144 honored by the glory of islamat the beginning of Mehmed IV’s reign, when the boy was enthroned at a tender
age, fi rst the previous valide sultan and then Mehmed IV’s mother competed to
be the boy’s regent and struggled for power in the palace along with the chief
eunuch of the harem. As in imperial China, eunuchs, unlike virile men, were
able to staff the imperial harem and wield considerable authority; castrated
men and women who gave birth to sultans exercised power to the detriment
of sultans.^23 This situation troubled Ottoman chroniclers for whom, similar towriters in contemporary Qing China, it seemed a violation of the ideal of the
“hegemony of the imperial phallus,” since “the only penis in the palace was
that of the emperor—enjoying sole access to countless female vessels, who
were guarded by thousands of emasculated attendants.”^24 In response, not dis-
similar to depictions of the Manchus during debates at the Chinese court, Ot-
toman writers promoted the martial qualities of the ruler.^25
Those who wrote after the 1 660s when Mehmed IV had matured re-
sponded to Karaçelebizade, Katip Çelebi, and Solakzade, chroniclers who had
passed away in 1 657–58. Among historians there was a real changing of the
guard. The new writers paid less attention to the valide sultan, made the sul-
tan the center of the narrative, and wrote conquest books devoted to boasting
of the martial successes of the ruler and inserted poetic panegyric in the text
where they described the conquest of citadels.^26 They composed accounts glo-
rifying the sultan as military conqueror of territories in central Europe and
Mediterranean islands, hoping to shape his legacy as a warrior for the faith.
A key narrative also written with this intention is the Chronicle of Abdi Pasha,
who relied on Karaçelebizade, Katip Çelebi, and Solakzade when composing
his history. Contrary to these works, which were written as part of the advice
to kings genre, the offi cial historian chose to situate his account of the reign
of Mehmed IV in the genre of the book of kings, meant to glorify, not give
advice to, the ruler, although with perhaps less of the exaggerated praise that
usually characterizes such works and written in plain language so the sultan
could understand it.^27 Similar to those writing conquest books, this choice of
genre and omission of discussion of Ibrahim’s reign by Abdi Pasha make his
work an “amnesiac text” that expends “much labor and ingenuity in the serv-
ice of forgetfulness,” including forgetting the fate of Mehmed IV’s father and
predecessor.^28 This forgetfulness did not make his text free of the specter of
the problems during Ibrahim’s reign against which he was writing. For this
reason his strategic choice also allowed Abdi Pasha to write a work that lays out
a model of sultanic behavior.
In a sense, Mehmed IV’s own personal history begins with the beginning
of the writing of the chronicle, for he marked his attainment of or wish to attain
maturity by producing a history that conveniently skips over his father’s reign,