Introduction 23
be generous to the soldiers, as well as the suspicious attitude towards every
attempt to reinforce centralized power, are clear and unsurprising. After that,
the first chapter deals with the introduction of imperial ideals by scholars born
and trained in neighboring principalities and influenced by Persian culture
during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Ahmedi’s famous chronicle
in verse, as well as early authors on ethics such as Şeyhoğlu Mustafa (who,
like Ahmedi, came to the Ottoman court from Germiyan in the late 1380s) and
Sinan Pasha, the bitter grand vizier of Mehmed II, brought onto the scene adab
literature (the Persian “mirror for princes”) and the notion of sultanly justice,
which is more important than piety, according to the old motto which declares
that a realm collapses due to injustice rather than infidelity. Finally, this chap-
ter delves into the shifting methods of legitimization at this early stage of the
Ottoman Empire.
The second chapter deals with the neo-Aristotelian tradition as inherited
by Persian authors such as Nasir al-Din Tusi and Davvani, who combined
Aristotle’s analysis of the human soul with Plato’s notion of the ideal state
(via al-Farabi’s tenth-century work). These authors conceived of humanity as
a continuum, from the human soul to society, and their moral vision may be
said to be a study in governance: from individual morals, i.e. governance of the
self, through family and household governance, i.e. what the Ancient Greeks
called economics (οικονομία: “regulation of the household”), to state theory and
the governance of society. It is little known that the first introduction of such
a theory to Ottoman literature dates from the early fifteenth century, when
Ahmed Amasi, a contemporary of Ahmedi and Şeyhoğlu Mustafa, adapted
two of the most famous Persian political works, Nasir al-Din Tusi’s Akhlâq-e
Nâsirî (also known as “The Nasirean ethics”) and al-Ghazali’s Nasîha al-mulûk.
If Amasi’s work passed relatively unnoticed, the blossoming of Persian ethi-
co-political theory came in the time of Mehmed II with Tursun Beg’s intro-
duction to his history and Idris-i Bitlisi’s treatise on ethics. Both works stress
the cardinal virtues needed by the sultan, and both follow closely Jalal al-Din
Davvani’s Akhlâq-e Jalâlî, an improved and extended version of Tusi’s ethical
system. Kınalızade Ali’s mid-sixteenth-century work, the most complete of its
kind, will be studied in detail (with separate sections on the human soul and
its faculties; political economy; and the beginning and principles of govern-
ment) because a number of his ideas, such as the vision of society as composed
of four orders (i.e. the men of the sword, the men of the pen, the peasants, and
the merchants) remained relevant for many centuries to come.
In the third chapter, we will give an overview of the ideas prevailing in
the field of juristic and political thought during the reign of Süleyman the
Magnificent (1520–66) in order to detect the beginnings of later trends or the