398 chapter 9

its peace terms to the defeated.34 He then stresses that, whereas soldiers may
be disciplined in a short time, it requires a longer period for the officers to be
trained in the sciences of war. The Ottoman insists that the goal is retaliation,
and thus a long time of peace is needed so that order is restored, to which the
Christian answers that there are two ways of campaigning, one with constant
attack and besieging, the other having an army ready at the border to inspire
fear in the enemy and make him spend unnecessarily. We must also make a
final note about a concept that was much used later, as seen in chapter 8, and
which seems to have been first mentioned in this text: temporary success or is-
tidrac in order to explain the victories of infidels. The author gives the example
of the Crusaders when they managed to capture Jerusalem (U119, E602–603).

...

It is easy to understand why Müteferrika’s work marks the beginning of a
quite new trend in Ottoman thought. Undoubtedly, much of his orientation
came from his Christian background: for one thing, his detailed knowledge
of contemporaneous European military science must have originated in his
Transylvanian years, and perhaps it was due to the same intellectual origins
that he chose to copy Kâtib Çelebi’s translation of the Aristotelian concept of
politics and government. He may not have been the first to express such ideas,
but the fact that his book was printed and circulated widely among Ottoman
litterati made it one of the most influential works in the eighteenth century—
and especially in its later half. As well as the works examined earlier, which
were composed independently of one another, Müteferrika’s ideas were used
and copied, sometimes verbatim, by numerous authors, one of whom was
Süleyman Penah Efendi (see above, chapter 8). An anonymous and undated
manuscript entitled Nizâmiyye (“[Treatise] on order”), for instance, copies or
paraphrases large parts of Müteferrika’s Usûlü’l-hikem to produce a treatise
(addressed to an unnamed grand vizier) on two issues, the benefits of geogra-
phy and the organization of the army.35 The author interpolates a long section
presenting the idea of printing detailed maps of the Ottoman Empire (some-
thing which is again reminiscent of Penah Efendi), which, being in Turkish,
would sell at a profit not only in Arab and Persian lands but in Europe as well
(7b); on the other hand, he omits certain parts of Müteferrika’s description

34 A large part of the Dialogue is devoted to a detailed description of the diplomatic situa-
tion of the time and advice on the moves to be made to ensure a possible peace.
35 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, suppl. turc 201. One is tempted to suggest that this might
also be an early draft of Müteferrika’s own work.