130 chapter 3
specific model phrases for letters addressed to governors, viziers, princes, various
officials, and ulema, as well as to merchants, sheikhs, friends, and various rela-
tives, including husbands and wives (as well as lovers, both male and female);
model letters (and model answers to them) follow, together with model docu-
ments, mainly appointment diplomas for teachers, judges and officers.87 As
the palace bureaucracy was becoming an increasingly powerful and diversi-
fied apparatus,88 such manuals kept being produced throughout the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, culminating with Feridun Bey (d. 1583) and his famous
collection of sultanly letters and treaties, Münşe’âtü’s-selâtîn (“The correspon-
dence of sultans”), completed in 1575. Feridun, the private secretary of the
grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, was given the position of reisülküttab or
chief secretary in 1570 and that of nişancı in 1573–76, and again in 1581, holding
it until his death. He also wrote a history of the Szigetvár campaign and a moral
treatise, but his most well-known work was the aforementioned collection,
which was presented to Murad III in 1575 and contains more than 500 docu-
ments, running from the first years of Islam until Murad’s own time.89 Not all
these documents were genuine, and some were probably forged or invented by
Feridun himself in order to legitimize the Ottoman dynasty and its worldview:
as Dimitris Kastritsis has recently observed, the collection “was never intended
as a practical chancery manual at all, but rather as a type of history writing”.90
This series of documents illustrated the rise of the Ottomans to the status of a
world power, situated in the middle of an Islamicate world (those addressed to
the “heretical” Safavid shahs are much more pompous than those to the “infi-
del” kings of Europe) but not ignoring Europe either: not surprisingly, Feridun
had also commissioned the translation of a history of the kings of France.91
4.2 Celalzade and the Glorification of the Empire
Almost contemporary with Kınalızade, Celalzade Mustafa (c. 1490–1567) was
a major exponent of the rising bureaucracy who followed a slightly different
path, choosing to stand on the shoulders of Kashifi rather than Davvani or
Tusi. The son of a middle-ranking kadi, he had a career similar to Feridun: he
87 Kırımlu Hafız Hüsam – Tekin 2008. The addresses to merchants (pp. 44 and 64) are of
particular interest, as they stress their generosity and charity. The next known Ottoman
manual, copied in 1479, has similar content: Yahya bin Mehmed – Tekin 1971; for an early
sixteenth-century specimen, see Mesihi – Ménage 1988.
88 Fleischer 1986b; Darling 1996, 49–80; Sariyannis 2013, 105–107; Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 55ff.
89 Feridun Bey 1848; Vatin 2010, 63ff.; Kastritsis 2013. There are two different printed Ottoman
editions of this monumental work and a modern systematic study is highly needed.
90 Kastritsis 2013, 107.
91 Bacqué-Grammont 1997.