Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2019
Bidlisi, Shah Qasim Tabrizi, and the other Persian émigré secretaries introduced in these pages shared certain features of educational upbringing, professional experience, and political outlook that suggest their participation in a distinct bureaucratic subculture within the Ottoman court in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Their experiences as valued contributors to Ottoman chancery, administrative, and literary products were central to the trajectory of Ottoman imperial ideology at a critical juncture in the history of the sultanate. More generally, perhaps as a consequence of their insistence on Persian for the articulation of such ideology, these secretaries had a role in the emergence of a confident Ottoman imperial idiom that accepted the literary sensibilities of the Persian chancery style, even if ultimately it settled upon Ottoman Turkish as the principal language of refined communication and belles lettres. Their experiences are also key to approaching again the question first raised at the beginning of this book: Wherefrom did the widespread and novel discourse on sacral and cosmic kingship of the sixteenth century originate and how did it come to be a common feature of kingship among the major Muslim empires of the sixteenth century?
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.