The Empire in the Making 39
is condemned as a sign of greed and oppression; furthermore, a very nega-
tive attitude to the emerging strata of the ulema and the high officials of the
court can be detected, especially when they are newcomers from Iran or the
neighboring emirates. The army, meaning here the free raiders of the gaza and
the early timariots, in contrast to the janissaries, is viewed as the spine of the
Ottoman state; its protection is seen as almost the main task of a just ruler.
1.2 Apocalyptic Literature as a Vehicle for Opposition
Aşıkpaşazade’s chronicle is not the only example of anti-imperial writing from
the late fifteenth century.22 One may see a similar attitude in various apocalyp-
tic texts from that period, works which seek to demonstrate that their era has
all the characteristics of the end-times, or at least that depravity is so dominant
that it may have eschatological implications. Islamic apocalyptic imagery has
a standard inventory of ideas connected with immorality, especially among
women, decline in religious fervor, and dishonesty on the part of judges and
other officials.23 However, texts produced in the late fifteenth century have
some features that show that they were primarily composed in order to criti-
cize their own times and thereby to promote their own vision for what consti-
tuted an ideal society. For instance, some legendary histories of pre-Ottoman
Constantinople, which circulated widely in this period, concentrate on tales
of depravity and immorality that resulted in destruction, thereby implying (as
shown by the late Stéphane Yérasimos) that the Ottomans should never make
that city the seat of their empire and thus opposing the evolution of the mili-
tary emirate into an empire with claims of universalism.24 Interestingly, the
same stories were re-told between the 1530s and the 1560s, when Süleyman I’s
plans for a universal empire brought the subject of imperial centralization into
the middle political scene once more. This opposition may have reached a cli-
max in calls for Edirne rather than Istanbul to be selected as the capital of the
empire (or, at any rate, of the Ottoman state): there are early sixteenth-century
legends on its founding, which place it as the polar opposite of Istanbul (created
by the prophet Idris, or else predestined for the Muslim armies and inhabitants
22 The ideas that follow, as well as the part on Yazıcıoğlu, were first expounded in Sariyannis
2008a, 128–132.
23 Cf. Cook 2002, 13–14; Kurz 2011, 24–25. In the thirteenth century, this imagery was used
against the Turks (recte Mongols): Peacock 2016, 294–295.
24 Yerasimos 1990, esp. 84–85, 154–59, 194ff., 201ff. Some of these legends continued to circu-
late during subsequent centuries as well, but we should not necessarily seek anti-imperial
attitudes in the authors who incorporated them into their chronicles. See, e.g., Solakzade
1879, 201–209; Mahmud Efendi – Tunalı 2013, 167–174 and 351–353.