The Last of an Age

The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet

Sooyong Kim

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781409440994
• eBook ISBN: 9781134791514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Last of an Age, Sooyong Kim explores the relationship between

social change and the development of an Ottoman literary canon in the

course of the sixteenth century by examining the work and reception of

a popular poet, Zati (1471–1546). Kim argues that a newly emergent

group of bureaucratic literati, through the production of authoritative biographical

dictionaries, ultimately relegated Zati to a lesser literary age,

driven by a self-fashioning that privileged broad linguistic ability, above

all else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that.

This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literary

studies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarship

on the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual arts

and music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed by

ongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modern

Europe and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspective

on those issues.

1 Contexts

The Court and Beyond

The Court and Poetry

Süleyman’s reign has always been a main period of focus in Ottoman history. While still mentioned as a golden age, the period has in recent years been subject, appropriately, to re-examination. New lines of study have highlighted the problems of political and social change at the time and over the course of the sixteenth century. The perspectives we have now are less singular and sweeping in approach. But this renewed attention has not prevented scholars from making frequent generalizations about the uniformity of Ottoman culture, which remains synonymous with the imperial culture, i.e., that of the court and the ruling elite.

Studies of particular Ottoman cultural practices tend to focus on the extent to which they cohered with that broader culture, often informed by the binary of courtly and popular and variations thereof. This is especially evident regarding poetic practice. Turkish poetry in the high Islamicate tradition is routinely referred to as divan poetry, set apart from other kinds of poetry.¹ The term specifically applies to poetry composed according to the established forms and generic conventions of Perso-Arabic poetry, which was gathered in collections called divans. Since a certain level of learning was required to produce such poetry, it is virtually axiomatic among scholars that only a minority of people were in a position to do so. In assessing the place of divan or elevated poetry, Talât Halman wrote:

By and large, Divan poetry, as Turkish élite verse influenced by Arabic and Persian literature is often called, conformed, almost subserviently, to the Empire. An empire can seldom afford to be empirical and its literature runs the risk of becoming empyrean. So the conformist poets, century after century, perpetuated the same norms and values, offering variations on unchanging themes, looking to virtuosity as the highest literary value, wrote celebrations of the triad of the Ottoman system: Dynasty, Faith, and Conquest.²

Halman’s assessment is not unique, and telling in two important respects. First, it is presumed that social and literary hierarchies neatly coincided in the Ottoman Empire, with no margin of maneuverability. Second, the practice of elevated poetry is identified with the “Ottoman system,” as yet another manifestation of the centripetal force of the court and one in complete agreement with the ruling ideology.

A rigidly tiered approach, however, overlooks the complexity of the cultural realities. We cannot speak of a distinctive Ottoman imperial culture until near the end of Süleyman’s reign. The years before then, notably in the intellectual and literary spheres, were marked by both “innovation that is often extreme” and “experimentation that sometimes verges on the ad hoc,” as Cornell Fleischer has observed.³ Nor should we not take for granted that imperial or courtly culture was an entity accessible to a small and select group of people, separate from everyday culture. Courtly culture, for Suraiya Faroqhi, was from the sixteenth century onward a source of “inspiration” for the urban populace, “particularly with regard to non-religious matters in the widest sense.”⁴ Regarding poetry in a similar time frame, Cemâl Kurnaz has argued for a multilayered but shared ethos of practice. As far as he is concerned, Ottoman Muslim society exhibited “a homogeneous social structure fed largely by Islamic culture,” by institutions such as mosques, medreses, and Sufi dervish lodges.⁵

To be sure, historiographical categories such as courtly and popular are not cut-and-dried. And the term divan poetry is helpful for differentiating one mode of literary activity, as long as it is used within limit and not in a deterministic fashion. Nevertheless, scholars have been careful to relate the practice of elevated poetry to the Ottoman court’s energetic and conscious cultivation of all art forms in the high Islamicate tradition before and during Süleyman’s reign. This, too, applies to Kurnaz, despite his argument. In the same breath, he has pointed to the major role of the court in the promotion of elevated poetry, which, in his words, “can’t be underrated.”⁶ Kurnaz does not suggest, as Halman did, that court norms and values were reproduced in the poetry. Rather, he considers court patronage crucial in its development and thus locates its production ultimately at the social top.

Walter Andrews has made a more explicit case for the appeal of elevated poetry across the social spectrum. Andrews, like Kurnaz, has argued that divisions in Ottoman Muslim society “do not define quite as strictly the audiences of poetry nor do they differentiate separate cultures.”⁷ Andrews, on the other hand, has stressed the horizontal instead of the vertical ties. As he has shown with the lyric gazel, its mystical content provided a common ground of interest for various social groups, since that content echoed the poetry of the widespread dervish lodges.⁸ Andrews does not go so far as to claim that poetry in the high Islamicate tradition had a mass audience and readily acknowledges that some learning was needed to appreciate such poetry. Yet he also makes clear that to presume that social and literary hierarchies neatly coincided or to view such poetry as the pursuit of an exclusive group obscures the fact that the audience for it and the pool of practitioners were much larger. He and Mehmet Kalpaklı, most recently, have noted that during the sixteenth century, taverns and coffeehouses offered a popular public venue for elevated poetry, one that “cut across class lines.”⁹

To the issue of the court and artistic patronage, Gülru Necipoğlu has pointed out that in the field of visual arts the ruling elite had by the middle of the century formulated a new aesthetic synthesis. Necipoğlu states:

This mid-sixteenth century transformation was part of a process of state formation and self-imaging by the ruling elite of an Empire at the crossroads of the East and West that had come to perceive its identity as different from its neighbors. With the establishment of a distinctively Ottoman visual canon the earlier receptiveness to foreign artistic models, both Persian and European diminished.¹⁰

The process of Ottomanization in the visual arts—architecture, painting, and objets d’art—occurred at a time when the branches of state administration were being systematized with the establishment of territorial limits. This process of cultural self-definition served to convey, if not always in full display, “the cultural hegemony of the ruling elite.”¹¹ It glorified not only the sultan and his court but also the officials who ruled in his name. Intimately connected was historical and poetic composition that had the same purpose, which flourished under the sponsorship of the court. But whether the literary arts by mid-century represented some kind of unity of taste through a canon defined by a bureaucratic elite is not so obvious. That is undoubtedly the case for the visual arts, the patronage of which was restricted to the highest echelons of society due to their high cost.

The situation of music, though, presents a different trajectory. Walter Feldman has observed that while the patronage of “art music” was concentrated at the uppermost social stratum, this “court-centered and ‘international’ musical high culture” did not result in a mid-century transformation.¹² The formulation of a distinctive Ottoman musical canon would not come about until the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Ottomanization of the musical arts therefore cannot be characterized as being part of precisely the same process of cultural self-definition that involved the visual arts. And it begs the question: Where does music, as well as literature, fit into the broader process of cultural self-definition? Both fields traditionally show a low degree of institutionalization, making possible a high degree of free play among the parties seeking to govern them.

It is a commonplace that Ottoman Turkish (as opposed to simpler, spoken Turkish) did not attain the status of a recognized literary language until the sixteenth century, hampered earlier by the dominant cultural prestige of Persian. The growth of literature, and especially of poetry, in Ottoman Turkish has chiefly been attributed to the patronage activities of a succession of sultans, who provided deserving poets with posts, stipends, or gifts. That keen support, moreover, has been viewed as a complement to the administrative activities of the state, which led to the burgeoning of the bureaucratic ranks. Thus, by mid-century, the ability to produce elevated poetry in Ottoman Turkish had become not only a prerequisite for participation in the cultural life of the court but also a hallmark of membership in the ruling elite. In short, the centrality of the court in the patronage and propagation of that kind of poetry and the concomitant rise of what we may describe as a class of bureaucrat-poets have been well emphasized for the first half of the sixteenth century.

Still, the almost totalizing vision accorded to the court tells us little about the actual and variegated literary environment of this period. It fails to take into account poets mentioned in the contemporary tezkires who did not fall exactly into that class. The sweet seller Kandi (d. 1556) and the perfumer Rahiki (d. 1546), the medrese student Merdümi (d. 1563) and the dervish Meşrebi (d. 1555), to name a few, all had courtly connections, yet they were not bureaucrats, nor could they be regarded as social elites.¹³ And if the court did exert some kind of common influence, it certainly did not define their work or their lives. Their backgrounds, their careers and types of experience, and their relations and dealings with the court are far too diverse. Among them we can include the specialized professional poet, who did not necessarily seek out the court’s patronage. This is not to say that the court was insignificant as a locus of patronage. Literary talent brought great material rewards from the court, and poets and would-be poets flocked there from all parts of the empire and beyond. Yet only in the very widest sense can we say that the court constituted the matrix for the practice of elevated poetry in the first half of the sixteenth century—one that allows for different social positions and literary stances.

An important reason why scholars have viewed the growth of poetry in the high Islamicate tradition through the prism of the court is that the Ottomans themselves saw the Timurids to the east, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (1469–1506) and his court at Herat in particular, as models of cultural patronage. The florescence of Persian art and literature, and more notably literature in Chagatai (an eastern Turkic language), at the Timurid courts under “Turkish political hegemony” had a strong resonance on the Ottoman court.¹⁴ Like the Timurids, the Ottomans aimed to translate cultural prowess into political prestige as a component of their rule, and the court in Istanbul and its artistic and literary accoutrements were at the core of that project.¹⁵ So the development of literature in Ottoman Turkish has been related to the larger political agenda.

There is no doubt that the Ottomans were influenced by the Timurid idea of cultural power as a form of political legitimacy. The aesthetic authority of the sultan, both as patron and connoisseur of art and literature, epitomized by Süleyman, did buttress the ruling claims of the Ottomans. The Timurid mod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Usage
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Contexts: The Court and Beyond
• 2 A Poet in Istanbul
• 3 A Poet and His Work
• 4 An Emerging Tradition
• 5 The Making of a Legacy
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index