıdı” appears in the narh price register of 1640. It is also one of only a few types of paper mentioned in Meninski’s dictionary, though his definitions leave some doubt as to what it was used for: “Charta emporetica” (for wrapping goods that were bought); “carta da impannare” (to cover something, especially a window); “Papier a chassis” (frame paper). Franciscus à Mesgnien Meninski, Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium Turcicae-Arabicae-Persicae, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Simurg Yayıncılık, 2000), 3847.

114 The historiography of Ottoman paper has been dominated by the question of whether the Ottomans produced paper in Istanbul (and, more generally, in Anatolia). Franz Babinger, whose early studies of the subject informed all subsequent research, reviewed the writings of Evliyā Çelebi and of many European travelers. He concluded that paper was manufactured in the Kāġıthāne (“paper house”) district of Istanbul until the early sixteenth century, after which all paper was imported until the foundation of new mills in the eighteenth century. Even though paper was not produced in Istanbul for over two hundred years, Babinger wrote, Istanbul had many workshops dedicated to finishing imported paper by burnishing and sizing it. The only monograph-length study of Ottoman paper is Osman Ersoy’s XVIII. ve XIX yüzyıllarda Türkiye’de kâğıt (“Paper in Turkey in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century”), published in 1963. Ersoy’s interest in paper grew out of his research on the introduction of print in Arabic type in the early eighteenth century. Following in Babinger’s footsteps, Ersoy reviewed the evidence for Ottoman paper production and ultimately agreed that the Ottomans did, indeed, import all of their paper until the eighteenth century. He attributed the “late” arrival of print in the Ottoman realm (disregarding the presses that had been operating in languages other than Turkish and Arabic) to the lack of local paper production. Subsequent scholars have debated whether a city with Istanbul’s appetite for paper would have relied on imports alone for so long. No one questions that a large majority of paper was imported until at least the nineteenth century; the debate is about whether any paper at all was produced locally. Evidence falls on both sides of the question. Supporting Babinger’s position is the lack of any archival documentation for paper manufacture prior to the eighteenth century. Doubts about Babinger’s position — expressed by Vsevolod Nikolaev, Süheyl Ünver, and İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı — stem from a few unexplained mysteries. One is the persistence of the term “Istanbul paper” (kāġıd-i İstanbul), a category of paper that surfaces again and again in price registers and account books. Scholars do not have a compelling explanation for this term, which on its face would seem to indicate paper from the Istanbul region. Similarly a recent study of paper in seventeenth-century Cairo reported that one type of paper used there was known as rūmī (“of Rūm,” i.e., from the region of Anatolia and the Balkans). The subtext to this debate seems to be about how “Europeanized” or “advanced” Istanbul was (or was not). It seems unlikely that this debate will be resolved without the serendipitous discovery of relevant documents. Franz Babinger, Das Archiv des Bosniaken Osman Pascha (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1931) 25–33; and Babinger, “Papierhandel und Papierbereitung in der Levante,” Wochenblatt für Papierfabrikation 52 (1931). Ersoy, XVIII. ve XIX yüzyıllarda Türkiye’de kâğıt, iii. Febvre and Martin,

paper, also apparently of decent quality for writing, was referred to as “ḫaşebī kāġıdı.”115

Although extant manuscripts reflect the full range of paper available on the market, scholars have not matched the Ottoman vocabulary for paper with extant examples, aside from the very finest manuscripts. As a result, we do not yet understand the “period eye” for paper. The type of paper used in a manuscript must have communicated something about its contents and its owner, but we have difficulty discerning this sensibility for all but the highest and lowest quality books.116

We also do not know exactly how paper was purchased, but a paper-sellers’

(kaġıtçiyān) guild did exist. This guild was involved in setting the maximum prices in

1640, and one paper-seller appears as a creditor in the probate sample in this study.117

The imperial guild parades of 1582 and 1638 included paper-sellers decked out in clothes made from paper, who burnished large sheets of paper as their floats passed.118 Paper had to be burnished by rubbing a piece of polished rock or glass over it before it could be

Coming of the Book, 30, 40–43; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, c. 4 k. 2 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1959), 518-519; Hanna, In Praise of Books, 87–88.

115 On the basis of documents from the kāġıtçıbaşı ḳalemi, Velkov and Kütükoğlu describe these as writing paper. It seems somewhat unlikely that ḫaşebī kāġıdı would have been made from wood, since Europeans did not develop a technique for creating paper from wood until the eighteenth century, and there is no previous Middle Eastern tradition of paper made from wood. Perhaps “ḫaşebī” denotes paper with a rough, wooden-like texture, or perhaps is a corruption of “ḥabeşī,” and refers to a type of paper originally associated with Abyssinia. Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, 36; Joseph von Karabacek, Arab Paper (1887), trans. Don Baker and Suzy Dittmar (London: Islington Books, 1991), 41–42. The origins of the term “İstanbul kāġıdı” remain a mystery.

116 The same can be said of book dimensions, bindings, hands, and other material qualities. Please see the “Sources and Methods” section of Chapter One for a broader discussion of this problem. The notion of a “period eye” comes from Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 29.

117 In this inventory, one of the creditors is identified simply as “kaġıdcı,” with no proper name given, although other creditors are listed by proper name. Perhaps there was only one paper-seller in the neighborhood? KA d. 6, f. 143b (v147).

118 Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304, f. 199a. Facsimile edition: The Seyahatname of Evliya Çelebi, ed. Fahir İz, Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures 19 (Cambridge, MA: NELC, Harvard University, 1993), 401. See also Nurhan Atasoy, 1582 Surname-i humayun (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1997), 52–53.

used for a document or manuscript.119 Glazing (applying a starch-based size to) the paper before burnishing was preferable, as a glazed surface was easier to “erase” in case of a mistake. For this very reason, paper intended for official registers would reportedly be polished but not sized (glazed), in order to prevent fraud.120 It appears that it was possible to purchase glazed and burnished paper ready for use, but we do not know whether most paper was sold in this condition, or in a rawer state.121

Access to Books

Making new books required not just the ability to write and the proper materials, but also access to exemplars. The major institutions supporting access to books were the endowment libraries. Personal contact with private book collectors and booksellers also played an important role.

119 For accessible overviews of how paper and pens were prepared, see Derman et al., Masterpieces of Ottoman Calligraphy, 17-25; and Déroche et al., Islamic Codicology, 103–153.

120 Suheyl Ünver, “XVinci asırda kullandığımız filigranlı kağıtlar üzerine,” in V. Türk Tarih Kongresi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1960), 390. I have not been able to examine the hard copies of the probate court records used to create the sample on which much of this study is based (they were made available to me as digital copies), so I do not know whether Ünver’s assertion holds for these records.

121 Ünver writes that European paper was imported in a raw state and needed to be finished. (Suheyl Ünver, “XVinci yüzyılda Türkiye’de kullanılan kâğıtlar ve su damgaları,” Belleten 26 (1962): 739–762.) An early nineteenth-century English traveler to Istanbul reported that paper or glazing was one of the main activities visible in the booksellers’ market. (John Cam Hobhouse Broughton, A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the Years 1809 and 1810 (Philadelphia: 1817), 342; digital surrogate accessed through HathiTrust on August 5, 2015: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.ah655u. I first learned of this source from Yahya Erdem, “Sahaflar ve Seyyahlar: Osmanlı’da Kitapçılık,” in Osmanlı, ed. Güler Eren, vol. 11 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 1999), 724.) We do not know where else in the city paper might have been sold, or by whom. In contemporary Bursa, paper was available through booksellers, who sometimes carried an impressive selection so that their clients could choose the quality they desired for a manuscript. (Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar, 58.)

When Evliyā Çelebi visited St. Stephen’s Church in Vienna in 1665, he was taken with the magnificent library he saw there and immediately compared it to the great libraries of the Ottoman world:

There is no such collection of eminent books anywhere in the world, except in Cairo at the mosques of Sultan Barquq and Sultan Faraj, and in Istanbul at the mosque of Mehmed the Conqueror, the Süleymaniye, the mosque of Beyazıd the saint, and the New Mosque. God only knows the number of books in those mosques.122

Evliyā Çelebi mentions four libraries associated with sultanic mosque complexes; the

New Mosque, opened in 1663,123 had just barely been completed, but the other three complexes were between one and two centuries old. Over time, the original endowments had been augmented by countless donations of books by individuals. Furthermore, books had flowed from the outer reaches of the empire into the capital city, pooling in these great collections.

In the late seventeenth century, Istanbul had dozens of smaller endowment libraries, all associated with institutions such as medreses, sufi lodges, and mosques.

Books were donated through the Islamic legal framework of the vaḳıf (Ar. waqf), which allowed the owner of any immovable property to endow it for the benefit of others in perpetuity. Whether books could be subject to vaḳıf was debated in earlier centuries,

122 “Bu diyârda böyle kitâb-ı müstetâb cemʿiyyeti yokdur. İllâ Mısır’da Sultân Berkuk ve Sultân Ferec câmiʿinde ve İslâmbol’da Ebü’l-feth câmiʿinde ve Süleymâniyye’de ve Bâyezîd-i Velî’de ve Yenicâmiʿde dahi hisâbın Allâhu Rabbü’l-âlemîn bilir kitâblar vardır.” Transcription from Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi: Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304 Yazmasının transkripsiyonu, dizini, vol. 7, ed. Yücel Dağlı, Deyit Ali Kahraman, and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003), 103 [59b of the manuscript]. The translation is quoted from Gottfried Hagen, “Atlas and Papamonta as Sources of Knowledge and Power,” in Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi’nin Yazılı Kaynakları, ed. Hakan T. Karateke and Hatice Aynur (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2012), 110; Hagen adapted the English translation found in Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi (London: Eland, 2010), 236.

123 The library, however, was established some ten years before. İsmail E. Erünsal, “Turhan Vâlide Sultan Kütüphanesi,” DVİA c. 41: 426 (accessed from İSAM website, August 8, 2015).

since books were, after all, moveable goods and subject to deterioration. On the other hand, books were seen to offer a perpetual benefit, much as a cauldron (though technically moveable) could be used indefinitely to prepare food for the poor in a soup kitchen.124 By the Ottoman period, endowing books was a well-established practice.

The first Istanbul book endowment was made in 1454, just a year after the

Ottoman conquest of the city, when Şeyḫ Geylānī endowed nine books to his sufi lodge.125 Mehmed II endowed over eight hundred books to the mosque complex that he built beginning in the 1460s. As the comprehensive endowment deed of 1496 indicates, these books were to serve the needs of the teachers and students of the medreses associated with the complex, as well as the needs of other scholars who lived nearby.126

On the basis of endowment deeds, İsmail Erünsal has documented almost eighty book endowments made in Istanbul between 1454 and 1678.127 Over half of these endowments were made as part of the establishment of a new institution, following the pattern set by

Mehmed II (though with fewer books). In this context, books served as an essential part of the infrastructure for the larger institution, supporting its aims; they were not themselves the focus of the endowment. Concurrently, individuals (usually scholars)

124 As a result of this controversy, book endowments typically include a declaration at the end that it is a valid endowment. Yūsuf ʿIshsh, Les bibliothèques arabes publiques et semi-publiques en Mésopotamie, en Syrie et en Égypte au Moyen Age (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1967), 68-74; Ahmed Akgündüz, “Osmanlı hukukunda vafkın konusunu teşkil eden mallar ve kitap vakfı,” in Osmanlı devleti’nde bilim kültür ve kütüphaneler, ed. Özlem Bayram (Ankara: Türk Kütüphaneciler Derneǧi, 1999), 63–77. I owe these citations to Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 423.

125 Erünsal, “Fetihten sonra İstanbul’da kurulan ilk vakıf kütüphânesi ve vakfiyesi,” 391–403. Edward Mitchell includes a translation of part of Geylānī’s vakfiye in his dissertation, “Institution and Destitution: Patronage Tales of Old Stamboul” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1993), 173.

126 Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 109; Fâtih Mehmet II Vakfiyeleri (Ankara: Vakıflar Umum Müdürlüğü Neşriyatı, 1938), 204.

127 Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 91–170.

endowed books to existing institutional collections. These donations were often more modest, and they are difficult to trace systematically. However, the endowment inscriptions at the beginning of so many extant manuscripts testify to the prevalence of this practice.128

Endowment deeds typically specified that the books were to be made available to

“people who are able to read them,” which may have meant not those who could make out the words, but those who were judged able to comprehend the books in their full context.129 The great library endowed by Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa in the late 1670s was, according to its deed, intended for “seekers of knowledge, and stationers,” who were invited “to come, and to read and to copy.”130 In other words, endowment libraries were explicitly intended for copying manuscripts as well as for reading them.131

A recently discovered exemplar from just such a lending library sheds light onto how the lending and copying process worked. In Antoine Galland’s memoirs of his stay

128 The 1546 register of charitable endowments includes thirteen endowments of this type, in addition to two book endowments made by grand viziers as part of the establishment of major institutions. These types of endowments (made by individuals to existing institutions) also occasionally appear in court records; Erünsal has found many like this. Kut and Bayraktar have documented endowment seals belonging to major figures who endowed massive collections bearing these seals, but vakıfs were made by many types of people. Ömer Lütfî Barkan and Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, ed., İstanbul Vakıfları Tahrîr Defteri: 953 (1546) Târîhli (Istanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1970); Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, passim; Günay Kut and Nimet Bayraktar, Yazma eserlerde vakıf mühürleri (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1984).

129 See, for example, the 1546 vakıf of Mevlana Alaüddin b. Hacı Sinan, who specifies that if his progeny should die out, the books are intended for “’ulemâ-i sâlihînden mutala’asına kaadir olanlara.” Barkan and Ayverdi, İstanbul Vakıfları Tahrir Defteri: 953 (1546), 341. For an extended discussion of the verb “muṭālaʾa” (to study a text carefully), see Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Rise of ‘Deep Reading’ in Early Modern Ottoman Scholarly Culture,” in World Philology, ed. Sheldon I. Pollock et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 201–24.

130 “Talebe-yi ʿilm ve varrāḳīn varup ḫizāne-i mezbūrede müṭālaʿa ve istinsāḫ idüp…” Fażıl Aḥmed Paşa vakfiye (Köprülü Kütüphanesi Ekler 2447), f. 43a.

131 On this topic, as with everything relating to endowment libraries, Erünsal’s book is replete with anecdotes and examples. Yavuz Sezer, who is writing a much-anticipated dissertation on eighteenth- century Ottoman libraries, has noted that the architecture of the libraries evolved by that point to facilitate copying of manuscripts. Sezer, “Architecture of Bibliophilia;” personal communication.

in Istanbul in 1672–73, he wrote that it was possible to borrow copies of three titles —

Sūdī’s (d. 1599 / H. 1007) commentaries on the Gülistān, the Bostān, and the poetry collection (dīvān) of Ḫāfīẓ — from the Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa Mosque in order to read or copy them.132 Galland provides precious details about how the borrowing worked:

Each of the books is made up of seven volumes. Each person who comes is given one of [the volumes] as long as he leaves two piasters, which he receives back whenever he brings back the volume. The money serves as a pledge for the purpose of buying another volume, in case the one that was borrowed is not returned.133

Galland reports that the price to commission a complete copy of one of the titles is, indeed, two piasters for each of the seven volumes that make up a title, or fourteen piasters in total.134

Today, the book collection from the Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa Mosque is held in the

Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. In the collection, I located a volume that corresponds exactly to Galland’s description. Cataloged as “Sūdī al-Bosnevī’s commentary on the fourth section of the Gülistān,” it actually comprises both the fourth and fifth sections of

132 Sūdī’s Turkish-language commentaries on these three Persian books were notable for their grammatical focus, especially in comparison with earlier Turkish commentaries. It is not clear whether other titles, not of interest to Galland, were also available. Although all three titles were classics, it is somewhat curious that these would be singled out at this particular mosque (or at any mosque). For more on Sūdī’s commentaries, see especially Murat Umut Inan, “Writing a Grammatical Commentary on Hafiz of Shiraz: A Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Scholar on the Divan of Hafiz” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2012).

133 “Il y a une mosquée, à Constantinople, qu’on nomme la mosquée d’Hafis Ahmed Pacha, où il ya une fondation pour donner le Gulistan, le Boston et le Divan d’Hhafis [sic], tous trois commentés par Soudy, à lire ou à transcrire à ceux qui le souhaittent. A cet effet, il y a sept volumes de l’un et de l’autre dont en [sic] en donne un à chasque personne qui vient, pourvu qu’on laisse deux piastres, lesquelles se peuvent reprendre toutes les fois qu’on veut, en rapportant le volume; car elles servent seulement de gage pour achepter un autre volume, en cas qu’on ne rapporte celuy pour lequel elles ont été laissées.” Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland, 234–6.

134 See the beginning of the section on paper, above, for a calculation of the labor and materials cost of a book, using the details provided by Galland. As I explain there, a piaster was known in Turkish as a guruş and was taken to be the equivalent of 100 aḳçe.

Sūdī’s commentary.135 Remarkably, the volume is almost exactly one-seventh the length of the entire work; in other words, copying the entire commentary would indeed require seven volumes of this length, just as Galland reported.136 The manuscript bears several clues that confirm it was used as an exemplar for copying. There are ink smudges and spills throughout, including a red ink blot that does not match the original rubrication and must have been spilled later, as a new copy was being created.137 The manuscript also bears many minor grammatical corrections that seem to date from later readers. This points to one of the mysteries of the manuscript, which is the fact that it appears to contain many mistakes that were later corrected. It is puzzling that an imperfect exemplar, meant to serve as “copy zero” for countless other manuscripts, would be

135 The manuscript, Hafız Ahmed Paşa 33, measures 260 x 159 mm, with the text measuring 187 x 103 mm, and comprises 45 folios. (The measurements come from the catalog, but they appeared to be accurate when I examined the manuscript itself. Note that the digital surrogate available at the Süleymaniye Library does not show the entire page, since the images cut off substantial portions of the top and the bottom. The manuscript is miscataloged as comprising 55 folios due to misfoliation on the manuscript itself, skipping from f. 23 to f. 34 even though the text runs continuously with a corresponding catchword.) The manuscript is made up of four quires of ten folios each, and then five final folios of indeterminate structure. The paper, folded into quarto, appears to bear a watermark of an anchor in a circle. This watermark appears frequently in Ottoman manuscripts of the period. A copyist’s note at the end indicates that it was copied by a certain İsmaʿīl in the month of Şaʿbān H. 1015 (1606 CE). It bears extensive rubrication (overlining) and copious annotations which document the places in which Sūdī disagrees with previous commentators. There is ample evidence of repair, resewing, and page trimming. Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa’s endowment seal is stamped at the beginning and the end; this suggests that the endowment was made during Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa’s lifetime (other manuscripts which bear his personal endowment inscription also have the seal; see Hafız Ahmed Paşa 18, for example). The manuscript was copied just eleven years after Sūdī composed the text, and seven years before Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa’s death. I have not been able to ascertain why he would have valued these three titles enough to make sure they were available for copying. For reproductions of Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa’s seals, see Kut and Bayraktar, Yazma eserlerde vakıf mühürleri, 72–73. For background on Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa (sometimes known as Hadım Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa, not to be confused with the Grand Vizier Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa who died in 1632 / H. 1041) and the endowment, see Semavi Eyice, “Hâfız Ahmed Paşa Camii ve Külliyesi,” TDVİA c. 15: 85–87; Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 150–151n790; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, III.1: 91; III.2: 550.

136 I determined this by referring to complete manuscripts of Sūdī’s commentary on the Gülistān. For example, Fatih 3986, copied in H. 1107, is 426 folios long. The fourth and fifth sections of the commentary comprise 62 folios, or approximately 14.5% of the entire text. One-seventh would equal 14.3%. Hafız Ahmed Paşa 33 comprises 45 folios; if these equaled one-seventh of the text, the complete commentary held in the mosque would have stretched to approximately 315 folios.

137 See folio 5a.

chosen.138 The handwriting and layout, too, are utilitarian and unlovely. The rubricated overlining appears to have been done in haste. Of the dozens of seventeenth-century manuscripts of this title that I examined, this exemplar was among the least attractive.

Perhaps the book’s plainness points to its entirely instrumental nature as a vehicle for transmission rather than a copy meant to be read and enjoyed in its own right.

The fact that a single work was split into equal portions to facilitate copying brings to mind the pecia system, documented in late medieval Bologna and Paris.139 The advantage to splitting up the text into seven portions was not only portability, but the fact that seven copyists/readers could be working simultaneously on copies of the text, each

138 However, European pecia exemplars (discussed below) were also imperfect copies that had been corrected: “By and large, exemplars were thoroughly corrected copies of miserable texts. Although no single explanation will resolve this paradox, it is such a standard state of affairs that there must surely be a common element, whatever it may be, inherent in the whole process.” Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “The Book Trade at the University of Paris, Ca. 1250 - Ca. 1350,” in La production du livre universitaire au Moyen Age (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1988), 72–73.

139 Building on the work of Jean Destrez, Richard and Mary Rouse have summarized the pecia system as follows: “A specially licensed bookshop owner, called a stationer, would make an exemplar — that is, a model from which further manuscripts were to be copied — of a basic text much in demand by the students of the university. The stationer did not bind this exemplar, however, but kept it in his (or her) shop in the form of loose gatherings or quires called ‘pecias’ — pieces — numbered in sequence, as gatherings customarily were. The stationer rented out the exemplar, one pecia at a time, at a rental price controlled by the university, to enable students to make copies of the text for themselves — or to hire scribes to copy it for them. As the copyist finished with a pecia, he returned it and borrowed the next pecia in the sequence. Since each copyist took away — and thus removed from circulation — only one gathering at a time, many more copies could be made in a given time-period than if each copyist had to finish copying the entire text — had to render the whole exemplar inaccessible — before a second copyist could even begin. With a text divided into, let us say, thirty-five pecias, in theory thirty-five copies of the text could be in production simultaneously, each copyist following along one pecia behind the next.” Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “The Dissemination of Texts in Pecia at Bologna and Paris,” in Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ergebnisse eines buchgeschichtlichen Seminars, Wolfenbüttel, 12.–14. November 1990 (Marburg: Institut für Historische Hilfswissenschaften, 1994), 69. The Ottoman case differs most immediately from that of late medieval Europe in that 1) the pecia are based at an endowment library rather than a stationer; 2) there is no evidence of outside supervision of the pecia and stationers to ensure quality (unlike in Europe, where universities took an active regulatory role); 3) it has not been possible to identify a manuscript that was definitively copied from pecia (unlike in Europe, where marks on surviving copies provided the crucial clues about the existence of the system). For more on European pecia, see Rouse and Rouse, “The Book Trade at the University of Paris,” 41–114. Pecia were also apparently in use in England, but for coterie copying as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991), 205.

on a different part. Hafız Aḥmed Paşa 33 was clearly created to be a discrete exemplar. If a complete manuscript had been later disassembled into seven equal parts, this part could not have begun so neatly at the top of folio 1a, with a new chapter heading.

It is not surprising that, of the twenty-one exemplars that Galland reported being in the mosque, only one has survived. If all the exemplars were as utilitarian and well- used as this one, a single exemplar would carry little value to subsequent generations. It might even be difficult to identify the work from which a given exemplar came. Hafız

Aḥmed Paşa 33, for example, does not include the invocations or introduction that usually come at the beginning of a manuscript and provide the title and author of the text; instead, the text begins abruptly. The lack of surviving exemplars not only in this collection, but in others, is therefore consistent with their physical presentation. Given that many endowment libraries were established explicitly to enable the copying of new texts, it seems likely that a similar pecia-like system was in use elsewhere in the city, especially for works that had a reliably high demand for copies, like textbooks. Perhaps a fresh look at surviving collections will yield more examples.140

Unfortunately, with the exception of the Palace Treasury (which lent books within the palace), there are no known registers of book borrowing or reading for any early modern Ottoman library.141 It is unlikely that the libraries were truly open to any

140 Manuscript colophons also sometimes indicate quite specifically where the manuscript was copied. For example Leiden University Library contains a book of Arabic grammar (Cod. Or. 12.045) that was copied at the same Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa medrese in 1759 / H. 1173. There is no sign that a pecia-like system was involved here.

141 There are some extant registers from the nineteenth century. See, for example, those discussed in Stoyanka Kenderova, “Bibliothèques et livres musulmans dans les territoires balkaniques de l’empire Ottoman: Le cas de Samokov (XVIIIe – Première Moitié Du XIXe Siècle)” (PhD diss., Université Marc Bloch, 2000), 422–427. For loans from the Palace Library in the sixteenth century, see records cited by Fetvaci, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court, 29 and 35.

member of the public.142 However, some people were certainly able to access endowment collections. Kātib Çelebi, for example, noted in at least one bibliographical citation that the given book could be found in the library at the mosque of Mehmed II.143

When Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa endowed his library, the fact that a bookbinder was included on payroll (as was typical for a large endowment library) indicates that significant wear-and- tear was expected.144

Library collections corresponded to the needs of the institutions of which they formed a part. As a result, endowment libraries were more likely to have holdings in the religious sciences, jurisprudence, or mysticism (depending on the type of institution) than literature and history. There are many examples of powerful men who were well-known patrons of literature and history, but who endowed libraries that did not contain any books from those genres.145 At the same time, the chronicles and biographical

142 For example, a 1583 ferman to the trustee of the Selimiye institution in Edirne ordered that a poet be able to use the book collection there. Evidently, a Sultan’s order was necessary to ensure that this happened. İsmail E. Erünsal, The Archival Sources of Turkish Literary History, Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures, Turkish Sources 75, (Cambridge, MA: NELC, Harvard University, 2008), 24.

143 From Kashf, page 1651:

ﻭو ﻟﻠﻤﻮﻟﻰ ﻣﺼﻨﻔﻚ ﺷﺮﺡح ﻛﺒﻴﯿﺮ ﻭو ﻫﮬﮪھﻮ ﻓﻲ ﺧﺰﺍاﻧﺔ ﻛﺘﺐ ﺍاﺑﻲ ﺍاﻟﻔﺘﺢ ﻓﻲ ﺟﺎﻣﻌﻪﮫ.

One early sixteenth-century inventory of that mosque library specified that a certain Muhyiddin Karamanī had borrowed a book and lost it. Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 469. Evliyā Çelebi accessed books in Vefa Cami when he was younger. Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304 f. 108 (Facsimile edition: Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi: Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304 Yazmasının Tıpkıbasımı, ed. Fahir İz (Cambridge, MA: NELC, Harvard University, 1989), 220). Cited in Karateke, “Seyahatname’deki popüler dinî kitaplar,” 222.

144 Köprülü Kütüphaensi Ekler 2447 (vakfiye no. 4), f. 60a.

145 On Mahmud Paşa, see Theoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelović (1453–1474) (Leiden: Brill, 2001): 307–310. On Rüstem Paşa, see İ. A. Yüksel, “Sadrâzam Rüstem Paşa’nın Vakıfları,” in Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi Hâtıra Kitabı, 219–281 (Istanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1995), and Zeren Tanındı, “The Manuscripts Bestowed as Pious Endowments by Rüstem Paşa, the Grand vizier of Süleyman the Magnificent,” in Soliman le Magnifique et son temps, 265–278 (Paris: École du Louvre, 1992). Similar observations can be made about Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa (see below) and Feyżullah Efendi (Nir Shafir, personal communication).

dictionaries composed in the seventeenth century clearly demonstrate that authors had access to a variety of books on these subjects.146

Certainly, those who were in-the-know could access private collections. And, as the following chapters demonstrate, private collections could be quite rich. The historian

Muḥammed Emīn Muḥibbī (d. 1699 / H. 1111) was able to use the private library of his teacher (and noted bibliophile) ʿIzzetī Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1681 / H. 1092).147 While Fāżıl

Aḥmed Paşa was alive, he was lauded for making his considerable collection available to others.148 One of the inventories studied here documents a book that was lent out; upon the owner’s death, it was found to be in someone else’s possession.149 We do not have an account of how books in private collections were stored (and probate inventories do not help us, since books were usually recorded separately from other items and not in their natural context). However, we might imagine that book collections served as a backdrop to the lively gatherings of scholars and poets, accounts of which permeate biographical dictionaries and which themselves were often cited as the impetus for the creation of new works.150

The most significant private collection in Istanbul was that of the sultan. Although scholars might have had access to the palace treasury and library in previous centuries, by the seventeenth century, it is not clear to what extent people outside the palace staff and

146 See, for example: Bekir Kütükoğlu, Kâtib Çelebi Fezlekeʾsinin Kaynakları (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Matbaası, 1974), 17–56; Mustafa Naima, Târih-i Naʻîmâ, 4.

147 İsmail Durmuş, “Muhibbî,” TDVİA c. 31 p. 35.

148 İbrahim Behcetī, Silsiletü’l-Āṣafiyye (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Hafız Ahmed Paşa 212, f. 164a).

149 KA d. 5, f. 95b (v100). The mecmūʿa analyzed in Chapter Four includes an inscription documenting a loan of a portion of a major Qurʾānic commentary (Leiden Cod. Or. 1155).

150 On the relationship between gatherings (Tr. meclis / Ar. majlis, majālis) and book circulation, see Helen Pfeifer, “Encounter After the Conquest,” 219–39.

pages could consult the precious books within. I am not aware of any accounts from this period of access to the books held in the palace. However, books flowed out of the palace and into the endowment libraries of the well-connected. Books bearing the seal of Sultan

Bayezid (r. 1481–1512) and other earlier sultans were apparently de-accessioned (for unknown reasons) and eventually re-endowed in the two largest seventeenth-century library endowments, those of Hatice Turhan Sultan and Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa.151

This account of how readers accessed books has so far de-emphasized booksellers

(saḥḥāflar). Without a doubt, booksellers played an important role in book circulation.152

Like the books they sold and rented, booksellers came in many types.153 Those at the highest end might have stores in Istanbul’s great market, or operate out of their homes, while those at the lowest end hawked their wares on foot. Bibliophiles like Antoine

Galland and Kātib Çelebi noted their dependence on booksellers to locate books and even to learn of books previously unknown.154 Since booksellers sometimes helped to estimate the value of private collections that were being valued by the probate court, they sat at the key points of transmission and could be the first to know about important books coming into the market.155

151 I observed the seal of Bayezid II on the following manuscripts: Yeni Cami 106, 175M, 278, 44, 86, 8, 181, 296, 259, 152, 207. Yeni Cami 262 has Sultan Selim’s seal on it. Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 869, 919, and 985 all bear the seal of Bayezid II; both of these books are noted as having come from “merḥūm Ḥüseyin Çelebi”’s book collection, one of the major sources of the original Köprülü library collection.

152 İsmail Erünsal’s recent book looks at booksellers from many possible angles and presents a wealth of original archival material. All of us who have an interest in Ottoman books owe him a huge debt. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık ve Sahaflar.

153 See Chapter Three for information about book rentals.

154 Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland, 31, 72; Fikret Sarıcaoğlu, “Kâtib Çelebi’nin Otobiyografileri,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi, 37 (2001–2): 315.

155 For example, one inventory includes a fee paid to a bookseller as part of the probate process (Galata d. 100, f. 28a (v39)).

Although booksellers served as crucial brokers in the market for manuscripts, they were not the only stream through which texts flowed. Those of us who have only known a print-based system of book circulation, with its attendant role specialization, can easily misinterpret the role of booksellers. For example, there are no accounts of browsing in early modern Ottoman bookshops. To the contrary, the anecdotes we have about booksellers paint them as brokers who brought manuscripts that might be of interest to the attention (and to the homes) of particular customers. Early modern Ottoman manuscripts were not in any way set up for quick browsing; identifying a work required reading the first page or more of the manuscript, and important information about the copy itself was only found in the colophon.156 Only rarely were there title pages of the sort that developed in Europe and in China when bookshops became places to browse amid a flood of print-produced books, and publishers needed to advertise the features of a book, usually sold unbound, prominently to would-be buyers.157 Manuscripts did not announce themselves in this way. They had human intermediaries.

Crucially, a reader did not need to go to a bookseller in order to obtain a text. It was always possible to copy a text oneself, an approach that was certainly cheaper than commissioning a new copy and possibly more reliable than a used book. Extant manuscripts bear extensive evidence of private copying for personal use; when one looks

156 Once in a collection, an abbreviated title might be written on the tail of the book, to facilitate easy retrieval. Extant manuscripts demonstrate that the practice was not universal, however.

157 For the development of the title page in Europe, see Margaret M. Smith, The Title-Page, Its Early Development, 1460–1510 (London: Oak Knoll, 2000). For Chinese cover pages, see Sören Edgren, “The Fengmianye (Cover Page) as a Source for Chinese Publishing History,” in Higashi Ajia shuppan bunka kenkyū: Niwatazumi [Studies of publishing culture in East Asia: Niwatazumi], ed. Akira Isobe (Tokyo: Nigensha, 2004), 261–67. Edgren views the development of the cover page as a direct result of the rapid rise in available books (printed on speculation) and the manner in which they were accessed: “As in earlier periods in the West, Chinese buyers of new books rarely acquired bound volumes, and Chinese book customers first encountered new publications as no more than stacks of folded leaves. It is in this context that cover pages played an important role” (262).

closely, the examples multiply.158 Besides the economic advantages of doing the labor oneself, copying could give the reader a closer relationship to the text. Taşköprüzāde (d.

1561 / H. 968), for example, reported that as part of this education, he copied a book himself: “I read it (qirātihi) from the beginning to the end, and I wrote (ketebtu) this book, and I corrected it with extreme correction and thoroughness.”159 The best examples of copying for oneself are the thousands of readers’ notebooks that fill post-Ottoman manuscript libraries (see Chapter Four).

In a manuscript-based written culture, repeated copying is the key to a work’s survival. When lamenting his contemporaries’ neglect of previous scholars, ʿAbd al-

Ġanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731 / H. 1143) framed his criticism in terms of a lack of copying:

158 Examples of manuscripts in which the copyist appears to have been the first owner include: Leiden Cod. Or. 895 and Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen 63. Leiden Cod. Or. 11.901 (f. 2a) contains an undated list of manuscripts that the owner said he copied (“istinsāḥ eyledüm”). Being a statesman was not an impediment to making one’s own copies: Rāmi Meḥmed was believed to have personally copied Kātib Çelebi’s Mizānü’l-haḳḳ, and Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa was believed to have personally copied two of Birgivī’s works. Whether or not these manuscripts were really copied by these men, the possibility was not considered far-fetched. Atiyas, “Political Literacy and the Politics of Eloquence, 28–29; Kaylı, “Study of Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s Works,” 212–213. Compare to the high rate of copying attested by extant Hebrew manuscripts: “More than half of all the extant medieval Hebrew codices are the product of the work of a learned copyist who copied for his own use, and not of a professional scribe.” Emile G. L. Schrijver, “The Transmission of Jewish Knowledge through MSS and Printed Books,” 101.

159 Aḥmad ibn Muṣṭafá Ṭāshkubrīʹzādah, Al-shaqāʾiq al-nuʻmānīyah fī ʻulamāʾ al-dawlat al-ʻUthmānīyah, ed. Ahmed Subhi Furat (Istānbūl: Jāmiʻat Istānbūl, Kullīyat al-Ādāb, Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Sharqīyah, 1985), 554. In a study of private manuscript copying in Japan after the advent of print, Peter Kornicki notes many reasons why a reader might copy for himself: needing just a fragment of text for a commonplace book, devotion, as an expression of artistry, and as a form of economy. In addition, as in the example here, copying could be part of studying the text. P. F. Kornicki, “Manuscript, Not Print: Scribal Culture in the Edo Period,” Journal of Japanese Studies 32, no. 1 (January 2006): 28–30. See also Brokaw and Chow, Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, 91. Ann Blair discusses reasons for personal copying of manuscripts in early modern Europe: Ann Blair, “Reflections on Technological Continuities: Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 91, no. 1 (2015): 7–33. Earlier advice manuals to students in the Middle East did not, however, privilege copying a book over purchasing it. Al- ʿAlmawī (d. 1573), drawing on a book by Ibn Jamāʿah (d. thirteenth century), wrote: “Do not bother with copying books that you can buy. It is more important to spend your time studying books than copying them.” Franz Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship, Analecta Orientalia; Commentationes Scientificae de Rebus Orientis Antiqui 24 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1947), 9.

How many works of erudite men of knowledge, of men who grew up among them, have [Damascenes] disregarded and lost, neither respecting them nor taking note of their books and writings until they had all disappeared and perished? And surely there was among them the best man of knowledge and the pride of all hadith scholars, Ibn Ṭulūn al-Ḥanafī, yet they disregarded him and lost his books and works, of which hardly any are now left, and those that are left are still in his own handwriting, since no-one cared to have them copied.160

To be sure, al-Nābulusī was engaged in specific polemics about Ibn Ṭulūn’s legacy, but the concern he showed for survival was a common touchstone. In introducing his bibliography, Kātib Çelebi stated that one of his motivations for compiling it was to make sure that the Islamic intellectual heritage was not lost. In fact, Gottfried Hagen has argued that Kātib Çelebi’s working habits can be explained by the fact that books he saw might not be easily accessed again. He cites, for example, the extensive notes that Kātib

Çelebi took in the margins of his copy of an earlier geography book, notes that not only formed the core of a new book, but also seemed to imply that he might not see the same books again.161

A Case Study: The Köprülü Library

To conclude this overview of manuscripts as circulating objects and return to the question of what made some books particularly valuable, I will offer a case study of the library endowed by Grand Vizier Köprülü Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa.162 Although the library

160 Samer Akkach, Letters of a Sufi Scholar: The Correspondence of ʻAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641– 1731) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 23.

161 Hagen, “Kâtib Çelebi and Sipâhîzâde,” 532.

162 Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s tenure as grand vizier — the most powerful person in the empire after the sultan — was one of the longest in Ottoman history, a fact that is remarkable given the general tumult of the Ottoman seventeenth century. When he died, Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa left a multitude of charitable foundations befitting someone as powerful and wealthy as he was. These foundations included mosques on Crete and in today’s Slovakia and Ukraine (areas which he was credited with annexing); several religious colleges; many dozen fountains; and sufficient agricultural and rent income to employ some five dozen people and pay for upkeep at these institutions. But the crown jewel of his charitable endowments — as measured by its

drew upon the precedents set by other vakıf libraries, it was also a departure from them.

Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa was the first to build an independent library where books were the focus of the endowment rather than tools or infrastructure to support other activities (see

Figure 1.6).163 Furthermore, his donation of books was much larger than any the city had seen before. Rather than several hundred books, he gave over 1,600 titles.164

Many of the donated manuscripts were quite old, had traveled across the Balkans and Middle East, and had seen multiple owners before they made their way back to

Istanbul and were endowed there. In other words, the vaḳıf worked in a way that is true to its root meaning, “to stop.” Because of Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s endowment, these manuscripts have remained in Istanbul, where they are still available today. Studying the library is akin to examining a piece of amber in which relics of another era are preserved whole. This frozen time capsule of a collection can help us to see how the circulation of manuscripts worked.

prominence in contemporaries’ descriptions, and the space accorded it in the endowment deed — was a single-room library on Istanbul’s main thoroughfare known as the Köprülü Library.

163 Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 171–175. The Köprülü Library is often seen to inaugurate a new era in Ottoman library building and endowments. See forthcoming work on this topic by Yazuz Sezer. Curiously, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also saw the development of libraries and other public institutions for accessing books in France and England. Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, 202; C. John Sommerville, Popular Religion in Restoration England (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1977), 24.

164 Our sources do not say why Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa created this library, but what we know of his background is suggestive. As a child and young adult, he had received a classical medrese training. He had even served as a well-regarded professor for a time, before changing careers and becoming an administrator. He supported many authors as their patron when he was at the height of his career, and he had even trained as a calligrapher. The library collection contains a large portion of books — perhaps a third to a half — in the realm of religious and legal learning, though classical Arabic literature, grammar, rhetoric, and history are all well represented.

Figure 1.6: The Köprülü Library (January 2013)

Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s endowment deed lists all the books that he donated, but it does not specify where his books came from. The historian Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa, who lived one generation later, described the library as drawing from the paşa’s own collection. This historian wrote that Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa “endowed the precious books that he had collected, and built a library close to his tomb, putting those books there and endowing them to the seekers of knowledge. . .To this day, seekers of knowledge benefit from it. It is a work of great charity. And while he was alive, [Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa] gathered together many calligraphers with beautiful handwriting and, appointing them to salaries and positions, had them copy many very precious books.”165 This near-

165 “Nāʾil olduḳları kütüb-i nefīse vaḳf idüp merḳadīne [sic] ḳarīb bi kitābḫāne binā idüp ol kitābları vażʿ ve talebe-yi ʿulūma vaḳf eyledi…el-ān ṭullāb-i ʿulūm müstefīd olurlar. Bir ḫayir-i ʿaẓīmetdir. Ve zamān-i ṣıḥḥatinde ḥüsn-i ḫaṭṭa mālik nice ehl-i kitābeti cemʿ idüp veẓāīf [sic] ü taʿyīnāt taʿyīn idüp ḳatī çok nefīs

contemporary historian suggests that the collection comprised both books that Fāżıl

Aḥmed Paşa had collected over the course of his lifetime and those that he had arranged to be copied specifically for him. In fact, examining the artifacts themselves reveals that most of the endowed books were acquired rather than made to order. Thus far, I have only found three manuscripts that indicate specifically, in the colophon, that they were copied for Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa.166 Furthermore, they were copied by different scribes at different times in his career. In other words, the manuscripts provide no evidence for the systematic copying that the historian Defterdar Sari Mehmed Paşa describes. From what we know of the decentralized nature of manuscript production, it would have been surprising to find evidence of a stable of copyists working in tandem to create a new collection. Most of Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s books were used books.

Previous owners’ marks in the manuscripts suggest that many books must have been acquired by Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa as part of larger collections. For example, the manuscript shown in Figure 1.7 is a book of legal methods composed in the early fourteenth century and copied within a decade of the author’s death (1339 / H. 730).167

The title page contains a half-dozen ownership marks, only three of which are dated: an inscription from Istanbul from 1528 / H. 934 identifies ʿİsā bin Emīr Ḫān as the owner.

He was a scholar whose son became a very prominent Ottoman jurist. The next inscription is from Veysī, another prominent Ottoman intellectual, in 1610–11 / H.1019, and then ʿAṭāʿī, a judge in Skopje who was himself an author, dated 1635 / H. 1044. kitābler yazdılar.” (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Esad Efendi 2382, f. 36b.) See also Sarı Mehmet Paşa, Zübde-i Vekayiât: Tahlil ve Metin (1066–1116/1656–1704), ed. Abdülkadir Özcan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1995), 77.

166 Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 431, 797, and 1452.

167 Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 521.

Finally the inner cover also contains an inscription indicating that this book belonged to

“the late Ḥüseyin Çelebi.” Although no date is given, an ownership seal found in other books with similar inscriptions gives a date of 1675-6 / H. 1086, just one year before the death of Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa. In other words, this Ḥüseyin Çelebi (whose precise identity is unknown) was probably the last owner before Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa.

In the Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa collection, there are over thirty manuscripts that had belonged to Ḥüseyin Çelebi. In all, the collection also contains twenty manuscripts that had been part of ʿAṭāʿī’s library. Of the twenty, eleven had belonged to Veysī earlier in the century. As for ʿİsā bin Emīr Ḫān, Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa owned three books from his library, but the manuscript pictured in Figure 1.7 is the only one with this particular chain of ownership documented. The provenance of the manuscripts demonstrates that at least some books traveled together as collections, and that the practice of preserving collections extended back in time.

Figure 1.7: Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 521, f. 1a (Süleymaniye Library)

Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa had the network and the funds to gather the very best books.

Descriptions from close contemporaries confirm that the books he endowed were

“precious” (nefīs) — a word that is used consistently.168 But what made a book precious?

This time capsule of a collection offers us some clues as to what constituted a precious book at that time beyond the material characteristics discussed above.

168 See, for example Defterdar Sarı Meḥmed Paşa, cited above.

First, the known provenance of some of the Köprülü manuscripts suggests that prominent former owners could make a manuscript more attractive to subsequent owners.169 It is also clear that precious manuscripts were old manuscripts. Figure 1.8 analyzes the Köprülü manuscripts by copying date (for those that have copying dates).

Fazil Ahmed Pasha’s Manuscripts by Copy Date!

300"

250"

200"

150"

100"

50"

0" 10C" 11C" 12C" 13C" 14C" 15C" 16C" 17C" (h."4C)" (h."5C)" (h."6C)" (h."7C)" (h."8C)" (h."9C)" (h."10C)" (h."11C)"

Figure 1.8: Copy dates for Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa manuscripts, where known. Data compiled from the Ramazan Şeşen catalog.170

As expected, the century when the library was founded accounts for more manuscripts than any other century. However, those relatively recent books represent only about one

169 The importance of provenance is made more explicit in a 1607/H. 1015 endowment inscription written by Ḫāfıż Aḥmed Paşa at the beginning of a manuscript he was endowing to his library. He specifically notes that the manuscript had come from the estate of “the late kadi of Egypt, Ṭursun-zāde.” (“İşbu şerḥ-i Keşşāf Mısır ḳāżī iken mütevefā olan merḥūm Ṭursun-zāde’niñ muḫallefātından iştirā olunub İstanbul’da Küçük Ḳaramanda olan medresemize vaḳıf itmişuzdur.”) Süleymaniye Library, Hafız Ahmed Paşa 33, f. 1a. This manuscript is discussed in Chapter Four.

170 Ramazan Şeşen, Fihris makhṭūṭāt maktabat Kūprīlī (Istanbul: İRCICA, 1986).

quarter of the books that Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa endowed. Over half the endowed manuscripts were at least two hundred years old, and over a third were at least three hundred years old. This collection shows a clear bias for older manuscripts. It was intended, from its founding, to be a rare books library.

Even recently copied books reveal a concern with the origins of the copy. A

Qurʾānic commentary copied just two years before Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s death notes in the colophon that it is a “sound copy from a copy from the author’s copy” — in other words, two degrees of separation from the original.171 Similarly, a book on religious fundamentals copied in the same year as Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s death specifies that the manuscript it was copied from was itself made in the mid-fourteenth century (H. 755), just a century after the text’s original composition.172 Another manuscript dated 1658–59

(H. 1069) specifies that it is the very first copy in the author’s hand.173

The Köprülü collection emphasizes origins, and therefore age, since the texts were themselves quite old — perhaps most predating the conquest of Istanbul. One corollary of this is that a manuscript’s quality is not immediately apparent in its execution. While Köprülü manuscripts copied in the seventeenth century do tend to be on fine cream-colored paper, with gold frames and headpiece illuminations, manuscripts that were several centuries old might be on rougher paper with execution that appears less neat. In this collection, authenticity of the text as defined by age and closeness to the author’s manuscript seems to have been more important than production values.

171 Süleymaniye Library, Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 179.

172 Süleymaniye Library, Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 814.

173 Süleymaniye Library, Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 596.

In summary, the Köprülü Library presents a more nuanced notion of a book’s value than is reflected in an average probate inventory. Most of the Köprülü books were considered precious not because of their material qualities, but because they were old or were the result of particularly sound transmission. In many cases, the prestige of the books’ previous owners helped to confer value and legitimacy. The Köprülü Library was a rare books library even when it was founded, a fact that set it apart from previous endowment libraries. At the same time, its emphasis on origins and its intended role as a place for copying reflected long-standing concerns about manuscript survival and transmission.

The provenance of books in Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s library shows that behind every great collection there were traces of earlier great collections. If vakıf law made the survival of a book collection possible, inheritance law encouraged its dissolution. As described in the Introduction, Islamic law limited the percentage of an individual’s estate that could be bequeathed according to his or her wishes. Two-thirds of an estate was supposed to be divided among heirs in a specifically prescribed way. The division of estates militated toward book sales: an heir would have to be wealthy and a bibliophile himself to retain his father’s library.174 Individual bookowners could keep their collections intact by endowing them to an institution (as many did). Others must have sold them along the way. But when a major bookowner died, chances were that the collection would be broken up. For example, Kātib Çelebi acquired some books from the estate of Kara Çelebizāde Maḥmūd Efendi (d. 1653). Then, upon Kātib Çelebi’s death,

174 As Chapter Two will demonstrate, book ownership was distinctively male.

there was a scramble for his books.175 The Istanbul book market churned endlessly, and that made it an exciting place to be.

* * *

The three dimensions of the Istanbulite book world highlighted in this chapter — a wide range in book values, decentralized production, and deep concern about survival

— are inseparable from the fact that most books were copied by hand. Manuscript technology also helps to explain why so many texts circulated in fragments, as described in Chapter Four. In a manuscript-based written culture, many people, including readers, can create books, and those books and their contents can be tailored to the needs of a particular owner. Manuscript technology is flexible. However, the fact of manuscript copying cannot, by itself, explain these features of the Ottoman book market. A review of the history of European manuscripts demonstrates that manuscript-based book production took very different forms over time.176 Seventeenth-century Istanbulite manuscript production bears strong similarities to that of late medieval European cities, but putting Istanbul’s book culture in its proper context will require a better understanding of what came before and after, and how that compared to other great cities of the Middle East.

175 ‘İzzetī purchased many of them, but a broker was able to obtain a couple of the books for the Leiden collection. Hagen, “Katib Çelebi and the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi,” 106; Sarıcaoğlu, “Katib Çelebi’nin Otobiografileri,” 299; Jan Just Witkam, “Precious Books and Moments of Friendship in Seventeenth- Century Istanbul,” Essays in Honour of Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, vol. 1, ed. Mustafa Kaçar and Zeynep Durukal (Istanbul: IRSICA, 2006).

176 Rouse and Rouse cite several different “epochs” in the history of European manuscripts, including Carolingian, twelfth-century Anglo-Norman, and thirteenth-century Parisian stationers. Rouse and Rouse, Authentic Witnesses, 450.

Chapter Two

Books and Their Owners

Partway through Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, the heroine, Tatiana, enters the empty library of Eugene Onegin. Tatiana has fallen deeply in love with this mysterious man even though she knows hardly anything about him. In an attempt to discern

Onegin’s character, she wanders the bookshelves, pulling down volumes and reading the notes in the margins of his books. Readers of the novel, who have had an opportunity to observe Onegin in other scenes, understand that her quest is not folly. This is a man who has been shaped by his books and has consciously tried to emulate the pretentions and poses of the characters in the volumes he reads. Because Onegin has been defined by his reading, Tatiana does indeed grasp something essential about him from her secret examination of his library. However, the need to approach Onegin through the medium of books underscores just how distant and unfathomable he is — both to Tatiana, and to us.

It is not possible to enter the private libraries of seventeenth-century Ottomans and leaf through their manuscripts. The law of inheritance largely prevented the preservation of intact collections, and, as detailed in Chapter One, new generations of bibliophiles stood ready to acquire books from estate sales.177 However, we can reconstruct many personal libraries using inventories compiled by probate court officials

177 Some of the libraries endowed by noted Ottoman book collectors for semi-public use are extant and, in fact, form the basis of Istanbul’s great manuscript collections. However, the endowed books do not fully reflect the libraries of their collectors, who seemed to follow an unspoken code of decorum in choosing what to put in their endowed libraries. For example, as detailed in Chapter One, the Grand Vizier Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s endowment was the largest that had been made in the Ottoman capital, but it does not include the many literary works he was known to have sponsored as a patron. His endowed collection was meant to serve a particular scholarly and political purpose, and does not fully reflect his own interests or his private collection.

after an individual’s death. Ottoman probate inventories typically open with an introduction stating the deceased’s name and place of residence, heirs, and the date upon which the record was made. This introduction is followed by a list of the deceased’s goods, each carrying a monetary value. When the individual was a bookowner, the probate court often included the titles of books he owned. In the absence of preserved private libraries, these lists offer us a glimpse into private book collections.178

This chapter, based largely on statistical, geographical, and network analysis of probate data, shows that bookowners were far more likely to be male and wealthy than not. I focus on the collections of a group who were the most significant bookowners, the efendis. As with the case of the fictional Onegin, whose books revealed his character because he was so thoroughly defined by them, the personal libraries of efendis are revelatory precisely because efendis were strongly associated with books. In fact, this might be the only Ottoman social group that can be profitably studied through inventories alone. By analyzing co-occurrences of books across private collections, using network analysis, I have identified a constellation of books that were commonly owned together.

This constellation of co-occurring books most likely reflects the texts that the owners found useful as they moved through their careers. My analysis suggests that the textual world of this key Ottoman social group centered not on religious sciences, but on practical jurisprudence.

178 But, in some cases, truly only a glimpse: as discussed in the Introduction, probate inventories might not include all of a person’s possessions, since some might be in a different city and inventoried separately. Furthermore, books could have been endowed prior to death. For these reasons, book lists in inventories might not reflect an individual’s library. Please see below for a discussion of how I address this shortcoming.

Overview of Private Collections

Most seventeenth-century Istanbulites did not own books. In the sample studied here — in which book-owners are probably overrepresented — just 16.5% of the individuals had books among their possessions. When we exclude Qurʾāns, the book ownership rate drops to 11.5%. No matter what margin of error one assumes between the surviving inventories and the historical reality, it is clear that book ownership was rare.179

Among bookowners, there was no “typical” collection. Even the size of collections varied dramatically. Although the median collection size was eight titles, a collection of that size was unusual.180 A tiny minority of book collectors accounted for the majority of books held in private libraries. In this sample, nine “mega-owners” stand out from the rest of the bookowners. These nine individuals owned a total of 1,387 titles, or 54% of all the (non-Qurʾān) books in the sample. (Furthermore, the top five owners account for over one-third of all books.) In other words, although there was no typical collection, chances are that any given manuscript would have been part of a large library.

Figure 2.1 shows the number of titles held by each bookowner in this sample.

Each column represents the size of a single private collection. The nine “mega-owner”

179 In his study of six ʿaskerī inheritance registers from Istanbul (1591–1669), including some I examined, Said Öztürk found a book ownership rate of 24%, significantly higher than the 16.5% rate I found for the sample studied here. Part of the difference can be attributed to the fact that Öztürk only examined probate records of ʿaskerī individuals, whereas this sample includes non-ʿaskerī individuals. (Conversely, Establet and Pascual, who only examined non-ʿaskerī records, found a 12% rate of book ownership in early eighteenth-century Damascus.) In any case, neither my sample nor Öztürk’s can be taken to represent the true rate of book ownership in the population. Please see the Introduction for a discussion of my methodology and statistical interpretation. Said Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait onyedinci asır İstanbul tereke defterleri, 174–184; Establet and Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 147.

180 These figures do not include Qurʾāns. Arguably, measures such as median and average are of limited value, since the sample comprises inventories taken from three different archival series, each in a slightly different way. I offer statistics such as this median to give a very approximate sense of scale of the libraries. However, it is unlikely that the median private collection in Istanbul was really eight titles. Given the fact that KA records are proportionally oversampled here, and these records yielded a higher rate of book ownership, it seems likely that the true median was lower.

collections tower over the rest of the collections. At the other end of the spectrum, in the long tail of book ownership, one-third (thirty-four, or 33%) of bookowners had three or fewer titles (not including the Qurʾān).181

Size of Private Collections in Sample (does not include Qurʾāns, or bookowners who only had Qurʾāns)

300"

9 “mega-owners” (100-270 titles) 250"

200"

150" 4 “bibliophiles” (50-90 titles)

100" 16 “enthusiasts” Number of titles in collection collection in of titles Number (20-45 titles) 39 “middlers” 34 “micro-libraries” 50" (4-15 titles) (3 or fewer titles)

0" Each column represents an individual collection, arranged according to the number of titles

Figure 2.1: Size of private collections in sample.

The probate data on these micro-libraries of fewer than three titles is limited. (See

Appendix Three for details on each of these thirty-four collections.) They include a

181 Although it is difficult to make direct comparisons with other studies, Orlin Sabev’s work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sofia and Colette Establet and Jean-Paul Pascual’s study of early eighteenth- century Damascus document a similar “long tail” phenomenon, with a small number of bookowners owning huge libraries and the majority owning very few books (especially when owners of the Qurʾān are taken into account). Sabev, “Private Book Collections,” 39; Establet and Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 148.

number of unidentified “Turkish books” (türkī kitāb) and miscellanies (mecmūʿa), as well as a few copies of the devotional book Muḥammediyye. At the end of this chapter, we will return to these and other unidentified books.

Between the extremes of the “mega-owners” and the “micro-libraries,” it might be possible to further segment the bookowners into “bibliophiles” with collections more than double the average, “enthusiasts,” whose collections were significant but not vast, and “middlers,” whose collections hugged the median of eight titles. Of course, this segmentation only takes into account the size of book collections, not their content or any of the data about the owners themselves.182

This segmentation ignores the very real possibility that some of these collections are incomplete and were actually larger, either because the probate inventory was not complete or because the owner had endowed many of his books to a library prior to his death. As a result, it must be taken as a first approximation. If one believes that the inventories usually omitted a large number of books that had been in a private collection, it would be quite distorted. If one believes that such omissions were either minor or infrequent, then it would accurately represent the range of collection sizes. Although there are anecdotes supporting both viewpoints, the scale of possible unrepresentativeness remains a matter of belief. In order to minimize the potential for distortion, the next section focuses on a binary characteristic — whether a person was a

182 Creating segments is more art than science. In practice, I was guided by places where there seemed to be a break in the graph, or where segments included the sample average or median. See Appendix Two for a summary of the characteristics of each of these segments.

bookowner, according to the inventory — rather than the total number of titles. Focusing on the binary characteristic makes distortions much less likely.183

Who Owned Books, and Who Did Not

In order to understand what kinds of people owned books, we must also examine those who did not own books. Without looking at both bookowners and non-bookowners, it is not possible to say how they differed, or what types of people were more likely to own books.184 Almost all previous studies of Ottoman book ownership have focused only on bookowners.185 This seemingly logical choice has limited the sound arguments that could be made on the basis of probate data.

183 For example, if someone who owned fifty titles had endowed forty-nine of them before death, his collection would falsely appear among the “micro-libraries” in this analysis. However, he would still be counted as a “bookowner.” One would have to believe that all of his books were endowed (or omitted from the inventory for other reasons) in order to find this variable flawed. 100% omissions did occur — Orlin Sabev has found a case in eighteenth-century Sofia, in which a müfti’s significant book endowment is separate from and unacknowledged in the probate record. On the other hand, Halil Sahillioğlu has described an inventory from Bursa, dated 1492, in which the individual’s book endowment is noted directly in the probate record. I have not seen anything similar in this sample. On a brief research trip to the Vakıflar Genel Mudurluğu Arşivi (Archive of the General Directorate of Endowments) in Ankara, I checked the names of many of the individuals in this sample in the electronic catalog and could not find a match. It has to be said that such a match would be unlikely; I would expect book endowments to have remained recorded simply in the endowment inscription in the book itself. I proceed here under the assumption that, while the omission of entire libraries undoubtedly occurred, it was so infrequent as to have no impact on the aggregate results – especially when a binary variable is considered (bookowner vs. non- bookowner). Sabev, “Private Book Collections,” 39, 47, and 70–74; Halil Sahillioğlu, “Ottoman Book Legacies,” Ottoman History and Civilisation Series 3 (1999), 190.

184 Moreover, as described in the Introduction, it is difficult to build a complete sample comprising bookowners without some selection bias. Books were conventionally listed first in Ottoman probate records, so researchers assembling a sample of bookowners might be tempted to read the first few items and skip the inventory if the first line does not contain books. However, in practice, many scribes listed books elsewhere in the inventory (i.e., not only in the first line), perhaps more often when the collection was small and inexpensive. As a result, studies which focus on bookowners and find them in the first line of the inventory are not only undercounting the number of bookowners, but are biased toward larger or more costly collections.

185 Exceptional studies which do consider non-bookowners include: Jean-Paul Pascual and Colette Establet, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 143–175, Klaus Liebe-Harkort, Beiträge zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Lage Bursas am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, and Sabev, “Private Book Collections.”

The sample studied here reveals three factors were significant in distinguishing bookowners from non-bookowners: gender, wealth, and the title of efendi.186 This leaves many factors that appear in probate inventories but do not have an association with book ownership. In fact, many conventional social categories according to which Ottoman history is written do a poor job of explaining who owns books, and which people own which books. In Chapter Three, I return to this problem and offer an alternative approach that begins with books rather than social groups.

Being a woman made the chances of owning a book other than the Qurʾān virtually nonexistent. Only 19 of the 320 women in the sample studied here owned books

(a rate of 6%), and just three women owned a book other than the Qurʾān.187 The sole female bookowner with a sizable collection (24 titles) had received her books from her

186 Please see Introduction for a discussion of the opportunities and challenges in using probate inventories, including which types of statistical inferences are possible. Appendix One describes my sampling method in detail.

187 Statistically, the difference of means of (non-Qurʾān) books owned between women (.08 titles per woman) and men (4.5 titles per man) is significant at the .001 level — a very robust finding. The difference of means in Qurʾān ownership and ownership of all books is similarly robust. In his study of six ʿaskerī inheritance registers from Istanbul (1591–1669), Said Öztürk found a higher rate of book ownership among women (12%, compared to the 6% I present here), with three female bookowners apparently owning non- Qurʾān books. The difference in book ownership rates can be attributed to the fact that Öztürk’s study included only ʿaskerī-status women. On my own, I was only able to identify two women in my sample who owned a book other than the Qurʾān (KA, d. 4, f. 99a (v101) and KA, d. 4, f. 41b (v43)). A third woman, Ḳamer Ḫātūn, was mentioned by Öztürk has owning book(s) worth 1000 aḳçe. I still have not been able to identify any books in her inventory, but there is one entry in her inventory worth 1000 aḳçe that is indecipherable to me and to others with whom I have consulted (KA, d. 6, f. 162b (v166)). Out of an abundance of caution, I have assumed that Öztürk accurately identified the book and have treated this person as a book owner in the analysis cited here. Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait onyedinci asır İstanbul tereke defterleri, 174–180 and 490–491. Studies on book ownership in late fifteenth-century Bursa, early- eighteenth-century Damascus, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sofia have found similarly low rates of book ownership among women. Sahillioğlu, “Ottoman Book Legacies,” 190; Establet and Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 147; Sabev, “Private Book Collections,” 36. As an aside, men and women also differed significantly in the size of their estates. Men had an average gross estate of 174,095 aḳçe, while women’s average gross estate was 42,386 aḳçe; this difference in means is significant at the .001 level. The difference in average net estate levels (after fees and debts were subtracted) is also statistically significant. See Chapter One for a discussion of the value of an aḳçe.

late husband’s estate (he had been a palace imam), further underscoring the starkly gendered nature of book ownership.188

In addition to being male, being rich made a person much more likely to own a book. The top quartile of individuals by wealth had the highest rate of book ownership, exceeding 25%. (See Figure 2.2.) Wealth mattered. But below the top quartile, book ownership dropped off sharply, and wealth made less of a difference. Because most individuals in Istanbul did not own books, and most of the bookowners were clustered at the top end of the wealth distribution, being of upper-middle or lower-middle means did not determine whether a person was a bookowner. As a result, the correlation between wealth and book ownership was not strong.189

188 KA, d. 4, f. 41b (v43). Female book endowers also seem to have been connected to “efendis.” For example, the widow of şeyḫülislām and historian Hoca Saadettin Efendi (d. 1599) endowed many books, and the endowment inscription noted explicitly that they had come from her husband’s collection: Nimet Bayraktar, “Tanınmamış Bazı Kütüphane Koleksiyonları,” Journal of Turkish Studies 27 (2003): 212.

189 Ali İhsan Karataş observed qualitatively that wealth did not seem to be correlated with book ownership in sixteenth-century Bursa. Ali İhsan Karataş, “Tereke Kayıtlarına Göre XVI. Yüzyılda Bursa’da İnsan- Kitap İlişkisi,” 323. Establet and Pascual make a similar qualitative observation about early eighteenth- century Damascus. Establet and Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 150. Please note, however, that the findings presented here supersede those published in Meredith Quinn, “On yedinci yüzyıl İstanbul’da ucuza okumalar,” in Eski Metinlere Yeni Bağlamlar: Osmanlı Türkçesi Metin Çalışmaları, ed. Hatice Aynur et al. (Istanbul: Turkuaz Yayınevi, 2015), 146–69. In that article and in several conference presentations, I erroneously stated that book ownership was evenly distributed across the wealth quartiles. These earlier incorrect results are due to a mistake in the data set I used to do the calculations.

50.0% 45.0% 40.0% 35.0% 30.0% 25.0% 20.0% 15.0% 10.0% 5.0% 0.0% Bottom quartile Second quartile Third quartile Top quartile

Figure 2.2: Rate of book ownership by quartile (based on gross wealth).190

Bookowners and non-bookowners did not differ in where they lived in the city.

Rather than cluster into “bookish” enclaves, bookowners’ homes were mostly distributed throughout the city in much the same way that non-bookowners homes were scattered.

(See Figures 2.3 and 2.4.)

190 A person is counted as a bookowner if he or she owns at least one book, including the Qurʾān. Excluding the Qurʾān from analysis yields similarly even results, as does basing the analysis on net rather than gross wealth.

Figure 2.3: Istanbul neighborhoods represented in probate inventories.191

191 Great care should be taken when interpreting the “blank spaces” on this map. The fact that there are no inventories from those areas does not mean that no one was living there; this might instead reflect uneven survival of the archival records themselves. The maps are best used together to answer a comparative question: given the distribution in the sample overall, does the distribution of bookowners differ in meaningful ways? This map represents data from 388 inventories. I excluded not only those inventories from Galata, but also those from neighborhoods whose location I could not ascertain (or, in some cases, where I could not distinguish between two neighborhoods with the same name). Although I had originally intended to extend the analysis to Galata, the lack of significant clustering in Istanbul proper led me to put aside this line of inquiry. It is the case that rates of book ownership are lower in Galata (6% for non-Qurʾān books in Galata vs. 13% in Istanbul proper). However, this difference reflects an important confounding variable: efendis were much more likely to live in Istanbul proper, and, as discussed below, they were also much more likely to own books.

Figure 2.4: Geographic distribution of bookowners.192

Most neighborhood quarters with any bookowners at all had only one bookowner from this sample. The prominent exception to this rule is the Hoca Üveys neighborhood, in Istanbul’s Fatih district, in which resided four of the sample’s bookowners. This cluster of private collections mirrors the district’s concentration of semi-public libraries affiliated with medreses and mosques, a concentration that attracted scholars to the neighborhood and contributed to creating the only truly “bookish” place that I could identify.

192 The directional distribution of bookowners differs slightly from that of the sample overall, since there are very few bookowners (in this sample) in the western part of the city. However, the bookowners’ neighborhoods are still quite diffuse along an axis running from the north-west to the south-east.

Among the other variables that can be discerned from probate inventories, the factor besides wealth and gender that had the greatest impact on book ownership was whether or not the individual carried the title of efendi. This honorific is customarily associated with people who have completed a substantial education, either in a medrese

(Ar. madrasah; “college”) or with private tutors. The social group known collectively as the ‘ulemā (Ar. ‘ulamā (pl.), ʿālim (sing.); “the learned”; hereafter, “ulema”) bore the title efendi; in some cases, the title was also used for scribes in government service.193 Books reached a totemic, even tautological, status among efendis, since a full 83% of people carrying that title owned at least one book.194 Images of ulema created at the time depict their close association with books. So-called costume albums, which offered depictions of various individuals outfitted with stereotypical clothing and accessories, invariably depicted efendis with books.

Ḥasan Beyzāde, a historian who wrote in the early seventeenth century, underscored the ulema’s affinity with books in his account of a 1601 uprising in Istanbul.

The soldiers who led the uprising wanted the chief military judges and the mufti to approve of a new grand vizier. Directing a message to these prominent efendis, the soldiers threatened, “If you don’t immediately have the royal seal taken and given to

193 In a dictionary of Ottoman terms and expressions, Pakalin explains that “efendi” is a title for those who know how to read and write (“Okuyup yazması olanlara unvan olarak verilen bir tâbirdir.”) Based his account of the historical development of the word, however, it appears that the title was associated more with formal education than with technical literacy. The title was used in governmental documents (such as the court records from which the probate inventories come), but it was not officially conferred. A mid- seventeenth-century interpreter in the Polish-Lithuanian embassy in Istanbul defined efendi as “lord” or “master” (“Dominus, Magister, Herus”) without noting any connotation with education. Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü (Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1983), 1:503–4; Meninski, Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium Turcicae-Arabicae-Persicae, 1: 324. See also Orhan F. Köprülü, “Efendi,” TDVİA, 10:455–56, and Bernard Lewis, “Efendi,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (accessed April 22, 2015).

194 This statistic reflects those who own a book other than a Qurʾān.

Ḥasan Paşa, we will certainly burn all of your books and will spill the blood of your associates.”195 Next to bloodshed, the most salient threat these soldiers could level against the efendis was to burn the belongings that most defined them: their books.196

The efendis and their books dominate any numerical analysis of books held in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Not only were the top fourteen book collections in this sample all held by efendis, but those fourteen largest collectors also account for more than two-thirds of the approximately 2,500 titles. However, most bookowners carried other titles, or no titles at all (Figure 2.5). Individuals with the title of ağa or çelebi also make up a considerable portion of bookowners. (Ağa suggests a significant position in the military or palace administration, and çelebi was a respectful title recognizing a certain nobility not attained through formal education or position.197) However, the majority of ağas and çelebis did not own books.198 These titles are not as predictive of book ownership as is efendi. Analysis of the specific titles owned by ağas and çelebis also reveals very few patterns. Beyond the efendis, defining what types of people own

195 “Müfti ve Kādīʿaskerler kapularına varup, eger, muʿaccelen, mühr-i hümâyûnı çıkardup, Hasan Paşa'ya virdürmezsenüz, cümlenüzi kitâblarunuzla bu gice iḥrâk ve baʿz-ı mukarreblerün demlerini ihrâk mukarrerdür’ diyü.” Variant readings of the passage mention of the efendis’ homes as well their books:“hānelerünüzi kütüb-i nefīsenüzle…” and “cümlenüzi hāne ve kitāblarunuzla...” Ahmet Hasan Beyzade, Hasan Bey-Zâde Târîhi, ed. Şevki Nezihi Aykut (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2004), 744–45.

196 Taşköprüzāde writes of a similar threat, this time made by the ulema themselves, in the fifteenth century. According to the story, the ulema were angry with Mehmed II for his arrest of Sinan Paşa. They demanded that Sinan Paşa be released. Otherwise, they threatened, they would leave the Ottoman realms en masse, first burning their books: Ṭaşköprüzāde, Al-shaḳāʾiḳ al-nuʿmāniyya, ed. Ahmed Subhi Furat, 175. I learned of this anecdote from Sami Arslan’s article in preparation, “Sessiz Şahitleri: Molla Lütfî’nin Müstensihleri,” which he kindly shared with me.

197 Cemal Kafadar, drawing on Meninski, has suggested that the English term “gentleman” offers a first approximation for çelebi. Comment at the Mahindra Humanities Seminar on the History of the Book (November 20, 2013). See also Pakalin, 1:21–22 and 1:342–45, and TDVİA 1:451–52 and 8:259.

198 Approximately 36% of ağas and 21% of çelebis were bookowners (of books other than the Qurʾān).

which books requires a creative approach drawing on many kinds of evidence; this is the subject of Chapter Three.

Beg Çavuş Beşe 5% 2% 5%

Çelebi Efendi 14% 38%

Ağa 17% Other title or no title 20%

Figure 2.5: Bookowners by title.199

As noted in the Introduction, the probate inventories studied here did not routinely specify the deceased individual’s occupation. Consequently, personal titles such as efendi, ağa, and çelebi constitute the best clues as to which sort of social group the individual belonged. One should be cautious about relying too heavily on personal titles, however. At least one scholar has found evidence that an individual might be characterized by different titles depending on the immediate context.200 More

199 Includes only owners of books other than (or in addition to) the Qurʾān. Said Öztürk found a very similar distribution of titles among the bookowners he found in askeri probate records between 1591 and 1669: 33% of the bookowners he found carried the title of efendi, while 13% had the title of ağa and 11% had the title of çelebi. Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait onyedinci asır İstanbul tereke defterleri, 177.

200 Güçlü Tülüveli, “Honorific Titles in Ottoman Parlance: A Reevaluation,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 11, no. 1–2 (2005), 20–22.

importantly, the probate inventories themselves demonstrate that each “group” could actually be quite heterogeneous. To take the example of efendis, who are emphasized in this chapter, the wealth of individuals bearing this title ranged from the fantastically rich to far below average. They could include both the powerful men depicted in costume albums and the lowly neighborhood prayer leaders.201 Although the people who owned the largest collections, and who spent the greatest portion of their wealth on their collections, were all efendis, most efendis had smaller collections.

The Intellectual World of Ulema as Seen Through Their Books

It can hardly be said that the ulema are a neglected social category in Islamic historiography. This was a particularly literate group, so they feature prominently in written sources from all periods of Islamic history. In early modern Ottoman historiography, too, the ulema have been a focus of attention, particularly their relationship with the state.202 Beginning in the fifteenth century and with increasing emphasis in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultans and their agents regularized both

201 For a discussion of the scholarly “subhierarchy,” see Madeline C. Zilfi, “The Ottoman Ulema 1703– 1839 and the Route to Great Mollaship” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1976), 82–83 and Hans Georg Majer, “Ulema und ‘kleinere Religionsdiener’ in einem Defter der Jahre vor 1683,” in Osmanistische Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, in Memoriam Vanco Boskov, ed. Hans Georg Majer (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), passim. A study of imams (prayer leaders) by Kemal Beydilli focusing on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries establishes how diverse even this “group” could be, to the point that some imams were not even able to read and write. Kemal Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde Imamlar ve Bir Imamın Günlüğü, Tatav Yayınları, no. 5 (Istanbul: Tarih ve Tabiat Vakfı, 2001), 21, and passim. An article on imams in seventeenth-century Bursa demonstrates that virtually all of the city’s imams carried the title of “efendi” (in contrast, almost all of the imams in surrounding villages carried the title of “ḥalīfe.” Osman Çetin, “1660’da Bursa camilerinde görev yapan İmamlar,” Uludağ Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 6 (1994), 38-40. I thank Aslıhan Gürbüzel for bringing Çetin’s article to my attention. On the role of preachers in seventeenth-century Istanbul, see Aslıhan Gürbüzel, “Teachers of the Public, Advisors to the Sultan: Preachers and the Rise of a Political Public Sphere in Early Modern Istanbul (1600-1675)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2016).

202 For an English-language overview of Ottoman ulema, see Madeline C. Zilfi, “The Ottoman Ulema,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 207–225.

the medreses where ulema trained and the judicial and scholarly career paths to which medrese graduates might aspire. Medreses were ranked in a hierarchy, with each rung designated by the daily wage of its professors (e.g., “a 40-aḳçe medrese” or a “20-aḳçe medrese”); the most prominent colleges were located in Istanbul, and, with some exceptions, those who reached the highest positions within the scholarly and judicial career paths had come through Istanbul medreses both as students and, often, as professors.203 It is not clear at what stage on this path someone came to be considered an

“efendi” or an “ʿālim,” but the title (never formally conferred, so far as we know) had a strong association with medrese education or its equivalent.

“Ulema” was a social category recognized and used by contemporaries. Ottoman chronicles, often written by efendis, are sprinkled with references to “ʿulemā efendis,” the label being sufficient to indicate the type of person about whom the author was writing.204 The leading Ottoman ulema also enjoyed (as had their counterparts in earlier

Islamic centuries) biographical dictionaries focused on themselves. The Ottoman tradition of ulema biographical dictionaries began in the mid-sixteenth century with

Ṭaşköprüzāde’s Al-Shaḳāʾiḳ al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamā’al-dawlat al-ʿuthmāniyya (The red peonies among the ulema of the Ottoman state), which, to judge by the ownership data in this probate sample, reached an audience made up primarily of ulema.205

203 The great medreses of Arabic-speaking lands retained their prestige, and their graduates could achieve powerful local positions. Even Cairo and Damascus, however, had chief judges appointed by Istanbul who had typically trained in the imperial capital.

204 For example, see Naʿīmā Muşṭafā Efendi, Tārih-i Naʿīmā, 4:1635; and ʿAbdurraḥman ʿAbdī Paşa, Vekayi’-name: Osmanlı tarihi 1648–1682; Tahlil ve metin tenkidi, ed. Fahri Çetin Derin (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2008), 47.

205 Four copies were identified in the probate sample, all of which were owned by individuals carrying the title of “efendi”: ʿAbdullah Efendi, d. 1071 (KA d. 5, f. 82b); es-seyyid Aḥmed Efendi bin es-seyyid Ṭāhir Çelebi, d. 1059 (KA d. 4, f. 47b); Aḥmed Efendi bin ʿAbdülkerīm, d. 1078 (KA d. 6, f. 116b); and

Ṭaşköprüzāde’s biographical dictionary received numerous sequels in following centuries. The sequel most relevant to the time period studied here was written by Şeyḫī

Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1731–32 / H. 1144).206 As the title “efendi” indicates, Şeyḫī was himself a member of the ulema. In his biographical dictionary, he introduced some innovations by including sections on poets and listing occupants of prominent positions.

However, the bulk of his work comprised more than one thousand biographical notices that traced the career progression from one post to another of individual ʿālims, one efendi after another.207

Şeyḫī’s short biography of Nāzīkīzāde Muṣṭafā Efendi, whose probate record appears in the sample discussed above, follows the typical format. After noting that he has already presented the biography of Nāzīkīzāde’s father, a poet, Şeyḫī describes the series of teaching positions held by Nāzīkīzāde, usually including the previous and subsequent occupants of each position:

In order to acquire knowledge and understanding, he tucked in his skirts [to prepare for work] in superior service. Sure-footed in the area of spiritual profit, he was known as Nāzīkīzāde Efendi. He became a mülāzim [eligible for official appointment] through the help of nobly emanating ʿİṣmetī Meḥmed Efendi. By being persistent in the lower-ranking medreses, he arrived at a 40-aḳçe medrese. While he was on leave from there, he was given the Ḫavāṣ Maḥmūd Paşa Medrese in place of Ḳüçük Bolulu Muṣṭafā Efendi [i.e., he took the latter’s position] in Safer of 1068 [Nov./Dec. 1657]. In Şaʿbān of the same year, when he was put on leave, he was given Bosnavī ʿAli Efendi [Medrese]. In Muharrem of

ʿAbdurraḥman Efendi bin Ḥasan Efendi, d. 1078 (KA d. 6, f. 157a). These collectors each owned between 78–180 books, which puts their collections in the top ten collections of the sample.

206 Şeyḫī’s contemporary ʿUşşāḳīzāde İbrāhīm Efendi (d. 1724 / H. 1136) also wrote a biographical dictionary about seventeenth-century Ottoman ulema. Şeyḫī criticized Uşşāḳīzāde’s work even as he drew heavily upon it (often copying entire entries) for his own work. Şeyḫī’s dictionary is almost twice as long as that by ʿUşşāḳīzāde, and was considered by contemporaries and subsequent scholars to be more detailed and complete. For a discussion of the relative merits of the two biographers, see Ali Uğur, The Ottoman ʿUlemā in the mid-17th Century, xiii–xxi.

207 Şeyḫī Meḥmed Efendi, Veḳāiʾü’l-fużalāʾ. Facsimile of Beyazid Library, Veliüddin Efendi 2361, ed. Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1989).

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‘69, he was returned to the aforementioned medrese for a second time in place of Ḫāfiʿ. In Ramażān of ‘70, upon Ḥabīb Efendi’s vacancy, he was made content with the Papasoğlu Medrese. Then he was disappointed by being made to leave in Şaʿbān of ‘71. Tatar Aḥmed Efendi was honored by the gift of that position [in his place].208

Şeyḫī concludes by giving Nāzīkīzāde’s death date (1668 / H. 1078) and burial place, and by noting that he “was a pleasant conversationalist and a skilled writer” (ḫoş soḥbet münşi-i pur-maʿrifet idi).209 The biographical notice ends with a couplet penned by

Nāzīkīzāde. In format and content, the biography of Nāzīkīzāde differs little from the biographies of efendis that precede and follow it. In other words, Şeyḫī’s book presents a series of detailed curricula vitae. The overall impression is that of a vast competitive field densely populated by efendis, each meticulously named and dated as they move from one position to the next. No other Ottoman social group was as thoroughly documented.

The Ottoman ulema have received scholarly attention not only because they left many records, but also because they were genuinely influential. Recent historiography has focused on the most powerful of these efendis, whom Baki Tezcan has labeled “the

208 “Taḥṣīl-i ʿilm ve ʿirfān içün ḫiẕmet-i efāżılda dāman dermiyān eyleyüp, maḳām-i istifāżada s̱ābıt-i ḳadem ve Nāzīkīzāde Efendi dimekle maʿalūm olmuşidi. Ṣudūr-i kerāmdan ʿİṣmetī Meḥmed Efendi ḫidmetlerinden mülāzim ve medāris-i resmiyyede medāriseye? müdāvim olaraḳ 40 aḳçe medreseye mevṣūl ve andan daḫi maʿazūl iken biñ altmış sekiz ṣaferinde Ḳüçük Bolulu Muṣṭafā Efendi yerine Ḫavāṣ Maḥmūd Paşa medresesi virilmiş idi. Sene-yi meẕkūre şaʿbānında ʿazl virilirinde Bosnavī ʿAli Efendi vaṣıl olundu. Altmış ṭoḳuz muharreminde Ḫāfiʿ yerine s̱ān i y en medrese-yi merḳūmeye iʿāde olunub, yetmiş ramażānında Ḥabīb Efendi maḥlūlından Papasoğlu medresesilye bekām olmuşiken yetmiş bir şaʿbānındaʿazılle telḫkām olup yerlerile Tatar Aḥmed Efendi maẓhar-i ikrām oldu.” Şeyḫī Meḥmed Efendi, Veḳāiʿü’l-fużalāʾ, 343–4. Nāzīkīzāde’s probate inventory can be found in KA d. 6, f. 103a–b (v106-107). The probate inventory reveals that Nāzīkīzāde was extremely wealthy, with a net estate of just over a million aḳçe. He owned over 140 titles, making him a “mega-owner.” He was clearly very active in finance (another fact not mentioned in his biographical notice), since his probate inventory contains a very high number of substantial loans to other people.

209 Şeyḫī Meḥmed Efendi, Veḳāiʿü’l-fużalāʾ, 344. Şeyḫī was born in 1668 / H. 1078, the year in which Nāzīkīzāde died, so he would not have known Nāzīkīzāde personally, but both Şeyḫī and his father taught at Istanbul’s Emīr Buḫārī sufi lodge, where Nāzīkīzāde was buried. See Fındıḳlılı ʿİsmet Efendi’s biographical notice on Şeyḫī, transliterated by Ali Uğur (Uğur, The Ottoman ʿUlemā, xxiii). For a discussion of Şeyḫī’s sources, see the introduction by Özcan to his facsimile edition: Veḳāiʿü’l-fużalāʾ, x– xi.

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Lords of the Law” (mevālī). These powerful efendis became a nearly hereditary class, with their sons enjoying opportunities to skip some steps on the theoretically well-defined and hierarchical career path.210 “Tall” ʿAbdullah Efendi, another ʿālim who appears both in Şeyḫī’s biographical dictionary and in the probate sample here, serves as a prime example of one of these powerful men.211 The list of his possessions indicates that he cut a striking figure, and not just because of his tall stature: he owned one purple broadcloth cloak with sable collar worth an astonishing 27,000 aḳçe (in a sample where the average net estate was approximately 94,000 aḳçe) plus two more cloaks in green which were together worth more than 26,000 aḳçe. His accessories included a silver sword and, befitting a member of the scholarly class, a pen case. Married to the daughter of

Āvārezāde Muṣṭafā Efendi, a powerful efendi, Tall ʿAbdullah rose to become the judge of

Aleppo and then Damascus. Şeyḫī wrote that Tall ʿAbdullah was “known for his attachment to the science of positive law.”212 Indeed, Tall ʿAbdullah’s library of 116 books featured at least two dozen titles in this genre. Şeyḫī also noted that Tall ʿAbdullah wrote a collection of poetry (dīvān); five dīvāns were found among his possessions at his death.

Though Tall ʿAbdullah’s children were underage when he died, both sons already sported the gentlemanly title of çelebi, and the probate inventory identifies his surviving wife with multiple honorifics: “faḫrü’l-muḫadderāt ʿAfīfe Ḫātūn ibneti’l-merḥūm

Muṣṭafā Efendi” (“pride of the veiled ones, Lady ʿAfīfe, daughter of the late Muṣṭafā

210 Baki Tezcan, “The Ottoman Mevali as ‘Lords of the Law,’” Journal of Islamic Studies 20, no. 3 (September 2009): 383–407; Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988), passim.

211 Şeyḫī Meḥmed Efendi, Veḳāiʿu’l-fużalāʾ, 340 and KA d. 6, f. 135a–135b (v138–39).

212 “Mevlānā-yı merḳūm ʿilm-i furūʿa intisāb ile maʿlūm [idi].”

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Efendi”). Tall ʿAbdullah exemplifies the wealthy, well-connected “Lords of the Law” who, as a class, constituted a formidable political force. However, even many of the less prominent ulema exercised real power. Medrese-trained efendis served as the judges who, posted throughout the empire, adjudicated disputes, notarized transactions, and effectively administered the empire on a local level.

Despite the historiographical attention the ulema have received, details of the education that defined this group have remained elusive. Consider the case of Nāzīkīzāde, the professor whose biographical notice by Şeyḫī is quoted above. The biography begins just ten years before Nāzīkīzāde’s death, when he receives an appointment from a 40- aḳçe medrese to the Ḫavāṣ Maḥmūd Paşa Medrese. Despite the rich detail offered for appointments and transfers, predecessors and successors, we do not learn much about

Nāzīkīzāde’s life prior to this appointment. We do not know about his childhood, education, or early career. For some ‘ālims, Şeyḫī indicates their place of origin, but his silence on their years before prominence is typical.213

Although education made someone an ʿālim, the content of an ʿālim’s education is only known in broad terms. Early education took place at home and/or in a primary school (mekteb) affiliated with a local mosque. Reading and memorization of the Qurʾān were fundamental. Secondary education might entail studying with private tutors

(sometimes relatives). At some point, one probably studied within a medrese. But what, precisely, was the substance of that education?

In order to approximate the curriculum of the medreses, scholars have relied on auto-bibliographical accounts given by a few key Ottoman scholars, on poems listing the

213 For a graphical summary of the places of origin of the ulema profiled by Şeyḫī, see Denise Klein, Die osmanischen Ulema des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Schwarz, 2007), 211.

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subjects that students ought to study, and on a unique imperial decree from 1565 specifying thirty-nine books that were to be taught in the imperial colleges.214 Perhaps the most widely used evidence — if difficult to isolate to a particular period — has been impressionistic accounts of which books have survived in significant numbers of copies and which received multiple commentaries and summaries by Ottoman scholars.215

Each of these approaches to approximating the medrese curriculum has its drawbacks. Auto-bibliographical accounts, such as the one by the sixteenth-century

214 Shahab Ahmed and Nenad Filipovic, “The Sultan’s Syllabus: A Curriculum for the Ottoman Imperial Medreses Prescribed in a Fermān of Qānūnī I Süleymān, Dated 973 (1565),” Studia Islamica no. 98/99 (January 1, 2004): 183–218; Cevad İzgi, Osmanlı medreselerinde ilim (Istanbul: İz, 1997), 67–107; Ömer Özyılmaz, Osmanlı Medreselerinin Eğitim Programları (Ankara: T. C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 2002); Câhid Baltacı, XV–XVI. Asırlarda Osmanlı Medreseleri (Istanbul: Marmara Üniversitesi İlâhiyat Fakültesi Vakfı Yayınları, 2005); İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı devletinin ilmiye teşkilâtı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1965), 11–31 and 39–43. I do not discuss in detail here the medrese curriculum outlined by historian Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (d. 1600) in his Künhü’l-aḫbār (see Mustafa bin Ahmet Âli, Künhü’l-aḫbār: c. II, Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed devri, 1451–1481, ed. M. Hüdai Şentürk (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2003), 72– 73). ʿĀlī names eleven books that, he says, Sultan Meḥmed II mandated for study at various levels of the medrese system. ʿĀlī glosses over the introductory texts (“muḫtaṣarāt”) which precede the study of the books he does specify. Uzunçarşılı adopts ʿĀlī’s categories and articulated curriculum wholesale; İzgi gives much credence to ʿĀlī as well. However, ʿĀlī’s claim to be describing a law established by Meḥmed II is suspect (see Baki Tezcan, “The ‘Kânûnnâme of Meḥmed II:’ A Different Perspective,” in The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation, ed. Kemal Çiçek, vol. 3 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), 658; on the question of Meḥmed II’s endowment deed, see Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, “The Initial Stage of the Historiography of Ottoman Medreses (1916–1965): The Era of Discovery and Construction,” Archivum Ottomanicum 18 (2000), 74–75). In the best case, we could assume that ʿĀlī offers an accurate portrait of books typically read in medreses during his lifetime, in the late sixteenth century (a topic on which he would have been quite expert). The probate inventory data studied here indicate that most of these books were still widely owned in the mid-seventeenth century (and probably later as well), and they could be considered complementary to the handbooks discussed toward the end of this chapter.

215 TDVİA, for example, often defines the importance of a title by how many surviving copies can be found, or how many commentaries were written about it. Contemporaries also demonstrated a text’s importance with reference to the number of commentaries that had been written upon it. For example, Kātib Çelebi organized Kashf al-ẓunūn so that each text was immediately followed by all of its commentaries, and Kevāḳıb-ı sebʿa pointedly mentions the number of commentaries several texts have received in order to establish their prominence (for one example among many, see the discussion of Ibn Mālik, whose book Alfiyyah is said to have “seventy-five commentaries and supercommentaries” (yetmiş beş şerḥ ve taʿlīkātı var, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément turc 196, f. 57b). Another promising, but scattered, source for the medrese curriculum (or its equivalent) is the permission notes (Tr. icāzetler) that teachers gave their students, often inscribed into books, certifying that the student was ready to teach the work itself. This source is probably most applicable and useful for the very highest levels of ulema education, and most of the notes date from the nineteenth century. Hüseyin Atay, Osmanlılarda yüksek din eğitimi: Medrese programları, icazetnâmeler ıslahat hareketleri (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1983), 103n39.

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scholar Ṭaşköprüzāde, tend to emphasize the exceptional books and teachers with whom the individual studied.216 They are precious sources for understanding the intellectual background of a particular scholar, but less helpful for grasping the formation of the ulema as a group. Poems listing the books that a student ought to study usually advocate for an impossibly ambitious reading list. For example, İṣḥāḳ bin Ḥasan et-Ṭoḳadī (d.

1689) wrote an advice poem to his son describing thirty-three different realms of knowledge one should study.217 A 1565 decree, provocatively called the “sultan’s syllabus” by the two scholars who have explicated it, focuses on the highest level of medrese training. As they note, it is not clear to what extent the decree was implemented.218 Manuscript survivals and frequency of commentaries seem like promising approaches to assessing the popularity of books in the curriculum. However, to date, accounts of survivals and commentaries have remained impressionistic and ahistorical, extrapolating from the better-documented late-Ottoman medrese curriculum

(or even the texts taught in religious colleges today) and tending to lump together all manuscript copies from many centuries of Ottoman history.219

216 Ṭaşköprüzāde, Al-shaḳāʾiḳ al-nuʿmāniyya, ed. Ahmed Subhi Furat, 553–60; Aḥmed bin Muṣṭafā Ṭaşköprüzāde, Eş-Şeḳāʾiḳu’n-nuʿmāniyye, trans. Meḥmed Mecdī Efendi (Istanbul, 1269 [1852]), 524–25. For one of several articles which use Kātib Çelebi’s autobiographical statements to reconstruct a curriculum, see Salim Aydüz, “Kâtip Çelebi’nin Osmanlı medreseleri müfredatı ile ilgili tespitleri ve önerileri üzerine bir değerlendirme,” in Doğumunun 400. Yıl Dönümünde Kâtip Çelebi, ed. Bekir Karlığa and Mustafa Kaçar (Ankara: T. C. Kültür ve Türizm Bakanlığı, 2009), 309–21.

217 İzgi, Osmanlı medreselerinde ilim, 77–82. Similarly, the curriculum outlined in the 1741 treatise Kevākib-i sebʿa (Seven stars) — written by an anonymous author for the French ambassador at the behest of an Ottoman official — depicts a regimented sequence approximately seventy books in over ten fields. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément turc 196, f. 55a–61b; for a simplified translation into modern Turkish, see İzgi, Osmanlı medreselerinde ilim, 70–75.)

218 Ahmed and Filipovic, “Sultan’s Syllabus,” 217.

219 One desideratum for Ottoman book history is a methodical way to compare the prevalence of titles on the basis of surviving texts from a given century. There are many factors to consider, including the uneven survival rates of various formats and genres.

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Most strikingly, the results of these various approaches diverge. This divergence may be expected given the variety of sources in question, ranging from imperial decrees to biographical notices. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to assume that students followed a strictly standardized curriculum. We should expect to see diversity of texts, especially on the higher levels of the medrese and private study.220 Still, the fact that the ulema were, as a group, defined by their learning implies a common set of fundamental knowledge and assumptions. The Ottoman system of shuffling professors among medreses, and judges from one locale to another, required a certain basic level of consistency in training.

Private collections documented in probate inventories offer another view into a medrese graduate’s textual world. At first glance, these collections exhibit significant diversity. Efendis’ libraries, on the whole, do not resemble one another. Many titles are held in only one or two copies across the sample of over 2,500 titles. At the same time, the most frequently held books among the estates studied in this sample clearly point to medreses, with titles in jurisprudence, Qurʾānic commentary, and grammar all appearing in the “top ten” list (see Appendix Four). As noted above, the predominance of efendis among bookowners means that their books top the charts. However, “top ten” lists do not illuminate how these books related to each other.

220 For a discussion of the non-standardized nature of Ottoman medrese education, see Şükran Fazlıoğlu, “Nebī Efendi-Zade’nin ‘Kaṣīde fī el-kutub el-meşhūre fī el-ʿulūm’una göre bir medrese talebesinin ders ve kitab haritası,” Kutadgubilig: Felsefe-Bilim Araştırmaları 3 (2003): 213. I leave aside here the question of how a canon was formed and transformed. On this, see Helen Pfeifer, “Encounter After The Conquest,” 229–30; and Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Ḥanafī School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Burak argues that jurisprudential texts were authorized in a formal process by ranking members of the ulema. Separately, he analyzed the citations within two jurists' fatwa collections to identify which texts were most important to them.

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Treating the collections as a network identifies not only which books were frequently owned but also which books were frequently owned together. Network analysis is more commonly applied to people to analyze the relationships in a social network.221 However, it can be applied to any network. Figure 2.6 illustrates co- occurrences of books in private collections. It includes only those titles that occurred together in at least five libraries. Each dot, or node, represents a title. 222 When two titles occur in the same private collection, they are connected by a line; heavier lines indicate that the two titles appear together in several libraries. The thickest lines connect books that co-occur in many libraries and therefore have an empirical affinity.

221 In an early and influential example, John Padgett applied social network analysis to the prominent families of fifteenth-century Florence to explain the rise of the Medici in terms of their social position. John Padgett and Christopher Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (May 1993): 1259–1319.

222 Collections which had no books other than Qurʾān(s) were excluded here. Please see the Introduction for a discussion of the distinctiveness of the Qurʾān.

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Law ﺣﺎﺷﻴﻪ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺗﻔﺴﻴﺮ ﺑﻴﻀﺎوي Koranic Commentary ﺣﺎﺷﻴﻪ ﻋﺎى اﳌﻄﻮل ﻗﺼﻴﺪه اﻟﺒﺮده< Rhetoric اﻧﻮار اﻟﺘﻨﺰﻳﻞ<

Lexicography اﳌﻄﻮل ﺗﻮﺿﻴﺢ< Panegyric to Prophet درر ﻏﺮر ﻣﺨﺘﺎر اﻟﺼﺤﺎح Muḫtār all-ṣiḥāḥ Grammar ﺗﻠﻮﻳﺢ The Chosen of The“) Correct Ones”) [Lexicography]

اﻟﻔﻮاﻋﺪ اﻟﻀﻴﺎﺋﻴﻪ< اﺧﺘﺮي Al-fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya (“Luminous benefits”) Aḫterī [Grammar] (a dictionary)

ﺷﺮح اﻟﻮﻗﺎﻳﻪ< ﺷﺮح ﻣﻨﺎر اﻻﻧﻮار Sharḥ al-wiqāyah Sharḥ menār al-anwār ﻣﻠﺘﻘﻰ< Commentary on The“) Protection”) Multaqā “Commentary on The Beacon of [Jurisprudence] (“Meeting place”) Light” [Jurisprudence] [Jurisprudence]

Figure 2.6: Titles that co-occur most often in private collections (in the sample studied here).

The constellation of books that emerges from network analysis probably represents the lowest common denominator of an efendi library. Although just a fraction of the total number of books that an efendi would have studied, the constellation illuminates precisely those books that were so common as not to be worth mentioning in most accounts of ulema training. One sign that we are dealing with fundamentals is the fact that the constellation includes two dictionaries, one in Arabic-Turkish and a simplified and selected version of an Arabic-language dictionary.223

223 These are Aḫterī and Muḥtār al-Ṣiḥāḥ.

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Commentaries (Tr. şerḥ, Ar. sharḥ) feature prominently on both the list of most frequently owned books and in the diagram of co-occurring books. Although commentaries were once taken by historians as signs of backward scholasticism, more recent accounts have noted the ways in which successive generations of scholars used commentaries and epitomes to update classic texts for later audiences.224 A commentary typically included the original text interspersed with the later clarifications and summaries; occasionally, the various layers of commentaries might even be represented graphically on the page (see, for example, Figure 2.7). Ownership data from probate inventories reflect the fact that Ottoman ulema first read the classics through the vehicle of commentaries. Aside from two dictionaries and a legal handbook, all of the frequently co-occurring books are commentaries.

224 See, for example, Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Opening the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten Arab-Islamic Florescence of the 17th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 38 (2006): 263–81.

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Harvard University - Houghton Library / Qadi Mir, Husayn ibn Mu?in al-Din, d. 1504 or 5. Sharh Hidayat al-hikmah : manuscript, undated. MS Arab SM4207. ???? ???? ????Figure ?? ???? ?????. ??? 2.7:????? ?????? Folio: ??????. Houghton from Library, Harvard a University, fifteenth Cambridge, Mass. -century commentary on a thirteenth-century text. The original text is shown in red ink; the commentary, written in black ink, is interspersed in it, and additional explications can be found in the margins. Qāḍī Mīr, Sharḥ Hidāyat al-ḥikmah, Houghton Library MS Arab SM4207, undated manuscript, f. 3a.

The books that were commonly owned together span many genres, including

grammar, rhetoric, and Qurʾānic studies. However, jurisprudence — both positive law

(furūʿ) and legal principles (uṣūl) — appears to have played the central role. Previous

accounts of the typical medrese curriculum give an impression of a balanced reading list

spread across many genres.225 At the highest levels of the medrese system, the course of

225 For example, the eighteenth-century Kevākib-i Sebʿa lists some seventy books in grammar, syntax, logic, jurisprudence, literature, logic, rhetoric, theology, hadith, and Qurʾānic commentary (among which are the books appearing in this constellation).

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study might indeed have included many subjects and genres. When it came to the most basic instruction, however, the need to train judges who could apply the law consistently required a practical legal education. Ownership data suggest that a trio of legal books — al-Hidāyah (The right way) by al-Marghīnānī (d. 593 / H. 1197), Multaqā al-abḥur

(Meeting place of the seas) by al-Ḥalabī (d. 956 / H. 1549), and Sharḥ al-Wiqāyah

(Commentary on The Protection) by Ṣadr al-Sharīʿah (d. 747 / H. 1346) — formed an unspoken core reference set for efendis in Istanbul. These books are well-known to have played an important role in ulema education. All three of these books appear in other approximations of the medrese curriculum, but the central role they played (at least in

Istanbul) is not readily apparent since they are listed among many other titles.226

Possibly, the prominence of legal books in personal collections reflects not the taught curriculum but the fact that these books were more likely to be owned and retained by students, other textbooks having been resold on the used book market.227 Even if this is the case, the centrality of jurisprudence, and especially of these three titles, suggests that legal education was the part of an ʿālim’s training most likely to be of enduring value to him through his career.

226 Multeqā al-abḥur, in particular, has been recognized as a pillar of Ottoman legal education. See, for example, Şükrü Selim Has, “The Use of Multaqa’l-Abhur in the Ottoman Madrasas and in Legal Scholarship,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları / Journal of Ottoman Studies 7–9 (1988–89): 393–418. Kevākib-i sebʿa also names Multaqa as the first book of jurisprudence studied (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément turc 196, f. 57b–58a).

227 Similarly, studies of eighteenth-century book ownership in Ottoman Sofia and Damascus have also found jurisprudence to be the most widely owned subject. Sabev, “Private Book Collections,” 44; Establet and Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 161.

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The format of three seventeenth-century copies of the legal compendium Multeqā al-abḥur reinforces the impression that this was a book made for practical use.228 Two copies with original bindings feature simple decoration on the leather exterior, with sturdy boards underneath (Figures 2.8 and 2.9).

Figure 2.8: Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden, Cod. Or. 1081, copied 1647–8 / H. 1057.

Figure 2.9: Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden, Cod. Or. 871, copied 1655–56 / H. 1066.

228 The three manuscripts discussed here are all held by the Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden: Cod. Or. 871 (copied in 1655–56 / H. 1066); Cod. Or. 1211 (copied in 1665–66 / H. 1076); and Cod. Or. 1081 (copied in 1647–48 / H. 1057).

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Two of the copies contain detailed tables of contents that make it easy to find one’s way to a desired topic (Figures 2.10 and 2.11). These pages use rubrication to differentiate headings from subheadings, and give page numbers even for subsections of the work.229

In Cod. Or. 1081 (copied 1647–48 / H. 1057), the divisions of the text are made even more apparent as the word “Kitāb” (book, meaning “section” here) is written with an elongated final “b” to highlight graphically each of the major topics. Cod. Or. 1211

(copied 1665–66 / H. 1076), features a table of contents that has been revised by the copyist/user (probably the same person, as the handwriting appears identical). The copyist/user seems to have created the table inexpertly at first, and found the need to insert references that he missed the first time around. The effort involved in inserting these references so that the table would be complete (even if messy, to our eyes) suggests that the table of contents served a useful function for a reader who needed to find subsections easily.230

229 Although many Ottoman manuscripts feature tables of contents that were added by later readers, both of these tables of contents were made at the time of copying. They appear to feature the same handwriting as the main text. In addition, both were brought to Leiden very close to the copy date, so they appear in their seventeenth-century state and do not include accumulations of later centuries (except for an obviously new binding on Cod. Or. 1211).

230 According to many contemporary and subsequent sources, one of the reasons by Multaqā enjoyed such popularity was that the author had reorganized the cases found in other legal handbooks (including some that remained quite popular) so that they were grouped together into appropriate sections. The material qualities of these copies of Multaqā reinforces the pragmatic orientation of the text itself. Has, “The Use of Multaqa’l-Abḥur in the Ottoman Madrasas and in Legal Scholarship,” 401–2.

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Figure 2.10: Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden, Cod. Or. 1081, copied 1647–48 / H. 1057, fol. 2b–3a.

Figure 2.11: Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden, Cod. Or. 1211 (copied 1665–66 / H. 1076), fol. 3b–4a.

All three manuscripts are of modest size, with the smallest being 9 x 16.5 cm and the largest being 14.5 x 20 cm. The material qualities of these copies suggest that they were intended to be easily referenced and easily portable as a scholar or judge moved from one position to the next. These books were made to be used.

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Ottoman judges typically did not include the legal reasoning behind their rulings in court records, nor did muftis usually specify the source of their fatwas.231 Knowing which texts lay at the core of the Ottoman legal training brings us a step closer to understanding how legal ideas played out in practice. After all, a primary reason for studying book ownership is that it is a proxy for the history of ideas. The field of book history, rooted in the history of European books, originally grew out of a desire for a new approach to intellectual and cultural history. At their most aspirational, book historians sought to write a “social history of ideas” through the production and circulation of books.232 From the beginning, however, book historians have been sensitive to the chain of assumptions they must make in order to connect ownership of a book to engagement with the ideas contained in it.233 On the simplest level, it is possible to read books that one does not own, and to own books that one has never read.234 Like Tatiana perusing

Eugene Onegin’s library, when we look at efendi book collections, we are really trying to understand something about the individuals who owned them. Books are an imperfect means. They are especially imperfect when we only know the titles owned and cannot connect those titles to extant manuscripts. The question is, for a given individual or group, how imperfect a means is ownership?

231 Ronald C. Jennings, “Kadi, Court, and Legal Procedure in 17th c. Ottoman Kayseri,” Studia Islamica 48 (1978): 133–134; Uriel Heyd, “Some Aspects of the Ottoman Fetvā,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 32 (1969): 42.

232 Robert Darnton, “In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas,” Journal of Modern History 43 (March 1971): 113–132.

233 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 34–35; Henri-Jean Martin, The French Book: Religion, Absolutism, and Readership, trans. Paul Saenger and Nadine Saenger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59.

234 Not to mention owning books with which one disagrees.

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In Pushkin’s novel, Tatiana could actually grasp something essential about

Onegin’s character because he had been shaped by his reading. The same is true of the

Istanbulite ulema examined here. Books were central to the education that, in turn, defined the ulema as a group. Although in-person instruction and memorization of texts were valued dimensions of medrese training (and its private equivalent), books were essential supports to the learning process. Scholars described their education in terms of the books they studied, and with whom. Long gone were the days when knowledge transmission happened orally.235 As discussed in Chapter One, libraries were endowed in

Istanbul and elsewhere specifically to enable students to copy their textbooks. Books probably served as markers of distinction, or as symbols of an individual’s aspirations, but Ottoman ulema also had books because they used them.236

What’s Missing

Probate inventories are an exceptionally good window onto the book world of the ulema not only because ulema were the largest bookowners, but also because they wrote the records. Inventories were legal documents created by a judge and his assistants, men who had the title efendi and had been trained in a medrese. Inheritance law is, in fact,

235 In “The Rise of ‘Deep Reading’ in Early Modern Ottoman Scholarly Culture,” Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that ulema interactions with texts shifted from teacher-centered to text-centered in the core Ottoman lands as a result of Ottoman reforms to the medrese system. Konrad Hirschler argues that pivotal processes of “textualization,” in which written texts challenged the primacy of oral transmission, can be observed in the thirteenth century. Hirschler, Written Word, 17–22 and passim.

236 Ultimately, understanding how books were used will require further studies of the manuscript evidence. The potential of this approach is made clear in a recent dissertation on the Süleymāniye Dār al-Hadīth, a graduate school that specialized in Prophetic traditions. In his dissertation, Mehdin Çiftçi examined the extant books from the Dār al-Ḥadīth’s library for readers’ notes (placed there by instructors) and endowment inscriptions. The result is a unique reconstruction of teaching as it actually took place. Mehdin Çiftçi, Süleymaniye Dārülhadisi (XVI–XVII asırlar) (PhD diss., Marmara Üniversitesi, 2012), 140–156; Mehdin Çiftçi, Süleymaniye Dârülhadisi: (XVI–XVII. Asırlar) (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2013), 163–81.

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one of the topics covered in the legal manuals that appear so often in the inventories.

When probate judges or their clerks made a list of all the books a deceased person owned, they must have recognized many of those books from their own training.237

Probate inventories reflect an efendi’s view of the book universe, but they present a distorted perspective on other book worlds. Book lists in probate inventories do not include extended bibliographical descriptions. The records refer to books using conventional “nicknames” such as the first word of the title, the author’s name, or, sometimes, just the subject covered. Most of the books in this sample are identified by such shorthand. The remaining books are described in general terms. Most commonly, they appear as “a quantity of books” (alāy-i kütüb); sometimes one encounters “Persian books” (kütüb-i fārisī) or “Turkish books” (kütüb-i türkī).238 The unidentified books tend to be cheaper. While the median value in the sample is 150 aḳçe, unknown titles have a median value of 55 aḳçe, or less than half the median. In other words, cheaper books and books in Persian or Turkish are systematically unidentified in the probate inventories.239

The efendis’ book world was centered on the Arabic language and on books associated with medrese training.240

237 The process of compiling probate inventories (or, what little we know of it) is described in the Introduction.

238 “Mecmūʿa” and “evrāḳ-i perişān” also make frequent appearances. “Kütüb-i ʿarabī” is very rare, perhaps reflecting the biases of the court officials who created the records.

239 Probate inventories in early eighteenth-century Damascus were also less likely to identify inexpensive books, even though a higher proportion of books were identified in that archival series. Establet and Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas,” 153, 165. In the sample studied here, there are cases efendis whose inventories contain mostly unidentified books; see, for example, ʿİsā Efendi bin Maḥmūd, who owned 116 books, most of which were not identified: KA 5, f. 34b (poz 37).

240 Note that this is also the default perspective of Kātib Çelebi in his bibliography Kashf al-ẓunūn, who wrote that he would specify the language only of those books that were not in Arabic (Kashf, 2):

ﻭو ﻣﺎﻟﻴﯿﺲ ﺑﻌﺮﺑﻲ ﻗﻴﯿﺪﺗﻪﮫ ﺑﺄﻧﻪﮫ ﺗﺮﻛﻲ ﺍاﻭو ﻓﺎﺭرﺳﻲ ﺍاﻭو ﻣﺘﺮﺟﻢ ﻟﻴﯿﺰﻭوﻝل ﺑﻪﮫ ﺍاﻻﺑﻬﮭﺎﻡم.

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This chapter began with conventional social categories — wealth, title, gender — and examined how these groups differ with respect to book ownership. The next chapter pursues the inverse strategy: I identify clusters of books that go together and then use manuscript evidence to suggest their audience. As we move away from the efendis, a group so clearly defined by book ownership, it is necessary to triangulate evidence from sources beyond the probate inventory and to consider “readers” who might listen to a book being read aloud.

Just as conventional social categories dissolve in this analysis, so do conventional categories for books. Genres prove to be of limited help in determining which books belong together in practice. The network analysis of efendi books with strong empirical affinities included books from a variety of genres. Similarly, the constellations at the center of other book worlds appear heterogeneous at first but are in fact held tightly together by common practices of reading and listening.

Eleazar Birnbaum has estimated that, indeed, just 7% of Kāṭib Çelebi’s citations are for books in Turkish (and fewer for Persian). Eleazar Birnbaum, “The Questing Mind: Katib Çelebi, 1609–57,” in Corolla Torontonensis: Studies in Honor of Ronald Morton Smith, ed. Emmet Robbins and Stella Sandahl (Toronto: TSAR, 1994), 133–58.

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Chapter Three

A Book-Centered Approach to the Social History of Books

Kātib Çelebi claimed that he spent a large inheritance — 300,000 aḳçe — on books for his own library. If this is true, Kātib Çelebi’s book collection would have been larger and worth more than any of those held by his contemporaries studied here. Not much is known of the contents of Kātib Çelebi’s library, since no inventory survives and only a few extant volumes have been identified as belonging to him. Still less is known about what the book collection might have looked like in his home. Almost certainly, his books would have been stacked, probably in niches or in chests. But in what order, and according to what logic, would his hundreds upon hundreds of books have been placed?241

We can be certain that there was an order of some sort. Kātib Çelebi’s own writings reveal him to be a person who favored arrangement and classification. He collected and alphabetized the biographies of hundreds of scholars in Ladder of

Achievement (Sullām al-wuṣūl), and his bibliography Lifting Doubts (Kashf al-ẓunūn) contains over 14,000 entries. One of his most widely circulated works, The Arrangement of Dates (Taḳvīm et-tevārīḫ), comprises chronological tables of dates for events from the

241 I should note that one of the largest bookowners in the sample is named Muṣṭafā Efendi bin ʿAbdullah (Çavuş), which was also Kātib Çelebi’s name. (This inventory is KA d. 5, f. 67b (poz 70); he owned over 150 titles.) However, the date of the probate inventory is H. 1071, which is four years after Kātib Çelebi is believed to have died. Even though Kātib Çelebi’s death date is not certain, it must have been before H. 1071, since this is the terminus ad quem for a letter written by a book broker to Levinus Warner offering him a few books that had belonged to “the late Kātib Çelebi.” The name is common enough that there could very well have been two bibliophiles who shared it. Witkam, “Precious Books and Moments of Friendship,” 467–74.

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beginning of world history. It is not a stretch to imagine, therefore, that Kātib Çelebi must have had some organizing principle for his book collection. Perhaps he arranged it according to the radical scheme he deployed in his bibliography: alphabetically, by title, but with commentaries next to their source text. Or perhaps he emulated endowment libraries and organized his books by subject, with histories in one corner and books of syntax in another.

This chapter focuses on a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: when we look at the panorama of the seventeenth-century Istanbul book world, which books belonged together? Some Ottoman intellectuals had ready answers to this question. Their beliefs about which books belonged together are reflected in library endowment deeds and catalogs. Both types of book list drew upon well-established and persistent classifications of the sciences, classification schemes that were documented in books that circulated at the time. However, the book constellation identified in the previous chapter should give us reason to doubt the usefulness of subject as a primary means to approach intellectual and cultural currents as they were lived and experienced. The books in the medrese constellation represent many different subjects. However, they are united by a common social setting and typical use, and documented by patterns of co-ownership.

This chapter builds on the last by identifying groups of books that implicitly or explicitly belonged together, even if these groupings depart from traditional Islamic or

Ottoman ontologies. 242 One result of looking for implicit taxonomies is to highlight some

242 The notion of implicit taxonomies was inspired by contemporary library and information science. Among librarians, the label “folksonomy” arose as a way to describe the implicit classification schemes that emerge from social tagging in online media. As users were able to assign books and other media to categories (sometimes of their own making) in the first consumer internet generation, librarians and information scientists sought a way to describe the flat (non-hierachical) and overlapping groups which emerged. I am ambivalent about the term “folksonomy” because the word “folk” evokes a strong flavor of condescension and distance. For the blog post which first proposed the term, see Thomas Vander Wal,

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books — especially inexpensive books in the vernacular — which survive neither in contemporary book lists nor, mostly, in today’s libraries. Since social categories are of limited use in predicting book ownership, I argue that we should put books at the center of the analysis, identifying books that go together in use and only then identifying how they were used, and by whom. This chapter first considers how Ottoman intellectuals arranged books — usually beginning with a taxonomy of the sciences and slotting books in accordingly — and then proceeds in the inverse direction: finding books that empirically belonged together at that point in time before making sense of the resulting grouping.

Beginning with implicit taxonomies inverts a common paradigm for writing cultural history. Rather than map cultural currents onto predetermined social groups, we begin with clusters of books that anecdotally or statistically belonged together. Then we use manuscript evidence such as reading statements and ownership data to suggest their audience. This methodology addresses Roger Chartier’s criticism that book history all too often “implicitly [postulates] that cultural cleavages are necessarily organized according to pre-existent social divisions.”243 The idea that social class does not necessarily

“Folksonomy,” February 2, 2007 [http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html]. Adam Mathes offers a more thorough explanation of the term (which he defines as “grassroots classification”): “Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication through Shared Metadata,” December 2004 [http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html]. “Folksonomy” was one of the New York Times “ideas of the year” in 2005: Daniel H. Pink, “Folksonomy,” New York Times, December 11, 2005 [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1- 21.html?_r=0].

243 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 7. Elsewhere, Chartier has written, “When we start from the circulation of objects and similarities in practice, rather than from classes or groups, we can recognize the many principles of differentiation that explain cultural variety, such as belonging to a common sort or generation or sharing a religious affiliation, community solidarities or educational or corporative traditions.” (Chartier, Introduction to A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 4.) Nelly Hanna and Gottfried Hagen have echoed Chartier’s call for a cultural history not

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determine one’s cultural engagements (or that this hypothesis should at least be tested) has great appeal. Beyond that, however, I would argue that a book-centered approach is necessitated by our as-yet superficial understanding of Ottoman social structure. Despite

Cemal Kafadar’s call for greater nuance in treating Ottoman social groups,244 Ottoman history is still written in terms of monolithic social groups. That received social categories (level of wealth, official titles) are of limited use in predicting book ownership may cause us to question the usefulness of these social categories in the first place.245

Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Books

Although there are no extant Istanbul library catalogs squarely from the period of this study, we have library inventories from the generations just before and just after (as well as much earlier and much later).246 These book lists were created for different reasons. Both the 1502–3 catalog of the Topkapi Palace library and the 1567 catalog of

predicated on social groupings, though Hanna ultimately sees an economically-defined Cairene “middle class” as a relevant cultural group. Gottfried Hagen writes that “...historians often assume that social status more than anything else pre-determines the outlook and world view expressed in the surviving texts. Yet this bias is highly problematic. Instead, intellectual life and political ideologies in the pre-modern age are far more ambiguous than state-focused historians are ready to admit.” Hagen, “The Order of Knowledge, the Knowledge of Order: Intellectual Life,” The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 408. Hanna, In Praise of Books, 3.

244 Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff,” 124-129.

245 Similarly, Ekin Tusalp Atiyas has questioned the assumption of distinct socio-cultural zones in Ottoman society. Disagreeing with the notion, in this case articulated by Carter Findley, that there existed “different cultures associated with different elites: the religious studies of the ulema, the experiential orientation of the mystics, the philosophical-scientific tradition, and the worldly belletristic adab culture of the literary artists and scribal elite,” Atiyas writes that this "compartmentalization does not do any justice to the fact that the presumably distinct cultural zones of these segments of society often melded into one another." Carter Vaughn Findley, “Political Culture and the Great Households,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3, ed. Suraiya N. Faroqhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 69; Atiyas, “Political Literacy and the Politics of Eloquence,” 26-7.

246 İsmail Erünsal has tirelessly documented archival and manuscript sources relating to endowment libraries in his book Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri. My discussion in this section is enabled by Erünsal’s work in finding, collating, and publicizing these sources.

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the library at the Eight Colleges documented existing collections as part of a process of taking inventory. In contrast, the endowment deeds for Köprülü Fāżıl Aḥmed Paşa’s library (1678 / H. 1089) and Feyżullah Efendi’s graduate school library (1694–95 / H.

1106) documented newly formed collections.247 All these inventories organized books according to subject, the order and titles of which are quite similar. Table 3.1 compares the headings used in two of these library book lists.

247 The endowment deed for the Köprülü Library, discussed in Chapter One, does not contain an explicit organizing scheme. However, Ramazan Şeşen discerns an implicit scheme which is similar to those discussed here. Fihris Makhṭūṭāt Maktabat Kūprīlī, ed. Ramazan Şeşen et al., 7.

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Table 3.1: Categories used in Ottoman library book lists

Endowment deed for library for Ayasofya Library inventory Feyżullah Efendi’s medrese (1748-9)249 (1694–95)248

Qurʾāns (Muṣḥaf) [sic] Qurʾāns (Muṣḥāf) Qurʾānic exegesis250 Qurʾānic exegesis (Tafāsīr) Glosses on Qurʾānic exegesis (Al- Traditions of the Prophet (Aḥādīth) ḥawāshi ʿalā al-tafāsīr) Jurisprudence (Fiqh) The science of reading the Qurʾān (ʿIlm Principles of jurisprudence (Uṣūl al-fiqh) al-qirāʾat) Theology (Kalām) Traditions of the Prophet (Aḥādīth) Mysticism (Al-taṣawwuf) Principles of Hadith (Uṣūl al-ḥadīth) Interpretation/expression? (Al-taʿbīr) Stories of the Prophet and Histories (Al- Literature (Al-adabiyyāt) siyar wa’l-tawārīḫ) Literary sayings, anecdotes? (Al- Jurisprudence (Fiqh) muḥāḍarāt) Principles of jurisprudence (Uṣūl al-fiqh) Histories (Al-tawārīḫ) Theology (ʿIlm al-kalām) Language (Al-lugha) Exhortations, ethics, and mysticism (Al- Medicine (Al-ṭibb) mawāʿiẓ wa’l-aḫlāq wa’l-taṣawwuf) Logic (Al-manṭiq) Philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics Philosophy (Al-ḥikmah) (Al-ḥikmah wa’l-hayʾah wa’l- Astronomy and astrology (Al-hayʾah riyāżiyāt) wa’l-nujūm) Medicine (Al-ṭibb) Rhetoric (Al-maʿāni) Rhetoric and style (ʿIlm al-maʿāni wa’l- Syntax (Al-naḥw) bayān wa’l-badīʿ) Morphology(Al-ṣarf) Literature (Al-adabiyyāt) Morphology (ʿIlm al-taṣrīf) Syntax (ʿIlm al-naḥw) Miscellanies (Al-majāmiʿ)

These catalogs span almost two centuries, with Feyżullah Efendi’s endowment deed being closest to the period of this study. Despite the broad span of time, the book lists present a consistent division of their collections in a similar hierarchical order. This

248 Feyżullah Efendi Vakfiyesi, Millet Kütüphanesi 2189, microfilmed in 1960 (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi mikrofilm no. 579). I omit two section headings that I could not decipher: f. 165a and the last section.

249 Drawn from an inventory created in 1748–49 / H. 1162: Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Yazma Bağışlar 242.

250 There is no subject heading for this section, but this is clearly the subject.

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consistency reflects the fact that librarians were working in a long intellectual tradition that posited hierarchical categories of knowledge. The structure of the lists echoes the advice given by sixteenth-century scholar al-ʿAlmawī (d. 1573), who instructed bookowners to stack their books in order of importance, with the Qurʾān at the top of the stack.251 There is some evidence that the books themselves were arranged into categories much like the titles were in catalogs.252

Another contemporary source for book groupings is, of course, Kashf al-ẓunūn,

Kātib Çelebi’s massive bibliography containing more than 14,000 entries. In the introduction, Kātib Çelebi explains that he wrote the bibliography in order to collect in one place the traces of those who have gone before: “The titles of their works were not later recorded in any detail …There are many sciences and books, and a lifetime is precious and short, so comprehending their particulars is difficult, perhaps impossible.”253 The full title, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asām il-kutūb wa’l-funūn (Lifting doubts about the names of books and sciences), reflects the interconnected goal of organizing both sciences and the books that address them.

251 “Some elevated place, and not a place on the ground, should be selected for stacking books, in order to protect them from the dampness which would result in their decay. They should be arranged according to subject. The books whose subject matter is of the greatest importance should be placed on top. Books of the same subject should be arranged according to the importance of their respective authors; those by the most important author should be placed on top. The Holy Writ should be placed on top of all other books.” Franz Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship, 10. Al-ʿAlmawī drew upon the work of Ibn Jamaʿah (d. 1273). His treatise includes other instructions for storing books, e.g. large volumes should not be placed on top of small volumes and titles should be written on the outer edge of the book. Extant manuscripts testify to the prevalence of writing titles on the edge of the text block, but it is otherwise difficult to know to what extent these recommendations reflect actual practice.

252 As indicated in the introduction to the 1502–3 inventory of the Topkapı Palace Library. See Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 462.

253 The original reads: (Kashf, 1)

ﻏﻴﯿﺮ ﺍاﻥن ﺍاﺳﻤﺎء ﺗﺪﻭوﻳﯾﻨﺎﺗﻬﮭﻢ ﺍاﻡم ﺗﺪﻭوﻥن ﺑﻌﺪ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻓﺼﻞ ﻭو ﺑﺎﺏب...ﺍاﻟﻌﻠﻮﻡم ﻭو ﺍاﻟﻜﺘﺐ ﻛﺜﻴﯿﺮﺓة. ﻭو ﺍاﻻﻋﻤﺎﺭر ﻋﺰﻳﯾﺰﺓة ﻗﺼﻴﯿﺮﺓة.ﻭو ﺍاﻟﻮﻗﻮﻑف ﻋﻠﻰ ﺗﻔﺎﺻﻴﯿﻠﻬﮭﺎ ﻣﺘﻌﺴﺮ. ﺑﻞ ﻣﺘﻌﺬﺭر.

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In the introduction to Kashf, Kātib Çelebi discusses the ways that his predecessors had organized the fields of knowledge (and, therefore, books).254 He notes that knowledge may be divided up according to any number of variables: “into old or new; according to its qualifier, into conception and assent;255 according to how it is reached into three classes: the class that is established in itself, the class that is arrived at by perception, and the class that is known by analogy; and [knowledge] is classified according to the variety of its subjects into many categories.”256 Kātib Çelebi goes on to summarize the knowledge taxonomies used by five of his predecessors, saving his greatest praise for Ṭaşköprüzāde’s Miftāḥ al-saʿādah (The key to happiness). Declaring that “it is the best of all of them,” Kātib Çelebi painstakingly lists the approximately three hundred sciences categorized by Ṭaşköprüzāde.257

According to Kātib Çelebi, what made Ṭaşköprüzāde’s work outstanding was the way that he divided the sciences into seven “branches” (dawḥā), each with its own subdivisions. Each of the branches grew organically from the previous one. Thus, the list

254 Translating ʿilm/ʿulūm is challenging, since it can mean “discipline” or field of knowledge; the abstract noun “knowledge”; and “the concrete, specialized discipline of learning.” (Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 43.) I often use “science” here, but this should be understood as a synonym for “discipline” or “subject” in most cases.

255 These are technical terms drawn from the field of logic; see Khaled El-Rouayheb, Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 261–267.

256 Kashf, 11:

ﺍاﻋﻠﻢ ﺍاﻥن ﺍاﻟﻌﻠﻢ ﻭو ﺍاﻥن ﻛﺎﻥن ﻣﻌﻨﻰ ﻭوﺍاﺣﺪﺍا ﻭو ﺣﻘﻴﯿﻘﺔ ﻭوﺍاﺣﺪﺓة ﺍاﻻ ﺍاﻧﻪﮫ ﻳﯾﻨﻘﺴﻢ ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺍاﻗﺴﺎﻡم ﻛﺜﻴﯿﺮﺓة ﻣﻦ ﺟﻬﮭﺎﺕت ﻣﺨﺘﻠﻔﺔ ﻓﻴﯿﻨﻘﺴﻢ ﻣﻦ ﺟﻬﮭﺔ ﺍاﻟﻰ ﻗﺪﻳﯾﻢ ﻭو ﻣﺤﺪﺙث ﻭو ﻣﻦ ﺟﻬﮭﺔ ﻣﺘﻌﻠﻘﻪﮫ ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺗﺼﻮﺭر ﻭو ﺗﺼﺪﻳﯾﻖ ﻭو ﻣﻦ ﺟﻬﮭﺔ ﻁطﺮﻗﻪﮫ ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺛﻼﺛﺔ ﺍاﻗﺴﺎﻡم ﻗﺴﻢ ﻳﯾﺜﺒﺖ ﻓﻲ ﺍاﻟﻨﻔﺲ ﻭو ﻗﺴﻢ ﻳﯾﺪﺭرﻙك ﺑﺎﻟﺤﺲ ﻭو ﻗﺴﻢ ﻳﯾﻌﻠﻢ ﺑﺎﻟﻘﻴﯿﺎﺱس ﻭو ﻳﯾﻨﻘﺴﻢ ﻣﻦ ﺟﻬﮭﺔ ﺍاﺧﺘﻼﻑف ﻣﻮﺿﻮﻋﺎﺗﻪﮫ ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺍاﻗﺴﺎﻡم ﻛﺜﻴﯿﺮﺓة ﻳﯾﺴﻤﻰ ﺑﻌﻀﻬﮭﺎ ﻋﻠﻮﻣﺎ ﻭو ﺑﻌﻀﻬﮭﺎ ﺻﻨﺎﺋﻊ.

257 Kātib Çelebi does not mention Ibn al-Nadīm’s tenth-century Fihrist as one of his models. However, Ibn al-Nadīm’s bibliography was known in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Kātib Çelebi has an entry for it in his bibliography, and two copies of it were placed in the Köprülü Library as part of the initial endowment. The two copies are Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1134 and 1135.

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begins with the sciences relating to writing, since this was the prerequisite for all subsequent knowledge:

1. Writing sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ḫaṭṭiyya)

2. Sciences relating to expression (ʿulūm teteʿāliḳ bi’l-ʾalfāẓ)

3. Sciences which treat that which is in the intellect (ʿulūm bāḥithiyya ʿimmā

fī’l-adhhān)

4. Sciences which are dependent on the eyes [i.e., on perception] (al-ʿilm al-

muteʿalliq bi’l-aʿyān)

5. Practical wisdom (al-ḥikmah al-ʿamaliyya)

6. Legal sciences (al-ʿulūm al-sharʿiyya)

7. Esoteric sciences (ʿulūm al-bāṭin)

Ṭaşköprüzāde listed books for many of the sciences he categorized. Unlike the ontology reflected in library book lists, which ordered subjects according to intrinsic value, Ṭaşköprüzāde’s scheme reflects the relationship between the subjects. In this organic worldview, one set of sciences blossoms out from preceding ones.

Kātib Çelebi could not be more effusive in his praise for Ṭaşköprüzāde’s work.

He even offers an invocation in Ṭaşköprüzāde’s honor: “May God be abundant to him, for he dived into the ocean of knowledge and brought up its pearls.”258 Indeed, Kātib

Çelebi refers repeatedly to Ṭaşköprüzāde’s book in the course of his own bibliography.

However, Kātib Çelebi did not follow his predecessor’s example. Instead, he adopted a revolutionary approach: he alphabetized his entries. Although those of us who consult

258 Kashf, 17:

ﻓﻠﻠﻪﮫ ﺩدﺭرﻩه ﻓﻲ ﺍاﻟﻐﻮﺹص ﻋﻠﻰ ﺑﺤﺎﺭر ﺍاﻟﻌﻠﻮﻡم ﻭو ﺍاﺑﺮﺍاﺯز ﺩدﺭرﺭرﻫﮬﮪھﺎ

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this bibliography often remark on its size and scope, Kātib Çelebi himself, when describing his work, emphasized that it was alphabetical.259 For example, a book on jurisprudence could come immediately after a history book and be followed by a book of medicine if their titles followed one another alphabetically.

However, Kātib Çelebi did not simply present a list of books. In addition to thousands of book titles, Kashf al-ẓunūn also contains some three hundred entries on domains of knowledge (including “the science of categorizing knowledge”).260 Although many subject-specific entries are incomplete, it seems that each was meant to comprise a brief introduction and then list the relevant titles, often referring the reader to the appropriate book entry.261 Subject entries, too, were folded into the overarching alphabetical arrangement. For example, the entry on the science of language (ʿilm al- lugha) appears alphabetically under “L” (for lugha, “language”), approximately three- quarters of the way through Kashf al-ẓunūn. The entry begins with a discussion of linguistics and then lists, in alphabetical order, approximately fifty titles that address this

259 “Bu musannif Hazret-i Ādem zamānundan berü geçen musanniflerin teʾlīf itdiği kitābları hurūf tertībi ile Keşfü’z-zunūn an esāmi’l-kütübi ve’l-funūn nām kitābda cemʿ eyledi.” This autobiographical statement is located in a manuscript copy of Kātib Çelebi’s Cihānnümā in Vienna. Fikret Sarıcaoğlu, “Kâtib Çelebi’nin Otobiyografileri,” 305. Kātib Çelebi praised the fact that another author (of a geography) had used alphabetical order, stating: “He arranged it in alphabetical order and added what other works he found so that it would be easy to utilize and of great usefulness.” Kashf, 469; Hagen, “Kâtib Çelebi and Sipâhîzâde,” 533. We do not know how contemporaries reacted to Kātib Çelebi’s work, though it was immediately well-known enough to come to the attention of French scholar d’Herbelot within a generation. Few extant manuscript copies of Kashf al-ẓunūn in the Süleymaniye collections are dated to the seventeenth century; most dated extant manuscripts are from the eighteenth century. It is hard to ascertain to what extent these survivals reflect changing popularity as opposed to changes in dating practices or likelihood of manuscript survival itself.

260 “ʿIlm taqsīm al-ʿulūm,” Kashf, 463. A second breach of alphabetical order, not treated here, is Kātib Çelebi’s approach to commentaries, epitomes, and super-commentaries. All of these derivative texts were listed together with the original book to which they were related.

261 Most subject entries do not have book lists, or their lists are incomplete. This, in addition to the fact that details about the books appear under the title’s alphabetized entry, suggests that Kātib Çelebi prioritized the alphabetical list of titles over the subject-level entries.

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subject. The dictionary known as Aḫterī, widely held in seventeenth-century Istanbul, appears nested within the subject entry for language under “L” and also towards the beginning of the bibliography under “A” (alif ). Thus, a given title might appear twice: a longer entry in its appropriate alphabetical place, and once under the relevant subject entry.262 Kātib Çelebi nodded to the subject-centered tradition of book lists even as he flattened the pyramid of subjects, entering them not according to their hierarchy (as in library inventories) or according to their relationship to each other (as in Ṭaşköprüzāde’s book), but according to the first letter of the subject itself.

We do not know whether Kātib Çelebi followed the same radical system in his own library. There is no known catalog or inventory of his collection. Even where we do have inventories of large personal libraries, as we do in the probate inventories, it is difficult to discern an organizing scheme. If a Qurʾān is among the books of the deceased, it is almost always listed first in the inventory, before all other possessions, as a sign of respect. At the other end of the spectrum, unnamed books, inexpensive books, miscellanies (mecmūʿalar), and “loose papers” (evrāḳ-i perişān) are slightly more likely to appear toward the end of probate book lists. Besides these two tendencies, probate inventories reveal few patterns in how books were physically arranged. Books do not appear to be grouped by recognizable genre or subject, and books by the same author are not listed side-by-side.

It is certainly difficult to imagine that books in the largest libraries in the sample

— those of one hundred or more titles — were scattered around willy-nilly with no

262 The first catalog of the nearly contemporary Bodleian Library at Oxford (1605) also took a hybrid approach. Thomas Bodley wanted the catalog to be organized by subject, while his librarian, Thomas James, argued for an alphabetized list. The donor prevailed, but James included an alphabetical index. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 185.

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organizational scheme at all. It could be that some of these private libraries were systematically organized, but that the organizational scheme was jumbled as part of the probate process, as books were pulled from trunks and niches to be recorded by the court’s scribe. Alternatively, the probate inventories might reflect some groupings that we simply cannot discern from the laconic entries. For example, books might have been grouped by size, as they were in many early modern European libraries.263 They might have been organized by their bindings, or even by language. These characteristics were only intermittently recorded in probate records, which, after all, were never intended to be bibliographical documents.264

A survey of explicit ways that books were grouped in seventeenth-century

Istanbul, therefore, reveals a general scholarly consensus focused on subject. In library catalogs and endowment deeds, books were ordered according to the well-established categories of Islamic intellectual tradition. Even Kātib Çelebi made use of these categories, though he employed a radical alphabetical approach as the backbone of his bibliography. These categories were without a doubt contemporary categories, used and recognized by many Ottomans.

263 For example, Samuel Pepys (d. 1703) arranged his library according to size. The Pepys Library, Cambridge: University Printing Services, 7.

264 As noted by Benito Rial in his discussion of European book inventories, “[D]escriptions were not undertaken to make bibliographical catalogs, but to avoid confusing any single book with other possessions or books included on the same list. Consequently, any described volume included in an inventory contained the most relevant characteristics or qualities needed to individualize it as an object.” (I thank Hannah Marcus for referring me to Rial’s article.) However, as discussed in Chapter One, endowment deeds did make a note of many physical qualities, perhaps in order to establish the precise value of the donation and to ensure that a fine copy that formed part of the original endowment could not later be swapped out for a less valuable copy by unscrupulous librarians or readers. Erünsal, Osmanlı vakıf kütüphaneleri, 449-450; Benito Rial, “Sixteenth-Century Private Book Inventories and Some Problems Related to their Analysis,” Library and Information Science History 26, no. 1 (2010), 73–74.

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However, if we want to understand the social context for books, these traditional categories are of limited use. The medrese book constellation presented in the previous chapter, based on network analysis, identified a set of books that tended to appear together in personal collections. These books are not necessarily the most frequently owned books (though some of them are), but they are most frequently owned together. If cataloged according to the principles used by contemporary scholars and librarians, they would fall into many different subjects: principles of jurisprudence, positive law, lexicography, and grammar. Nonetheless, these books are united by a common social setting and use. Contemporaries would have readily recognized that, in terms of use and audience, these books belonged together. Analogous to today’s Amazon.com recommendation engine, they would have known that those who have read Multeqā (a handbook on positive law) have likely also read Al-fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiya (a book of grammar). From a contemporary’s point of view, Multeqā was, in fact, much closer to Al- fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiya than it was to most other works of positive law. That this set of books does not have a recognized contemporary label does not diminish the strength of the connection between them.

The full network analysis of book ownership hints at other book constellations, but none has the same numerical strength of the medrese constellation. A larger sample of private book collections would probably yield statistically significant associations among other sets of books. However, as discussed in the last chapter, probate inventories were constrained by the perspectives of the court staff, men who had themselves received a medrese education (or its private equivalent). Cheap books, and books not in Arabic, were less likely to be identified by title in probate inventories and therefore would not

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surface in network analysis. Consulting more probate inventories will not address the systematic biases that make some books invisible. However, an unusual inventory of a bookseller reveals not only titles and numbers of cheap books, but also a high-demand genre completely missing from the library catalogs and bibliographies examined above.

Telling Stories

In 1668 (H. 1078), an argument broke out among the heirs of the recently deceased bookseller Aḥmed Efendi. Aḥmed Efendi’s first wife had died some time before, and their minor son, ʿAlī, was entitled to a significant sum from her estate when he came of age. In the meantime, the bookseller not only remarried and had more children but also spent much of the money that belonged to his son ʿAlī. When Aḥmed

Efendi himself passed away, the now-grown ʿAlī sued his stepmother to obtain the balance. Thanks to this lawsuit (as well as the presence of underage heirs, ʿAlī’s half- siblings), a probate official was dispatched to Aḥmed Efendi’s residence to record his belongings and ensure a fair division of the inheritance.265

When the probate official arrived at Aḥmed Efendi’s home in the Molla Ḫüsrev neighborhood, he found and recorded around seventy personal items ranging from clothing to cushions.266 The first part of the inventory is relatively normal for someone of

265 See the Introduction for a discussion of the probate process.

266 My article in Eski Edebiyat Çalışmaları includes a transcription of the tereke, which is found in KA d. 6, f. 142a–143b (v145–46). Meredith Quinn, “On yedinci yüzyıl İstanbul’da ucuza okumalar,” 146–69. The tereke does not explicitly identify Aḥmed Efendi as a bookseller. However, it seems unlikely that anyone would own books in these numbers just for his own collection. The Ḥamza-nāme and other cycles could run to dozens of volumes, but the numbers owned by Aḥmed Efendi far exceed what would have been a complete set for many of these tales. For example, the highest numbered volume in Lütfi Sezen’s study of the Ḥamza-nāme is 69. Many intermediate volumes remain unidentified. However, it is not at all clear that a given numbered volume always had the same content. Lütfi Sezen, Halk Edebiyatında Hamzanâmeler (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1991), 33. Mustafa Aksoy estimates that the Ḥamza-nāme comprised 60

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Aḥmed Efendi’s means, though the inclusion of blank paper (beyāż kāğıd) and multiple inkpots (mürekkeb hoḳḳası) — supplies that could be used to make books — is somewhat unusual. Aḥmed Efendi also owned a copy of the tale Şāh ü Gedā (The king and the beggar).267

The second section of Aḥmed Efendi’s possessions is introduced by a sentence indicating that what follows is a record of the deceased’s home and “books of tales”

(ḥikāye kitābları).268 After the home, the inventory contains nineteen entries for books.

It comprises a list of titles held in extraordinary numbers. The titles include well-known cycles such as 1001 Nights, the Alexander romance, and the Ḥamza cycle (Table 3.2).

volumes. Mustafa Aksoy, ed., Ḥamzanâme (Istanbul: Kriter, 2009), 8. Both scholars make reference to Evliyā Çelebi’s assertion, probably not meant to be precise, that the “storytellers of Rum” (meddāḫān-ı Rūm) had extended the Ḥamza-nāme corpus from 60 volumes to 360 volumes. Evliyā Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 1996), 225. The format of the inventory also suggests that Aḥmed Efendi was a bookseller. Terekes that include goods from a shop often list the shop’s wares separately from the deceased’s personal effects, exactly as Aḥmed Efendi’s possessions are divided into two lists. Furthermore, Aḥmed Efendi’s tereke accounts for the storybooks as if they are interchangeable commodities, like wheat in a grocery store. For example, in the inventory of a shopkeeper who was Aḥmed Efendi’s contemporary, wares are recorded as “ḳahve, ḳiyye 20 fi 125 = 3750,” and “şeker, ḳiyye 20 fi 120 = 2400.” (Mülga Beledī, d. 3, f. 9b (v11).) This form neatly echoes the form in which the court scribe recorded Aḥmed Efendi’s storybooks (e.g., “Elf leylā, cild ʿaded 40 fi 35 = 1400”). Finally, Aḥmed Efendi’s inventory bears a strong resemblance to the inventory of a bookseller from Edirne recently published by İsmail Erünsal, discussed below. The Edirne tereke, recorded in 1680 (H. 1091, or just over a decade after Aḥmed Efendi’s death), also contains multiple volumes of many of the same storybooks. The Edirne tereke explicitly identifies the deceased individual as a “bookseller” (ṣaḥḥāf). The preponderance of evidence suggests that Aḥmed Efendi was a ṣaḥḥāf as well. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar, 516–21.

267 The best known versions of this story, about a scholar who falls in love with a city boy, are by Hilālī (in Persian, composed at the turn of the sixteenth century) and Yaḥyā Beg (in Turkish, composed 1537). Extant manuscripts of this tale are plentiful and range from quite elaborate to quite simple. Aḥmed Efendi’s copy was valued at 30 aḳçe. The only other copy identified in this study of private libraries was valued at 200 aḳçe and was apparently in two volumes or booklets (the entry reads Şāh ü Gedā 2). It formed part of a large library with nearly 150 titles (tereke of Muṣṭafā Efendi bin ʿAbdullah Çavuş, dated 1661 (H. 1071), KA d. 5, f. 67b (v70)). For more on this title, see Bayram Ali Kaya, “Taşlıcalı Yahyâ,” TDVİA, 40:156–57 and Ralph Jaeckel, “Dukaginzade Taşlıcalı Yahya Bey’s ‘King and Beggar’, a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Allegorical-Mystical Love Poem (mesnevi)” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1980).

268 “Müteveffā-yı mezbūruñ taḳvīm-i ṣaḥīḥ ile taḳvīm ve taḫmīn olunup veres̱e yedinde ḳalan menzil ile ḥikāye kitāblarıdır ki ẕikr olunur.” I thank Himmet Taşkömür for helping me to decipher parts of the inventory and the entry that followed it.

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Table 3.2: Aḥmed Efendi’s books

Entry English translation Ḥamza-nāme, cild 184 fi 40 Hamza Cycle, 184 volumes at 40 [aḳçe; each] Bedīʿnāme, cild ʿaded 19 fi 40 Bedīʿ Tales, 19 parts at 40 Futūḥu’ş-Şām, ʿaded 10 fi 40 The Conquest of the Levant, 10 parts at 40 Gerden Keşān, ʿaded 7 fi 35 The Brave One, 7 parts at 35 Süleymān-nāme, cild 45 fi 30 Tales of Süleymān, 45 volumes at 30 İskender-nāme, ‘aded 12 fi 70 (?) Alexander Romance, 12 parts at ?70 Ḳahramān-nāme, ‘aded 23 fi 30 Hero tales, 23 parts and 30 Elf Leylā cild, ʿaded 40 fi 35 1001 nights,269 volume, 40 parts at 35 Giriye-nāme, ʿaded 25 fi 20 Weeping? Tales, 25 parts at 20 Şehnāme, cild 28 fi 40 The Book of Kings, 28 volumes at 40 Ebu Müslim, cild 33 fi 30 Ebu Müslim, 33 volumes at 30 Siyer-i kebīr, cild 2 = 300 Proper conduct, 2 volumes = 300 Seyyid Baṭṭāl, 1 = 100 Seyyid Baṭṭāl, 1 = 100 Ḥoşenk-nāme, 1 = 30 (?) Tales of Ḥoşenk, 1 = 30 (?) Camasp-nāme, 1 = 60 Tales of Camasp, 1 = 60 Leṭāʾif-i [?], 1 = 30 Witty sayings/pleasantries of [?], 1 = 30 Firūz Şah, 33 fi 30 Firūz Şah, 33 at 30 Tevāriḫ-i Ṭabarī, 80 = 2000 Ṭabarī’s history, 80 = 2000 Siyer-i nebi, cild 23 = 575 Tales of the Prophet, 23 volumes = 575

The scribe called these books “books of tales” (ḥikāye kitābları), and, indeed, they are almost all romance cycles, the sort where a heroic character goes through one adventure after another. Most of these tales wouldn’t have a single recension, and they have a rich history of traversing languages and peoples in the Middle East. Although it seems likely that Aḥmed Efendi’s books were in Turkish, the primary vernacular in

Istanbul, the same stories were elsewhere told and written down in Persian or Arabic (or both).270

What should we imagine Aḥmed Efendi’s manuscripts to have been like? The

269 It literally reads “1000 nights,” since the inventory identifies Elf leylā wa leylā (1001 nights) in an abbreviated way.

270 For a recent discussion of the development and narrative structure of epic literature, see Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus, 149.

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low values attributed to each copy, generally between 30 and 40 aḳçe, fall far below the sample’s median book value of approximately 150 aḳçe. Although the court scribe identified many of the books as being “volumes” (cild), these books must have comprised unbound or cheaply bound quires or booklets, with little to no ornamentation.271 The word cild is ambiguous; it could mean either a physical codex (possibly bound) or a part of a story. Many extant Ottoman storybooks exhibit a striking convergence between form and content: a single booklet contains one or two episodes, and the episodes themselves can be read in any order.272

For example, a portion of Ḳahramān-nāme (also one of the titles in Aḥmed

Efendi’s shop) copied in 1642 (H. 1052) is in a small quarto format (Figure 3.1). It contains minimal rubrication and, in general, appears quite plain.273 The text is vocalized throughout, probably to facilitate reading aloud.

271 See Chapter One for a discussion of the meaning of “cild.”

272 A study of a lending collection in late eighteenth-century Damascus, owned by a certain Aḥmed al- Rabbāṭ, supports this physical characterization of manuscripts of tales. Based on a study of the surviving manuscripts themselves (a remarkable achievement), Boris Liebrenz describes al-Rabbāṭ’s books of tales as being of similarly characteristic appearance: “With few exceptions this type of literature is characterized by books of a rather uniform outer appearance: They are of small size; they have the simplest cardboard or quarter-leather binding; although the script is often professional, clear, and readable, there can be no claim to calligraphic beauty; the texts are bound into many volumes of usually between 30 to 60 leafs, which leads to extremely inflated numbers of volumes for one single text that could – more economically arranged – fit into one or a few volumes. This might have served both the professional needs of the public narrators in the coffeehouses as well as those of the book-lenders who could thereby lend out many parts of a text at the same time.” Boris Liebrenz, “The Library of Aḥmad Al-Rabbāṭ,” 26.

273 The manuscript’s dimensions, given in the electronic catalog for the Süleymaniye Library, are 19 x 12 cm. The binding is a simple cardboard but is probably not original as the pages are out of order and some are missing.

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Figure 3.1: Two folios from the Ḳahramān-nāme. Süleymaniye Library, Yazma Bağışlar 7173, f. 1b–2a).

Unbound or flimsily bound booklets are particularly vulnerable. They are easily misplaced or damaged, especially if readers bring them from one location to another, and their unassuming material qualities make them unattractive to most collectors. Survival must have also been affected by later generations’ attitudes toward tales. M. Fuat

Köprülü relates the disdain with which the poet Süleymān Fāʾiḳ Efendi (d. 1838) regarded the Ḥamza-nāme and ‘Anter-nāme because they were long and lacked an identifiable author or date of composition.274 It is hard to imagine someone like

Süleymān Fāʾiḳ Efendi wanting to preserve the material record of these stories. While

274 Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, Edebiyat Araştırmaları (Istanbul: Ötüken, 1989), 201–2n6.

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nineteenth-century copies have survived, it is indeed challenging to find books of tales that date from Aḥmed Efendi’s lifetime in the seventeenth century.275

However, we must not allow the paucity of cheap ḥikāye manuscript survivals to leave us with the impression that these books had only a limited circulation in early modern Ottoman Istanbul. In the European context, cheap books, especially entertaining stories, have been found in large numbers on lists of booksellers’ wares, pointing to a high circulation even though many of these books are no longer extant.276 The significant numbers of tales offered by Aḥmed Efendi indicate a tremendous and certain demand.

Instead of 184 booklets from the Ḥamza-nāme, Aḥmed Efendi might have just stocked a couple dozen and copied more as needed (after all, the inventory indicates that he had the ink and paper on hand). In a manuscript-based written culture, there was no need to mass-produce copies of books on speculation. That he held these titles in stock in such high numbers means he knew they would sell. And because these cheap books were his stock-in-trade, the court recorded them in more detail than cheap books would usually merit.

We know that some of these titles are the sorts of stories that would have been

275 There is better luck to be had in some foreign libraries. Although many early modern European collectors preferred fancier manuscripts or more esoteric literature, cheap manuscripts also made their way into the collections. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in particular, has an significant collection of stories. I have not been able to access this collection; nor have I have seen M. Fuat Köprülü’s collection, also said to be rich in storybooks, because of renovations to the library in which it is housed. The Süleymaniye Library’s Yazma Bağışlar (“Donated Manuscripts”) section has proven to be the most fruitful source of early ḥikāye manuscripts within Istanbul in the course of this research. The manuscripts here survived within private hands, sometimes for centuries, before being donated in the twentieth century.

276 Henri-Jean Martin, Print, Power, and People in 17th-Century France (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993), 335–36; Cristina Dondi and Neil Harris, “Oil and Green Ginger: The Zornale of the Venetian Bookseller Francesco de Madiis, 1484–1488,” in Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, ed. Malcolm Walsby and Natasha Constantinidou (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 341–406; and Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 45.

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told by Istanbul’s storytellers, and that storytellers made use of texts. Storytelling was not an entirely oral tradition.277 For example, Evliyā Çelebi described a group of storytellers (meddāḥ) in a 1638 guild parade declaiming stories from miscellanies

(mecmūʿalar) in their hands.278 On the basis of readers’ notes in the flyleaves of manuscripts, Tülün Değirmenci has recreated vivid scenes of oral storybook readings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.279 Değirmenci shows that the books traveled from one part of the city to another and could be found in places as diverse as the palace schools, coffee shops, sufi lodges, and the market.280 The unbound booklet format would have made these books particularly portable. The Ḳahramān-nāme manuscript in Figure

3.1 was optimized for reading aloud in other ways. It was written in a clear script that was fully vocalized, and the text fills a large portion of the page, without the visual elements (wide margins, delicate rubrication) that are the hallmarks of a page that is optimized for viewing.

It is likely that these books were not for sale, but for rent. Living in Istanbul in the seventeenth century, Antoine Galland described shops that rented out books of

“stories and fables” for 4 or 5 aḳçe. Galland wrote that these bookshops were especially busy during the long nights of winter, when, he said, “Turks gather to listen as these tales

277 Georgios Dedes offers a thorough account of the relationship between Ottoman storytellers and their texts. Georgios Dedes, “The Battalname: An Ottoman Turkish Frontier Epic Wondertale” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1995), 75–90. Nonetheless, these tales were filled with oral elements; see Zehra Öztürk, “Osmanlı döneminde kıraat meclislerinde okunan halk kitapları,” Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi 5, no. 9 (2007): 401–46; and Elif Sezer, The Oral and the Written in Ottoman Literature, 72–76.

278 Evliyā Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 1 (Yapı Kredi), 225.

279 Değirmenci, “Bir kitabı kaç kisi okur?” Elif Sezer’s in-depth study of a single story manuscript (probably dating to the eighteenth century) also paints a rich picture of reading: Elif Sezer, The Oral and the Written in Ottoman Literature.

280 Değirmenci, “Bir kitabı kaç kisi okur?,” 13–14, 23.

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— for which they have a great fondness — are read aloud.”281 In fact, the possibility of rental might help to explain the large numbers observed in Aḥmed Efendi’s tereke. Just as video-rental shops (before they were made nearly obsolete) would need to stock enough copies of a video to meet peak demand on weekend evenings, Aḥmed Efendi’s stock might have been necessary to satisfy customer demand in the busiest rental periods.

In the case of seventeenth-century Istanbul, peak demand for tales seems to have come during the winter, and probably also during the lively nights of Ramaḍān. Aḥmed

Efendi’s inventory was recorded at the beginning of Şevvāl, just a week after the end of

Ramaḍān.282

The likelihood of rental implies that ḥikāyāt enjoyed a popularity and reach that goes even beyond that suggested by the numbers in Aḥmed Efendi’s inventory. Because of their biases, probate inventories are especially unhelpful in assessing the popularity of tales. Despite ample evidence of demand for stories, the titles in Aḥmed Efendi’s stock appear very rarely in the private collections I have studied. For example, the İskender- nāme appears by title in just two other inventories, both in more expensive copies. One copy belongs to a certain Ḥüseyin Çelebi, a resident of Istanbul who died on campaign.

His inventory contains forty-one books, almost all of which are unidentified. The other copy belongs to a shop owner in the Beşiktaş neighborhood, El Ḥac Muṣṭafā Ḫalīfe.283

Almost all his books are unidentified, with the sole exception of the İskender-nāme.

281 “Il y a, dans le Bezestein, certains libraires qui ne font autre trafic que de prester ces livres à lire pour quatre ou cinq aspres, et surtout ils ont grande foule, pendant l’hyver, que les nuits sont longues, parce que c’est là l’occupation que les Turcs prennent en ce temps là, de s’assembler pour entendre lire ces fables pour lesquelles ils ont un penchant tout à fait grand.” Antoine Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland, 242.

282 I thank Ann Blair for suggesting the video store analogy to me, and Cemal Kafadar for pointing out the significance of the month of Aḥmed Efendi’s death.

283 Mülga beledī kassamlığı, d. 3, f. 17b (v19) and Galata kassamlığı, d. 96, f. 21a (v22). The copies of İskender-nāme in these inventories are worth 110 and 300 aḳçe, respectively.

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Similarly, Ṭabarī’s History also appears twice in the inventories. One copy is owned by a certain Zırhī Muṣṭafā Ağa, and the other by the chief accountant of Anatolia.284 The latter bookowner has seventy-four books in his collection, half of which are unidentified.

In most of these collections, the epic title in question appears with dozens of other unknown books. Just these four bookowners’ collections hint at many books beneath the surface of the inventory. These four owners — comprising a shopkeeper, a soldier, a senior bureaucrat, and a wealthy ağa — also demonstrate the heroic story’s broad social reach.285

The relationship between a physical book and that text’s impact must have varied by genre. Stories seem to have had a particularly wide reach. As Tülün Değirmenci’s painstaking research indicates, a single book could travel to many locations within the city and might be heard by large audiences. Değirmenci learned from one reader’s note that the audience for a reading comprised twenty-four people.286 While we can assume that each type of book has a readership “multiplier” — that is, it was encountered not just by its owner but by the owners’ associates — certain kinds of books must have had a much higher multiplier. Stories probably had among the highest. Consider how many people might have been touched by one of Aḥmed Efendi’s booklets in the course of a single year as it was rented and read aloud. The answer is probably in the hundreds.

284KA d. 6, f. 71b (v76), and KA d. 6, f. 110a (v113).

285 Based on an exemplary study of readers’ marks in suriving manuscripts, Boris Liebrenz found a similar broad reach for sīra literature in late eighteenth-century Damascus. Boris Liebrenz, “The Library of Aḥmad Al-Rabbāṭ,” 33–36.

286 Değirmenci, “Bir kitabı kaç kisi okur?,” 26.

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Ḥikāye and the Determinants of Genre

Aḥmed Efendi’s inventory presents a constellation of books completely different from that of the medrese constellation introduced in the last chapter. The court scribe who recorded Aḥmed Efendi’s wares identified this group of books with a specific label, introducing them as ḥikāye kitābları (books of tales). Inadvertently, the scribe left us a precious clue as to how a contemporary labeled and grouped books together. The ḥikāye genre was not included in library catalogs or endowment deeds, and Kātib Çelebi barely mentions it in his bibliography. However, contemporaries used the label frequently.287

Looking at how they defined this group of books — what was in and what was out — shows that genre was not only determined by content and narrative form, but also by the material form of the book themselves, which was adapted to a particular social situation and use.

Most of the books in Aḥmed Efendi’s shop are readily recognized today as being heroic tales. However, there is one that appears incongruous at first glance: the history written by the tenth-century scholar and Qurʾānic commentator al-Ṭabarī. The inclusion of al-Ṭabarī seems particularly odd given his status as a canonical historian of the highest order. Many contemporaries viewed stories as being antithetical to real history, as exemplified by al-Ṭabarī. For example, the anonymous author of the Risāle-i garībe, a litany of complaints about worthless elements in Ottoman society, assumed the incompatibility of al-Ṭabarī and heroic story cycles when he disparaged “those liars who

287 “Ḥikāye,” taken from Arabic and ultimately associated with an Arabic root meaning “to tell” or “to report,” could be used in a variety of contexts in seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish. For example, the author of a chronicle might use the term to precede an anecdote, in much the same way that the term “beyt” (verse) could precede a couplet. Here, I discuss what contemporaries meant when they identified a text as being of the “ḥikāye” type.

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don’t read Ṭabarī, but read the Book of Kings and the Ḥamza Cycle.”288 For this anonymous author, it was a sign of the depravity of his time that the canonical al-Ṭabarī was ignored in favor of storybooks.

Likewise, the early eighteenth-century historian Naʿīmā Efendi scorned mere stories as antithetical to proper history: “[Historians] must be reliable in what they say, and must not make foolish statements or write spurious tales (ḥikāyāt).”289 He went on to argue that context and useful, practical details were what distinguished history from simple stories:

Whatever the sphere of human life to which the question which an historian is treating belongs, he should not be content simply to tell the story (nakl ü ḥikāyeti ile iktifāʾ etmeyüp), but should also incorporate useful information directly into his narrative. It is of no great consequence merely to recount campaigns and seasons of repose from campaigning, arrivals and departures, appointments to office and removals from office, and peace and war... Historians must first ascertain what it was that men thought and what it was over which they disagreed, what it was they believed to be the best course in the conduct of war and in making terms with the foe, what were the causes and the weaknesses which were then bringing triumph or entailing destruction… But simple annals, devoid of these useful features, are in no way different from so many Ḥamza-nāmes.290

288 “Tevārīḫ-i Ṭabari [sic] oḳumayub Şāhnāme ve Ḥamzanāme oḳıyan keẕẕāblar.” Nuruosmaniye 4925 f63a, reproduced in Hayati Develi, Risāle-i garībe (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2001), 32, 158. Develi estimates the date of composition to be late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Both of the titles mentioned by the anonymous author were found in Aḥmed Efendi’s shop.

289 “Sâdıku’l-kavl olup ekāvîl-i bâtıla ve hikâyât-ı zâʾife yazmaya bir husûsun hakîkatine vâkıf değil ise muttaliʿ olanlardan tefahhus edip, teyakkun hâsıl ettiği mevâddı yaza.” Naîmâ Mustafa Efendi, Târih-i Naʿîmâ, 4. English translation from Lewis Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed. Norman Itzkowitz (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 112.

290 “Zabt olunacak umûr havâdis-i kevniyyenin ne kısmından ise yalnız nakl ü hikāyeti ile iktifā etmeyip, kıssadan hisse alınacak köşelerde dekāʾik-i nâfiʿa derc eyleye. Zîrâ sefer u hazar ve zehâb ü iyâb ve azl ü nasb silm ü harb ve dahi sâʾir bu maküle havâdisi sâde yazmakta çendân fâʾide yoktur. Belki her zamanın muktezâ-i hâli ve ricâl-i asrın meslek ü meʾâl-i ahvâli ve nizâm-ı mülk ü malda amâl-i fikr ü meşveretleri ve mâhasal netâʾic-i melhûzât u reviyyetleri ve aʿdâ tarafiyle mukātele ve mütârekede muhtâr-ı vakt olan maslahatları ve husûl-i zafer veya lühûk-ı zarara müʾeddî olan esbâb u illetleri gereği gibi dânâ-i kâr olanlardan istihbâr ettikten sonra ıttılâʿı mertebe-i mahalline göre îrâd eylemek lâzımdır ki baʿde zamanin kırâʾat edenler nice fevâʾid-i mücerrebeye muttaliʿ olalar. Bu fevâʾidden hâlî ve sâde târihlerin Hamza- nâme’den farkı yoktur.” Naîmâ Mustafa Efendi, Târih-i Naʿîmâ, 4–5. English translation from Thomas, A Study of Naima, 113.

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Naʿīmā Efendi refers to al-Ṭabarī in the course of his work. Clearly, al-Ṭabarī meets his definition of proper history.291

The inclusion of al-Ṭabarī among Aḥmed Efendi’s wares is no fluke, however.

İsmail Erünsal has recently published the probate inventory of a bookseller in Edirne who was a contemporary of Aḥmed Efendi and who offered many of the same tales. The

Edirne bookseller, Aḥmed Ḥoca, had a much broader selection, encompassing, for example, Qurʾānic commentary and jurisprudence. Grouped at the end of his inventory, however, is a list of storybooks reminiscent of those of Aḥmed Efendi, and in similarly high numbers (Table 3.3):

291 The tension between “real” history and epic stories was not new. Konrad Hirschler describes scholarly concerns about the reading of epics from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries: Hirschler, Written Word, 165-183. However, epic stories have much in common with historical works. Ḥikāyāt were usually set in a vaguely historical time and featured historical personages. The earliest Ottoman chronicles, recorded in the fifteenth century, resembled epics and stories of the prophet, having arisen from the same oral milieu. In the 1502-3 catalog of the palace library, the section dealing with history also includes siyer, epics such as Ebu Müslim and Seyyid Baṭṭāl, the İskender-nāme, and general histories. In other words, for the early eighteenth-century historian Naʿīmā Efendi, ḥikāyāt served as a useful foil for his definition of history because they were adjacent genres. Kaya Şahin and Cemal Kafadar, presentations at “The Ottoman Palace Library Inventory of 1502–3” (Harvard University, April 5, 2014); Gottfried Hagen, “The Order of Knowledge, the Knowledge of Order,” 443; Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 62–65, 94; Sajdi, Barber of Damascus, 145–150.

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Table 3.3: Storybooks held by Aḥmed Ḥoca in Edirne (inventory dated 1680/H.1091).292 Titles also held by the Istanbul bookseller Aḥmed Efendi are listed in boldface.

Şāhnāme, cild 24, fi 33 Siyer-i şerīf, cild 31, fi 33 Gerden-keşān, cild 5, fi 33 ʿAnter-nāme, cild 6, fi 33 Tevārīḫ-i Ṣarı Saltuḳ, cild 5, fi 33 Tevārīḫ-i Ṭabarī, cild 10, fi 33 Ebu’l-Müslim, cild 21, fi 33 Seyyid Baṭṭāl, cild 4, fi 33 Aḥmed-i Zemcī, cild 6, fi 33 ?Ḳerān-i ḥabeşī, cild 4, fi 33 Kerb Gāzī, cild 17, fi 33 Envārü’l-ʿĀşıkīn, cild 5, fi 33 İskender-nāme, cild 15, fi 33 Ḥamza-nāme, cild 125, fi 33 Firūz Şāh, cild 23, fi 33

The tales sold by Aḥmed Ḥoca in Edirne are listed together at the end of his probate inventory; either he stored them together in his Edirne shop, and the written inventory reflects the way that he organized his books (in fact, this is one of the very few cases where I can discern a pattern of organization), or the scribe grouped these titles together when he was copying the inventory into the register.293 In either case, these fifteen titles form a coherent set within the larger inventory. They were all valued at 33 aḳçe per booklet and recorded much the same way that Aḥmed Efendi’s books in Istanbul were recorded. And among them is al-Ṭabarī’s history.

How do we reconcile the competing evidence for affinity between al-Ṭabarī and heroic stories and, at the same time, their incompatibility? As al-Ṭabarī’s history was refracted through languages and various milieux, new forms of the text appeared. By virtue of content, format, and use, some versions were more similar to “ḥikāye kitābları”

292 Edirne ŞS. 58, s. 49b, reproduced in Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar, 516 and 519–520. Aḥmed Ḥoca’s inventory also includes other stories such as copies of “ḥikāye-i elf leylā” (1001 Nights) and another copy of İskender-nāme, but these are not grouped with the rest of the storybooks at the end of the inventory.

293 In a similar way, Ronald Zboray tried to discern the layout of an antebellum American bookstore from three inventory lists, and use the layout to determine a “bookshelf epistemology.” Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 146–47. I thank Ann Blair for referring me to Zboray’s work.

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than they were to the original. The history was translated out of the original Arabic into

Persian by the tenth century. The first Turkish versions were translated from Persian, but there were subsequent translations directly from the Arabic.294 Kātib Çelebi noted that the

Turkish translation, in particular, “circulated widely among the Anatolian people.”295 In all three languages, books that were called “al-Ṭabarī’s history” in fact acquired stories that had never appeared in al-Ṭabarī’s original composition, including tales from the cycles of Camasp and Baṭṭal.296 Al-Ṭabarī’s history came to have multiple lives: it was remembered and used as a reliable source for early Islamic history at the same time that it provided fodder and backdrop for a rich storytelling tradition. If both textual streams flowed from the same tenth-century source, by the time they arrived in seventeenth- century Istanbul, they were distinct rivers with divergent content and narrative form.

Like al-Ṭabarī’s history, many of the titles in Aḥmed Efendi’s shop could be found in fancier, lengthier versions. the Book of Kings (Şāhnāme), the Story of Firūz Şāh

(Firūz Şah), and the stories of the Prophet (siyer-i nebī) were all prime subjects for elaborate and costly volumes.297 In fact, two of the most expensive books in the sample studied here are an illustrated version of the Book of Kings and an illustrated volume of

294 Mustafa Fayda, “Târîhu’l-ümem ve’l-mülûk,” TDVIA, 40:93.

295 Kashf, 298:

ﻭو ﻧﻘﻠﻪﮫ ﻏﻴﯿﺮﻩه ﺍاﻟﻰ ﺍاﻟﺘﺮﻛﻴﯿﺔ ﻭو ﻫﮬﮪھﻮ ﺍاﻟﻤﺘﺪﺍاﻭوﻝل ﺑﻴﯿﻦ ﻋﻮﺍاﻡم ﺍاﻟﺮﻭوﻡم.

296 Irene Melikoff, “Sur le Jāmaspnāme,” Journal Asiatique 242 (1954): 453; Ocak, “Battalnāme,” DV İslam Ansiklopedisi c 5, 107. Many versions of al-Ṭabarī, including the original composition, treat people who are the heroes of other ḥikāye stories, such as King Solomon (of the Süleymān-nāme), Alexander the Great (of the İskender-nāme), and Ebu Müslim. See, for example, the tables of contents in Laleli 2018 and İzmir 463, both accessed in the Süleymaniye Library.

297 On different registers of the tale of Fīrūz Şāh, see Elif Sezer, The Oral and the Written in Ottoman Literature, 55–56.

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stories about the prophet, titles that also appear in Aḥmed Efendi’s shop.298 Together, these two costly volumes alone were worth about the same amount as the nearly five hundred cheap books owned by Aḥmed Efendi. These same tales were also widely circulated in very simple manuscripts, like the quarto-sized miscellany in Figure 3.2, a hagiography of the Prophet, copied in 1681–82 (H. 1092).

Figure 3.2: Two folios from Siyer-i Nebi. Hacı Mahmud Efendi 4491, f. 76b–77a.

As the divergent prices suggest, differences between a classic text and its ḥikāye version were also apparent in the material qualities of the manuscripts themselves. The

“classic” Ṭabarī circulated in hefty, bound volumes. Two inventories in the sample studied here each contained a part of al-Ṭabarī’s history worth 300 aḳçe, twice the

298 See Chapter One; these titles belonged to Zırhī Muṣṭafā Ağa.

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median value of a book (and ten times the value of a volume in Aḥmed Ḥoca’s shop).299 I imagine these more expensive versions to have been something like the manuscript shown in Figure 3.3 (Nuruosmaniye 3140). This manuscript, copied in 1656 (H. 1067), contains a Turkish translation of al-Ṭabarī. The large-scale folio book features a fine headpiece and gilded rule-borders.300 It is bound in a stamped binding with envelope flap.

Figure 3.3: Two folios from al-Ṭabarī’s history. Nuruosmaniye 3140, f. 1b–2a.

299 KA d. 6, f. 71b (v75) and KA d. 6, f. 110a (v113).

300 The electronic catalog of the Süleymaniye Library indicates that the manuscript’s dimensions are 40.4 x 25.9 cm.

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In contrast, the ḥikāye Ṭabarī appeared in inexpensive, easily portable booklets.

See, for example, the manuscript of al-Ṭabarī in Figure 3.4 (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi

Yazma Bağışlar 3696).

Figure 3.4: Two folios from al-Ṭabarī’s history (second volume). Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Yazma Bağışlar 3696, f. 2b–3a.

This modest manuscript, probably dating to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century, was less than half the size of the illuminated, gilded folio version.301 The scribe

301 According to the electronic catalog of the Süleymaniye Library, the dimensions of Yazma Bağışlar 3696 are a very portable 15.8 x 10 cm. By courtesy of the librarians of the Süleymaniye Library, I was able to examine the manuscript itself for a few minutes. During this examination, I identified two different watermarks, one a hand and the other a stacked crown-star-crescent. According to Nikolaev’s album, hand watermarks appear in sixteenth century Ottoman documents (see, for example, number 4 on page 17, which appears on a document dated 1505). Briquet’s album shows hand watermarks flourishing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Heawood’s examples almost all date to the sixteenth century, with just a handful associated with the early seventeenth century (118–120). Velkov shows a similar distribution (368– 370).The stacked crown-star-crescent watermark dates most often to the early seventeenth century in

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provided simple red rubrication to highlight quotations from the Qurʾān and section headings. Decorative red dots end each line, but the manuscript lacks even the simplest of rule-borders. Plain copies of al-Ṭabarī like this were, in all probability, physically indistinguishable at first glance from the Ḥamza cycle, Baṭṭāl cycle, and other storybooks held by Aḥmed Efendi. In terms of material qualities, this second manuscript resembles the Ḳahramān-nāme in Figure 3.1 or the hagiography of the Prophet in Figure 3.2 much more strongly than it does the other al-Ṭabarī.

In other words, the ḥikāye genre was a genre not just because of the qualities of the text itself (a narrative structure suited to oral reading, an epic-historical setting, a particular type of historical yet larger-than-life character), but also because of how the text physically appeared, in inexpensive booklets. The physical qualities, in turn, cannot be divorced from how the book was used. Genre was constituted by these mutually reinforcing elements: the object itself, the text it contained, and the use to which it would be put.

The Role of Language

The example of al-Ṭabarī’s history, which was translated into Persian and Turkish and ultimately had different trajectories within each language, touches on the importance of language for identifying constellations of books and their likely readers. Without question, contemporaries considered language one of the most salient features of a book.

For example, when the historian Naʿīmā discussed the chronicles that he used as sources

Nikolaev’s (Sofia) album (see, for example, number 159 on page 69, which appears on a document dated 1611. Heawood’s album contains a single watermark of this style (but with a clover in the crown), number 1132, which he dates to 1610 (page 89). In summary, the watermark evidence suggests that the manuscript was created in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.

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for his own history, he organized them according to language (Arabic, Persian, and

Turkish), and discussed each language in turn.302 When court officials prepared probate inventories, they sometimes identified a book only by its language (kitāb-i türkī, kitāb-i fārīsī; “Turkish book,” “Persian book”), as if this were enough to distinguish it from the rest of the books in the list.

However, language was intimately connected to Ottoman generic and social conventions in ways that are only dimly understood now. Of course, language mattered because it made a book accessible to some and not to others. A common trope among authors writing in Turkish in the seventeenth century (or translating from other languages into Turkish) was their desire to reach the broadest possible audience. Sometimes,

Turkish was seen as appropriate for a very specific audience. Naʿīmā, for example, wrote of his disappointment that a useful political treatise was only available in Arabic:

[The book] is a vast treasure-house, but it is in Arabic. To be sure, the ulema and the [scribes] today read a thousand books of this sort, and understand the secrets which these books contain. But, since the control of affairs is not in their hands, this does not do one atom of good. On the other hand, if it were to be translated into Turkish and to become known to the incumbent of the grand vizierate, it would do worlds of good.303

In contrast, an Istanbulite author who wanted to be read in Damascus and Cairo, and to converse with earlier generations of Islamic scholars, needed to write in Arabic.304

302 Mustafa Naima, Târih-i Naʻîmâ, 4.

303 Lewis Thomas, A Study of Naima, 47. “Lisân-i Arabîde bir defîne-i azîmedir, lâkin şimdi ol makūle bin kitabı ulemâ ve küttâb okuyup sırrına muttaliʿ oldukları sûrette ellerinde iş olmamakla develete zerre kadar fâʾidesi yoktur. Ammâ lisân-i Türkîye tercüme olunup makām-ı sadaret sâhibinin maʿlûmu olsa dünyalar kadar nefʿi olurdu.” Mustafa Naima, Târih-i Naʻîmâ, 1891.

304 See Gottfried Hagen, “Arabic in the Ottoman Empire,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed. Kees Versteegh (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 501–5.

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The intended audience was only one dimension of language choice, however.

Sheldon Pollock, a scholar of premodern Southeast Asian literature, has framed an author’s choice between vernacular and cosmopolitan languages as a choice with social and political consequences. He asks, “What is at stake in this choice, what else in the social and political world is being chosen?”305 Given the state of research, it is difficult to answer Pollock’s question for the early modern Ottoman world. However, much could be learned from studying the choices of Ottoman authors who wrote in multiple languages.

For example, Birgīlī Meḥmed Efendi wrote mostly in Arabic but famously authored a catechism in Turkish so that “its benefit might be widespread.”306 At another time, when specifically requested to write a treatise in Arabic on the cash waqf, he demurred and wrote in Turkish instead, saying that his thinking was not yet sufficiently detailed to merit treatment in Arabic.307 The connotations and limitations of language communities merit a significant study of their own. I offer these anecdotal examples to suggest some of the contours of meaning that a book’s language might have conveyed, and to note that even one language had many possible registers and connotations.308

305 Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998), 7.

306 Birgili explained himself in Arabic, however:

ﻛﺘﺒﻬﮭﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﺘﺮﻛﻴﯿﺔ ﻟﻴﯿﻌﻢ ﻧﻔﻌﻬﮭﺎ

Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Servili 182, f. 1b. Facsimile printed in Birgili Mehmed Efendi, Vasiyyet-name, ed. Musa Duman (Istanbul: R yayınları, 2000).

307 “It’s appropriate for a treatise in Arabic to be completely detailed.” (ʿArabça risāle yazacak temāmca tefṣīl olmaḳ münāsıbdır.) Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1085, f. 4b. Birgili also claimed that his eyes were too weak for writing Arabic. I learned of this discussion thanks to Ahmet Kaylı’s thesis on the Birgili manuscript tradition. Kaylı, “Study of Birgili Mehmet Efendi’s Works,” 156–7.

308 See the Introduction for a discussion of the hypothesis that vernacular readership grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Implicit Taxonomies as Methodology

“Ḥikāye” is an example of a category that emerges from use rather than from explicit taxonomies. Implicit taxonomies are particularly useful for approaching cultural and intellectual history through the social history of books. The two examples examined closely in this and the previous chapter — an efendi’s reference library and ḥikāyeler — are not reflected in catalogs or bibliographies. The efendi constellation comprises books from many different subjects. Ḥikāyeler are excluded from formal catalogs altogether, even though engagement with these books was clearly very high. Both of these examples point to the need to pursue alternative approaches to the history of Ottoman books — not only in order to reconstruct the panorama of the Ottoman book world, so that we can properly put extant manuscripts in their context, but also because these books are, after all, proxies for cultural and intellectual history. As long as some books and categories of books remain invisible to us, we will be blind to entire swathes of Ottoman culture.

Constellations of books that emerge from use reflect the way that titles were used and perceived by contemporaries. As a result, the categories can be quite fluid. Just as a star might figure into several different constellations in the night sky, depending on who is looking at it, a single text could have real affinities to very different clusters of books.

Likewise, clusters of books united in use in one context might overlap strongly with other clusters. For example, the genre of the ḥikāye has strong affinities with (among many things) hagiographies of saints (menāḳıb-nāme) and legends or ballads (destān). Our goal should not be to create a rigid taxonomy with sharply defined boundaries between groups. Such a taxonomy could only distort the historical reality.

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How should we identify other constellations of books based on use? Ownership data found in probate inventories (and, for later centuries, in inventories of seized goods) provide strong evidence for some. However, they, along with manuscript libraries and catalogs, exhibit systematic biases. As a result, they must be complemented with anecdotal evidence and with the evidence of manuscripts themselves. Anecdotal groupings abound in narrative sources, even if we are only rarely given labels for them.

While a single anecdote might be of limited value, when it is collated with others and supplemented with the evidence of the manuscripts themselves, it acquires layers of substance and also context for how the books were read and by whom.

The next chapter explores the implicit taxonomies contained in a special kind of manuscript, the personal miscellany (mecmūʿa). The contents and arrangement of miscellanies are extremely idiosyncratic but nonetheless yield precious clues as to what kinds of texts were used together.

* * *

One of the benefits of examining implicit taxonomies is that they can bring to the foreground books and texts that would otherwise remain invisible. In some versions of the Alexander romance — one of the tales held by Aḥmed Efendi — Alexander the Great visits India and asks the Brahmins a series of grand questions. They respond with pithy, often paradoxical answers. For example, Alexander asks them, “Which is stronger, life or death?” and, “Which is greater, the earth or the sea?” When the Conqueror asks them,

“Who are greater in number, the living or the dead?” the Brahmins declare, “The dead are

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more numerous than the living.” Then their answer turns enigmatic. Because the dead

“no longer exist, they cannot be counted. The visible are more numerous than the invisible.” Even if the dead number more than the living, their invisibility makes them seem less numerous because they are uncountable.309

Statistics and data carry more persuasive power than ever, but the Brahmins’ paradoxical reply to Alexander cautions us to be mindful of what we cannot count. An abundance of surviving traces help us to envision the book culture of early modern

Istanbul. Manuscript libraries teem with early modern Ottoman books. Archival sources such as library endowment deeds and probate inventories catalog books that circulated.

The writings of contemporary authors make frequent reference to books, with Kātib

Çelebi’s massive bibliography constituting an especially rich source. However, these vestiges of the past are selective survivals. Cheap books and books in vernacular languages were systematically underrepresented in probate records. These are the very same books least likely to survive in manuscript collections, least likely to be endowed to a library, and least likely to be mentioned in a scholarly biography or bibliography.

Today they are invisible, but not insignificant.

309 The Greek Alexander Romance (London: Penguin, 1991), 131.

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Chapter Four

Peering Over Readers’ Shoulders: Note-Taking as a Reflection of Reading

The history of books resembles the study of other material artifacts—up to a point. Like gloves or cooking pots, books are things that are made, bought, sold, given, stored, and destroyed. Even lying unopened, as purely physical objects, books can be laden with meaning. But studying the history of books is not the same as studying the history of gloves or pots because books are also containers for ideas. While rooted in material culture, books point to intellectual and cultural history.310

It is much easier to trace the movements of books than it is to trace the movements of ideas, and easier to identify a book’s owner than to know who actually read it, and how it was read (especially when “reading” is broadly defined to include listening to a book, as in the case of the ḥikāye texts in the previous chapter). Typically, readers do not leave much evidence in their wake.311 Nonetheless, Ottoman sources do offer some opportunities to peer over the shoulders of readers and see how they engaged with the texts they read. This chapter focuses on the traces left by readers in the margins of books and on the pages of personal notebooks (mecmūʿas). After an overview of

Ottoman note-taking, with special attention paid to marginalia, this chapter uses a case study of two mecmūʿas dating to seventeenth-century Istanbul to show how personal

310 On gloves and cooking pots, see: Steven C. Bullock and Sheila McIntyre, “Glove-Giving and the Large Funeral in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 2 (April 2012): 305– 46; Emily Lynn Osborn, “Casting Aluminum Cooking Pots: Labour, Migration and Artisan Production in West Africa’s Informal Sector, 1945–2005,” African Identities 7, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 373–86.

311 As Leah Price has noted, “The greater a reader’s engagement with the text, the less likely he or she is to pause long enough to leave a record.” Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2007): 312.

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reading notebooks are uniquely suited to revealing how and why people read. Mecmūʿas reflect their owners’ perspectives on what was important enough to keep and how fragments of texts related to each other. In a manuscript-based written culture, notebooks were key vehicles of textual transmission, albeit often fragmentary transmission. Finally, this chapter argues that fragmentary circulation of texts was not the exception, but the norm. Mecmūʿas enabled this fragmentation, but they also allowed readers to recombine fragments into a new whole.

Note-Taking in the Margins

Although it is sometimes assumed that the makers of Ottoman and other Islamic manuscripts left wide margins in order to allow for note-taking and other marginalia, the truth is that readers did not often scribble in the margins of the texts they read. Notes are plentiful on the flyleaves and the first folio of many manuscripts (see, for example,

Figures 1.7 and 4.2). These paratextual inscriptions may include the title and author of the book, endowment testaments, ownership and reading statements, and couplets or prayers. Such inscriptions have much to reveal about the social context of books (see

Introduction). However, they only rarely tell us about readers’ reactions and engagements with the book’s text. For such traces of reading, one must look to the margins.

Among copies of early modern Ottoman books, the incidence of marginalia seems lower than the rate of 20% found by William Sherman in a collection of early printed

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English books.312 Where readerly marginalia do appear, most consist of brief corrections to the text, often indicated as such by the use of well-known abbreviations.313

Not infrequently, marginalia became part of the text itself, as when an author’s note was, in most copies, entered in the margins and indicated with a “minhu” (“from him [the author]”), or when a point of contention with another text was indicated with a

“refutation” cross reference (reddiye).314 For example, most manuscript copies of Sūdī’s commentaries contain hundreds of refutations in the margins that indicate which competing commentary a given part of the text refuted.315 The exemplar loaned out from the Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa library for copying in the seventeenth century included such

312 William H. Sherman, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 122; William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Material Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 5. Sherman assumes that the incidence of marginalia must have been higher, but that clean copies would have been more likely to survive and enter rare book collections.

313 Al-Ghazzī (d. 1577 / H. 984) listed common types of marginal annotations and their abbreviations. See Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship, 15–16, and El-Rouayheb, “The Rise of ‘Deep Reading’ in Early Modern Ottoman Scholarly Culture,” 219–20. These annotations were still used by seventeenth-century Ottoman readers. For a comprehensive discussion of abbreviations in manuscript notations, see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers, 2–6.

314 Authors such as Kātib Çelebi used “minhu” to make additions to the main text, sometimes simply elucidating it further. Saḥḥ was used to mark additions or corrections which should later be inserted. Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit: Entstehung und Gedankenwelt von Kātib Čelebis Ğihānnümā, (Berlin: Schwarz, 2003), 288; Bekir Kütükoğlu, Kâtib Çelebi Fezlekeʾsinin kaynakları, 13. Hagen believes that the use of authorial marginalia could be an Ottoman innovation in the Middle Eastern context (290). On “minhu” notes, see Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche, “Minhīyāt - Marginalien des Verfassers in arabischen Manuskripten,” Asiatische Studien : Zeitschrift Der Schweizerischen, 987- 1019, 60, no. 4 (2006).

315 Inan, “Writing a Grammatical Commentary,” 26-27. Inan considers it possible that Sūdī himself inserted these refutational notes, indicating where his text disagreed with his predecessors, especially given that these notes are present in the copy of Sūdī’s commentary on the Gülistān that is considered to be an autograph, MS Veliyuddin 2693 in the Beyazit Library in Istanbul. However, this attribution, though widely accepted, rests on a shaky foundation: a note added to the colophon, in a different hand from the text, indicating that the manuscript was copied by Sūdī. With the kind assistance of a librarian, I was able briefly to examine the manuscript for watermarks. However, I was not able to match conclusively the watermarks I found to those in any of the standard watermark albums.

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marginal annotations, apparently written in the hand of the main text and probably copied from an earlier exemplar (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1: Marginal annotation indicating that the points made in the main text refuted the earlier commentaries written by Surūrī and Şemʿī (“redd-i Surūrī ve Şemʿī”). Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Hafız Ahmet Paşa 33, f. 40a (detail).

Such marginal notes, copied from manuscript to manuscript, did not reflect a particular reader’s engagement with the text. Rather, they came from the author and should be considered a part of the text itself.316

In fact, copious annotations were so unusual that when a scholar did annotate his books, this was considered remarkable. For example, the scholar Ṭursunzāde ʿAbdü’l- bāḳī Efendi (d. 1607 / H. 1015) was said to have been an inveterate reader and annotator:

He was constantly occupied with studying the books in circulation, quick to write down the ideas that came to him. Like a hummingbird with a beautiful bud, he would tirelessly attend scholarly gatherings, always with a case under his armpit. His scribblings were beyond description, and, what’s better, they were innumerable, like the pages of grass.317

316 R. F. Kreutel has shown that copies of marginalia could be quite vulnerable to scribal error. R. F. Kreutel, “Neues zur Evliya-Çelebi-Forschung,” Der Islam 48 (January 1972): 275. I learned of this article from Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit, 287.

317 Mütala'a-i kütüb- mütedavvelaya şedīdü'l-iştiğāl ve taḥrīr-i bedīhıyyāt-i ḫvāṭirāt berīʿül-istiʿcāl gonca- yı raʿnā gibi dāʾim(en) cüzdanı der bağal ve muṣāḥabet-i ʿilmiyyede bülbül gibi bī tevāni ve kesel teʾlīfātı

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At least one of Ṭursunzāde’s manuscripts was acquired by Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa for his college in Istanbul (this is the same college whose library lent out the exemplar discussed in Chapter One and shown in Figure 4.1). As a result, it is possible to see exactly what was meant by scribblings so numerous that they resembled grass (Figures 4.2 and 4.3).

Figure 4.2: Folio 1a from Hafız Ahmet Paşa 3, Taftāzānī’s commentary on the Kaşşāf. The endowment inscription, written in the hand of Ḫāfıẓ Aḥmed Paşa and dated 1607 / H. 1015, reads: “This commentary on the Kaşşāf was purchased from the estate of the late Ṭursunzāde who passed away while he was judge of Egypt. We have endowed it to our medrese in Küçük Ḳaraman, in Istanbul.”318

bīrūn-i dāʾire taḥrīr ve aḥṣ(an) taḥīrātı ṣaḥāʾif-i çemen gibi lā yuʿadd ve lā yuḥṣā. Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī, Ḥadāʾiḳü’l-ḥaḳāʾiḳ fī tekmileti’ş-şaḳāʾiḳ, ed. Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1989), 514.

318 İşbu şerḥ-i Keşşāf Mıṣır ḳāżī iken mütevefā olan merḥūm Ṭursunzāde’niñ muḫallefātından iştirā olunub İstanbul’da Küçük Ḳaramanda olan medresemize vaḳıf itmişüzdür.

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Figure 4.3: Folios 79b–80a from Hafız Ahmet Paşa 3. Presumably, the marginal annotations were inserted by Ṭursunzāde.

Until recently, the best-studied note taker in Ottoman history was the seventeenth- century polymath Kātib Çelebi, though it is difficult to generalize from his methods to those of others. Gottfried Hagen and Thomas Goodrich have analyzed the notes Kātib

Çelebi wrote in two geographical works. They found that Kātib Çelebi inserted anecdotes and facts from other books he read, citing the original source, sometimes disagreeing with the main text. Gottfried Hagen argued that one of these annotated texts was the beginning of the first recension of Kātib Çelebi’s celebrated geography, Cihānnümā. The process of inserting marginal notes that then became frozen into a new text, seen frequently in the scholarly commentary tradition, is mirrored in Kātib Çelebi’s approach to composition.319 Separately, Eleazar Birnbaum studied the structure of Kātib Çelebi’s

319 Gottfried Hagen, “Kâtib Çelebi and Sipâhîzâde,” 525–42. Thomas D. Goodrich, “Marginalia: A Small Peek into Ottoman Minds,” Journal of Turkish Studies 29, no. 1 (May 2005): 181–99. The most extensive

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massive bibliography, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, and biographical dictionary, Sullām al-Wuṣūl, to hypothesize that Kātib Çelebi must have also taken notes on notecard-like paper fiches.

Birnbaum argued that only notes taken on fiches can explain how Kātib Çelebi managed to alphabetize thousands upon thousands of names and books.320 As might be expected after so many centuries, none of the fiches survive.321

The jottings of another copious note taker, Veliyüddin Cārullāh Efendi (d. 1738 /

H. 1151) were the subject of a recent collaborative project. Born in the mid-seventeenth century, Cārullāh Efendi rose to prominence in the scholarly class and, like Kātib Çelebi, was an extraordinary bibliophile. Cārullāh Efendi endowed a collection of more than two thousand books to a library that he built in Istanbul. The endowed manuscripts are those that he used personally, as evidenced by the thousands of annotations that he left on them. A team of scholars led by Berat Açıl has shown these annotations can be used as documentary evidence for Cārullāh’s life. They have also cataloged the many different types of notes Cārullāh left, including tables of contents and other paratext, information about the purchase of the book, biographical details on the author of the book, textual corrections, and criticism of the contents.322

discussion of Kātib Çelebi’s note-taking in preparation of the Cihānnümā can be found in Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit, 288–91. For a similar example of notes that become a rough draft, see the description of Cārullāh Efendi’s notes in a book that directly contributed to his own composition in the same genre: İbrahim Halil Üçer, “Yazının Ufku, Kayıların Dili,” in Osmanlı Kitap Kültürü: Cârullah Efendi Kütüphanesi ve Derkenar Notları, ed. Berat Açıl (Istanbul: İlem and Nobel, 2015), 61.

320 Birnbaum, “Katib Chelebi and Alphabetization,” 235–63; and Birnbaum, “The Questing Mind: Katib Çelebi,” 133–58.

321 Birnbaum, “Katib Chelebi and Alphabetization,” 262–63.

322 Osmanlı Kitap Kültürü: Cârullah Efendi Kütüphanesi ve Derkenar Notları. For one contributor’s classification of Cārullah Efendi’s notes, see Üçer, “Yazının Ufku, Kayıların Dili,” 55.

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Kātib Çelebi and Cārullāh Efendi were such unique figures that we cannot assume their methods were typical. Although there were, to my knowledge, no seventeenth- century Ottoman manuals instructing students and others on how to take notes, earlier manuals assumed that note-taking would be a regular part of a student’s education.

Instruction to the Student, written by al-Zarnūjī (fl. early thirteenth century) and still actively circulated in seventeenth-century Istanbul, recommended that students take notes, but reminded them that notes were to complement memorization: “It is essential to write down an extract [of the material] after memorizing [it].” Furthermore, the student should not “write anything unless it is fully understood, for verily [this] blunts the character, destroys intelligence, and wastes time.”323 Given the relative scarcity of marginalia, it seems likely that most students took notes in separate notebooks or sheets of paper rather than in the margins of texts (or they did not heed the advice!). The remainder of this chapter focuses on reading notebooks and compilations, and considers how they both encouraged and mitigated against fragmentary circulation.

Notebooks and “Scattered Sheets”

Creating a notebook was as simple and cheap as cutting and folding a few sheets, and perhaps using a short length of thread to stitch them into a pamphlet. For those who

323 Zarnūjī, Instruction of the Student, 47. Al-Zarnūjī also discusses the importance of having ink on hand at all times in order to make notes. He cites a saying that “he who commits to memory is [uncertain as if] in flight; but he who writes down a matter stands firm” (62). This text is discussed by Khaled El-Rouayheb in an article arguing that the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of reading — independent reading, without a teacher — among scholars and aspiring scholars. (Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Rise of ‘Deep Reading’ in Early Modern Ottoman Scholarly Culture,” 203–4.) On the popularity of al-Zarnūjī in seventeenth-century Istanbul: The probate inventories read for this study included four copies of Zarnūjī’s text or a commentary thereupon. Kātib Çelebi reported that a commentary on the text was written in the sixteenth century and subsequently translated into Turkish. Kashf 1:425.

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could afford more, blank notebooks were available for sale in Istanbul.324 Such notebooks represented a modest upfront investment on the part of a binder or stationer, since they had very simple bindings. They were probably sold unruled, providing the owner with flexibility for the mise-en-page as texts or notes were jotted within. Indeed, flexibility was the major characteristic of notebooks, which rarely have an explicit thematic structure and often, as discussed below, feature quirky page layouts.325

The pages on which a reader kept notes might be called “evrāḳ-i perişān,”

(miscellaneous papers; literally, “scattered sheets”).326 The most common term for a notebook was mecmūʿa (“compilation” or “miscellany”; Ar. majmūʿa), though the same label applied then (as it does today) to a wide variety of compilations, including formal anthologies which circulated in identical copies.327 The past few years have seen

324 Karin Scheper’s examination of extant mecmūʿas suggests that some mecmūʿas were bound as blank books before being inscribed by a readers. She speculates that booksellers or binders might have sold these ready-made notebooks. Scheper, Technique of Islamic Bookbinding, 313–15. Lending credence to this theory is the existence of “blank notebooks” (beyāż mecmūʿa) among the personal belongings of four individuals studied in this project. Their inventories are the following: KA d. 5, f. 67b (“beyāż mecmū‘a, 1,” value of 80 aḳçe, dated 1071); KA d. 6, f. 103a (“beyāż mecmū‘a, 1,” value of 100 aḳçe, dated 1078), KA d. 6, f. 110a (“beyāż mecmū‘a, cild 5” [5 “volumes”], value of 390 aḳçe, dated 1078), KA d. 6, f. 114b (“beyāż mecmū‘a, 2,” value of 50 aḳçe, dated 1078; this one appears to have been located in the deceased’s barber shop).

325 Selim Kuru, “Mecmûaların içine, edebiyatın dışına doğru…” in Mecmûa: Osmanlı Edebiyatının Kırkambarı, ed. Hatice Aynur et al. (Istanbul: Turkuaz, 2011), 21.

326 Elizabeth Yale, in her study of the note-taking practices of early modern English scholars, found a similar contemporary distinction between “manuscripts” and “papers” among seventeenth-century scholars. They considered “manuscripts” to mean older books, usually those written on parchment or vellum. In contrast, “papers” meant things they themselves had written down, such as “loose sheets, notes from experiments and observations, commonplace books, correspondence, and drafts of treatises.” The contemporary nomenclature points to distinctions in perception and use which are not readily apparent when these materials are all lumped together as “manuscripts” today. Similarly, we should assume that the many subtle varieties of book within the Ottoman category of “kitāb” indicate meaningful distinctions made by contemporaries. Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive,” Book History 12 (2009): 4.

327 A seventeenth-century dictionary written by the official interpreter of the Polish-Lithuanian embassy in Istanbul defined “mecmūʿa” as “res collecta, collectio, compendium, & liber collectionum.” Meninski, Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium Turcicae-Arabicae-Persicae, 3:4408. The work first appeared in three large folio volumes in Vienna in 1680.

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increased interest in using mecmūʿas as sources, particularly among scholars of Ottoman literature.328 In addition to mining mecmūʿas for unique copies of poems and treatises, scholars have also come to see mecmūʿas as creative expressions in their own right, and as indispensable context for understanding literature. Ottomanist historians, too, have used mecmūʿas both to shed light on the intellectual formation and interests of famous men and to understand the concerns and interests of broader milieux.329

Categorizing mecmūʿas is anything but simple. They can be defined by their contents, which are sometimes consistent within a single mecmūʿa (e.g., poetry anthologies, collections of epistolary exempla, fatwa collections, or pharmaceutical anthologies). They can also be sorted by their structure or compilation method. Some are purposefully curated anthologies which circulated in identical copies. Others are

Sammelbände, composite volumes comprising diverse texts (treatises, short works), often on separate quires and in different hands, that were gathered and bound together at some point. Still others are best understood as personal notebooks, consisting of notes and extracts made by an individual or individuals.330 Personal notebooks, the most

328 For example, the seventh conference in the Eski Edebiyat Çalışmaları series, held at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul on May 2, 2011, was dedicated to the theme of mecmūʿas. Papers from the conference were published as Hatice Aynur et al., eds., Mecmûa: Osmanlı Edebiyatının Kırkambarı.

329 For some examples, see: Derin Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times: Sufi Self-Narratives and the Diary of Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (1618–94),” Studia Islamica 94 (2002): 139–65; Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 88–91; Tatjana Paić-Vukić, World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadı from Sarajevo (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2011), 83–87; Henning Sievert, “Eavesdropping on the Pasha’s Salon: Usual and Unusual Readings of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Bureaucrat,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları Journal of Ottoman Studies 41 (2013): 159–95.

330 Every way of categorizing mecmūʿas produces exceptions and overlapping groups. For more on types of mecmūʿas, see András J. Riedlmayer, “Ottoman Copyboooks of Correspondence and Miscellanies as a Source for Political and Cultural History,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 61 (2008): 201–14; Günay Kut, “Mecmua,” Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Türk Diyanet Vakfı, 1986), 6:170; Atabey Kılıç, “Mecmûa tasnifine dâir,” in Mecmûa: Osmanlı Edebiyatının Kırkambarı, ed. Hatice Aynur et al., 79; and Mustafa Uzun, “Mecmua,” TDVİA, 28:266. The term “sammelband” comes from

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idiosyncratic and miscellaneous type of mecmūʿa, are also the most valuable for the history of reading. While note-taking in the margins of books was not sufficiently widespread to inform reading history on a large scale, personal notebooks provide abundant evidence for how readers interacted with their texts. They also present significant methodological problems.

One of the many challenges of working with personal notebooks is identifying to whom they belonged, or even where and when they were created. Ownership notations rarely appear, and most of the mecmūʿas we encounter seem to have been supplemented over time by multiple owners, perhaps as the notebooks passed from generation to generation.331 It is difficult to properly historicize the many layers they contain, since owners rarely identified themselves or when they lived. This is not to say that mecmūʿas do not contain dates. To the contrary, they are typically replete with dates related to significant events such as births or marriages, or even major public events, but these inscriptions are difficult to link to a particular part of a mecmūʿa’s contents and may have been added at any point in a manuscript’s long history. Without clear indications of time or place, mecmūʿas make for difficult historical sources.

Two mecmūʿas today held in Leiden University Library, however, date unambiguously to seventeenth-century Istanbul. Cod. Or 1143 and Cod. Or 1155 form part of the Warner legacy, a treasure trove of a collection that was assembled in

European book history. It typically refers to works printed (or copied) separately that were gathered and bound by a single user.

331 For example, Tatjana Paić-Vukić has been able to document over 300 years of comments in one Ottoman mecmūʿa. Paić-Vukić, World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadı from Sarajevo, 58.

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seventeenth-century Istanbul.332 These simple pamphlets — one ten sheets (twenty folios) and the other six sheets (twelve folios) — bear a stacked crown-clover-star-crescent watermark, suggesting use around the early seventeenth century.333 The pages of the pamphlet bear many dates, mostly stretching over a ten-year period from H. 1035 to 1044

(1625–35 CE). Furthermore, the mecmūʿas must have been acquired by Warner (or given to him) between 1645 and 1665, when he was in Istanbul. The preponderance of evidence points to their being kept in Istanbul in the early to mid-seventeenth century.

We do not know who kept the notebooks, but, on the basis of handwriting and paper, they appear to have had one primary owner.334 Because the notebooks were placed

332 Bibliotheek Universiteit Leiden, Cod. Or. 1143 and 1155. Warner had studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish at Leiden with the pioneering Orientalist Jacobus Golius. In 1644, Warner left for Ottoman territory where he was to remain until his death two decades later. While in Istanbul, he was one of several Europeans who actively sought out and acquired manuscripts. Warner’s legacy of over nine hundred manuscripts to his alma mater, Leiden University, has made Leiden an essential pilgrimage site for scholars of the premodern Middle East. Most of the manuscripts collected by Warner were in Arabic, but Persian and Turkish are also represented. Warner’s broad tastes encompassed poetry, history, philosophy, and the religious sciences; the collection features exemplars from most genres that circulated in seventeenth- century Istanbul. Although Warner never explicitly explained his approach to collecting, it appears that he especially valued old and unique manuscripts, and that he or his advisers had the wherewithal to identify and acquire these. For a numeric breakdown of the Warner legacy, see Levinus Warner and his Legacy: Three Centuries Legatum Warnerianum in the Leiden University Library (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 37–39. For a qualitative discussion of the manuscripts he collected, see Arnoud Vrolijk, “Istanbul, entrep̱ ộ t of old manuscripts,” and Jan Schmidt, “The Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” in Turcksche boucken (Eindhoven: Lecturis, [2012]), 110–122 and 124–144. The collection has been cataloged by Jan Just Witkam and Jan Schmidt.

333 The most similar watermark in Nikolaev album is number 159 (page 69), which Nikolaev dates to 1611. The watermark can be found in both mecmūʿas. I have not been able to identify the precise mill, though a countermark “?VR” or “?AS” is visible. Cod. Or. 1155 also contains at least one sheet bearing the tre luna watermark associated with Venetian production. Although there are many examples of tre luna paper being used in the seventeenth century (e.g., numbers 165, 166, 187 in Nikolaev’s album), it also continued to be used through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nikolaev, Watermarks of the Ottoman Empire.

334 Analyzing Ottoman handwriting for similarity is notoriously difficult. One of the deans of Islamic manuscripts, Jan Just Witkam, has told me that he would hesitate to ever declare that two handwriting samples belonged to the same person; he believes that one can only conclusively prove the negative case (i.e., that two samples cannot be the same person). (Personal communication, August 15, 2014.) In spite of this, I agree with Jan Schmidt’s assessment that these two mecmūʿas were kept by the same person. There are enough similarities of handwriting and layout, not to mention the fact that the both mecmūʿas contain paper from the same stock. Schmidt’s catalog serves as an invaluable guide to these mecmūʿas. Jan Schmidt, Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in

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in a rare books library in Leiden in the seventeenth century, we can be confident that they were not expanded or otherwise modified by later generations. These two pamphlets are rare examples of mecmūʿas that clearly belong to a particular place and time.

In contrast to marginalia, which must adhere to the order of the main text, the notes in mecmūʿas can appear chaotic.335 In Cod. Or. 1143, the owner worked from both ends of the pamphlet; as a result, many of the pages are “upside down” relative to the rest. Without the library binding and later foliation, both arbitrary, it would be difficult to decide which end is the beginning. Of course, since the notebooks contain fragments rather than continuous texts, they exhibit none of the usual textual signposts such as invocations or a colophon. The mise-en-page varies from mosaic-like (to use a phrase from Jan Schmidt’s catalog) to notes appearing in a more familiar rectangular text block

(see Figures 4.4 and 4.5). On one spread, an anecdote copied or perhaps composed by the notebook keeper anomalously includes a catchword when it crosses from one page to the next.336 Some pages dealing with verb conjugations are roughly tabular (and may have been written by someone else, perhaps a teacher). In short, the notebooks demonstrate little regularity in format from page to page.

the Netherlands, Codices Manuscripti 30 (Leiden: Legatum Warnerianum in Leiden University Library, 2000), 472–479.

335 While marginalia are sometimes jotted in “upside down” or at odd angles to the text, they respond to and are keyed to the linear flow of the main text.

336 Cod. Or. 1143, f. 4b–5a.

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Figure 4.4: B.U. Leiden, Cod. Or. 1143, f. 18a (on the right) and f. 17b (on the left), shown “upside down” relative to the foliation.

The flexibility of the notebooks’ format brings us closer to the reader himself.337

Since he could copy notes and extracts in whichever way suited him best, their order reflects the way that he saw fit to group them. The jottings are not randomly scattered.

First, there is an implicit thematic difference between the two pamphlets. One centers on the study of the Persian language; the other dwells on a handful of Qurʾānic verses and various interpretations given to them, especially interpretations that hinge on their syntactic and figurative elements.338 Similarly, while neither notebook contains an overarching order or plan (let alone a table of contents, or explicit headings of the kind

337 I assume that the notebooks’ owner was male but I do not have any concrete evidence for this.

338 It is possible that the thematic difference stems from the different time periods in which they were mostly kept, since Cod. Or. 1143 contains several references to the year 1035 (1625–6 CE) and Cod. Or. 1155 contains multiple references to the year 1044 (1634–5 CE).

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one might find in a contemporary European commonplace book), both notebooks exhibit rough thematic groupings on the level of the page.

For example, at several points in Cod. Or. 1155, the notebook keeper combined excerpts from many different commentaries in order to explicate single verses of the

Qurʾān. Yet another set of folios groups together musings and quotations about the rules governing prayers. Even in the absence of explicit headings — rarely observed in personal notebooks — implicit themes emerge.

Were this notebook keeper someone well known, we might try to map his interests and see how the mecmūʿa uniquely reflects his public life or writings. What is intriguing about this notebook keeper is the fact that his sources were so ordinary and unremarkable. His concerns, while educated, were not esoteric. His sources were among those most frequently cited. When he studied Persian, he referred to Sūdī and

Kemālpaşazāde. When he examined a verse from the Qurʾān, he turned to mainstream and readily available commentaries. Over the course of the two notebooks, the owner quotes explicitly from eleven texts (in addition to the Qurʾān), including some of the more popular books of his day. (See Table 4.1.)

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Table 4.1: Works cited in Cod. Or. 1143 and Cod. Or. 1155

Shorthand Title and author Genre Al-ḳāmūs al-muḥīṭ Lexicon ﻗﺎﻣﻮﺱس by Fīrūzābādī (d. 1415 / H. 817)

Irshad al-ʿaḳl al-salīm Commentary ﺍاﺑﻮ ﺍاﻟﺴﻌﻮﺩد by Abu’l-Suʿūd (d. 1574 / H. 982) on the Qurʾān Builds on al-Bayḍāwī and al-Zamakhsharī

Ḥāshiyah ‘alā anwār al-tanzīl wa asrār al-taʾvīl Commentary ﺷﻴﯿﺨﺰﺍاﺩدﻩه by Şeyḫzāde (d. 1543 / H. 950) on the Qurʾān Commentary on al-Bayḍāwī

Mukhtār al-ṣiḥāḥ Lexicon ﻣﺨﺘﺎﺭر ﺍاﻟﺼﺤﺎﺡح by al-Razī (d. after 1268 / H. 666) A handbook to al-Djawharī’s dictionary known as Al-Ṣiḥāḥ

Aḫterī-i kebīr Lexicon ﺍاﺧﺘﺮﻱي by Aḫterī (d. 1560–1 / H. 968)

Dürer [u] gurer (The pearls and the most noble) Positive ﺩدﺭرﺭر ﻏﺮﺭر by Molla Ḫüsrev (d. 1480 / H. 885) jurisprudence Dürer is a commentary on the author’s own Gürer (furūʿ)

al-Muṭawwal (The long commentary) Rhetoric ﻣﻄﻮﻝل by al-Taftāzānī (d. 1390 / H. 792) Commentary on Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-miftāḥ

Risāle-i Yāiʾyye (A treatise on the letter yā) Persian ﺭرﺳﺎﻟﻪﮫ ﻳﯾﺎﺋﻴﯿﻪﮫ by İbn Kemāl (d. 1534 / H. 940) language

Şerḥ-i Gülistān (Commentary on the Gülistān) Persian ﺷﺮﺡح ﻛﻠﺴﺘﺎﻥن by Sūdī (d. 1599 / H. 1007) language / literature al-Kashshāf (The revealer) Commentary ﺍاﻟﻜﺸﺎﻑف by Zamakhsharī (d. 1144 / H. 538) on the Qurʾān

Mashāriḳ al-anwār al-nabawiyya ʿalā ṣiḥāḥ al- Traditions ﻣﺸﺎﺭرﻕق akhbār al-muṣṭafawiyya (“The places where the prophetic light rises…”) by al-Ṣaghānī (d. 1252 / H. 650)

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Take, for example, the notebook keeper’s notes on the verse “Which is harder to create, you people or the sky that he built?” (79:27).339 The verse itself is never quoted — it need not be, since our reader presumably knew the Qurʾān by heart. The right-hand page (Figure 4.5) is three-quarters full of fragments from commentaries on the Qurʾān, each addressing a part of the verse. A line from Bayḍāwī is followed by an excerpt about the interpretation of the phrase “or the sky,” taken from the commentary of Abu’l-Suʿūd

(Ebüssüʿūd; lines 1–4). A lengthy excerpt from an unidentified commentary comes next, annotated with a single-word quotation from Zamaḫsharī’s Kashshaf, and followed by another excerpt from Abu’l-Suʿūd’s commentary on a different verse. The block of notes closes with Şeyḫzāde’s super-commentary on Bayḍāwī’s commentary on one phrase (“or the sky”) from the verse.340 As is to be expected for Qurʾānic commentaries, these notations are all in Arabic.341 The left-hand page features a Turkish exegesis “translation”

(“tercüme,” as it is labeled) in Turkish, a syntactic interpretation of the verse drawing on

339 M. A. Abdel Haleem, ed., The Qurʼan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 407. The notes are found on Cod. Or. 1155, f. 2b–3a.

340 For the printed versions of these excerpts, see: al-Saʻūd Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad Abū, Tafsīr Abī al- Suʻūd, aw irshād al-ʻaql al-salīm ilá mazāyā al-kitāb al-karīm, ed. ʻAbd al-Qādir Aḥmad ʻAṭā (al-Riyāḍ: Maktabat al-Riyāḍ al-Ḥadīthah, 1971), 366 and 470; ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad Shaykhʹzādah, Ḥāshiyat Shaykhʹzādah ʻalá tafsīr al-Qāḍī al-Bayḍāwī, vol. 4 (Istanbul: Hakîkat Kitâbevi, 1998), 520; Maḥmūd ibn ʻUmar Zamakhsharī, Al-Kashshāf ʻan ḥaqāʼiq ghawāmiḍ al-tanzīl wa-ʻuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wujūh al-taʼwīl, ʻĀdil Aḥmad ʻAbd al-Mawjūd, and ʻAlī Muḥammad Muʻawwaḍ, eds., vol. 6 (Riyadh: Maktabat al-ʻUbaykān, 1998), 308.

341 It is worth noting that the keeper of the notebook cited the sources for the fragments. I have the impression that it was not uncommon to identify the author of an excerpted work, though one consequence of manuscript technology is that it would not have made sense to offer more detailed citations of volume and page number, as these would vary by manuscript. In the case of commentaries and dictionaries, the most frequently cited types of sources in these notebooks, there would have been no need to offer precise page-level citations because commentaries and dictionaries were both arranged to facilitate reference.

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the commentaries excerpted at right. It might have been a sermon given by the keeper of the notebook or notes that he took during a study circle.342

Figure 4.5: B.U. Leiden Cod. Or. 1155, f. 2b–3a.

Assuming that the reader was not copying these notes wholesale from someone else (though even if he were, these pages would offer evidence of someone else’s reading), he consulted four major Qurʾānic commentaries in order to pull together their insights on this verse. The quotations from Qurʾānic commentaries are quite accurate, so

342 Remarkably, the Turkish text is dated 1037, fixing these notes in a particular time. The care taken by the notebook keeper to identify the date might suggest a particular conversation, study circle, or lecture. Running perpendicular along the bottom of the pages and then upside down, up and around the margins — but not discussed here — are a series of hadith (traditions from the Prophet) and definitions of words. The dictionaries cited are among the most popular: Ḳāmus, Muḥtār al-ṣiḥāḥ, and Aḫterī. The words defined do not bear an obvious relationship to the texts on the pages.

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they must have been copied directly from another manuscript or taken down by dictation.343 However, it is unlikely that the notebook keeper had all these books in his own collection. 344 Although these four commentaries are among the most popular, only one person in the probate sample owned all of them.345 After all, these were multi-volume works that tended to be quite expensive.346

If the notebook keeper’s library were inventoried upon his death, the court’s list might include these mecmūʿas (and others) — recorded as “scattered sheets” — along with a Qurʾān, a couple of commentaries, and some additional volumes. But it is very unlikely that it would have contained all the books that the notebook keeper cited in his notebook. Indeed, the fact that he did not own the books would help to explain the need for note-taking! The notebook keeper most likely accessed many of these books at the library of a local mosque or through the collection of someone he knew.

In other words, personal notebooks help us to see the book world of this reader more clearly than we might have seen if we had only been able to look at the books he

343 The possibility of dictation is unlikely as I have not found any errors that would stem from aural transmission. For accuracy, I compared the excerpts to printed editions cited above.

344 The notebook keeper probably did own at least one of the cited commentaries, Anwār al-tanzīl, since a notation in Cod. Or. 1155 indicates that a şeyḫ in Eyüp borrowed one part of Bayḍawī’s Qurʾānic commentary, presumably from the keeper of the notebook. Cod. Or. 1155, f. 1a: “Eyüb şeyḫ Naṣrullah Efendi'ye Tefsīr-i Ḳāḍī'den ṣuretü'l-fātiḥa ?altıncı bir cüzʾ ön ḳısmı ki on varaḳdır iʿāre olundu fi 7 ?m [müḥarrem] sene 1038.” It seems most logical that the notebook keeper owned the commentary and made a note when he lent it out. Alternatively, and this seems less likely to me: he might have been a witness to the loan (but would it require such documentation? Given the scale of borrowing of books, we would expect to see many notes like these if documenting loans were common). Or perhaps he was the one who borrowed the portion of the commentary though, again, I’m not certain why he would need to make a note of it.

345 The probate inventory data studied here indicate that if someone (usually, an efendi mega-owner) had one of these commentaries in his library, he was likely to own a second, but unlikely to have three or four. (Of course, it is possible that some people in the sample owned all four commentaries but had endowed them to a library before death. It is also possible that they were owned by a single person but not all identified by title in the inventories. The latter seems less likely, since these books tended to be expensive while unidentified books were quite cheap, as discussed in Chapter Two.)

346 The inventory values given for these four commentaries often run to thousands of aḳçe.

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owned himself. We can see a fuller picture of the books he actually used, as well as the uses to which he put them. Personal notebooks are complicated sources, but they serve as a useful complement to probate inventories.347

Mecmūʿas pose two main methodological challenges that must be addressed in order to use them to illuminate intellectual history. First, as described above, they are difficult to pin to a particular time, place, or person. Like a building to which successive generations of a family have added rooms and wings, the form and contents of the artifact we encounter may bear very little resemblance to the original construction.348 The lack of personal identification also makes analysis of mecmūʿas vulnerable to a particular kind of circularity. For example, we might surmise that a mecmūʿa containing mostly legal texts belonged to a judge. But then it would be logically flawed to use that mecmūʿa as evidence for the type of texts that judges used.349

Second, the very idiosyncrasies that make mecmūʿas so exciting as sources for reading history make it difficult to generalize from any particular mecmūʿa to broader statements about cultural and intellectual history.350 Mecmūʿas have often been likened to miniature libraries. This is especially true of the “sammelband” type of mecmūʿa, in which an owner gathered together treatises and longer excerpts, sometimes copied at very

347 For another comparison of the usefulness of probate inventories to mecmūʿas for the history of reading, see Derin Terzioğlu, “Mecmû’a-i Şeyh Mısrî: On yedinci yüzyıl ortalarında Anadolu’da bir derviş sülûkunu tamamlarken neler okuyup yazdı?,” in Mecmûa: Osmanlı Edebiyatının Kırkambarı, ed. Hatice Aynur et al., Eski Türk Edebiyatı çalışmaları 7 (Istanbul: Turkuaz, 2011), 293–94.

348 I thank Elias Muhanna for this analogy (Harvard Book History Writers’ Group, March 10, 2010).

349 In an example of a notebook’s content not being a straightforward predictor of owner, Tatjana Paić- Vukić cites a Christian priest who copied Muslim fatwas into his notebook. Paić-Vukić, World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadı from Sarajevo, 70.

350 Derin Terzioğlu discusses the problem of generalizing from mecmūʿas in “Mecmû’a-i Şeyh Mısrî,” 294.

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different times and by different people, into a single bound volume.351 If Chapters Two and Three explored the textual ecology for a given title — the types of books with which it tended to appear within a book collection — one could, theoretically, conduct a similar analysis of which texts tended to be bound or mentioned together across a body of mecmūʿas.352 However, our ability to see into mecmūʿas on any kind of scale is very limited. “Sammelband” mecmūʿas are more likely to have their contents cataloged, but the identification of texts is still uneven.353 It seems likely that a grassroots, collaborative effort spanning many years will be necessary to make mecmūʿa contents visible and searchable on a large scale. In the meantime, mecmūʿas will continue to provide us with rich qualitative evidence for how particular, often anonymous, readers used their books.

351 In practice, it is difficult to differentiate perfectly between the “sammelband” and a reading notebook, since sammelbands could serve as a canvas for later reading notes. Sammelbands are the main way that the copious treatises (risāleler, Ar. resāʾil) of the seventeenth century (sometimes called the Ottoman equivalent of political pamphlets since they dealt with contemporary controversies) have survived until today. Himmet Taşkömür has explicitly compared early modern Ottoman treatises to contemporary European pamphlets because “they are argumentative; they cite multiple sources…and the texts were open to public scrutiny as opposed to being closed works for internal or courtly consumption only,” among other reasons. Personal communication, and presentation at “Beyond Golden Age and Decline” conference, March 14–15, 2011, George Mason University. Nir Shafir also likens treatises to pamphlets: “Pamphleteering in a Manuscript Culture” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, MA, April 1, 2016).

352 For an example of this, see Meredith Quinn, “Houghton MS Turk 11 ve kişisel mecmûaların söyledikleri ve söyleyebilecekleri,” in Mecmûa: Osmanlı edebiyatının kırkambarı, ed. Hatice Aynur et al. (Istanbul: Turkuaz, 2011), 255–70 and Meredith Quinn, “Making Sense of Miscellanies: Houghton MS Turk 11, an Ottoman Mecmua,” Harvard Library Bulletin 24, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 27–44. Nir Shafir has described how digital research makes discovering the links between texts all the more easy: Chris Gratien, Michael Polczyński, and Nir Shafir, “Digital Frontiers of Ottoman Studies,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 37–42.

353 For a discussion of feasibility study of mass cataloging of mecmūʿas, see Jan Schmidt, “Bir tür olarak Osmanlı mecmûalarının artı değeri,” in Mecmûa: Osmanlı edebiyatının kırkambarı, ed. Hatice Aynur et al., Eski Türk Edebiyatı çalışmaları 7 (Istanbul: Turkuaz, 2011), 393–97.

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Fragmentary Circulation

The owner of the Leiden mecmūʿas jotted down a note to himself on the opening page of Cod. Or. 1155: a şeyḫ in Eyüp had borrowed one quire — ten pages — from

Bayḍāwī’s commentary on the Qurʾān.354 It is somewhat startling to think of just a portion of Bayḍāwī’s canonical commentary being lent out. We usually encounter the commentary as a hefty volume of hundreds of pages, handsomely bound and, today, housed in fine rare books libraries. We cannot know whether the owner of this particular portion had a complete copy of the work or just this section. In either case, the notion that a text would circulate as a fragment rather than a complete text was not at all unusual in seventeenth-century Istanbul.355 As discussed in Chapter One, some libraries owned piecemeal exemplars that were lent out serially for the purpose of copying new books.

Even in the case of classic medrese textbooks, it was unusual for a book to be read from beginning to end. Examining flyleaf notes left by instructors at the

Süleymaniye Darü’l-hadis in Istanbul, Mehdin Çiftçi discovered frank disagreement about how best to teach a book of hadith by Buḫārī. One instructor wrote that he started students at the beginning and proceeded methodically through it; another, jotting a note just below him, disagreed with his predecessor’s pedagogy. The second professor found that Buḫārī was sufficiently challenging for students that it was best read thematically. As

Çiftçi notes, both professors’ appointments at the Süleymaniye were so brief (it was often a way station to prominent posts in the judicial service) that neither would have had time

354 Folio 1a; see footnote above for transliteration.

355Fragmentation of texts was also a feature of the late medieval European book world; see Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print, 206. Cemal Kafadar pointed out to me that lengthy excerpts are analogous to photocopying a few pages from a book for later use.

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to teach the entire book to his students, no matter which method was followed.356

Biographical dictionaries and appointment registers make it clear that short tenures were the rule rather than the exception for medrese teachers.357 It is hard to imagine that students at the medrese experienced meaningful continuity in their reading as their professors were shuffled in and out. Piecemeal education — especially once someone had progressed beyond introductory handbooks — must have been the norm.

Taşköprüzāde’s account of his studies likewise gives the impression that reading an entire book was exceptional. He takes great care to note when he read a book “from beginning to end.” This might be taken merely as a way to emphasize his own particular thoroughness, except for the fact that he also notes where he was only able to read portions of books, and which portions those were.358

In some cases, a part of a work came to be much more popular than the whole.

Surviving manuscripts of Muşṭafā ʿĀlī’s universal history Künhü’l-aḫbār, for example, are of the fourth section, or even just a portion of the fourth section.359 Readers apparently jettisoned the earlier chapters in favor of those that dealt with recent history.

Similarly, Ṭabarī’s history only appears in the probate sample as incomplete copies. One owner has a “part” (ḳıṭʿa) of the history while the court scribe specifies that another person’s copy comprised just the second volume (el-cild es̱ -s̱ ānī).360 Incomplete

356 Mehdin Çiftçi, Süleymaniye Dârülhadisi, 166–168.

357 See, for example, Şeyḫī’s biography of Nāzīkīzāde Muṣṭafā Efendi, quoted in Chapter Two. Nāzīkīzāde Muṣṭafā Efendi’s tenure at any given post rarely lasted beyond a year.

358 Ṭāshkubrīʹzādah, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʻmānīyah fī ʻulamāʾ al-Dawlat al-ʻUthmānīyah, ed. Ahmed Subhi Furat, 555.

359 Jan Schmidt, Pure Water for Thirsty Muslims, 364.

360 KA d. 6, f. 71b (v75); KA d. 6, f. 110a (v113).

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manuscripts were not limited to histories. Dozens of other books were noted in the inventories as being partial (nıṣf, ḳıṭʿa) or incomplete (nāḳıṣ). A recent study of surviving exemplars of Sūdī’s commentary on the dīvān of Ḫāfıẓ found that fewer than twenty percent were complete copies.361 The great book collector Cārullāh Efendi repeatedly noted cases where he owned just one or two volumes of a multi-volume work, and he apparently went to great effort to find the missing parts.362 Even the Grand Vizier Fāżıl

Aḥmed Paşa could not find a suitable, whole copy of Ibn al-Nadīm’s Index (Fihrist) to place in his library, and instead placed two incomplete but complementary copies there.363

In the context of fragmentary circulation, the common practice followed by authors of listing the number of divisions in their texts and, often, the titles of those divisions, might have been an attempted bulwark against the potential fragmentation of the text. As long as readers had access to the introduction, they would be able to identify incomplete copies and search out missing parts. Following this practice, Kātib Çelebi begins each section of the introduction to his bibliography with an outline of that section’s contents. In the individual citations which make up the main body of the text, he often includes the incipit as well as the number of chapters in the book he is citing.

361 “Given that out of the ninety-nine copies only seventeen feature the complete text of the commentary, one can contend that Sudi’s text existed, for the most part of its history, in pieces, that is to say, not as a full-fledged text, at least until its printing in 1834.” Murat Inan, “Writing a Grammatical Commentary on Hafız of Shiraz,” 31.

362 Berat Açıl, ed., Osmanlı kitap kültürü: Cârullah Efendi kütüphanesi ve derkenar notları (Istanbul: İlem and Nobel, 2015), 98, 112, 158, 188.

363 Ramazan Şeşen, Fihris Makhṭūṭāt Maktabat Kūprīlī, 579–580. The two copies are Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1134 and 1135.

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Armed with this bibliographical information, a reader who wanted to ensure a copy was complete had a better chance of doing so.

However, it was readers themselves who were responsible for the fragmentation of texts. Then, as now, they poached the parts of books that were meaningful or useful to them.364 An advantage of operating in a manuscript-based culture was that one need not purchase, commission, or copy the parts of a book that were irrelevant for one’s particular purposes. Focusing on specific parts of a text reduced the cost of a manuscript and made its use more efficient. Those quotations, letters, formulae, and sub-chapters — divorced from their original context — could, in turn, be shared with others and recopied anew. Parts of disparate texts could even be recombined to a specific purpose, as when the owner of Leiden Cod. Or. 1155 drew upon four commentaries to explicate a single

Qurʾānic verse. Mecmūʿas were the instrument of textual fragmentation, but they also helped to combat it.

364 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 165–76.

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Conclusion

An Ideal Bookshelf

One of the arguments of this study is that understanding book culture of seventeenth-century Istanbul requires beginning with the books themselves. I mean this in two ways: how we structure our inquiry and the evidence upon which we rely. Books have their own textual and social ecologies, and these can overlap. One book may have a narrow audience that coincides with a distinct social group; another book may transcend social groups in surprising ways. Rather than begin with predetermined social groups and map books onto these groups, beginning with books and then discovering where they belonged allows us to see their sometimes unexpected social connections.

A second way in which this study argues for starting with books is the importance of the material object. Although this project relies heavily on statistical analysis of probate inventories and anecdotal evidence from contemporary sources, it depends on the clues that manuscripts themselves provide. Paratext and physical qualities provide an abundance of clues about intended and actual use.

Given the emphasis on beginning with books, it seems appropriate to close with them. The probate inventories studied here testify to the variety of books that existed in seventeenth-century Istanbul. So do today’s overflowing manuscript libraries. But most people did not own books, and those who did owned few. Perhaps many of us have our own implicit sense of a “canon” of books, those that are most important in our time.

Similarly, Ottomanist historians and literary scholars might have an implicit understanding of which books were most important for the time and place they study, a

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sort of ideal bookshelf that typified the book culture as we understand it. My own nomination for an ideal bookshelf, one that would well exemplify the book culture of this time and place, would include, first, a copy of the legal handbook Multaqā, in flexible leather binding with a table of contents and page numbers added by a reader for easy reference. Probate data indicates that it was one of the most widely held titles at the time.

It anchors a constellation of books associated with medrese-type learning and reinforces the centrality of jurisprudence to the ulema’s textual world.

Second, the ideal bookshelf (or, more appropriately, book niche or trunk) would include a plain storybook telling one of dozens of heroic adventures lived by Ḥamza. Of the books listed here, this is the one that would had the highest “multiplier” — the number of people who engaged with the text within, even if they were listening rather than reading. The humble storybook would have fancier illuminated and illustrated cousins, worth many times as much money. Because of the storybook’s material and linguistic qualities, it belongs firmly to a different genre (ḥikāye), one which does not appear in formal book lists but was nonetheless pervasive.

Finally, the ideal book niche must include a humble and completely unremarkable mecmūʿa, a personal miscellany. If pressed to choose just one book for the niche, this is the one I would pick, for it underscores the fact that readers could and did create their own books and reminds us that many texts circulated in incomplete form, often as mere fragments. My idealized mecmūʿa would include some treatises, many fragments of poetry, and some recipes — all excerpted, sorted, and recombined according to the needs of its unique user. Utterly idiosyncratic, this miscellany would offer us the best chance at understanding the elusive connection between individual and text.

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Appendix One

Creating a Database from Seventeenth-Century Court Records

This study rests upon many types of sources, including close readings of archival documents, evidence from contemporary reference books (such as bibliographical dictionaries, bibliographies, and chronicles), and the clues found in manuscripts themselves. In order to suggest what types of people owned books, and which kinds of books they owned, I read hundreds of probate inventories and created a database to analyze them statistically. The Introduction describes these archival documents and the limitations and biases inherent in using them. In this appendix, I offer details about how I translated from document to database (for this is a translation, and therefore an act of interpretation), and how I accounted for the books that were listed in the inventories.

Sampling method

The statistical, geographical, and network analyses in this study are based on a sample of 886 inventories. These inventories were drawn from three archival funds:

• Mülga Beledī: defters (registers) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I examined two-thirds of each

defter, alternating between the first two-thirds and the last two-thirds. (As a result,

the middle third is oversampled across the registers — but I have no reason to

believe that inventories in the middle of a register differed in terms of book

ownership from those in the first third or last third.)

• Kısmet-iʿaskerīye: defters 4, 5, 6. I examined two-thirds of each defter,

alternating between the first two-thirds and the last two-thirds.

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• Galata: defters 72, 75, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 102, 103,

104, 105. Because these registers are so voluminous, I examined every ninth

inventory within each of them.

While the sampling method does not have the rigor of current statistical methods (for example, I did not sample with replacement), neither is it based on pre-determined criteria of interest. For example, I sampled both bookowners and non-bookowners.

Mülga Beledī and Ḳısmet-i ʿaskeriye records mostly pertain to those living on the main Istanbul peninsula. Galata records mostly pertain to those living within Galata.365

Within the sample, the three funds make up the following percentages of total inventories

(Table 6.1):

Table 6.1: Sample distribution among archival funds

Archival fund Number of % of sample inventories in sample Mülga Beledī 333 37% Ḳısmet-i ʿaskeriye 343 39% Galata 210 24%

Without a doubt, the Kısmet-i ʿaskeriye records are oversampled here. This is one of many reasons why the sample cannot be taken as representative of the population as a whole. Please see the Introduction for further discussion of the types of statistical analysis that are valid given this important constraint.

365 There are, however, exceptions to the rule. For example, one person whose estate appears in a Galata register is said to have lived in Eyüp, a different district that had its own probate court (not examined here).

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Modifications to the sample:

I eliminated two inventories from most of the statistical analysis. One was a bookseller whose wares are examined closely in Chapter Three (KA d. 6, f. 142a–143b

(v145–146)). Since he was a bookseller, it was not appropriate to include him in a statistical analysis of private collections. The other inventory that I removed was that of a priest who lived in Galata (Galata d. 83, f. 8b (v11)).366 The court record indicates that he owned many hundreds of books, none of which are identified. I removed this inventory from the sample because it was a statistical outlier that distorted the analysis.

Furthermore, the fact that the books were unidentified (perhaps because they were in a language that the probate official could not read) made it less useful in assessing ownership patterns.

Database

Table of Individuals

In order to run statistical, network, and geographic analyses, I created a relational database in FileMakerPro and kept track of a set of variables as I read the records.367 I read every record in the sample from beginning to end. The variables I tracked were:

• TerekeID (unique key) • Court • Defter • Folio • Sex • Religion • Nickname

366 Note that there are many non-Muslims represented in the probate records.

367 I am grateful to Professor Hülya Canbakal for sharing her experience creating datasets from probate inventories.

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• Title • First Name • Father’s Name • Father’s Title • Occupation • Neighborhood • District • NeighborhoodID • Spouse Title • Child Title • Presence of underage heirs • Person identified as a traveler? • Month • Year • Size of estate (gross) • Net estate (as recorded) • Number of Qurʾāns • Value of Qurʾāns • Number of Other Books • Value of Other Books • Among the possessions, is there a: • Desk? • Home? • Pencase? • Papers? • Date Entered • Notes

This table was crucial for running the statistical analysis to determine how bookowners and non-bookowners differed (see Chapter Two).

Tables of Book Instances and Book Titles

I returned to the records of identified bookowners and created two more tables, one for “book instances” (tracking each time a book appeared in an inventory) and onefor bibliographic control. The variables I tracked in these tables were:

Book Instances: • InstanceID

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• TerekeID • BookID • HowRecorded [the title given] • Value • Notes • Date Entered

Book Catalog: • BookID • Title • Author • AuthorDeath • CompositionCentury • Language • Genre • Sourcesfor ID • Appears in Kashf? • ProcessNotes • Notes • Commentary or gloss

Each book instance could be linked by TerekeID to an individual person and by

BookID to the controlled bibliographic database.

I also created a table of neighborhoods, to enable geographic analysis, with information on latitude and longitude and which sources I used to identify the latitude and longitude.368

Difficulties in Translating from Archive to Database

Where there was a short title that could stand for many different possible books, I assigned the text that had the longest entry in Kashf al-ẓunūn. However, this introduces

368 Whenever possible, I used the historical atlas created by Wolfgang Müller-Wiener. If I could not find the neighborhood in Müller-Wiener’s atlas, I consulted Çiğdem Kafescioğlu’s book on the post-conquest rebuilding of Istanbul, and the Pervititch insurance maps. Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls: Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, Istanbul bis zum Beginn d. 17. Jh (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1977); Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Jacques Pervititch, Jacques Pervititch Sigorta Haritalarında İstanbul (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2000).

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possible circularity for some arguments (i.e., of all the possible matches for this title, I choose X because it appears to be more important, according to Kātib Çelebi, but I cannot then use the dataset to argue that X was most popular).

I also consulted Kashf al-ẓunūn to assign genres. When Kātib Çelebi did not specify a genre, I relied on encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., and

Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi. In rare cases, I was able to use the genres mentioned in Feyżullah Efendi’s library endowment deed.

One of the most challenging aspects of translation from archive to database is how to interpret entries that contain more than one title. There are many ways to do this.

My goal was to remain consistent. Here are some sample entries with my interpretations:

Table 6.2: Sample Entries with Interpretations

Entry How Accounted for in Database ḳıṭʿa min el-tefsīr 2 = 300 One entry worth 300, assigned to a generic tefsīr category ḳıṭʿa min el-keşşāf 4 = 330 One entry worth 330, identified as Zamaḫsharī’s commentary; genre is tefsīr ḳıṭʿa min Ṭabarī 1 ve kitāb-i Two entries (note that the scribe gave each book its own nāḳıṣ 1 = 150 numeral): one is Ṭabarī worth 75, the other is an unidentified book worth 75

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Appendix Two

Overview of Five Bookowner Segments Identified in Chapter Two

Table 6.3: Characteristics of Bookowner Segments

% of Total titles in % of titles sample Average Average gross owned owned value of value of wealth Number of by this by this book title in held in individ- segment segment collect- their books uals in (in this (not incl. ions collect- (not incl. Segment segment sample) Qurʾān) (aḳçe) ions Qurʾān) Mega- owners (100–270 titles) 9 1387 54% 70,340 456 16% Bibliophiles (50–90 titles) 4 279 11% 27,660 397 4% Enthusiasts (20–45 titles) 16 496 19% 5,599 181 2% Middlers (4–15 titles) 39 368 14% 2,678 288 1% Micro- libraries (<3 titles) 34 51 2% 393 264 0.1%

Please note that identifying segments is somewhat arbitrary. I selected these segments by finding natural “breaks” in the size of their libraries (see Figure 2.1). See Chapter Two for a discussion of these segments and the potential pitfalls in relying on probate inventories for collection size.

188

Appendix Three

Micro-Libraries (Owners of Three or Fewer Books)

This segment does not include those who only own the Qurʾān, though some do own the Qurʾān or parts of the Qurʾān.

Table 6.4: Owners of three or fewer books, and what they owned

Gross estate (in thousands of aḳçe, Name rounded) Books owned Citation Evanos (an 33 kitāb-i ḥikāye Mülga Beledī d. 1 f. 15b Armenian) (v17) Aḥmed Ağa 484 Qurʾān KA d. 5 f. 16b (v19) mecmūʿa Meḥmed Ağa 370 Qurʾān Galata d. 85 f. 46b (v48) “evrāḳ-i şerīfe” Ḥasan Beşe 98 mecmūʿa Galata d. 89 f. 29a (v40) türkī kitāb Muṣṭafā Beg 2,647 enʿām-i şerīf Galata d. 89 f. 51a (v52) Meḥmed Beg 4 Qurʾān Galata d. 96 f. 51b (v53) ?itʿād-i şerīf Meḥmed Beşe 85 türkī kitāb Galata d. 84 f. 18b (v20) ʿAlī Ağa 2,502 enʿām-i şerīf Galata d. 84 f. 26b (v28) Derviş Meḥmed 1 mecmūʿa-i ʿarabī Mülga Beledī d. 3 f. 42b (v44) ʿAbdülbāḳī 2 türkī mecmūʿa Mülga Beledī d. 3 f. 43b (v45) Aḥmed Çelebi 25 Muḥammediyye KA d. 5 f. 15b (v18) Yūsuf ve Züleyḫā Ḫalīl Çelebi 47 Qurʾān KA d. 5 f. 28b (v31) risāle-i Birgīlī (100) El Ḥac Aḥmed 643 türkī resāʿil KA d. 5 f. 45a (v47) mecmūʿa El Ḥac Ḥasan? 91 Qurʾān KA d. 5 f. 49b (v52) evrāḳ-i şerīfe ʿAbdī Çelebi 452 Qurʾān KA d. 5 f. 80a (v83) evrāḳ-i şerīf Gülistān evrāḳ-i perişān ʿAlī Çelebi? 1,722 Qurʾān KA d. 5 f. 95b (v100) dīvān-i türkī

189

Table 6.4 (Continued)

Name Gross Books owned Citation estate ʿAbdülvehāb- 103 Qurʾān KA d. 5 f. 116a (v120) zāde luğat-i Aḫterī Ḥüseyin Beg 68 evrāḳ-i şerīf KA d. 6 f. 67b (v71) mecmūʿa 2 Şaʿbān Beşe 47 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 81a (v84) enʿām-i şerīf Ḥasan Çavuş 255 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 91b (v95) enʿām-i şerīf Ṣāliḥ Efendi 84 mecmūʿa x2 KA d. 6 f. 96a (v99) ʿAlī Beşe 25 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 99a (v102) evrāḳ-i şerīf unidentified book Berber Ḫalīl 338 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 114b (v118) Çelebi evrāḳ-i şerīf beyāż mecmūʿa x2 Ḫalīl Beg 17 evrāḳ-i şerīf x2 KA d. 6 f. 127a (v130) Maḥmūd Ağa 283 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 128a (v131) türkī kitāb 3 Kātib Meḥmed 131 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 134a (v137) Efendi cild-i şerīf kitāb cild 2 Muṣṭafā Çavuş 126 Qurʾān KA d. 6 f. 146a (v149) mecmūʿa Ḳamer Ḫātūn 10 [indecipherable]369 KA d. 6 f. 162b (v166) Aḥmed 195 türkī kitāb x2 KA d. 6 f. 164b (v168) ?Pazarbaşı (also müteferriḳa) Meḥmed Beşe 34 Tefsīr-i şerīf nıṣf KA d. 6 f. 177b (v181) Meḥmed 5 evrāḳ-i şerīf Mülga Beledī d. 4 f. 49b (v51) Meḥmed Ağa 548 Qurʾān x2 KA d. 4 f. 38a (v40) Siyer-i nebī ḳıṭʿa Muḥammediyye ḳıṭʿa Emine Ḫātūn 221 Muḥammediyye KA d. 4 f. 99a (v101) Mevlūd İbrāhīm Çelebi 45 Qurʾān KA d. 4 f. 39b (v107) Şerḥ-i Bostān-i Sūdī “minbariyye kitāb”?

369 I was not able to identify this item, but Öztürk thought that it was a book, so I include it here. Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait onyedinci asır İstanbul tereke defterleri, 490–91.

190

Appendix Four

Frequently Owned Books

Table 6.5: Most frequently owned books370

Number Common way(s) of of copies Title and author referring to the book in the (with approximate date of in the probate Genre sample death) inventories ﺍاﻟﻬﮭﺪﺍاﻳﯾﺔ ﺍاﻟﻬﮭﺪﺍاﻳﯾﺔ Positive 17 jurisprudence al-Hidāyah (“The right way”) al-Hidāyah (furūʿ) by al-Marghīnānī (12C) Commentary on his own legal compendium ﻣﻠﺘﻘﯽ ﻣﻠﺘﻘﯽ ﺍاﻻﺑﺤﺮ ﻓﻲ ﺍاﻟﻔﺮﻭوﻉع ﺍاﻟﺤﻨﻔﻲ Positive 17 jurisprudence Multaqā al-abḥur fī al-furūʿ al- Multaqā (furūʿ) ḥanafī (“Meeting place of the seas in Hanafi positive law”) by al-Ḥalabī (early 16C) Based on four other Hanafi works ﺻﺪﺭر ﺍاﻟﺸﺮﻳﯾﻌﺔ ﺷﺮﺡح ﺍاﻟﻮﻗﺎﻳﯾﺔ Positive 17 jurisprudence Sharḥ al-wiqāyah (“Commentary Ṣadr al-Sharīʿah (furūʿ) on The Protection”) (author’s name) by Ṣadr al-Sharīʿah (14C) Commentary on his grandfather’s Hanafi handbook ﺗﻔﺴﻴﯿﺮ ﻗﺎﺿﻲ ﺍاﻧﻮﺍاﺭر ﺍاﻟﺘﻨﺰﻳﯾﻞ ﻭو ﺍاﺳﺮﺍاﺭر ﺍاﺍاﺗﻌﻮﻳﯾﻞ Qurʾānic 14 commentary Anwār al-tanzīl wa al-asrār al- Tafsīr-i Ḳāḍī (tafsīr) taʿwīl (“The radiance of the revelation and the mysteries of the explanation”) by al-Bayḍāwī (13C) ﺩدﺭرﺭر ﻏﺮﺭر ﺩدﺭرﺭر ﻏﺮﺭر Positive 13 jurisprudence Dürer [u] gurer (“The pearls and Dürer u gurer (furūʿ) the most noble”) by Molla Ḫüsrev (15C) Dürer is a commentary on the author’s own Gürer

al-Mukhtaṣar; “The summary”). The latter shorthand) ﺍاﻟﻤﺨﺘﺼﺮ This list does not include the Koran or 370 title appears seventeen times, but it is impossible to pinpoint to which “Muḫtaṣar” it refers (most likely, either the work by al-Ḳudūrī or the one by al-Taftāzānī).

191

Table 6.5 (Continued)

Number Common way(s) of of copies Title and author referring to the book in the (with approximate date of in the probate Genre sample death) inventories ﻣﻨﻼ ﺟﺎﻣﻲ ﺍاﻟﻔﻮﺍاﻋﺪ ﺍاﻟﻀﻴﯿﺎﺋﻴﯿﻪﮫ Syntax 13 (nahw) Al-fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya Monlā Cāmi (author’s (“Luminous benefits”) name) by Molla Cāmi (15C) Commentary on İbn al-Hācib’s al-Kāfiyya ﻗﺼﻴﯿﺪﻩه ﺍاﻟﺒﺮﺩدﻩه or commentary thereof ﺍاﻟﺒﺮﺩدﺓة ﻗﺼﻴﯿﺪﺓة Panegyric 12 about the Ḳaṣīdat al-burdah (“Poem of the Ḳaṣīdat al-burdah Prophet mantle”) (siyar) by al-Buṣīrī (13C) ﺍاﻟﻤﻄﻮﻝل ﺍاﻟﻤﻄﻮﻝل Rhetoric 11 (al-maʿāni al-Muṭawwal (“The long al-Muṭawwal wa’l-bayān) commentary”) by al-Taftāzānī (14C) Commentary on Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-miftāḥ ﺍاﻟﻨﻬﮭﺎﻳﯾﻪﮫ ﺍاﻟﻨﻬﮭﺎﻳﯾﻪﮫ ﻓﻲ ﻓﺮﻭوﻉع ﺍاﻟﻔﻘﻪﮫ ﺍاﻟﺤﻨﻔﻲ Positive 11 jurisprudence al-Nihāyah (“The ultimate”) al-Nihāyah (furūʿ) by al-Ṣighnāqī (14C) Commentary on Hidāyah of al- Marghinānī ﺍاﻟﻌﻨﺎﻳﯾﻪﮫ ﺍاﻟﻌﻨﺎﻳﯾﻪﮫ ﻓﻲ ﺷﺮﺡح ﺍاﻟﻬﮭﺪﺍاﻳﯾﻪﮫ Positive 10 jurisprudence al-ʿInāyah fī sharḥ al-Hidāyah al-ʿInāyah (furūʿ) (“Grace in commentary on The Right Way”) by al-Bābartī (14C) Commentary on Hidāyah of al- Marghinānī ﻣﺨﺘﺎﺭر ﺍاﻟﺼﺤﺎﺡح ﻣﺨﺘﺎﺭر ﺍاﻟﺼﺤﺎﺡح Lexicography 10 (lugha) Muḫtār al-ṣiḥāḥ (“The Chosen of Muḫtār al-ṣiḥāḥ The Correct Ones”) Commentary on Tāj al-lugha wa ṣiḥāḥ al-ʿarabiyya of Cevherī ﺍاﻟﺼﺤﺎﺡح ﺗﺎﺝج ﺍاﻟﻠﻐﻪﮫ Lexicography 10 (lugha) Tāj al-lugha (“Crown of the al-Ṣiḥāḥ (“the correct language”) ones”) by el-Cevherī (10C)

192

Table 6.5 (Continued)

Number Common way(s) of of copies Title and author referring to the book in the (with approximate date of in the probate Genre sample death) inventories ﺗﻮﺿﻴﯿﺢ ﺗﻮﺿﻴﯿﺢ Principles of 10 jurisprudence Tawḍīḥ (“Declaration”) Tawḍīḥ (uṣūl al-fıqh) by Ṣadr al-Sharīʿah (14C) Commentary on his own al- Tanqīḥ fī al-uṣūl ﻛﻠﺴﺘﺎﻥن ﻛﻠﺴﺘﺎﻥن Literature 9 (adabiyyāt) Gülistān (“Rose Garden”) Gülistān by Saʿdī (13C) Moralizing anecdotes in Persian; influential 16C Turkish translation by Lāmʿī ﺳﻌﺪﻱي ﺍاﻓﻨﺪﻱي ﺣﺎﺷﻴﯿﺔ ﻋﻠﯽ ﺗﻔﺴﻴﯿﺮﺍاﻟﺒﻴﯿﻀﺎﻭوﻱي Qurʾānic 9 ﺳﻌﺪﻱي ﭼﻠﺒﻲ (ﺍاﻟﻔﻮﺍاﻋﺪ ﺍاﻟﺒﻬﮭﻪﮫ) commentary (tafsīr) Ḥāshiyah ʿalā tafsīr al-Bayḍāwī Saʿdī Efendi, Saʿdī by Saʿdī Efendi (16C) Çelebi (author’s Gloss on Bayḍāwī’s Qurʾān name) commentary ﻣﻔﺼﻞ ﺍاﻟﻤﻔﺼﻞ ﻑف ﺍاﻟﻨﺤﻮ Syntax 8 (nahw) al-Mufaṣṣal fī al-naḥw Mufaṣṣal (“Detailed [work] on grammar”) by al-Zamaḫsharī (12C) ﭼﺎﺭرﭘﺮﺩدﻱي ﺣﺎﺳﻴﯿﺔ ﻋﻠﯽ ﺍاﻟﻜﺸﺎﻑف Qurʾānic 8 commentary Ḥāshiyah ʿalā al-Kashshaf Chārpardī (author’s (tafsīr) by Chārpardī (14C) name) commentary on al-Zamaḫsharī’s [not the book on al-Kashshāf grammar?]

ﺍاﻟﻜﺸﺎﻑف ﺍاﻟﻜﺸﺎﻑف ﻋﻦ ﺣﻘﺎﺋﻖ ﺍاﻟﺘﻨﺰﻳﯾﻞ Qurʾānic 8 commentary al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl al-Kashshāf (tafsīr) (“The explorer of the truths of revelation”) by al-Zamaḫsharī ( 12C) ﻣﺼﺎﺑﻴﯿﺢ ﻣﺼﺎﺑﻴﯿﺢ ﺍاﻟﺴﻨﺔ Prophetic 7 traditions Maṣābīḥ al-sunna (“Lamps of Maṣābīḥ (hadīth) custom”) by al-Baghawī (12C)

193

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