14 Introduction
Slavic ...), and Jews. Unfortunately, however, limitations of time and language
made this task impossible within the scope of this book.48 Nevertheless, the
close relationship between Ottoman political thought and the Ottoman cen-
tral government, and the almost exclusive Turkish-speaking Muslim character
of the latter (at least until the Tanzimat period that constitutes the end of this
study), perhaps make this particular lack less important than it would be in
other fields of Ottoman culture. Having defined politics as the field of pub-
lic life related to statecraft and power, it seems quite natural that, when we
talk of Ottoman political thinking, we are mainly referring to thinking about
the Ottoman state or, to put it another way, to attempts to influence state
policy-making. That said, a study of the above-mentioned “other voices” would
surely shed new light on the history of Ottoman political ideas as it is usually
conceived.49
A collateral lacuna, which is impossible to fill due to the present state of the
field, is the fact that, while we may know the history of translations (mainly
from Arabic and Persian into Ottoman Turkish) of political works and, to a
lesser extent, the diffusion of their copies over time, there is no scholarship
(or, indeed, knowledge at all) on their commentaries. Indeed, this point may
be expanded to original Ottoman texts as well. Thus, there is a serious lack of
knowledge as to what the reception of both old and new political texts was for
Ottoman audiences.50
3 A Note on “Modernity”—Early or Not
The working hypothesis is that the Ottoman state underwent a process similar
to what has come to be called the formation of early-modern states in Western
Europe and that this process should be reflected in various ways in the history
48 On the attitudes of Byzantine authors against the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople
see Moustakas 2011; on the Greek (and Romanian) Phanariot political (often historical-
cum-political or moral-cum-political) literature, see Duţu 1971; Apostolopoulos 1976;
Panou 2008; Costache 2010–2011; Stavrakopoulou 2012; Shapiro 2014. In 1808 a nasihat-
name in Ottoman Turkish was commissioned by Alexandros Mavrocordatos: Philliou
2011, 30.
49 Cf. the observations by Stuurman 2000, 156–157 on Western European thought.
50 Cf. the observations of Pollock 2009, 954–955: “The place of traditional commentaries in
contemporary philological training illustrates one of the main things that has been wrong
about the field ... How different my first experience of reading Virgil would have been had
I read him through Donatus-Servius rather than through Conington-Nettleship”.