Reading Ottoman: Language, Palaeography, and the Historian’s Craft

Halil İnalcık—a man who, even during his exceptionally long and productive lifetime, was hailed as the “master of historians” (şeyhü’l-müverrih)—famously remarked that to study Ottoman history is to study world history. The Ottoman Empire was a polity that, at the height of its power, extended across three continents and endured for centuries. Some contemporary historians, such as İlber Ortaylı, have even interpreted it as a “Third Rome,” most notably in his book Osmanlı Barışı (The Ottoman Peace). The Ottoman Empire entered the European historical stage at a time when some of the earliest ideas of Europe and modernity were beginning to take shape, and shortly before the emergence of the powerful centralized states that would come to dominate the European political landscape.

The richness of the Ottoman legacy remains strongly visible today across a vast geographical area stretching from Africa and the Middle East to the Balkans and Central Europe, particularly in cultural forms and the built environment. Stojan Novaković, a 19^th century scholar and statesman, and perhaps one of the most representative figures of Serbian cultural nationalism, captured this phenomenon when he observed that borders in the Balkans often seemed visually to divide an Oriental world from a modern European one. Here, “Oriental” should not be understood in the sense later defined by Edward Said, but rather as referring to the visible traces left by the presence of a particular civilization.

The Ottoman legacy also includes powerful bureaucratic models of state administration, accompanied by their characteristic problems of corruption and nepotism. Leaving aside the negative dimensions of these processes, however, a highly bureaucratized state apparatus also produced an enormous body of written material that is today available to historians. Among the Ottomans, mastery of writing was itself a mark of learning and was closely connected with the extraordinarily rich Persian literary and administrative tradition, to which they regarded themselves as heirs.

Ottoman history includes sultans who composed poetry, but also rulers such as Selim III, who might be described as a “sultan who loved writing,” in the sense that he demanded reports from virtually every branch of the state administration. Such reports could be written in relatively vernacular language, but in the hands of highly educated bureaucrats they often developed into an elaborate administrative style marked by an exceptionally rich Arabic and Persian vocabulary.

Ottoman Turkish itself represents a complex and historically changing mixture of linguistic styles. It combined Turkish, Arabic, and Persian elements while employing an Arabic-based script that was poorly suited to the vowel-rich phonological structure of Turkish. Unlike Arabic, Turkish—and consequently Ottoman Turkish—possesses eight vowels. The presence of elements derived from three different linguistic traditions therefore requires at least a basic knowledge of the grammar and, very often, an substanial vocabulary of all three languages.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Ottoman Turkish frequently possessed at least two terms for concepts that may be expressed by a single word in modern languages. Here, however, we are not referring to synonims in the strict sense, but rather to lexemes of different linguistic origin, ranging from the languages of the Balkans to the Arabic and Persian. Particularly striking are bureaucratic formulations in which two words of almost identical meaning are routinely placed alongside one another. In constructing sentences, Ottoman narative could combine Turkish syntax with Arabic morphological forms and Persian constructions, particularly the izafet[1]. For this reason, even beginning to contemplate the reading of Ottoman manuscripts requires a working knowledge, together with at least a basic understanding of Arabic and Persian grammar and vocabulary.

Yet the difficulties do not end there. Islamic calligraphy developed a wide range of scripts, including the canonical “six scripts” (al-aqlām al-sitta), as well as a number of later and regionally specific hands. Several of which are encountered in Ottoman manuscripts. In Ottoman bureaucratic practice, one of the characteristic scripts of the Ottoman central bureaucracy was divanî, a distinctively Ottoman hand employed by the central bureaucracy for official documents and also for recording drafts and copies of documents issued in the offices of the Imperial Council (Divan-ı Hümayun). Registers of important affairs (mühimme defterleri), complaint registers (şikâyet defterleri), and similar series were written in related administrative scripts. Alongside divanî, Ottoman scribes employed a number of other cursive and administrative hands, including rik‘a that eventually acquired the status of an independent script. Among the most demanding and difficult for modern readers is siyakat, used primarily in financial and accounting records.

Mastering the Arabic-based scripts employed by the Ottoman bureaucracy does not, however, mean that Ottoman documents can automatically be read. Every scribe had an individual handwriting, while many documents were written in highly irregular or non-standard language, with considerable variation in grammar, spelling, and style. For someone encountering Arabic script for the first time, it is extremely difficult to recognize and correctly read an Ottoman word unless one has encountered it before.

This creates a fundamental paradox. In order to acquire experience in reading Ottoman texts, one must read them; yet in order to read them successfully, one already needs experience. The apparent circularity can seem impossible to overcome and constitutes an enduring challenge for researchers. Ottomanists, and historians in particular, therefore work with a constant degree of uncertainty, since every encounter with a new document can, in many respects, amount to a new beginning.

Documents from the 17^th and 18^th  centuries, a period of profound institutional transformation in Ottoman history, pose an additional set of problems. Archives preserve records produced by numerous Ottoman institutions, but the picture presented by different categories of documents can be strikingly contradictory. If, for example, we analyse records of timar distribution or lists of Janissaries in isolation[2], we might conclude that these institutions continued to function largely unchanged from the so-called classical age. Yet when we turn to other archival series, such as complaint registers, a very different—and often considerably more realistic—picture of institutional practice emerges.

The study of Ottoman history is therefore filled with challenges and is anything but straightforward. It requires exceptional concentration, patience, and organization. Yet its very complexity is also what makes it intellectually demanding. The process of overcoming linguistic, palaeographic, archival, and interpretative difficulties often produces a particular sense of satisfaction when the final results begin to emerge—rewarding the considerable effort invested along the way.

[1] Izafet is a grammatical construction of Persian origin used to link nouns with their modifiers or to express possessive and attributive relationships.

[2] A timar was an assignment of revenues from specified sources, usualy agricultural taxes, granted by the Ottoman state to cavalrymen (sipahis) in return for military service. It did not constitute private ownership of the land.The Janissaries (yeniçeri) were members of an elite Ottoman infantry corps. Over time, they become an influental military, political, and socio-economic institution within the empire.

Further Reading:

Redhouse, James W. A Turkish and English Lexicon. Constantinople: A. H. Boyajian, 1890.

Faroqhi, Suraiya. Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Buğday, Korkut M. The Routledge Introduction to Literary Ottoman. Translated by Jerold C. Frakes. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Kütükoğlu, Mübahat. Osmanlı Belgelerinin Dili (Diplomatik). 4th ed. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2018.

Lewis, Geoffrey. Turkish Grammar. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.