214 chapter 5
to what they perceived as Ottoman decline had moved a step further. Instead
of locating the shortcomings of the present situation against the standards of
a “Golden Era”, they simply laid down rules for the government to follow. It
is no coincidence that most of the works that could be classified within this
trend bear the title of kanunname, or “Book of laws”. In the words of Douglas
A. Howard, “[s]ome Ottoman authors of advice for kings did use the official
government document as a form”; and Heather Ferguson’s remark, that kanun-
names were, by themselves, a “paradigm of governance”, one which created
order and control by being issued, is not out of place here.47
Even what is known as “the kanunname of Mehmed the Conqueror” might
well be, according to Colin Imber’s reasoning, an actual product of a historian
and (not paradoxically) divan scribe, Koca Hüseyin: he included a copy in his
history, claiming that he had “taken it out ... from the kanunname of the Divan”
in 1614 (the earliest manuscript of Mehmed’s kanunname to survive is dated
1620). This would explain several anachronisms, which show that, in its current
form, the text cannot be dated earlier than 1574.48 If Imber’s suggestion is cor-
rect, the fact that Koca Hüseyin attributed his compilation to none other than
Mehmed II, one of the sultans most celebrated by the “Golden Age” theorists,
illustrates splendidly the political agenda of these “administrative manuals”. At
any rate, regardless of the authenticity of the kanunname, the fact is that cop-
ies began to circulate in the early seventeenth century, suggesting there was a
need to legitimize these regulations by an appeal to the glorious past. This em-
phasis on the ideal form of institutions seems to have been expanded in juridi-
cal theory as well: an anthology of fetvas and petitions by Ebussu’ud, entitled
Ma ’rûzât (“Statements”), was compiled so as to be presented to an anonymous
sultan, and Colin Imber has argued that the compiler might be identified with
the şeyhülislam Mehmed Es’ad Efendi and the sultan with Murad IV.49
When stating that some pieces of political advice took the form of official
documents, Howard focuses on the telhis form, used, for example, by Koçi Bey.
And indeed, Koçi Bey’s second Risâle (“Treatise”) is one contribution to this
category of “administration manuals”; at the same time, it illustrates very well
the close relationship between this genre and the “declinist” advice studied
47 Howard 2007, 147; Ferguson 2008. See also Howard 1988, 59ff.
48 Akgündüz 1990–1996, 1:317; Imber 2011, 174–178; cf. Tezcan 2000, 662, fn. 1 and 2 for the
rich literature on the authenticity of the kanunname. Vatin (forthcoming) suggests, for
instance, that the law on fratricide was interpolated during the first years of Süleyman’s
reign.
49 Imber 1992, 180–81, and fn. 11. On this text see also Heyd 1973, 183–185 (Heyd tentatively
dated the text to Selim II’s ascension; the editor of the book, V. L. Ménage, suggested
Murad III); Repp 1986, 280ff.