160 chapter 4
Celalzade and his successor, Nişancı Ramazanzade. From 1561 onwards, he held
various offices as a secretary attached to his patron, Lala Mustafa Pasha. He
accompanied him to Damascus and Egypt and on various campaigns (Cyprus,
the Caucasus) until the pasha’s death (in the intervening periods, Ali had minor
positions in Bosnia and Aleppo). Then, in 1583, he returned to Istanbul, where
he engaged in writing poetical, historiographical, and belles-lettres works
while serving in the mid-ranks of the financial bureaucracy or as the secretary
to various pashas (in Erzurum, Baghdad, Sivas, and other Anatolian towns).
Returning to Istanbul in 1589, he spent a number of years in bitter isolation,
continuously sending treatises and literary works to viziers and sultans in an
effort to be noticed; in 1592, he was appointed a secretary to the janissaries and
then registrar of the Imperial Council (defter emini), only to be dismissed soon
after. In 1595, after Murad III’s death, he was made a provincial governor in
Anatolia and, finally, governor of Jedda. On his way to this last post, Ali arrived
in Cairo in 1599; he reached Jedda at the end of that year, only to die soon after.
Ali’s work is vast in both scope and volume: from poetry to history and from
Sufism to etiquette, it is an extraordinary specimen of high-blown inşa litera-
ture. However, Ali’s high expectations met with the complex political alliances
of late sixteenth-century Istanbul, with the result that he almost never gained
the recognition he felt was owed to him. His formidable erudition combined
with his mediocre career produced a work marked with bitterness and despair:
living in a general milieu of declinist, even apocalyptic visions, he developed
a strong sense of a world in decline, and he did his best to describe it. His
haughty style makes even the slightest detail look lofty and part of a grander
vision of the ideal government.
One may find Ali’s political views scattered throughout his historiographical
works. The monumental Künhü’l-ahbâr (“The essence of histories”), arguably
his most important work, is a voluminous world history, whose composition
began in 1591/2 and was completed almost ten years later.29 The work is con-
ceived in four “pillars”; the first a treatise on cosmology and geography, the
second and the third on pre-Islamic and Islamic history, and the fourth on the
Ottoman dynasty. There is a strong sense of decline in Ali’s views of Ottoman
history, as explicitly stated in his introduction as well as being evident in his
accounts of the reigns of Süleyman’s successors.30 This sentiment is even
more explicitly stated in his final book, Füsûl-i hall ü akd ve usûl-i harc ü nakd
(“The seasons of sovereignty on the principles of critical expenditure”), a short
29 Ali 1860–1868; Ali – Çerci 2000; Ali – Şentürk 2003. Cf. Fleischer 1986a, 235–307; Schmidt
1991; Piterberg 2003, 38–42; Hagen 2013, 450–451.
30 See Fleischer 1986a, 258–259 and 293–307; Ali – Çerci 2000.