The Imperial Heyday 129
to ethical advice (the style known as adab) rather than philosophical theory
(known as ahlak); in other words, the vengeance of the “mirror for princes”
tradition over the abstract interpretation of rulership. Kashifi removed the
heavy philosophical systems of Tusi and Davvani’s books and replaced them
with historical anecdotes and poems. In Ottoman literature, Kashifi’s work
was both copied abundantly in its Persian original and translated four times
during the sixteenth century (among the translations, one was made by Idris-i
Bitlisi’s son).84
The shift to Kashifi coincided with the rise of the scribal bureaucracy and its
literary production, andit is perhaps no coincidence that Kashifi himself was
an accomplished bureaucrat who played a major role in the development of
scribal epistolary composition.85 It was noted in chapter 1 that a bureaucratic
structure, manned mostly by medrese-educated scholars from the neighbor-
ing emirates (as well as Islamicized Byzantines and Serbians, especially from
the mid-fifteenth century onwards), was apparent even by the mid-fourteenth
century, while the system for registering the land was in full use by the first
decades of the fifteenth century. Tursun Bey and İdris-i Bitlisi, two of the most
famous exponents of Tusi’s and Davvani’s political philosophy, were educat-
ed or had worked as scribes; however, the most representative literary genre
produced by these bureaucrats was more closely connected to their everyday
work, even though it may seem utterly rhetorical to the modern reader. The
model prose, münşeat or inşa, quite similar to the contemporaneous epistolog-
raphy of the Italian city-states, contained models and instructions with all the
necessary ornaments for composing letters with a view to serving as the pat-
tern for the day-to-day correspondence of the government.86 Usually, such col-
lections were compiled and used alongside collections of official documents,
copies of registers and law regulations, and other useful texts; one of the ear-
liest Turkish examples, Teressül (“Correspondence”) by Kırımlu Hafız Hüsam
(who was probably trained in the Germiyan court of Kütahya in the late four-
teenth or early fifteenth century), contains general advice for letter-writing and
84 Yılmaz 2005, 45–47: in 1550 by Firâkî Abdurrahman Çelebi; around the same time by
Ebu’l-Fazl Mehmed, son of Idris-i Bitlisi; in 1566 by Azmî Efendi, Mehmed III’s tutor,
as Enîsü’l-kulûb; toward the end of the century by Nevâlî Efendi, the successor of Azmi
Efendi. Kınalızade (Kınalızade – Koç 2007, 38–39) refers to Kashifi’s work, but does not
seem to have used it.
85 Mitchell 2003.
86 On the evolution of scribal writing style and language, cf. Matuz 1970; Woodhead 1988;
Riedlmayer 2008; Darling 2013a; Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 138ff. On early Renaissance epistolog-
raphy and its importance for the history of European political thought see Skinner 1978,
I:28ff.