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

194 honored by the glory of islam

with archival documents, failing to understand the context of power rela-

tions in which the latter were recorded. By reading the archival sources alone,

without the benefi t of contemporary chronicles, he is misled about the cir-

cumstances in which scribes depicted these items being bestowed. This is

not surprising in a work that covers an enormous, diverse region during the

reigns of a number of different sultans in a time frame selected for its archi-

val documentation rather than historical cohesiveness. The documents depict

the giving of new clothes to converts who willingly change religion in “the

capital city” at the palace. Minkov concluded that most conversions probably

took place at the meeting of the imperial council and that the sultan was not

present.^30 But he does not match the dates of these documents with the move-

ments of Sultan Mehmed IV as recorded in the offi cial history of his chronicler,

Abdi Pasha. Had he done so, he would have realized that these conversions

occurred at conversion ceremonies before the sultan in Thrace and Bulgaria

while he was en route to a military campaign or on the hunt.

One is compelled to acknowledge that the best option is to read Ottoman

archival and narrative sources together to understand the context of conversion

and Ottoman understandings of conversion and to examine how the inten-

tions of the converters are depicted. This is the most responsible course to

take considering that the converts lived more than three hundred years ago

and their experience is available to the historian only fi ltered through Ottoman

offi cialese and literary fl ourish. Flesh-and-blood characters are drawn in black,

gold, and red Ottoman ink. Archival recordings of their actions are not merely

mines of information to be culled and recorded in satisfying tables and charts.

They cannot be simply displayed like gems shorn of their muddy origin. This

is not to say that narrative sources are without their problems, to turn the tables

and go to the opposite extreme, ignoring archival documents and fetishizing

chronicles. It is best to avoid document fetishism and chronicle positivism,

instead reading both archival and literary sources as traces of the past that not

only refl ect lived experience, but reveal how writers conceived of the era in

which they lived.

Let us examine archival documents concerning the cloaking of new Mus-

lims. They exist for the reigns of earlier seventeenth-century sultans, Ahmed I

and Murad IV, but they are few and far between.^31 During the second half of

the reign of Mehmed IV there is a large increase in documentation of the distri-

bution of clothes to new Muslims. Although one cannot discount the fact that

the period after 1 650 saw a massive increase in scribal documentation, the

change is remarkable nevertheless. Ottoman archival sources provide evidence

that hundreds of Christians and Jews converted to Islam in the presence of