228 chapter 5
the position of Crete in the list (Hezarfen, writing just after its final conquest,
had placed the island after the province of Anadolu, while the anonymous
compiler has it registered between Cyprus and Anadolu), which show that the
manuscript was intended to have some practical use.
Another late seventeenth-century work, Kavânîn-i osmanî ve râbıta-ı Âsitâne
(“Ottoman rules and the orderly arrangement of Istanbul”), is essentially a se-
lective reproduction of the Telhisü’l-beyân.84 In general, the relationship of
this text with Hezarfen’s Telhisü’l-beyân makes any identification of the com-
piler uncertain; it is only known that the compilation was made after 1688, as
Mehmed IV’s reign is mentioned as something in the past.
The text begins with a note on the Imperial Council and the days of the
week in which it hears cases, then describes the judges and deputy judges of
Istanbul and the dues for various judicial and notary deeds. The author pro-
ceeds to describe briefly various aspects of city life (the bakeries of the city and
their production, the numbers and prices of other manufactures and stores,
the city’s neighborhoods, etc.). Then, he describes in great detail the palace,
its topography, services, and protocol (I14ff.): he stresses the procedure of the
Imperial Council and of the daily meals of all palace officials. Following this,
the procedure for paying the soldiers’ salaries, the structure of the inner palace
and various ceremonies, the appointment of provincial governors, the situa-
tion of the Crimean khans, the history and ceremonies of the janissaries (I24ff.,
with a long excursus on Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli) and (much more briefly) of the
kapu sipahileri (I31), as well as the representatives of European states (with a
note on the tributes from Hungary; I31–32), are described in turn.
Then, somewhat abruptly, the author jumps to the ulema (I32; again copy-
ing Hezarfen, but omitting the simile with the human body). Following, almost
word-for-word, Hezarfen’s analysis, the author divides the ulema into the man-
ifest or external ones (including, like Hezarfen, scribes of the divan, “those who
know Indian numbers and the siyakat script”—a phrase missing in Hezarfen)
and the internal ones; he also copies (with some mistakes) Hezarfen’s assess-
ment of the relationship between the şeyhülislam and the grand vizier.85
Written at almost the same time as the Kavânîn-i osmanî ve râbıta-ı Âsitâne,
another description of the empire was also primarily based on Hezarfen as
far as it concerns the non-geographical parts: Ebu Bekr b. Bahram Dımışki’s
which gives us a terminus ante quem (the loss of the province to the Venetians in 1685). I
wish to thank Antonis Hadjikyriacou for bringing this manuscript to my attention.
84 The text was published in İpşirli 1994 (see 18, 19, 28 and elsewhere for the dating).
85 The anonymous author here writes that the vizier is the head of “his own state” (kendi
devlet re’isi), instead of “head of the state” (yalnız devlet re’isi) as in Hezarfen – İlgürel 1998,
- See Sariyannis 2013, 91.