a decade of crisis 41historians to view historical documents as sources embedded in a knowable
social world that allow us to assume the material reality and lived experience of
the past, while at the same time perceiving historical documents as texts that
display a certain linguistic construction or literary consciousness of that world.^3
She argues that we can accept that language refl ects that world because it is
mimetic, documenting and describing the past to which it refers, describing a
perceived reality, and constitutive of that world or performative and generative,
being a self-refl ective, literary discourse.
Spiegel’s approach can be used to read the chronicles of the seventeenth-
century Ottoman Empire. As in earlier periods of Islamic history, their authors
were court offi cials who often witnessed events as they unfolded, had close
relations with the leading members of the administration and the dynasty, and
incorporated offi cial documents, which they may have composed, into their
works. They were “members of a class who shared a common educational
background, certain stylistic approaches to literary composition and specifi c
political concerns; their writings therefore exhibit many common assumptions
as to the purposes and the proper content of history, as well as how it should
be written.”^4
Ottoman chronicles of the seventeenth century often display a unity of
form and content.^5 The meaning of Ibrahim’s deposition and murder was de-termined after the fact and revealed in the future by authors who used it to
articulate their understandings of the era.^6 Many of them were concerned with
writing “ethical-rhetorical” history, using rhetorical styles to express ethical con-
cerns in order to articulate a usable past for the present audience.^7 Their works
provide insight into the imaginal world of late seventeenth-century writers. By
the time Mehmed IV turned sixteeen in 1 657, Karaçelebizade, Katip Çelebi,
and Solakzade had completed their works of history addressed to the sovereign.
They begin their narratives with tumult, noise, anger, uprising, confusion, and
disorder, making for good drama. The fi nest example is The Gardens of Fruit,
written by Sheikhulislam Karaçelebizade after his tumultuous period in offi ce
( 1651 –52), composed in the guise of a memoir while he was in exile in Bursa
and refl ecting back on the fi rst ten years of Mehmed IV’s reign. In the criti-
cal view of Karaçelebizade, Ottoman society faced insurmountable woes. Even
if we bear in mind that Karaçelebizade was a disgruntled, dismissed offi cial
writing after being banished from the court, labeled full of wrath, excessively
critical, and even slanderous by a contemporary writer, we cannot miss how
members of the Ottoman elite such as this former sheikhulislam articulated
what they saw as the woes of their era and what needed to be done to remedy
them, namely, the restoration of the idealized system with a morally virtuous
male ruler at its head.^8