134 chapter 3
describe the salaried servants of the state (erkân-ı devlet, ayan-ı saltanat), with
twenty subsections or levels (derece) on the palace personnel, the viziers
(vüzera ve erkân-ı devlet ve ayan-ı saltanat), the janissaries, the sipahis, the pal-
ace porters, and the musicians and palace artisans. The second section would
deal with the beylerbeyis and their provinces, with twenty-one subsections on
each individual province; similarly, the next sections would enumerate the for-
tresses of the empire, the auxiliary troops, and the navy. Then, the work would
deal with Istanbul and the twenty provinces of the empire, depicting the num-
ber and rules of their timars, their towns, villages, holy endowments, and pop-
ulation, all in subsections according to smaller administrative units. Finally,
the thirtieth section would deal (and indeed deals) with Süleyman’s reign.
This conception of the world demands some interpretation. The inclusion
of history into a spatial description of an empire implies a worldview that
regards the present as the consummation of history and as the perfection of
the human condition.100 In fact, the plan of Celalzade’s book seems to come
from the cosmographical tradition, which traditionally tried to encompass
the world in a similar grid of lists: in Aşık Mehmed’s (ca. 1556/57–1598) mon-
umental work, for instance, and in the geographical part of his contempo-
rary Mustafa Ali’s history, geographical elements (seas, lakes, rivers, springs,
wells, islands, mountains, flora and fauna, minerals, and finally cities) are
arranged in lists according to their geographical region and alphabetical order.101
Celalzade’s plan is thus part of a tradition of describing the world through the
use of lists, and one might argue that eventually this “empire of lists” became
a typically scribal Weltanschauung for the Ottoman bureaucracy. In chapter 5
it will be seen that the list structure was used in a whole series of early seven-
teenth-century works, all composed by scribes and all proposing a normative
description of the imperial institutions.
For Celalzade, the sultan is the ultimate source of the Ottoman kanun, and
hence of the law. He places great emphasis on discretionary punishment by
the sultan (siyaset), such as in the case of Molla Kabız (the highly-esteemed
ulema who was executed for heresy in 1527, under Süleyman’s personal pres-
sure), or in the collective punishment of wrongdoers, much like Dede Çöngî.
100 Kaya Şahin finds it “neo-Platonic” and notes that it reflects Celalzade’s desire “to repre-
sent the world within hierarchically/organizationally bound, recognizable, and also very
bureaucratic categories[, a notion which] stems from the idea that every single part of
the empire ... is tied together within a system in the middle of which sits the sultan, the
ultimate lynchpin of a neo-Platonic universe”: Şahin 2013, 174.
101 Aşık Mehmed – Ak 2007; Ali 1860–1868, I:48–237; cf. Schmidt 1991, 49–50 and 289ff.,
Fleischer 1986a, 140–142, 241–52. This “list phenomenon” appears to have been common
across Eurasia, according to Howard 2007, 156–157.