Khaldunist Philosophy: Innovation Justified 323
mixture of legitimizing discourse in favor of strong sultanly rule and religious
optimism (although the concept of what he sees as Süleyman’s “Golden Age”
is not missing).80 Yet this work, which only marginally pertains to politics, will
be skipped here; rather, the new ideas that were introduced in the second half
of the seventeenth century will be studied in detail instead. For instance, it
is not surprising, in light of the wars and treaties of the first decades of the
eighteenth century, that Na’ima’s defence of peace was followed by various au-
thors. As well as political thinkers such as Resmi Efendi, whose work will be
examined in more detail in chapter 9, this advocacy for peace also found its
way into poetry. A whole genre of lengthy poems in praise of peace, known as
the Sulhiyye, flowered in the period between the treaties of Karlowitz (1699)
and Passarowitz (1718).81 Yusuf Nabi’s (c. 1642–1712) Sulhiyye is also a eulogy
of Amcazâde Hüseyin Pasha, who was Na’ima’s mentor; Nabi states that, due
to that pasha’s efforts, “the world found again its order, with peace and sound-
ness”. People had tired of continuous war, and “without an anchor, the ship of
the realm had almost sunk”. The Karlowitz peace treaty was like a slave’s manu-
mission document: friendship succeeded hostility, love and ease took the place
of hate and fear. Nabi likens the war to a disease that had made health invis-
ible; in this, we may perhaps see a reflection of Na’ima’s Khaldunist notion that
peace is like medicine for a sick state. Another Sulhiyye composed for the same
treaty, written by Alaeddin Sabit of Bosnia (d. 1712), goes on to say that
with the fetva of the imam of Islam, the wine of war became canonically
forbidden (haram) and the sweet drink of peace permitted (helal).Another poet, Seyyid Vehbi (d. 1736), wrote two similar poems on the treaties
of Passarowitz (1718) and of Istanbul (1724, with Persia), which praised the
grand vizier Damad İbrahim Pasha. Like his predecessors, he stressed the dif-
ficulties of war with multiple enemies; on the other hand, he laments much
more forcefully the distress of the Muslim army. Ahmed III, he says, sought
peace because he was saddened by the disasters inflicted on his subjects by
the Austrians. Vehbi wrote explicitly of his hopes that İbrahim Pasha would
be able to reinstate the might of the empire, avoiding a repetition of Karlowitz
(which he sees as a defeat). Praise of peace (rather than military might) is also
80 On Evliya’s political views see Dankoff 2006, 83ff. and esp. 106–114; Balta 2006; Taştan
2012.
81 See Rahimguliyev 2007 (in the appendices of the thesis, the author presents the Sulhiyyes
of Nabi, Sabit, and Vehbi: pp. 91–108). On Vehbi’s first Sulhiyye, see ibid., 73–80. On early
eighteenth-century views on peace see Menchinger 2014a, 122–124, who argues that “the
very rarity of the sulhiyye also militates against using it as proof of major change”.