Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe

conversion to piety 107

Spellberg writes, a life and a legacy are not the same thing; the latter is usually

considered a vision of reality shaped by those who thought and wrote about the

subject, for their own reasons, after the life to be retold had ended.^2 In this case,

the legacy was shaped in the narrative of the sultan’s life mediated by his offi cial

historian in part by the sultan while he was still living. His story is also about the

construction and presentation of a sultan’s historical persona by a select group

of elite men, many of whom were partners in power, promoting their patron,

who shaped the meaning of his life for fellow Ottomans.

The spatial and symbolic move away from Istanbul and his mother con-

fi rmed the coming into being of the sultan as ruler. For this reason he brought

Abdi Pasha to Edirne and ordered him to compose a history of his reign in

consultation with him. According to Abdi Pasha, “While your humble serv-

ant [Abdi Pasha] was among the servants of the royal ward under the sultanic

gaze in the harem, when his eminence our majestic sultan settled in illustrious

Edirne, the Abode of Victory, he appointed this slave of little worth or knowl-

edge to the duty of recording events” (3a). Abdi Pasha’s history, though penned

by the able writer, emerged dialogically with its patron. It is diffi cult at times

to distinguish the sultan’s voice from that of his chronicler, nor is it possible

to separate the imagined sultan from the real. In this situation it is tempting to

agree to some extent with Derrida, who argues that language constitutes real-

ity and does not merely refl ect it.^3 At the same time, it would be too extreme

to consider everything written in texts such as Abdi Pasha’s to be only literary

tropes and rhetorical devices, to claim, for example, that no conversion or con-

quest occurred. Instead, it is safer to claim that it did not necessarily occur as

described. The aim is to discuss experience and meaning together as they can

be reconstructed primarily from Ottoman chroniclers.

Abdi Pasha’s text functioned fi rst as an oral address. As he relates in the

narrative, he was ordered to tell the sultan everything that he wrote about him.

The author frequently read back to the sultan what he had written, the work’s

strength and weakness. In the summer of 1 665, when Abdi Pasha fell ill and

was not able to be with the sultan for several days to write the Chronicle, the

sultan visited him to ask, “Why are you lying down? Get up and write about

events!” ( 1 80a). He did not want any affair to be missed.

In the chronicle, when Mehmed IV reached his early to mid-twenties in

the 1 660s, following the fi re and conversion of Jewish and Christian places,

Abdi Pasha begins to note the sultan’s piety. The sultan did not want Abdi

Pasha to be remiss in making sure that posterity would remember his patron

for his devoutness. Abdi Pasha included some of the sultan’s favorite Qur’anic

verses ( 1 65b– 1 66a). They include “God enjoins justice, kindness, and charity

to one’s kindred, and forbids indecency, wickedness, and oppression” (Al-Nahl,