302 chapter 7
As for the timar system and the poor sipahis, they were scarcely mentioned
any longer: in Düstûrü’l-amel, it may be remembered, thoughts about the mili-
tary are restricted to the janissaries and other salaried standing troops.
3 Kâtib Çelebi’s Immediate Influence: the Conciliation with Change
If there is one element from Kâtib Çelebi’s writings that passed almost imme-
diately into his contemporaries’ works, it was his sense of innovation, and more
particularly his admission that every kind (or stage) of society (or the state) re-
quires a different approach, and thus that any potential reformer should adopt
a problem-oriented policy rather than revert to some idealized constitutions
of the past. His general vision of history (i.e. his Khaldunist conception of the
laws of history) would take another 50 years to be adopted wholesale, but the
conciliation with the idea that societies change and ideal policies change ac-
cordingly (again often using the simile of the human body) was integrated very
soon into works otherwise belonging to totally different political traditions.
Furthermore, in sharp contrast to the “declinist” literature studied in chapter 5,
his followers ignored the timar problems, as he had, and focused on the mili-
tary-administrative branch instead.
A good example is the Nasîhatnâme (“Book of advice”) composed in 1652, i.e.
almost simultaneously with Kâtib Çelebi’s Düstûrü’l-amel;49 one should pre-
sume that the similarities with Kâtib Çelebi’s ideas must be attributed to per-
sonal acquaintance rather than textual transmission. The identity of the author
is unclear; one of the two manuscripts is followed by some poems signed by
Hemdemî, and they might well belong to the same author. On these grounds,
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (followed by Rhoads Murphey, who nevertheless
considers the identification “far from being definitely established”) identified
the author as Solakzade Mehmed (d. 1657/8), the well-known historian who
also wrote poems under the pen-name Hemdemi. Little is known of Solakzade:
he was an early recruit to the palace and was a “constant companion” of Murad
IV, together with Evliya Çelebi; it seems that he remained in the palace under
the next two sultans as well. Solakzade was a musician and composer of note,
but his main work is the history of the Ottoman dynasty up to 1643, mainly a
49 There are two manuscripts, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Or. Oct. 1598, ff. 125b–172b (cop-
ied together with Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa’s treatise) and Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek MS N.F. 283. Here I use the Vienna MS, 1b–38b (see Murphey 2009b,
46–47, for some differences; probably a copy). There is no study of this text other than
Murphey 2009b.