The Eighteenth Century: the Westernizers 385
oriental languages and served as an interpreter and emissary, as well as holding
various military posts during the wars of the late 1730s. In 1726 he managed to
found the first Ottoman Turkish printing press, with the support of the grand
vizier Nevşehirli İbrahim Pasha. Before he died in 1745, he published seventeen
books on history (including several works of Kâtib Çelebi and Na’ima’s histo-
ry), geography (including a monumental edition of Kâtib Çelebi’s Cihânnümâ,
reworked and supplemented, as well as a description of the Americas), and
language (among them a Turkish grammar in French). It is interesting to see
the rationale used by Müteferrika for justifying the need for a press and to over-
come the objections of some ulema: among his arguments (as published in the
introduction of the first book he printed), he stresses that the multiplication
of copies and the subsequent fall in book prices would bring knowledge to
everyone, from the rich to the poorest students and even the inhabitants of
provincial towns and villages.14
Among his own works, which include an essay on the benefits of printing,
a treatise on magnetism, and translations of Latin geographical and histori-
cal works, Usûlü’l-hikem f î nizâmi’l-ümem (“Rational bases for the order of the
countries”) was written in 1731 and published in his printing house the follow-
ing year.15 The importance of Usûlü’l-hikem is two-fold, as is its structure, too:
on the one hand, it introduces (or rather re-introduces, as in fact it copies a
forgotten work by Kâtib Çelebi) to Ottoman literature the Aristotelian distinc-
tion of governments (and it remained the only such work for a long time); on
the other, it was the first time that an Ottoman straightforwardly proposed
military reforms based on an acknowledgment of the superiority of European
armies. In the first respect, Müteferrika’s work stands alone, as indeed is this
theoretical part isolated and unexploited inside the Usûlü’l-hikem itself; in the
second, it was to be followed throughout subsequent centuries not only by
theorists but by government policies as well.
In his preface (Ş123–127), Müteferrika states quite boldly the reasons he
wrote his treatise: the 1730 revolt, as well as the military defeats of the empire,
led him to study books in Latin and other languages in order to discover the
reasons for the decline and the means for restoration, especially concerning
the military strength of the Ottomans. The book is composed of three chapters,
the first and last of which are related to the “need for order in the army”, the
treatise referring to Müteferrika’s conversion see also Krstić 2011, 203; Tezcan 2014 (who
rejects Berkes’s arguments about his Unitarianism).
14 Gerçek 1939; Sabev 2006, 139–140; Küçük 2012, 165; Erginbaş 2014, 68.
15 Müteferrika – Şen 1995. See Berkes 1962; Berkes 1964, 36–45; Yılmaz 2003a, 315–16; Aksan
1993, 56 (=Aksan 2004, 30–31); Yılmaz 2000a; Sabev 2006 and 2014; Erginbaş 2014, 85–92.