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OTTOMAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS BY L A M J ' IAND OTHERS IN THE
COLLECTION OF TURKISH MANUSCRIPTS
AT THE LEIDEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Jan SCHMIDT*
During the past few years I have been busy cataloguing Turkish
manuscripts. In thecourse of this work I have come across texts in
many genres. I have always been fascinated byautobiographies and
what struck me during my work was how rich Ottoman literature is
inthis genre. I would like to share some of my experiences in this
field with the reader. I willbegin by quoting (part of) a sentence
from an unpublished work by Lmi'i (d. 938/1532), theintroduction to
his translation of Fatth-i Nishbri's Hsn dil:
"At times... I weighed my melancholy circumstances and the
things that were on mymind and I investigated the leaves of the
records of my pious deeds... and I regretted anddeplored the days
of my past and the years that have gone by, and I wept..." ' Lmi"
continues- the passage in intricate rhymed prose is too long to
quote here at length - that he was steepedin frivolities but
repented and decided to forsake all fame and wordly endeavours.2 In
anintroduction to another translation, this time Jmi's Nafaht
al-uns, he wrote more soberly:
"Is so happened that one day a group of pure brethren and
trusted friends - may Godbless their exertions and fulfill their
desires - came to me and mentioned - one subject leads toanother -
the book Nafaht al-uns and demonstrated to me that its translation
would meanperfect progress and an increase in carefulness..."3
Both passages are taken from the preface sections of the
translations and we know thatthese were specifically used by
Ottoman writers to display their literary skill and are
nearlyalways filled, apart from some essential facts, with more or
less elaborate literary clichs.Particularly the second case, which
makes use of the topos 'friends urged me to write thisbook; I
excused myself for being too ignorant/inexpert; but they insisted
and I gave in; mayGod help me with the difficult task etc' was
perhaps the most popular statement an Ottomanwriter could make in a
preface. I have encountered decades of them during my work.
Couldwe, then, still call these fragments autobiographical
passages, despite their mention of T, 'me'
* Leiden University Library' Leiden University Library Cod.Or.
14.510, f. 2b*.2 See Gunay Kut Alpay, 'Lmi'i Celebi and his Works',
in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 35/2 (1976), p. 79.3 Printed
edition (Istanbul 1289), p. 7.
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196 JAN SCHMIDT
and 'my' and, especially in the flrst case, their show of
personal emotion (perhaps never reallyfelt)? What to say, for
instance about this passage, not from an introductory section this
time,from Mustafa 'Ali of Gallipoli's Nushatu s-seltn (of 1581)? -1
quote Tietze's translation -
"It seems that the clumsy midwife of Time, while I was still a
nondescript foetus in thedark depths of the mother, was already
waiting with the tub of sorrows for my arrival, havingcome [there]
with a thousand troubles. When, seeing that my food in that thorny
bed was theblood of torture and my ever-ready nourishment day and
night were the dregs of the cup ofheadaches, I descended from the
hapless womb of my mother and touched the carpet of thesurface of
the earth, she prepared me a bed of burning fire and clothed me in
fetters of painand vexation...""*
Again deep-felt emotions, despair this time, and the indignity
of what had been done tohim after his birth during his chequered
career, are expressed in grandiloquent rhymed prose.
Such emotions remind one of another autobiographical focus point
in Ottomanliterature: that of the mahlas distichs in gaz.eh,
thousands of which have been composedthrough the centuries. I give
one example from the poet Vlih (d. 1008/1599-1600), a uniquecopy of
whose Dvan is found in the collection of the Berlin
Staatsbibliothek. Suffering fromthe infidelity of his beloved, who
is described as a rapacious Tatar (yagmaci Tatar), because hestole
the poet's heart, the gazel ends:
"Your sorcerer's eyes made me weak and helplessI do not know
what to do, you are a wizard I now understandYou turned away from
Vlihi, o love, and left himYou are sick of me, this distressed one,
I have come to understand" ^
Again 'I' and 'me', but we seem to even be further removed from
a concrete historicalsituation than in the previous passages. Less
realistic still are. fahrye ('self-glorification')sections in
kasdes. In Snblzde Vehbi's brilliant kasde on words (with a redf
rhymeending in suan, 'words'), written for the grand vizier Halil
Paa in the 1760s, he presents thereader with a 126 distich-long
expos of the decline of Ottoman poetry. There was howeverone
exception: Vehbi himself (I quote from Kemal Silay's
translation):
Let those new to poetry write poems in imitation of me, for
every word of mine is abook unto itself full of great words[...]In
order to prove myself I went to Shirz and engaged in a batde of
poetry with theboastful 'Urfi[...]There Hfi:z and Sa'di became my
competent witnesses, and it was judged in myfavour, that I
satisfied the claim to poetic skill
Counsel for Sultans II (Vienna 1982), p, 49,MS Diez A, 80, 30,
The odginal text reads:{remel) sihrle cd gz.n ben bidili kildi
z.ebn
care bilmem neyleyeni sahhrmisin sen aladumVlihl'den yz cevirb
eyledU cnftrkbenden ol bicreden blzmii^sin sen aladum.
An edition of the Divn by Edith Ambros and myself is under
preparation,
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OTTOMAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS BY LMIT... 197
What wonder is it that I am famed as the divine Vehbi; the gifts
of poetry to me arethe gift of divinely granted talent^
It goes without saying that Vehbi never went to Shirz nor were
the poets mentionedalive in the 18th century. This is not
autobiography, despite the repeated T.
It has indeed been maintained by some scholars that
'Autobiography... expresses aconcern particular to Western man...
(I quote Georges Gusdorf)'. So were 'Orientals', to usethe somewhat
antiquated term, able to become explicit in a serious, as opposed
to a purelyliterary-ornamental, way about their lives at all? I
think they did'' and I would like to illustratethis with a number
of texts I found in manuscripts of the Oriental Collection of the
LeidenUniversity Library, hitherto incompletely and misleadingly,
even disparagingly, cataloguedand consequently, I am afraid, unread
and unstudied.
Autobiographical passages are sometimes found in places and in
contexts where youwould not always expect them. On the last flyleaf
of a copy of 'Azmi's Enis I- 'rifin, we read:"I obtained the post
of k^zi of the town of Izmir... on Sunday, 25 Zi Ika 'de 1012 after
the hijraof the Prophet [25 April 1604]. My letter with the
Sultan's order arrived in the afternoon ofthe Festival of Sacrifice
[10 Zil-hicce, 10 May] and I took to sea on [the following] Monday.
Iarrived in Gallipoli... on 2 Muharrem [31 May]..."^ This
matter-of-fact note is written inArabic by an anonymous owner of
the manuscript, possibly the kazi'asker Eblfzl MahmudKara elebizde
(d. 1063/1653),^ whose inscription is found elsewhere in the
samemanuscript (f. 2a). He continues by describing how he visited
the tombs of MehmedYazicizde and Shaykh 'Al'uddin and finally
arrived, after stopping at the Dardanellesfortresses and Bozcaada,
in Izmir on the ninth (7 June). Although
autobiographicalannotations by owners of manuscripts are not rare,
this one is exceptional for its length and itslanguage.
A more obvious source for autobiographical material is histories
- a famous case isMust;af 'Ali's Knh l-ahbar which contains
fragments similar to the one quoted before fromhis Nushat - but
also in less well-known works. The Library owns a what appears to
be uniquemanuscript of a history of Baghdad during the reign of
Sultan Murad IV by an author whouses the pen-name of eyhogli - the
work contains a number of his poems, mainly kxisides,inserted into
the prose text. In his preface the poet-historian tells us that one
day, while he wasreading a history book, it occurred to him that he
could write one himself, and so he did,namely on the
'indescribable' events that occurred in Baghdad during its siege
and occupationby the Safavids (in 1033/1624). The work, written in
quite unadorned prose, contains sometouching eyewitness accounts. I
will give one example. Describing how the besieged townsuffered
from lack of food, he continues: "One day I came across some
Khazars who grabbed acat by its throat, lit a heap of dry dirt and
threw it into the flre. They wanted to cook the cat.However hard I
tried, I was unable to free the cat from their hands".i"
Nedim and the Poetics of the Ottoman Court. Medieval Inheritance
and the Need for Change (Bloomington, Indiana1994), pp 134-5.
"^ See for a survey of the genre, not acknowldged as such, in
Arabic literature, Georg Misch, Geschichte derAutobiographie III/2
(Frankfurt am Main 1962), p. 905 ff.
^ Leiden University Library Cod.Or. 895.^ cf. N. Gync,
'Kara-Celebi-zde', in Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition.10
Cod.Or. 1278, pp. 11-2.
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198 JAN SCHMIDT
Another unique, probably an autograph, copy (Cod.Or, 801) of
what has been describedas a history of the Shirvn Campaign of the
early 1580s, is in fact a treatise on the religiousjustification
for the war against the Muslim Safavids. The work, entitled Nesrii
l-nzirin vemakblii l-h=irin, was written by a Seyyid Sa'duddin
e-irvni of Byuk Dakhna(Azarbeijan) in 993/1585. The work contains
some lively personal passages which takentogether make up a more or
less full autobiography. Thus at various places in the work
theauthor writes that he, the son of a shaykh and molla, fled from
Shirvn when it was occupiedby the kizHba - this must have been in
the 1550s - and came to Istanbul to study. His familyhad suffered a
lot in the past: at the appearance of the cursed Haydar who invaded
Shirvnthree times in the 1480s, twenty-five members of his family
had perished, among them hispaternal great-grandfather, a molla
called Karadagi Mehmed. His grandfather Ahmedddin, ascholar and
author of a Persian tafsir, had been able to escape the carnage.
During his, theauthor's, student years he lived in a cell of a
certain Sleyman Bababai near the Sleymaniye,passing the night "on a
stone chest covered by a rush mat". Fortunately, he made
theacquaintance of Hca ' Abdlm'min, teacher of Ferhd Paa, and the
hca presented him tohis patron and the latter's wife Hmh Sultn.
They agreed to pay for his studies. In982/1574, he became candidate
{nmlz.im) but waited for eight years before he received
anappointment as teacher in a medrese and worked hard on a book, if
el-kulb, a work on sfidoctrine, for which he received 50 gold
pieces from the sultan. Finally upon the death of thekzVasker
Beh'ddinzde Efendi, who successfully opposed his career (which was
on theother hand fostered by the kzi' of Istanbul, Zekeriya
Efendi), he was made mderris with asalary of 40 ake. He also writes
that he stayed for a while in the hnkh of Erefzde at Iznik,became a
shaykh (baba) himself and describes in the book some of the
miraculous dreams hehad. These passages give us a good idea, as
indeed many serial biographies of contemporary'ulem, not only of
the problems of patronage and professional insecurity experienced
bymany of his colleagues, but also of his personality: his strong
emotions may be gauged in asentence where he mentions his enemy
Beh'ddinzede Efendi, and curses in the same sentenceall kz'askers
and kizHba^. The book was offered to the Grand Vizier zdemirogli
'OsmnPaa who however died before he could receive the final
version. (This may account for theobscurity of the book).
More of a real autobiography as we understand the term - and in
contrast to mereautobiographical passages - can be found in an
apparently unique but incomplete copy.Cod.Or. 1551, of an
autobiography-cum-travelogue by a certain el-Hcci Mustafa
VasfiEfendi of Kbd, a village in central Anatolia, who, as appears
from the text, participated in anumber of military campaigns in
eastern Anatolia and Rumelia during the reign of SultanMahmud [II,
ruled 1223/1808 - 1255/1839]; these are the main subject of the
book.n Nothingis known about the author apart from what he writes
here. He calls it a history, or rather [aseries of] 'histories'
(tevrih) which treat of 'war' and 'death'. No further dates are
given inthe history itself but, as is explained on the title page
(la), it covers the period between 1216(1801-2) and 1248 (1832-3).
Our copy however breaks off sometime in the eariy 1820s. It isdated
22 Zll-ka'de 1249 (2 April 1834, ibidem) and may well be an
autograph. The text iswritten in lapidary, colloquial Turkish in an
idiosyncratic (phonetic) and inconsistent spelling.The text is
adorned with interiinear coloured drawings of a pleasantly
primitive type.
11 I am preparing an edition with translation into English,
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OTTOMAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS BY LMI'... 199
At the beginning of the work proper (4b), the author states,
rather abruptly, "in the year1216 [1801-2], when I was eight years
old, I left home for strange lands." Home was thevillage of Kabud
near Tokat and he travelled to Erzurum apparently in the company of
hisfather (cf. 43b ff.) who was bayrakddr (standard bearer) in the
service of Tokath Deli Ahmed,adelibai (leader of irregular cavalry)
of Dramali Mahmud Paa (cf. 34a, 37b, 41a). Like hisfather, he
served as an irregular horseman (deli) with a monthly salary of 35
kuru (15b, 19b)which was supplemented by occasional bonuses, 'bahi'
and he was indeed a member of thesame unit ("...I had the intention
of going for the infidels. My father brought out his flag and
Ifound myself next to my father under the flag", 43b).
The first part of the history (4b-25a) - the work does not
contain any formal divisions -then, describes a number of campaigns
on the north-eastern borders of the Ottoman Empireundertaken from
Erzurum under the commanders (sefasker) Baba Paa and Hfi:z 'Ali
Paa.Baba Paa is probably identical with Pehlivn ibrhim Paa, better
known as commander ofthe Dobruja front during the Ottoman-Russian
wars of this period. 12 Vasfl Efendi gives alively description of a
number of dangerous skirmishes against, particularly local
Kurdishchiefs and Russian border troops. Sometime in 1820 Vasfl
Efendi moved with his unit toIstanbul (25a-28b).
The second part of the history describes the Rumelia campaign in
which the authorparticipated (from f. 28b). The army moved to Yanya
(Ioannina), the residence of Tepedelenli'Ali Paa, the more or less
independent ruler of a large part of Greece, who after a
lengthysiege of his citadel was lured to the tent of the commander
Hurid [Ahmed] Paa (d. 5 Reb' l-evvel 1238/ 20 November 1822)i3,
wherepon his head was cut off and sent to the Sultan (33b-34a). 14
Meanwhile a serious rebellion had broken out in the Ploponnse -
1821 was the firstyear of the War of Greek Independence - and Hurid
Paa was appointed 'Mora ser'askeri' (inevvl 1237/ June-July 1822).
The author joined the troops under Dramali Mahmud Paa andmoved from
Yanya by way of Yeiehir (Larisa), zdin (Lamia) and Badracik
(Ypati), in thesurroundings of which a number of villages were
subjugated and plundered, women and girlsabducted, heads cut off.
The author did not come through these battles unscathed: he
sufferedfrom frostbite after snow had fallen for fifteen days on
end. Two thousand soldiers died butthe author was saved because he
had the protection of a tent. "When we came to zdin, I went toa
bathhouse and slowly rubbed my feet with pigfat; they recovered,
thank God." (39b). Oncehe was hit by a bullet in his leg and had
his head nearly cut off by a "big, black-faced infidel"(44a). From
zdin - the army now consisted of 36,000 foot soldiers and 19,000
horsemen(51b) - the men moved to Levatiye (Livadia) and by way of a
pass through the mountains (the'Mora derbendi', at present
Dervenakia), to Krds (Corinth), fighting 'infidel' rebels all
theway down. Vasfl Efendi and his father, who had been seriously
wounded in the fightingthrough the pass, decided not to follow the
army to the Ploponnse but instead sailed toAgriboz (Fuboia) where
they joined the troops of irkaci (arhaci) 'Ali Paa (62a),
laterreplaced by 'mer Paa (84b). Father and son remained on the
island for four years (cf. 63b),Vasfl Ffendi spending his time
fighting infidels, or, on the other hand, suffering from long
12 See ismail Hmi Danifmend, izahh Osmanli Tarihi Kronolojisi IV
(Istanbul 1972), p. 84, passim.13 See Mehmed Sreyya (Nuri Akbayar
& Seyit Ali Kahraman, eds.) Sicill-i Osman. Osmanli nlleri II
(Istanbul
1996), p. 679.14 Cf. H. Bowen, "Ali Pas/ia, Tepedelenli', in
Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.).
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200 JAN SCHMIDT
Sieges, his father most of the time staying behind in the care
of a female slave (criye) in ahouse (konak) at Agnboz (Chalkis)
which had belonged to an infidel but had been confiscatedby the
Pasha's delibai Yrk Ms, whose standard-bearer was an acquaintance
of his father(62b-63a). The following flfty-odd folios are flUed
with the 'stories' (cf. 64a) of these yearsand the book breaks off
abruptly in the description of a battle between a Janissary
regiment,recently sent from Rumelia for reinforcement and
approvisioning, and Greek rebels in themountains near Kumiye
(Kymi).
Whereas the first part of the work is clearly written in the
tradition of the chronicle or,for the descriptions of journeys, of
the pilgrimage manual with their dry enumeration of factssuch as
distances in hours, the second part is increasingly
autobiographical: the author and hisexploits (mostly sieges, sword
fights, plundering of villages and so on, described now in
greatdetail) are central and personal references, including the
insertion of dialogues in which theauthor took part, abound.
Perhaps the most dramatic passage of the book is that in which
theauthor discovers that his father had been seriously wounded in
the battle at the Mora Pass. Iwill translate it, as simply as
possible, to give an idea of Vasfl Efendi's style at its best.
Theauthor writes that he was encamped in the plain of Corinth, and
continues (58b-59b): "Myfather had been wounded in the Mora pass...
I had not heard about this [but] after three days inthe plain of
Krds, I found my father, I looked at him. He had been injured in
seven places.Before this, when we had launched an attack against
the Mora Pass, my father had, before allother flags, planted his
flag at the entry to the pass and while he was reading the
Muhammedancall to prayer, the infidels [had fired] a bullet into
his breast, had hit [with] many sword on hishead and had injured
[him] in seven places but at the same time my father again had cut
[down]one infidel and had fallen into the infidels' trenches, where
he had lost consciousness andremained with the infidels. The
infidels had dealt many blows with [their] swords and firedmany
shots but had not cut off a single head [but] had stayed [on]. At
that moment, other flagshad arrived and soldiers had arrived and
had taken the pass. At that time, delibap Deli Ahmedhad anived and
had found my father. He had looked [and seen] that my father had
been injuredin five places and had been robbed of his things,
weapons and everything he had. Thementioned delibai had hoisted my
father onto a horse and had come to the plain of Krds.Three days
later, I went and found my father under a mulberry tree. My father
was naked [sic,but cf. below], wounded, giddy and out of his mind.
When I saw him in this state at the edge ofa stream under a
mulberry tree, I went out of my mind and lost control. I left my
horse behindand came to my father's side. For three days, my father
had been injured and bleeding and allhis clothes were stuck to his
body with blood. In this state I saw my father; in his head no
headhad remained, nor a body in his body. In this state I saw my
father and I wailed and burst intotears. After a while, my father
came to his senses and said: "Mustafa, my son, where are we?What
kind of place is this? Have we come through the Mora Pass? Son, why
do you cry? Praiseto God, we have come through the Mora Pass, we
have come here and found safety. Why doyou cry? I am well", and
saying this he conforted me a little. He lost his senses again,
lostconsciousness and lay down. I somehow tried to get off his
clothes but could not and cut awayall clothes that were on him and
had other clothes brought." When Mahmud Paa was told whathad
happened, he gave the wounded hero a horse, a great-coat (kabud)
and 500 gold coins(Mahmudye altuni). Later, when he deteriorated,
the pasha saw to it that the private physicianof Morali 'All Paa,
an Austrian, present in the camp, was fetched. Having looked at
the
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OTTOMAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS BY LAMI'I... 201
wounds (60a), the physician deemed them not very serious, apart
from a head injury. If, aftera tap on his head, blood would pour
from his ears the next day, he would live and recover. Thetest was
done, but no blood appeared.
The examples I quoted so far were found in works outside the
mainstream of Ottomanliterature: by authors soon forgotten because
their patron died (as in the case of SeyyidSa'duddin), partly
perhaps because their works were unpopular or never found
acceptancebecause of their rustic style (as in the case of eyhogli
and Vas Efendi). That we possesscopies of their work is largely due
to the activity of the Leiden collectors in Istanbul, LevinusWamer
(in the first half of the 17th century) and Testa (in the 1830s and
before), who, as inthe case of eyhogli and Vasfi Efendi, intervened
just in time before these works hadirretrievably disappeared. This
is not to say that many such examples do not exist in better-known
works, to the contrary. I have only to mention the names of Evliy
elebi or 'OsmanAga of Temevar (Timioara) whose works, of a
dominating autobiographical content, havebeen translated wholly (as
in the case of 'Osman Aga'^) or partly (Evliy elebi) into
variousEuropean languages, belong to the best known of Ottoman
litarature.
To sum up. Although Ottoman literature may not be so rich in
autobiographical texts asour Westem literature since the 18th
century (and Romanticism), it certainly did not cut apoor figure.
Comparison however is a tricky business, in which I will not
indulge in greatdetail. One should perhaps compare pre-modern, that
is pre-1840 or 1850s, Ottomanliterature with Westem medieval
litature rather than with post-Romantic Westem literature.Vasfl
Efendi, although he lived in the 19th century, after all wrote as
if he were still in theMiddle Ages and led the life of a gz. in, so
to speak, the Wittekian sense of the word. Whatseems to be the most
striking difference between the pre-modern Ottoman autobiography
andits, certainly modem. Western counterpart is that authors of the
former did not intend theirwritings to be autobiographical in the
way we understand that term now. Vas Efendi, as youmay remember,
called his book a history, not an autobiography, written to make
readersreflect on the facts of life and prepare themselves for the
hereafter. (This is, by the way,another well-wom topos of
prefaces.) But this lack of what we may style
self-consciousnessdoes not make these texts less interesting. What
I have tried to demonstrate in the first place isthe rich,
variegated, aspect of these texts, examples of which, then, can be
found in poetry andprose, in highly literate Kunstprosa as well as
in down-to-earth colloquial language, in textsranging from
matter-of-fact 'CVs', describing professional careers, to highly
emotionaloutbursts of angry people, texts written by both
spiritually-minded scholars and low-rankingsoldiers, facts as well
as time-honoured fiction. Further cataloguing work - forgive me
mysolipsism - may well bring more such texts to light and increase
our understanding of thisfascinating aspect of Ottoman literature
as well as the public and private lives of Ottoman menand
women.
Recently translated into French by Frdric Hitzel, Osman Agha de
Temechvar, Prisonnier des inftdles; un soldatOttoman dans l'Empire
des Habsbourg (Arles 1998),
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