308 chapter 7
(hılt-ı mahmud), surrounded by the other classes (sair esnaf dahi baki ihata
mu’adil düşmüşdür). They are thus like the heart, the source of the “animal
soul” (kalb ki, menba ’-ı ruh-ı hayvanidir) and which distributes this soul to
the limbs of the body via the blood. In Hezarfen’s simile, the “animal soul” is
knowledge of the Sharia and the ulema are the intermediaries who pass it on
to the people; as the animal soul is the source of the well-being and the contin-
uation of the body, so does the Sharia do so for society and the state (cem’iyyet
ve devlet). If blood is corrupt, it only brings harm to the body, and needs to be
cured or extracted.60
4 Na’ima: Stage Theory in the Service of Peace
Hemdemi and Hezarfen may have reflected Kâtib Çelebi’s ideas, especially
those promoting Ibn Khaldun’s bio-historical theory of stages, but a fully-
fledged introduction of the Tunisian scholar’s ideas into the Ottoman frame-
work would have to wait for half a century and the work of Na’ima, one of the
most important Ottoman historians. Mustafa Na’îmâ (ca. 1665–1716) was the
son of the janissary commander of Aleppo; he entered the palace service at a
young age and was educated as a scribe, spending his whole career in the divan
bureaucracy. Being a protégé of the grand vizier Amcazade Hüseyin Köprülü
Pasha (seen earlier as the principal negotiator of the Treaty of Karlowitz), he
was commissioned by him to write a history of the Ottoman Empire in order
to complete a now-lost draft by Şarih al-Menarzâde (d. 1657). Na’ima started
this task around 1698 and seems to have worked on it until 1704, when he was
promoted to Anadolu muhasebecisi, or chief accountant of Anatolia. He then
held various other posts, always in the financial bureaucracy and with several
ups and downs (occasionally due to his preoccupation with astrology), be-
fore his death at Patras in 1716. Na’ima’s history, Ravzatü’l-Hüseyin fi hulâsât
ahbâri’l- hâfikayn (“Huseyin’s garden, with a summary of news of the East and
West”; commonly known as Târîh-i Na ’îmâ), is based largely on Kâtib Çelebi’s
Fezleke, as well as other historians, oral transmission, and lost works; it covers
events from A.H. 1000 (1591) until AD 1660, while a treatise on the 1703 “Edirne
event” was added later (as a preface to the second part of his chronicle, which
would have covered the period up to Na’ima’s own days but was never written).
Na’ima’s history proved both popular (there are more than twenty manuscripts
60 Hezarfen – İlgürel 1998, 196.