48 chapter 1
But if Ahmedi’s work contains only scattered pieces of what may be reconsti-
tuted as his worldview, he had contemporaries who tried to transfer wholesale the
Iranian “mirrors of princes” tradition into Ottoman culture. For one thing,
translations of such texts into Anatolian Turkish appear quite early: the most
striking example is Kay Ka’us (Keykavus) b. İskender’s Qâbûsnâme, a famous
book of moral advice composed in Persian in western Iran in the late eleventh
century.44 Qabusname was first translated as early as the mid-fourteenth cen-
tury, while other translations date from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries:45 no less than five translations had been made by 1432. It is interest-
ing to note that the first translation, or rather adaptation, was made by a pious
individual who did not always agree with the sometimes libertine ideas of the
original. Whereas, for instance, Kay Ka’us’s advice is to divide one’s wealth into
three equal parts for household expenses, savings, and adornments or other
luxuries, the translator replaces the last category with charity (ahiret yolına);
additionally, he is “somewhat more negative to merchants” than the original.46
Other popular works of this kind include Najm al-Din Razi’s (known as Dâya; d.
1256) thirteenth-century Mirshâd al-‘ibâd, which was translated several times
during the fifteenth century.47 Both were also translated by Şeyhoğlu Mustafa,
another Germiyan courtier who changed sides (even earlier than Ahmedi) and
brought with him all his knowledge of the Persian political tradition, which
had, it seems, started to appeal to Bayezid I.
Şeyhoğlu seems to have been born in 1340 in the Germiyan emirate; he must
have been a high official in the Germiyan court before moving to the Ottoman
emirate following the death of Germiyanoğlu Süleyman Şah in 1387. His works
include Turkish translations of Persian ethical works (Kabusnâme, Marzuban-
nâme) and original works (Hurşid-nâme [1389], Kenzü’l-kübera), all of which
concerned moral and political advice. It is this latter work (Kenzü’l-küberâ ve
mehekkü’l-ulemâ, “Treasure of the great and touchstone of the learned”), com-
pleted in 1401 for some unspecified “Paşa Ağa bin Hoca Paşa”, that may argu-
ably be viewed as the first political treatise originally composed in Ottoman
Turkish stricto sensu (Amasi’s work, with which we will deal later, was to
44 On Kay Ka’us’ work see Rosenthal 1958, 78–81; Fouchécour 1986, 179ff.; Black 2011, 131–132.
45 Kay Kaus – Birnbaum 1981, 4–7; Yılmaz 2005, 34–35. On the dating of the first transla-
tion see Kay Kaus – Birnbaum 1981, 9–30. The manuscript published by Birnbaum can be
dated to sometime in the 1370s or early 1380s, but as it is not an autograph the translation
must have been made a decade or two earlier.
46 Kay Kaus – Birnbaum 1981, 31.
47 Razi – Algar 1982; Yılmaz 2005, 35ff.; Peacock 2016; on Razi cf. Lambton 1956a, 138–139;
Lambton 1962, 110–115; Black 2011, 136–137.