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3 - Chronicles and the Court

History Writing

from Part I - Sources and Structures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2025

By
Ethan Menchinger
Edited by
Alexis Wick
Alexis Wick
Affiliation:
Koç University, Istanbul
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Summary

The Ottoman Empire left a rich and multilingual legacy in history writing, one that scholars are only starting to explore. Eclipsed for a time after the opening of the Ottoman state archives, chronicles attract intense interest not only as sources to be mined for facts, but for what these works can tell us about wider issues – from elite and popular worldviews to politics and patronage, literary history, intellectual horizons, and others. But if the study of the past through reading, writing, copying, and listening to works of history was hugely popular in the empire, Ottoman views of history are not entirely like our own, especially in their conceptual baggage. This chapter surveys some of these issues: What are the sources? How can we access them? What kinds of practical or methodological issues do they raise? Last, what paths do chronicles offer for future research in Ottoman studies?

Keywords

chroniclesmanuscriptshistoriographyOttoman Turkishliteraturegenre

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Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Ottoman History , pp. 42 - 54
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Suggested Further Reading

Çıpa, E. and Fetvacı, E. (eds.), 2013, Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future, Bloomington: Indiana University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hagen, G. and Menchinger, E. L. 2014, “Ottoman Historical Thought,” in Duara, P., Murthy, V., and Sartori, A. (eds.), A Companion to Global Historical Thought, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 92–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kafadar, C. 1995, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, Berkeley: University of California PressGoogle Scholar
Murphey, R. 1994, “Ottoman Historical Writing in the Seventeenth Century: A Survey of the General Development of the Genre after the Reign of Ahmed I (1603–1617),” Archivum Ottomanicum, 13, pp. 277–312Google Scholar
Nur-Yıldız, S. 2012, “Ottoman Historical Writing in Persian, 1400–1600,” in Melville, Charles (ed.), Persian Historiography, New York: I. B. Tauris, pp. 436–502Google Scholar
Tezcan, B. 2012, “Ottoman Historical Writing,” in Raba, J., Hesketh, I., and Woolf, D. (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 192–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, M. 2006, “Arabic Historiography during the Ottoman Period (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” in Allen, R. and Richards, D. S. (eds.), Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 171–88Google Scholar

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