“Political Philosophy” and the Moralist Tradition^67
religious teaching institutions in Istanbul and organized the ulema hierarchy);
on the other hand, just as had happened with the earlier introduction of the
“mirror for princes” (adab) tradition, among the first to introduce these ideas
were people educated near the old centers of Islamic scholarship and who
had migrated to the new power. After all, Tusi’s other—and in a sense more
important—works (concerning astronomy, mathematics, and so on) were also
translated and widely read in Ottoman medreses from almost the beginning of
the fifteenth century, and some of them remained in use throughout the next
three centuries.12
1 Works of Ethico-political Philosophy: from Amasi to Kınalızade
Ottoman literature did not need to wait until the conquest of Istanbul for
someone to introduce the Persian moral and political systems (and, of course,
elements of the Nasirean theory of soul can be found in earlier, more eclec-
tic texts as well).13 We already mentioned Ahmed bin Hüsameddin Amasi, a
contemporary of both Ahmedi and Şeyhoğlu Mustafa but someone whose
work started a much more “philosophical” tradition. Amasi, as revealed by
his name, was a native of Amasya and came from a local family of scholars,
Sufis, and officials, the Gümüşlüzade. Information on his life is very scarce;
it seems that he was taken as a hostage to Shirvan by Timur, together with
his uncle Pir İlyas Sücaeddin, the mufti of the city, and that they returned to
Amasya after Timur’s death in 1405.14 It is not clear whether he is the same per-
son as Şemseddin Ahmed Pasha from the same family, nişancı and later (1421)
vizier. His work, Kitab-ı mir’atü’l-mülûk (“Book [that is] a mirror for rulers”),15
was most probably submitted to Mehmed I in 1406, when the latter was
re-establishing his base in Amasya.
Amasi used (or, indeed, translated—although he makes no references in his
text) two famous sources of Persian political philosophy: the first was Tusi’s
Akhlâq-e Nâsirî, his outstanding systematization of Aristotelian and post-
Aristotelian ethics; the second was al-Ghazali’s Nasîha al-mulûk, the proto-
type of Sufi-oriented political thought, a reflection of which we saw earlier in
Şeyhoğlu Mustafa’s work. Amasi omitted or shortened the parts on theological,
12 See Aydüz 2011.
13 For instance, Kadı Fadlullah (A164) discusses the elements of the human soul, namely
ruh-i tabi’i, ruh-i hayvani, and ruh-i nefsani.
14 Amasi – Yılmaz 1998, 1–3; cf. Kastritsis 2007, 72–73.
15 Amasi – Yılmaz 1998. Little has been written on Amasi’s work: Fleischer 1983, 218 fn9 and
1990, 69fn.; Yılmaz 2005, 23–33; Darling 2013b, 238; Darling 2013c, 131.