Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: İbrahim Muteferrika and his Intellectual Landscape

© 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-25505-0

Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in Languages

of the Middle East

Papers from the Third Symposium on the History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages

and Countries of the Middle East, University of Leipzig, September 2008

Edited by

Geofffrey Roper

LEIDEN •• BOSTON2014


CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .......................................................................................... viiPreface ................................................................................................................ xi

Mediæval Arabic Block Printing: State of the Field ............................. 1Karl Schaefer

Früher Druck mit arabischen Typen in Leipzig, 17.–18. Jahrhundert .................................................................................................. 17Boris Liebrenz

Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: İbrahim Müteferrika and His Intellectual Landscape ............................................................. 53Vefa Erginbaş

Waiting for Godot: The Formation of Ottoman Print Culture ......... 101Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih)

Printing and the Abuse of Texts in al-Ǧabartī’s History of Egypt ... 121Sarah Mirza

Judæo-Arabic Printing in North Africa, 1850–1950 ............................... 129Yosef Tobi

Marginal Miniatures: The Tehran Edition of al-Damīrī’s Ḥayāt al-ḥayawān (1285/1868) ............................................................................ 151Ulrich Marzolph

The Establishment of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate Press ........ 181Ahmet Taşğın and Robert Langer

L’Imprimerie Ebüzziya et l’art d’imprimer dans l’Empire ottoman à la fĳin du XIXe siècle ............................................................................... 193Özgür Türesay

vi contents


A Champion of Printing Quality in the Ottoman Turkish Press of the Second Constitutional Period: Şehbal Journal ...................... 231Bora Ataman and Cem Pekman

Arabic and Bilingual Newspapers and Magazines in Latin America and the Caribbean ..................................................................................... 245Philipp Bruckmayr

A Short History of Kurdish Publishing and Prospects for its Future ............................................................................................................ 271Blair Kuntz

The Bulaq Press Museum at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina ................ 287Ahmed Mansour

Index ................................................................................................................... 317


ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE OTTOMAN CONTEXT: İBRAHİM MÜTEFERRİKA AND HIS INTELLECTUAL LANDSCAPE1

Vefa Erginbaş

İbrahim Müteferrika is known as the person who introduced the print-ing press to the Ottoman Empire in the early eighteenth century, though “printer” was only one of the many roles one can attribute to him. He was a polymath in the truest sense of the word: an intellectual, an edi-tor, a physicist, a geographer, a map-maker, a soldier, and a historian. İbrahim Müteferrika as the polymath and complete intellectual has not been investigated in detail: his intellectual contributions to and the impact of his intellectual endeavour on Ottoman scholarship have not been scrutinised. In this study, I attempt to put İbrahim Müteferrika’s intellectual persona in its proper context. Being encouraged by the new trends in Enlightenment studies, I present him as a fĳigure of the early Ottoman Enlightenment.

New Trends in Enlightenment Studies

In recent years, signifĳicant advances have been made in the study of the Enlightenment.2 In the 1960s, Peter Gay, in his influential studies which aimed to restore the “stature” of the Enlightenment, defĳined the philoso-phes as a “family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking.”3 These philosophes pitted two aspects of their heritage, paganism and Christian-ity, against each other in order to gain their autonomy and to create, in a

1 I am very grateful to hocam, Jane Hathaway; without her extensive suggestions this article would not have reached its full potential. I should like also to extend my spe-cial gratitude to Y. Hakan Erdem of Sabancı University who introduced the wonderful world of İbrahim Müteferrika to me, as well as Dale Van Kley of the Ohio State Univer-sity who opened up my horizons with his courses on the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

2 For a synopsis of the Enlightenment’s journey from its origins to the present see Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, “Enlightenment Studies,” Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). In this article I used the electronic version of this encyclopedia, so no page numbers are specifĳied.

3 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), x.

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way, a “modern paganism emancipated from classical thought as well as Christian dogma.”4 He argued that there were “many philosophes in the 18th century but only one Enlightenment.” “The men of Enlightenment,” he posited

united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom above all, freedom in its many forms—free-dom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realise one’s talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of a moral man to make his own way in the world.

Gay also made a bold argument about the Enlightenment’s stand against religion. He argued that “While the variations among the philosophes are far from negligible, they only orchestrate a single passion that bound the little flock together, the passion to cure the spiritual malady that is reli-gion, the germ of ignorance, barbarity, hypocrisy, fĳilth, and the basest self-hatred.”5 Gay’s studies provided a convenient framework to understand the European intellectual activity of the eighteenth century and, in a sense, canonise the defĳinition of the Enlightenment. His perception proved very useful for a spectrum of social scientists who defended a coherent view of history, which culminated in the modernisation paradigm that whole-heartedly defended the idea that societies evolved from primitive to com-plex in order to achieve the best form of living and government.

Although Gay claimed that his view of the Enlightenment was com-prehensive and he made a compelling case, discontent began to emerge quickly. Within only a decade of the publication of his studies, historians began to argue that picturing the Enlightenment as a monolithic proj-ect would not do justice to reality. Although Gay also observed the fact that the philosophes were divided among themselves on philosophical and political questions, and some among them bore the marks of their religious schooling,6 new Enlightenment studies argued that the dis-parity was greater than Gay’s assumptions; they argued that there were many “Enlightenments” not just one, and each case should be taken into consideration in order to understand the intellectual, social, and politi-cal phenomenon called the Enlightenment. The study of Enlightenments has reached a point where the French version of the Enlightenment is

4 Ibid., xi. 5 Ibid., 373. 6 Ibid., 4.

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no longer deemed the Enlightenment:7 from Naples to Scotland and from Britain to Germany, the legitimacy of diffferent versions of the Enlighten-ment has been accepted by a wide range of scholars.8 In one of these state-of-the-art studies in which the possibility of Enlightenments was pushed to its limits, David Sorkin makes a convincing case even for a reli-gious Enlightenment. Faith, something hostile to the very core of Enlight-enment for the French philosophes, is now considered to be an essential part of the Enlightenment process in some contexts. In his study David Sorkin argues that:

Contrary to the secular master narrative, the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it. The Enlightenment made possible new iterations of faith. With the Enlightenment’s advent, religion lost neither its place nor its authority in European society and cul-ture. If we trace modern culture to the Enlightenment, its foundations were decidedly religious.9

On the other hand, not everyone accepted the idea of multiple Enlighten-ments peacefully. Critics of the Enlightenments idea emphasise the danger associated with the nationalisation and localisation of the Enlightenment project, which, they believe, would turn the concept of Enlightenment into a mere period of analysis—stripped of its original meaning—which would include all intellectual activity between 1680 and 1800.10 Although there is an imminent danger of depriving “the Enlightenment” of mean-ing, I fĳind the multiple Enlightenments idea useful because it allows us to incorporate diverse cultures into a global framework. If we can dis-play how diffferent countries and cultures developed similar ideas around the same time, the supposed dichotomy between the West and the rest

7 No one is bolder than J. G. A. Pocock in attacking the defĳinite article in “the Enlight-enment”: J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7.

8 See Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

9 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from Lon-don to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3. See also his Moses Men-delssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

10 John Robertson, “The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in 18th-century Scotland and Naples,” Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997), 671. Jonathan Israel rightly points out that it is more important now than ever before to form a clear picture of the Enlightenment and what it really entails. Jonathan Israel, “Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 3 (2006): 523–545.

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becomes less meaningful. The Ottoman Empire, the villain and sick man of Europe, was no diffferent from the rest of Europe in the eighteenth cen-tury. Through the example of the thought and actions of one eighteenth-century Ottoman intellectual, this study aims to contribute to the multiple Enlightenments project by exploring how progressive ideas, which could be deemed as “enlightened,” were formulated and circulated in the early eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire.11 Notwithstanding the diversity of its scope and impact, by including the Ottoman intellectual production of the eighteenth century in the broader Enlightenments project, one can fĳind ways to understand how certain ideas became widespread cross-culturally. Such attempts can also incorporate the Ottoman intellectual arena into the broader European framework.

Ottoman Empire and the Enlightenment

In her entries in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, historian Ann Thompson paints a picture of the Ottoman Empire in the most conven-tional way, as “an empire in decline.” The Ottoman Empire is only consid-ered as a subject of Enlightenment thinkers in this acclaimed encyclopaedia

11 In 1996, in a special issue of Die Welt des Islams, a handful of historians engaged in a conversation on the possibility of an “Islamic Enlightenment.” Reinhard Schulze, in his provocative article “Was ist die islamische Aufklärung?” found in the Islamic mystical literature of the eighteenth century an emphasis on “anthropocentrism” instead of “theo-centrism.” He described this change as the basis for the idea of an “Islamic Enlightenment.” According to Schulze, mystics of the eighteenth century emphasised the individual’s sub-jective experience on his path to God instead of traditional or theocentric modes. By cre-ating an alternative story for the modernisation of Islamic thought with an emphasis on indigenous actors, Schulze challenged the “impact of the West” paradigm, which attributes change and renewal in the Islamic world to European influence. In the same issue of the journal, Rudolph Peters criticised Schulze, claiming that it is not easy to spot the “agents” of novelty in the Islamic world in the eighteenth century because our knowledge of the period is not adequate to prove the existence of an “Islamic Enlightenment” represented by local actors. Peters also disapproved of Schulze’s use of the term “Enlightenment” outside of its specifĳic European context. In his survey of the eighteenth-century Sufĳi works, Bernd Radtke, too, rejected the idea of an Islamic Enlightenment. He states that he could not fĳind any “enlightened tendencies in the worldview of the 18th century.” These criticisms reflect the fact that Schulze’s aspiration to defĳine an “Islamic Enlightenment” comparable to its European counterpart(s) has not really been shared. His argument did not aim at defĳining an “Islamic Enlightenment” conclusively; he wanted simply to include the Islamic world in discussions surrounding Enlightenments. Schulze’s ideas did not create a positive wave of responses among his colleagues; however, developments in Enlightenment studies in European historiography in the last decades have proved that Schulze was not completely wrong in positing an Islamic Enlightenment. See the articles in “Islamic Enlightenment in the 18th century,” special issue, Die Welt des Islams, N.S. 36/3 (1996): 276–325.



and not as an entry itself. These thinkers pictured the empire as the land of the impostors and despots;12 few among them recognised it as a place of tolerance for diffferent religions and as a tool for criticism against the Catholic faith. Like the Enlightenment thinkers themselves, Ann Thomp-son and the editors of the Encyclopedia did not also consider the Ottoman Empire as a country where there could be some sort of an Enlightenment.13 Besides the Enlightenment philosophes’ attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire, there is another reason the Ottoman Empire was not considered a part of the broader Enlightenment project. For these philosophes and also for the modern scholars who follow their example, the Ottoman Empire, in a way, represented the anti-Enlightenment with its “backward” religion and despotic government. Therefore, the Ottomans could not resemble the “enlightened” countries and peoples. According to this view, not only were they representatives of anti-Enlightenment but they also posited a real threat to the dissemination of Enlightenment thought. For example, the internationally renowned historian of early modern Greek culture, Pachalis Kitromilides, argued once in one of his articles on the dissemi-nation of Enlightenment ideas in the southeastern Europe: “The fact of Ottoman domination meant that the Enlightenment was faced with insti-tutions of a theocratic Empire, based on a rigid corporate social organisa-tion and inspired by an ideology that constituted a complete counterpoint to all modern liberal values.”14 It seems that Kitromilides was inspired by Gibb and Bowen’s now badly outdated Islamic Society and the West,15 which was once the epitome of the notion of “Ottoman decline.”

12 For philosophes’ take on the Ottoman Empire, see Aslı Çırakman, “From Tyranny to Despotism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened Image of the Turks,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 1 (2001): 49–68; Thomas Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 1 (2000): 6–34.

13 Ann Thompson, “Ottoman Empire”; “Islam,” Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

14 Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “The Enlightenment East and West: A Comparative Per-spective on the Ideological Origins of the Balkan Political Traditions,” in his Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy: Studies in the Culture and Political Thought of Southeastern Europe (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994), 54. The picture that Kitromilides drew of the Ottoman Empire is based on nationalist Balkan historiography, which, until now, sees the Ottoman control in Europe as “yoke,” and the Ottomans as bearers of the most archaic, most bar-baric, and most anti-modern worldview.

15 H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East (London: Oxford University Press, 1950–57). For a critical take on this work see Roger Owen, “The Middle East in the Eigh-teenth Century—an ‘Islamic’ Society in Decline? A Critique of Gibb and Bowen’s Islamic

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Decline rhetoric was created by Ottoman intellectuals in the early six-teenth century. From then on they produced various works to cope with the “crisis” they observed in the operation of the Empire. They thought that the Ottoman Empire would collapse if the necessary precautions were not taken in a timely manner.16 According to the decline scheme developed by these Ottoman intellectuals, based on an Ibn Khaldunian framework, the Ottoman Empire saw its golden age in the early sixteenth century and began to decline from that point onward. Therefore, the his-tory of the Ottoman Empire from approximately the 1560s to its demise is seen as the history of the decline of the empire. The most ardent defend-ers of the decline rhetoric have been, however, troubled by the reality that this empire in decline survived another four centuries. European con-temporaries who were keen observers of the empire and well-read in the works of Ottoman men of letters also copied this rhetoric from Ottoman intellectuals. In the second half of the twentieth century, many revisionist studies were written to dismantle the decline paradigm and to show that what the Ottoman intellectuals observed was a society in crisis, which would transform and adapt to the new challenges. The eighteenth cen-tury, in which İbrahim Müteferrika lived, has also been considered a part of the long decline that the empire sufffered. Recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire also rejects the notion that the empire was on the verge of collapse.17 The eighteenth century is now regarded as an era of vivid transformation in which various parties in the Ottoman administration attempted to solve problems associated with the empire’s transformation from a traditional agrarian society into a commercial one. In parallel with these administrative changes, Ottoman intellectual life also changed, producing ideas comparable to those developed in Euro-pean countries. In the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire experi-enced intellectual movements similar to those sweeping western Europe, although not necessarily equivalent in scale or impact. Many reform trea-tises were written in this century to solve the problems of the empire. Although they remained essentially conservative and prioritised faith, the

Society and the West,” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 3, no. 2 (1976): 110–117.

16 For an overview of the decline literature see Douglas Howard, “Ottoman Historiog-raphy and the Literature of ‘Decline’ of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Asian History 22, no. 1 (1988): 52–77.

17 For a comprehensive survey of the twentieth-century historiography of the eigh-teenth-century Ottoman Empire, see Jane Hathaway, “Rewriting Eighteenth-Century Otto-man History,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19, no. 1 (2004): 29–53.



exponents of these ideas aimed to bring a scientifĳic approach to the study of military science, and they wanted to expand the public sphere by the dissemination of social and humanistic disciplines through printing. In the early eighteenth century there was a rapprochement between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Ambassadors were sent to Europe to observe the inner workings of European countries. There was also an increasing interest in learning European history, government, and military structure. As part of this efffort, the printing press was also introduced into the Otto-man Empire and many works were published. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the real seeds of reform were planted and a series of progressive sultans attempted to reform the military structure as well as the government. While the Enlightenment was flourishing in Europe, the Ottomans were not sitting and awaiting their unavoidable collapse. They were engaging in intellectual debates on the fate of the empire, as well as striving to bring forth new ideas and forms.

The Ottoman Empire’s early Enlightenment venture resembles in some ways those in Greece and Russia.18 However, the Ottoman Enlightenment of the eighteenth century should be understood in its specifĳic context: Ottoman intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had developed a unique understanding of progress based on their acceptance of the importance of faith and religious law, their extension of the disci-plines of history and geography to a wider readership, and the creation of a military structure on modern lines. The emphasis on Islamic values in the Ottoman version of the Enlightenment may seem contradictory, in view of the fact that the French version of the Enlightenment was openly anti-religious and anti-clerical. However, as mentioned earlier, faith and progress are no longer considered mutually exclusive. Current European historiography takes account not only of the secular Enlightenment led by the French philosophes, but also of Catholic,19 Protestant, and Pietistic versions of the Enlightenment. It is now evident that religion and religious intellectuals were not outcasts of the Enlightenment but contributed

18 The Enlightenment in Greece, which was part of the Ottoman Empire until the early nineteenth century, developed in a similar way to the Ottoman Empire. Religion was an especially sensitive topic. Even in the later phases, the Greek Enlightenment was anti-clerical but not anti-religious. Anna Tabaki, “Greece,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. The case in Russia is also similar. Isabel de Madariaga, “Russia,” ibid.

19 See Jefffrey Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: Univer-sity of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

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signifĳicantly to the intellectual transformation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.

In this article, İbrahim Müteferrika, one of the leading innovators of the early eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire and a member of the intellectual elites who represented enlightened thought in the Ottoman domains, is scrutinised as an intellectual of the Ottoman version of the Enlightenment. İbrahim Müteferrika was neither a philosophe, nor a man of religion: he was a restless and erudite learner, an amateur scientist like many of the Enlightenment fĳigures, and an urban, cosmopolitan intellec-tual. I argue that Enlightenment in the early eighteenth-century Ottoman context operated in a conservative, “middle way” instead of following a more radical and secular path.20 He therefore fĳits well into the frame-work of the early Enlightenment. Intellectuals such as İbrahim Mütefer-rika struggled to fĳind ways to incorporate new ideas into a society that took comfort in keeping up tradition. He argued that faith is the most sig-nifĳicant determinant in life; however, one should also pay close attention to the natural causes of events and their consequences. He also asserted that printing is a very good medium through which to educate Mus-lims and disseminate knowledge. When Müteferrika wrote these ideas, the Enlightenment in Europe was in the making: the fĳirst phase, which was more moderate, came to a conclusion, but a more radical one was yet to run its course. The Encyclopédie was published between 1751 and 1772, and Kant wrote his article “What is the Enlightenment?” in 1784. It is difffĳicult to establish real connections between Müteferrika and other Enlightenment thinkers because he did not write in dialogue with them. It is possible, however, to display themes and ideas that could be defĳined as enlightened in his case. As Peter Gay put it cleverly in his classic work, “the hardcore of the Enlightenment was surrounded by an ever-growing penumbra of associates.”21 I claim that İbrahim Müteferrika was one of those associates.

İbrahim Müteferrika’s upbringing played a crucial role in the formation of his intellectual landscape: therefore I begin my analysis with his biogra-phy. After his life story, I particularly look into his works that provide the main framework on which this study is based. I will not go into the details

20 Jonathan Israel insisted on the idea that the Enlightenment that we know is the Enlightenment of the radical philosophes and not the moderate ones. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

21 Gay, Enlightenment, 18.



of his printing venture, which has been aptly studied by contemporary authors in its proper context.22 I study his printing as part of his intel-lectual persona and attempt to put his publications in the proper con-text by explaining why and how he chose his works and what made him the most enlightened fĳigure of the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. I point out the importance of his innovative ideas and his links to the clas-sical heritage of the Islamic world in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular.

Courtier-diplomat: A Life in Borders: İbrahim Müteferrika’s Life Story

Most modern-day secondary studies of İbrahim Müteferrika have been undertaken by Turkish scholars. After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s, he was a subject of interest to only a few writers.23 Later, in the second half of the twentieth century, his career was revis-ited in the context of his printing venture.24 Only recently, however, have

22 See various studies of Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih): Ibrahim Müteferrika ya da ilk Osmanlı matbaa serüveni, 1726–1746: yeniden değerlendirme (Istanbul: Yeditepe, 2006); idem, “The First Ottoman Turkish Printing Enterprise: Success or Failure?” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Cofffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (Lon-don: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 63–89; idem, “Rich Men, Poor Men: Ottoman Printers and Booksellers Making Fortune or Seeking Survival (Eighteenth-nineteenth centuries),” Oriens 37 (2009): 177–190; idem, “A Virgin Deserving Paradise or a Whore Deserving Poison: Manuscript Tradition and Printed Books in Ottoman Turkish Society,” in Friars, Nobles and Burghers—Sermons, Images and Prints: Studies of Culture and Society in Early-modern Europe, in memoriam István György Tóth, ed. Jaroslav Miller, and László Kontler (Buda-pest: CEU Press, 2010): 389–409; idem, “In Search of Lost Time: How ‘Late’ was the Intro-duction of Ottoman-Turkish Printing?” Europa und die Türkei im 18. Jahrhundert [Europe and Turkey in the eighteenth century], ed. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2011): 447–456. See also his essay “Waiting for Godot: The Formation of Ottoman Print Culture,” in the present volume.

23 Imre Karacson, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” Tarih-i Osmani Encümeni Mecmuası (TOEM) 1/3 (1328/1910): 178–190; Ahmed Refĳik, Alimler ve Sanatkarlar (Istanbul: Kitabhane-i Hilmi, 1924), 329–358.

24 Niyazi Berkes, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. [heceforth EI2] (Leiden: Brill and London: Luzac, 1986), 3:996–998; idem, “İlk Türk Matbaası Kurucusunun Dini ve Fikri Kimliği,” TTK Belleten 26/104 (1962): 715–737; Türkiye’de Çağdaşlaşma (Istan-bul: YKY, 2004), 50–63; T. Halasi Kun, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” İslam Ansiklopedisi 2:896–900; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 4, pt 1 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1994), 158–162; William J. Watson, “İbrahim Müteferrika and Turkish Incunabula,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 435–441; Halil Necatioğlu, Matbaacı İbrahim Müteferrika ve Risale-i İslamiye adlı eserinin tenkidli metni (Ankara: Elif Matbaacılık, 1982); Şahap Demirel, “İbrahim Müteferrika’nın Füyuzat-ı Mıknatisiye Adlı Kitabı,” Dil Tarih Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi (DTCFD) (1982): 265–330; Salim Aydüz, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” Yaşamlarıyla ve Yapıtlarıyla Osmanlılar Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat

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his biography and the impact of his printing venture been scrutinised in detail.25 These studies have extended our knowledge of this unique fĳigure of the Ottoman eighteenth century as a printer;26 yet, ‘printer’ was only one of the many roles one can attribute to İbrahim Müteferrika—he was a man of many parts. The establishment of a printing press by a Muslim for the fĳirst time, not only in the Ottoman lands but also in the wider Islamic world, was no doubt revolutionary; however, Müteferrika’s proposals for military reform, which were reproduced in the last decades of the eigh-

Yayıncılık, 1999): 631–633; Mustafa Asım Yediyıldız, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” Vakıflar Der-gisi 22 (1991): 441–447; Rana Temir, “İlk Türk Matbaasının Kurucusu İbrahim Müteferrika üzerine Yeni Bilgiler,” Türk Kültürü 28/321 (January 1990): 43–47; Adil Şen, İbrahim Mütefer-rika ve Usulü’l Hikem fĳi Nizamü’l Ümem (Ankara: TDV, 1995); J. Jozsef Horvath, “Osmanlıda ilk Matbaayı Kuran İbrahim Müteferrika,” Tarih ve Toplum 215 (November 2001): 51–58.

25 Erhan Afyoncu, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi (DIA) 22: 324–327; idem, “İlk Türk Matbaasının Kurucusu Hakkında Yeni Bilgiler,” TTK Belleten 45/242–244 (2002): 606–622; Орлин Събев: Първото Османско пътешествие в света на печатната книга (1726–1746) (Sofĳia: Авангард Прима, 2004). I used the short English précis at the end of this work and not the main work itself. Turkish trans.: Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih), İbrahim Müteferrika (2006).

26 See the following studies for a discussion of the Müteferrika Press: Giambatista Toderini, İbrahim Müteferrika Matbaası ve Türk Matbaacılığı, ed. Şevket Rado (Istanbul: İstanbul yayıncılık, 1990); Franz Babinger, Müteferrika ve Osmanlı Matbaası (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayinlari, 2004); Selim Nüzhet Gerçek, Türk Matbaacılığı: Müteferrika Matbaası (Istanbul: Devlet Basımevi 1939); Server İskit, Türkiye’de Neşriyat Hareketleri Tarihine Bir Bakış (Istanbul: Devlet Basimevi, 1939; repr. Ankara: MEB, 2000); Aladar v. Simonfffy, İbrahim Müteferrika: Türkiye’de Matbaacılığın Banisi, trans. Faruk Yener ([Ankara:] Başbakanlık Basın ve Yayın Genel Müdürlüğü, 1945); Edvard Carleson, İbrahim Müteferrika Basımevi ve Bastığı İlk Eserler: İbrahim Müteferrika’s Printing House and its First Printed Books, ed. Mustafa Akbulut (Ankara: Türk Kütüphaneciler Derneği, 1979); İsmet Binark, “Matbaanın Türkiye’ye Geç Girişinin Sebepleri,” Türk Kütüphaneciler Derneği Basım ve Yayıncılığımızın 250. Yılı Bilimsel Toplantısı, 10–11 Aralik 1979, Ankara: Bildiriler (Ankara: Türk Kütüphan-eciler Derneği, 1980), 139–174; Süheyl Ünver, “İbrahim Müteferrika’nın Bilimsel Yönü ve Yayınlarındaki Özellikler,” in Türk Kütüphaneciler, 1–7; Osman Ersoy, “İlk Türk Basımevinde Basılan Kitapların Fiyatları,” in Türk Kütüphaneciler, 69–83; Hidayet Nuhoğlu, “Mütefer-rika Matbaasının Kurulması için verilen fetva üstüne,” in Türk Kütüphaneciler, 119–126; Jale Baysal, “II. Rakoczi Ferencin çevirmeni Müteferrika İbrahim ve Osmanlı Türklerinin ilk Bastıkları Kitaplar,” in Türk-Macar Kültür Münasebetleri Işığı Altında II. Rakoczi Ferenc ve Macar Mültecileri Sempozyumu (Istanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1976), 217–225; Alpay Kabacalı, Türk Kitap Tarihi (Istanbul: Cem, 1989), 31–55; Alpay Kabacalı, Başlangıcından Günümüze Türkiye’de Matbaa Basın ve Yayın (Istanbul: Literatür, 2000); Orhan Koloğlu, Basımevi ve Basının Gecikme Sebepleri ve Sonuçları (Istanbul: Gazeteciler Cemiyeti, 1987); Mustafa Akbulut, “İbrahim Müteferrika ve ilk Türk Matbaası,” in Türkler, vol. 14, ed. Hasan Celal Güzel, Kemal Çiçek, Salim Koca (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2002), 919–926; Hidayet Nuhoğlu, “Osmanlı Matbaacılığı”, in Türkler, 14: 927–932; idem, “Müteferrika Matbaası ve Bazı Mülahazalar,” Osmanlı, ed. Güler Eren, vol. 7 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 1999): 221–229; Yusuf Kaplan, “Osmanlılar’da Matbaa: Bir Medeniyet Krizi Sorunu,” Osmanlı, 7:230–237; Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Tarih-i Cevdet, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat, 1994), 69–76; Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Osmanıi Devleti Tarihi (Istanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat, 1983), 7:356–357.



teenth century by a handful of reform writers,27 and his loud call for order (nizam) in the Ottoman Empire certainly made his impact greater than that of simply a publisher.

While there is no certain information as to the birth date of İbrahim Müteferrika, recent fĳindings confĳirm that he was born between 1670 and 1674.28 Based on Risale-i İslamiye, a work which is attributed to İbrahim, his birthplace was the Hungarian town of Kolozsvár, today Cluj in Romania. The earliest scholarly study of İbrahim Müteferrika was written by a Hun-garian priest, Imre Karacson (1863–1911), in the early twentieth century. This particular study has greatly influenced perceptions of Müteferrika’s background. Karacson argues that İbrahim was born into a poor Calvinist family and later studied to be a minister. Niyazi Berkes challenges this idea in an article in which he discusses Müteferrika’s Unitarian beliefs as reflected in the latter’s Risale-i İslamiye.29 In this work, Müteferrika states that he read books prohibited by the Habsburg imperial authori-ties, which, according to Berkes, would have meant the works of Michael Servetus, the theoretical founder of Unitarianism.30 Unitarians view God as one person instead of three and defend non-Trinitarian monotheism. They also believe that Jesus was a Prophet of God and not a divine being. The Unitarians insist on the compatibility of reason and revelation and claim that “whatever is false according to reason—which for them meant common sense and natural knowledge—can never be true as revelation.”31 Islam also clearly espouses non-Trinitarian monotheism and Muslims view Jesus as a Prophet of God and reject his divine nature. Unitarianism and Islam are therefore easily compatible, and, as argued by Berkes, this similarity played a signifĳicant role in İbrahim’s conversion to Islam. It is evident from Müteferrika’s thoughts that he also carried over this notion of the compatibility of reason and faith from his old belief to the new one. Although it has been argued by Karacson that İbrahim was enslaved and forced to convert to Islam, it seems more reasonable to assert, as

27 See, for example, the discussion of İbrahim’s impact on Koca Sekbanbaşı’s reform treatise by Yusuf Hakan Erdem, “The Wise Old Man, Propagandist and Ideologist: Koca Sekbanbaşı on the Janissaries, 1807,” in Individual, Ideologies and Society: Tracing the Mosaic of Mediterranean History, ed. Kirsi Virtanen (Tampere, Finland: Tampere Peace Research Institute, 2001), 155–177.

28 Erhan Afyoncu, “İbrahim Müteferrika’nın Yeni Yayınlanan Terekesi ve Ölüm Tarihi Üzerine,” Türklük Araştırmaları Dergisi 15 (2004): 349–362.

29 Berkes, “İlk Türk Matbaası.”30 Ibid., 729–730. 31 Ibid.

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Berkes did, that he took refuge in the Ottoman Empire and converted voluntarily. Many Protestants, such as Müteferrika, did this, because of Habsburg pressure on the non-Catholic population of Transylvania. The Ottomans, indeed, had supported the independence of Protestant Tran-sylvania in the face of Catholic Habsburg religious persecution from the time of Süleyman the Magnifĳicent.32 İbrahim, in his twenties, most prob-ably moved to the Ottoman Empire with Imre Thököly (1657–1705), the Protestant prince of Transylvania who started an uprising against the Habsburgs and allied with the Ottomans against them.33

In a recent study, Erhan Afyoncu, utilising Ottoman archival documents, outlines the trajectory of Müteferrika’s career. Before being appointed as müteferrika on 18 April 1716 he was a sipahi in the cavalry branch of the imperial (Kapıkulu) army.34 The müteferrika regiment is a subject that has yet to be investigated in detail. It was principally an askeri position, related to the military. They were the special servants of sultans, viziers, and high-ranking bureaucrats.35 Mehmet Zeki Pakalin, in his acclaimed inventory of Ottoman historical terms, traces them back to the early period of the empire, noting that there is a reference to them in Mehmed II’s (r. 1451–1481) Kanunname. It seems that the post of müteferrika was mostly fĳilled to employ (or sponsor) the sons of high-ranking offfĳicials, such as grand viziers, governors of provinces, and chancellors (nişancı), who were not allowed to hold high offfĳices. Müteferrikas’ fathers were from

32 For the relationship between Ottomans and Protestants, see Carl Max Kortepeter, Ottoman Imperialism during the Reformation (New York: New York University Press, 1972); İlber Ortaylı, “The Ottoman Empire at the End of the 17th Century,” in Ortaylı, Studies on Ottoman Transformation (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1994), 9.

33 Niyazi Berkes, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” EI2. 34 Afyoncu, “İlk Türk Matbaasının Kurucusu Hakkında Yeni Bilgiler,” 610. On the sipahis,

see İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatından Kapukulu Ocaklari, II (Ankara: TTK, 1988), 190. İbrahim might have entered the Ottoman army as a volunteer. Beginning in the sixteenth century, foreigners were also included in times of need, which increased the army’s numbers dramatically. In 1713, when Müteferrika was in their ranks, the number of sipahis was 10,778, apart from the approximately 12,000 remaining members of the six divisions of the Kapıkulu cavalry (altı bölük halkı). Uzunçarşılı, Kapukulu Ocakları, 2:216.

35 The Müteferrika corps seems to have had its heyday in Egypt, where it was created in 1554–55 as a separate and regular regiment combining both infantry and cavalry. Its introduction was part of an efffort to Ottomanise Egypt’s administration. See the follow-ing works for the Müteferrika corps in Egypt in diffferent contexts: Stanford Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517–1798 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962); Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlıs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); idem, “The ‘Mamluk Breaker’ Who was really a Kul Breaker: A Fresh Look at Kul Kıran Mehmed Pasha, Governor of Egypt 1607–1611,” in The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era, ed. Jane Hathaway (Minneapolis, MN: Center for Early Modern History, 2009).



all the main bureaucratic channels of the Empire: askeriye, kalemiye, and ilmiye. It also seems that during the eighteenth century their composi-tion changed dramatically; any member of the elite who did not fĳit in the established administrative hierarchy was awarded this post and used for special missions. The existence of the müteferrika class shows how the Ottoman bureaucratic hierarchy was adapted to diverse needs. In the last years of the seventeenth century, there were 631 müteferrikas.36 They were an independent class under the sole authority of the sultan. From the example of İbrahim Müteferrika, one can conclude that, in the eighteenth century, people from outside palace circles, whose usefulness was proved, were also granted these posts. İbrahim Müteferrika probably received this post owing to his extensive knowledge of European languages (looking at the posts to which he was appointed, he seemed to know German, French, Hungarian, and Latin besides Turkish and Persian) as well as his role as an interpreter between the Ottoman sultans and the Transylvanian prince, Ferenc Rakoczi (r. 1704–1711).

After his appointment as a müteferrika, İbrahim was employed in various diplomatic missions. First, he was sent to Belgrade in 1716 with a delegation of Hungarians in order to promote their struggle against the Habsburgs. Belgrade was an extremely important Ottoman provincial capital and the forward base in campaigns against the Habsburgs. His long-term job was as a liaison offfĳicer to Prince Ferenc Rakoczi, who fled to Ottoman territory in 1711.37 Although his job became honorary after the Ottoman plan of controlling Transylvania with proxy princes failed, Müteferrika occupied this post until the death of Rakoczi in 1735.38 There is not much information on the friendship between Rakoczi and İbrahim Müteferrika, which probably developed greatly over twenty years, besides the letters that a personal scribe of Rakoczi, Kelemen Mikes, wrote to his imaginary aunt, in which he mentions İbrahim sporadically. While the Hungarian scholar Joseph Horvath insists that Rakoczi supported İbrahim Müteferrika in his printing enterprise,39 this claim still needs to be proved.

36 Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi, Telhisü’l Beyan fĳi Kavanin-i Ali Osman, ed. Sevim İlgürel (Ankara: TTK, 1998): 86.

37 Among those who fled with Rakoczi was Andras Tóth, the father of Baron de Tott, the outstanding military advisor to the eighteenth-century Ottoman sultans. It seems Hun-garians were especially interested in the military. Virginia Aksan, “Breaking the Spell of the Baron de Tott: Reframing the Question of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830,” International History Review 24, no. 2 (2002), 256.

38 Afyoncu, “İlk Türk Matbaasının,” 611. 39 Joseph Horvath, “Osmanlı’da ilk Matbaayı,” 55.

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The close relationship between him and his interpreter is evident in a let-ter which Rakoczi composed before his death. He asks the grand vizier to look after his “faithful translator and asks for the Sultan’s favour for him and prays for him in the following manner: ‘May almighty God reward him with His most precious gifts for his kindness to me.’”40

İbrahim’s long acquaintance with Rakoczi must have provided him with extensive experience in diplomatic afffairs. He was sent to Salonica, in what is now northeastern Greece, in 1731 to escort the prince Mirza Safĳi, claimant to the throne of Iran’s Safavid Empire, who had fled to Otto-man territory in the wake of the Afghan invasion of Iran in 1722.41 In 1736, İbrahim Müteferrika was sent on a diplomatic mission to Poland in order to renew the peace treaty between the two states;42 in 1738 he conducted negotiations on behalf of the Ottoman government and the anti-Habsburg Hungarians for the surrender of the fortress of Orșova (in modern-day Romania), which changed hands various times in the eighteenth century, to the Ottomans.43 He also took an active part, together with Comte de Bonneval (Humbaracı Ahmed Paşa), in promoting Turkish-Swedish coop-eration against Russia.44 He was appointed as the scribe of the Ottoman artillery (Top Arabacilar) in 1738 and stayed in this post until 1743. He was sent to Dagestan in that year to present an offfĳicial letter of appointment (tayin beratı) to Asmay Ahmed, who had been nominated to the Kaytak khanate.45 He was appointed offfĳicial imperial historian (divan-ı hümayun tarihçisi) in 1744 and held that position until 1745.46

40 Kelemen Mikes, Letters from Turkey, trans. Bernard Adams (London: Kegan Paul, 2000), 176. Kelemen Mikes, Osmanlı’da bir Macar Konuk: Prens Rakoczi ve Mikes’ın Türkiye Mektupları, trans. Edit Tasnadi (Istanbul: Aksoy Yayıncılık, 1999). For a good compilation of offfĳicial Ottoman documents on Rakoczi, see Ahmet Refĳik, Memalik-i Osmaniye’de Kıral Rakoci ve Tevabii (Istanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1333/1917).

41 Ahmed Refĳik, Onikinci Asr-ı Hicri’de İstanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Enderun, 1988), 119. When the Safavid Shah Husayn (r. 1694–1722) was deposed as a result of the Afghan inva-sion, at least three pretenders to the Safavid throne emerged. All of them were called Mirza Safĳi, all claimed to be the youngest son of Shah Husayn. Although real son of Husayn is believed to have been massacred with his father, one of those Safĳis took refuge in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans welcomed him thinking that he might prove useful in the future afffairs of the Persian throne when the things fĳinally settled. J. R. Perry, “The Last Safavids 1722–1773,” Iran 9 (1971), 60.

42 Afyoncu, “İlk Türk Matbaacısının,” 613. 43 Berkes, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” EI2, 3: 997. 44 Ibid., 3: 997.45 From the history of Suphi Mehmed Efendi (d. 1769), quoted in Afyoncu, “İlk Türk

Matbaacısının,” 615. 46 Afyoncu, “İlk Türk Matbaacısının,” 615.



Enlightenment through Printing: Müteferrika’s Printing Venture

When İbrahim Müteferrika began to consider opening a printing house in Istanbul,47 printing was already a well-known enterprise for the non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Greeks, and Jews had already published many books.48 By the nineteenth century, Istanbul’s Jewish community alone had published more than eight hundred titles, using Hebrew script.49 Christian communities in the Ottoman provinces also published titles in Arabic script. For example, an Arabic translation of the Psalms (Kitāb al-mazāmīr) was published in Aleppo in 1706; within fĳive years, ten more titles were published there.50 But İbrahim Müteferrika was an innovator not only in terms of his introduction of printing to the Muslim population of the empire but also in terms of his publication of Turkish works.

Müteferrika was very concerned about the future of his enterprise and developed a clear strategy to avoid forfeiting his business. In his manifesto-like essay, Vesiletü’t Tibaa [The utility of printing], which he presented to the enlightened grand vizier of the age, Damad İbrahim Paşa, he dis-cussed the importance and benefĳits of printing.51 Müteferrika was so con-cerned about possible objections to his new enterprise that he included this essay in the introductions to half of the books that he printed. In it, he points out that although the holy book of the Muslims has been preserved through the ages, many other useful titles were destroyed dur-ing the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. He presents print-ing as a means of preventing the destruction of rare books. According to Müteferrika, printing would multiply dictionaries which serve as the main references for the Arabic language and allow them to be corrected.

47 For the location of the press and a discussion about it, see Orlin Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, 156–160.

48 For details, see Günay Alpay Kut, “Matbaa: In Turkey,” EI2. 49 Kemal Beydilli, “Matbaa,” Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, 28:106.50 Ibid., 28:107. 51 Ebu Nasr İsmail Bin Hammad el Cevheri, Tercüme-i Sihah-i Cevheri (Vankulu Lügati),

2 vols., trans. Mehmed bin Mustafa el Vani (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1141 [1729]). For transcriptions and translations of these important materials, see Refĳik, Onikinci Asrı Hicride İstanbul Hayatı; Turgut Kut and Fatma Türe, Yazmadan Basmaya: Müteferrika, Mühendishane, Üsküdar (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Kültür Sanat, 1996), 34–35; George Atiyeh (ed.), “Appendix: Ottoman Imperial Documents Relating to the History of Books and Printing,” trans. Christopher M. Murphy, The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 283–292.

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The number of books on history, astronomy, philosophy, and geography would likewise be greatly multiplied. Printed books are more reliable and error-free, in Müteferrika’s opinion, than their manuscript counterparts, which are prone to erosion over time. They are also inexpensive and easy to produce, and thus provide both rich and poor with a proper educa-tion. Indexes and tables of contents in summary or detail make references easier to fĳind. With the fall in book prices that would result from the circu-lation of printed copies, Müteferrika asserts, people who live in the coun-tryside would also buy them and their ignorance would disappear. The increase in the number of books would also lead to the establishment of libraries. He argues that the Christians already recognise the signifĳicance of books in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and have profĳited from this. Yet, their printed books are full of errors, Müteferrika points out, because they are not the work of experts. Moreover, he continues, since the Ottomans are superior to their rivals politically and culturally, they should also be superior in the art of printing, which should meet the needs of not only the Ottomans but all Muslims. Particularly striking is the fact that Müt-eferrika was not only concerned with Istanbul, where he lived and which was the centre of learning and scholarship for those who had access to it; but he also considered the entire empire in his mission to spread ideas. Through proper education, made possible by the multiplication of books and libraries, an enlightened public would emerge throughout the Muslim world. As a matter of fact, in the probate inventories of the residents of Sarajevo and Sofĳia, which were studied by Orlin Sabev, there were Müt-eferrika Press publications.52 One can thus claim that Müteferrika was apparently successful in his mission to spread his publications to at least the European provinces of the empire.

Müteferrika also pointed out that the usefulness of printing had already been written and spoken about by many people, and some among them had been given the task of opening a printing house, though the plan was never realised. Although it is not clear who was given such a task and when it happened, the chronicler İbrahim Peçevi (1574–1649) and the polymath Katip Çelebi (1609–1657) are known as intellectuals who wrote about printing and explained its uses. However, neither of them intended to introduce printing to the Ottoman Empire.53 Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed

52 Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, 281–282.53 Sabev, “Waiting for Godot,” in the present volume.



Efendi, who was sent on a diplomatic mission to France in 1720–21,54 is known to have defended the uses of printing upon his return to the Otto-man Empire; in fact, his son Said Efendi, himself a future ambassador to France in 1742, who accompanied his father in his embassy, assisted İbrahim Müteferrika to open the press.

Printing in the Service of an Enlightened Public

The books and maps published by the Müteferrika Press reveal the extent of İbrahim’s connoisseurship: before his death (1746/7), he published sev-enteen books and four maps. The choice and timing of each title shows his involvement in the process of publication and his extensive interest in language, history, geography, and the natural and military sciences. The fĳirst publication of the press was Abū Naṣr Ismāʿīl b. Ḥammād al-Ǧawharī’s Arabic dictionary, known in Ottoman Turkish as Sihah-i Cevheri, which was translated into Turkish by Mehmed bin Mustafa el-Vani and pub-lished in 1729. Müteferrika included in this publication Sultan Ahmed III’s decree permitting the opening of the press, the fetva giving the approval of the şeyhülislam Abdullah Efendi, appraisals supporting the printing press written by signifĳicant scholars of his time, and his own manifesto, Vesiletü’t Tibaa. The inauguration of the press with a dictionary was a well-made choice. Müteferrika complained in his introduction about the laziness of scribes in compiling dictionaries and how difffĳicult it was to fĳind one. Although the dictionary was ostensibly published for students, the book’s extremely high price might have prevented students from buy-ing it. Thus it seems safe to assert that Müteferrika was targeting a wider audience. His press was still on shaky ground; therefore, he wanted to reach bureaucrats, offfĳicials, teachers, and scholars with proof of the utility of printing. Müteferrika returned to dictionaries and linguistics in his last publication, Hasan Şuuri’s Persian dictionary, Lisanü’l Acem, printed in 1741.55 In between these two dictionaries, he published a Turkish grammar book in French, Grammaire turque,56 prepared by a Jesuit priest, Jean-Baptiste Holdermann, in order to teach Turkish to French translators/interpreters (dragomans). This may have been the fĳirst book to provide Latin equivalents to Arabic letters. Its publication was supported by the

54 Gilles Veinstein, “Mehmed Yirmisekiz,” EI2. 55 Hasan Şuuri, Lisanü‘l Acem, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1155 [1741]).56 Jean Baptiste Holdermann, Grammaire turque (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1730).

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French ambassador to the Porte, the Marquis de Villeneuve,57 who also favoured the publication of a Turkish-French dictionary that, however, was never realised.58 The ambassador himself bought two hundred copies of Grammaire turque. Nevertheless, the dictionary is not included in the list of Müteferrika Press publications that İbrahim published in his edition of the chronicle of the court historian Mustafa Naima.59 This omission was probably due not to Müteferrika’s fear of negative reactions to his publication of a book in the Latin alphabet,60 but to the fact that Mütefer-rika did not edit the dictionary, as he did most of the other works he pub-lished. Such an enterprise was valuable for Ottoman offfĳicials who utilised these dragomans extensively, and for the French merchants who traded with the Ottoman Empire. As a matter of fact, after Sihah, this book was the second best-seller among Müteferrika’s publications.61 Thus we see that Müteferrika was astute in his calculations that this book would sell quickly and be sought after. Müteferrika’s close friendship with the French ambassador and his interest in the French language suggest that he might also have known French himself.

In Müteferrika’s printing venture and his Enlightenment project, which consisted of spreading literacy and the knowledge of humanistic (history and geography) as well as natural sciences (physics and astronomy), the disciplines of history and geography play a signifĳicant role. In fact, for most Enlightenment men of the eighteenth century, history was both a

57 The Marquis de Villeneuve, French ambassador to the Porte, between the 1710s and the 1740s seems to have been a most influential person, who increased the friendly rela-tions between the Ottomans and the French. He was useful in the signing of the Treaty of Belgrade and as a result of his services the capitulations given to the French were extended. Münir Aktepe, “Mahmud I,” EI2. His memoirs of the treaty of Belgrade, in which he played a mediating role representing France were later collected by one Marc-Antoine Laugier, and provide crucial insights into the character and work of the Marquis de Villeneuve, as well as the actual proceedings of the treaty. Laugier argues that Villeneuve was a perfect diplomat, who possessed all the qualities of a great negotiator. He also suggests that he was very much loved and appreciated by the Porte. Upon his return to France he was offfered the ministry of foreign afffairs, which he declined because of his old age and sick-ness. He died in Marseille in 1745. Marc-Antoine Laugier, The History of the Negociations for the Peace Concluded at Belgrade September 18, 1739, trans. M. l’abbé Laugier (London: J. Murray, 1770).

58 Gérald Duverdier, “Savary de Brèves et Ibrahim Müteferrika: deux drogmans cul-turels à l’origine de l’imprimerie turque,” Bulletin du Bibliophile 3 (1987): 346–350; idem, “Ilk Türk Basimevinin Kuruluşunda İki Kültür Elçisi: Savary de Breves ile İbrahim Müteferrika,” trans. Türker Acaroglu, Belleten 56/215 (1992): 298.

59 Mustafa Naima, Tarih-i Naima, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1147 [1734], 15a.60 Gerçek, Türk Matbaacılığı, 72–74.61 Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, 203.



major avocation and a philosophical subject. Some of these Enlightenment fĳigures, such as Edward Gibbon62 and Voltaire, found special pleasure in composing history and making a name based on these compositions.63 İbrahim Müteferrika was very fond of history both as a writer and as a compiler. In his intellectual endeavour, he took the seventeenth-century polymath Katip Çelebi as a role model. He was a polymath as well, and he showed his respect for his mentor by publishing three of his works. Kâtip Çelebi’s Tuhfetü’l Kibar fĳi Esfari’l Bihar published in the same year as the Arabic dictionary, is a compendium on the Ottoman maritime wars from the conquest of Istanbul to the author’s own time.64 It includes the struc-ture, hierarchy, and laws of the Ottoman navy as well as a special section of advice to pirates and privateers, who played an important role in Otto-man naval policy. As discussed below, Müteferrika was very interested in military history, and especially the maritime wars.

The greatest achievement of the Müteferrika Press was undoubtedly the publication of Katip Çelebi’s great geographical compendium, the Cihan-nüma. Müteferrika published this work at the urging of Mevlana Ahmed Efendi, who later became the şeyhülislam, or chief mufti, and felt that a printed edition of the work would help the “holy warriors” of Islam on land and sea. The mufti pointed out to Müteferrika that the non-Muslim pow-ers made extensive use of correct maps to launch expeditions to unknown lands. The mufti gave İbrahim a manuscript copy of the Cihannüma, and İbrahim compared it with the one he owned.65 Müteferrika’s Cihannüma is a critical edition of Katip Çelebi’s work; he used Ebubekir Dimaşki’s (d. 1691) geography66 in order to correct Katip Çelebi’s mistakes.67 He also wrote an appendix, which he called Tezyilü’t Tabii, in which he corrected Katip Çelebi’s linguistic mistakes and extended the work in accordance

62 Gay, The Enlightenment, 1:209–211. 63 Ibid., 2:368–396. 64 Katip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l Kibar fĳi Esfari’l Bihar (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1141

[1729]).65 Mustafa b. Abdullah (Katip Çelebi), Kitab-ı Cihannüma li-Katip Çelebi (Istanbul: Dār-i

Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1145 [1732]), 3a–3b. 66 Dimaşki’s translation is known as Nusret’il-islam ve’s-surur fĳi tercüme-i Atlas Mayor.

It has 9 volumes and consists of 242 maps. For a list of the maps see Thomas D. Goodrich, “Old Maps in the Library of Topkapı Palace in İstanbul,” Imago Mundi 45 (1993): 120–133.

67 El-Dimaşki was a late seventeenth-century scholar known as Coğrafyacı Ebubekir Efendi. He edited the Cihannüma while he was translating the Latin-language Atlas Major of Joan Blaeu, because he recognised Katip Çelebi’s mistakes. For his biography and works see Fikret Sarıcaoğlu, “Cihannüma ve Ebubekir b. Behram el-Dimaşki,” in Prof. Bekir Kütükoğlu‘na Armağan (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1991), 129; idem, “Ebubekir b. Behram,” Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, 10:110–111.

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with Katip Çelebi’s original plan, which he could not realise because he lacked access to certain key sources. İbrahim introduced new fĳindings in geography, geometry, physics, and cosmography in that appendix and extended the narrative of the cities, which Katip Çelebi had left at Van in eastern Anatolia, to Üsküdar on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. He also enriched the book with fĳigures and maps.68 The printed Cihannüma was one of the fĳinest works of Ottoman intellectual production. Katip Çelebi’s understanding of geography, which went beyond physical geography to encompass social and cultural anthropology, as well as history, shaped Müteferrika’s view of this discipline. Geography, along with history, was the backbone of his project of disseminating knowledge. Although the ostensible purpose of this publication was to assist “holy warriors,” it is doubtful that any “holy warrior” ever read the Cihannüma, which was priced beyond the average soldier’s or sailor’s means.69 Rather, Mütefer-rika intended to raise awareness of the world in which he lived by publish-ing such geographical compendia.

Müteferrika was fond of geography and he practised it as a map-maker and cartographer; in his attitude toward this science Müteferrika comes very close to the Enlightenment thinkers. “Geography was, at least in many books of the period [i.e., the eighteenth century], a universalising dis-course, designed to gather information about the globe.”70 Enlightenment thinkers saw geography as a way to collect and classify various natural and social phenomena which were traditionally studied by the geogra-phers. The Encyclopédie, which was published between 1751 and 1772 in fascicules, and which was one of the signature works of Enlightenment philosophes in France (1751–1772), is known to refer to various geographic representations: the world is depicted as the “Tree of Knowledge, or as a mappe monde, a world map, in which all subjects were situated and con-nected one to another.”71 Whatever use was intended, the Encyclopédistes aimed to bring together the information about various countries and peo-ples and to show the relationship between them. The Encyclopédie there-fore contained various articles on geography. Attaining precise geographic data seemed crucial in the Enlightenment, to understand nature and the

68 Fikret Sarıcaoğlu, “Cihannüma ve Ebubekir bin Behram el-Dimaşki,” 140.69 For the prices of Müteferrika’s publications relative to those of other goods during

Müteferrika’s lifetime see Orlin Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, 287–303. 70 Charles W. J. Withers, “Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century

Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995), 142.71 Ibid.



world better. Geography was useful for the Enlightenment thinkers, as it was for İbrahim Müteferrika. Charles Withers, in his studies on mapping and cartography in eighteenth-century Scotland, expounds on the role of mapping and geography in the creation of a national identity among the Scots, and how it shaped the very idea of the Enlightenment. Scottish mappers, he argued, “recognized the utility of maps as a means to national identity.”72 Mapping in the Enlightenment, he also argues, was “intrin-sically practical,” reflecting the expansion of geographical knowledge as well as colonial plans.73 Similar to those Scottish mappers but earlier than them and for practical reasons like theirs, İbrahim Müteferrika toyed with the idea of creating a comprehensive map of the Ottoman domains in order to reinforce the collective identity of the Ottomans and disseminate this geographic knowledge to a wider readership. He wrote a great deal on geography and its benefĳits in his treatise Usul’ül Hikem. He believed that geography is useful fĳirst and foremost for the statesmen who need to know the borders of their states, fortresses, easy passages, close and dis-tant routes, and conditions of the roads and seas, rivers, and mountains, as well as the peoples of these lands. Since ǧihād is required for Muslims, geography should be their greatest tool. By way of geographical knowl-edge they can make intelligent decisions and evaluate the viability and feasibility of events. Muslims are scattered all over the world and some among them live in despair under non-Muslim domination. The science of geography is a world-displaying mirror, which shows all these nations; by the promotion of this science one can know the needs of one another and one’s morale is strengthened. Müteferrika even goes so far as to pro-mote this science so that Muslims can unite under the authority of one sultan, if they know each other’s conditions. He therefore brings forth, maybe for the fĳirst time, a concept which was to become popular only in the late nineteenth century and under the direct threat of imperial-ism: pan-Islamic unity. He argues that the Ottoman navy does not have up-to-date portolans and maps; it is not permissible to be dependent on the ones produced by foreign cartographers. He argues that the theory of geography had been greatly advanced by the Muslims in the early Islamic

72 Charles W. J. Withers, “The Social Nature of Map Making in the Scottish Enlighten-ment, c. 1682–c. 1832,” Imago Mundi 54 (2002), 52; “Reporting, Mapping, Trusting: Making Geographical Knowledge in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Isis 90, no. 3 (1999): 497–521. See also his books, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and (with David N. Livingstone, ed.), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

73 Withers, “Social Nature”, 47.

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centuries but it was not put to practical use in the way Christians did. The early Muslims understood the importance of this science, he argues; the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn had important geographical works trans-lated into Arabic. Christians dominated the majority of the lands and sea in the world with the help of this science: Columbus, he adds, discov-ered the new world and made a great step forward for the Christians by using cartograms and maps in abundance. However, he strongly advises against depending on the hands of individual cartographers and recom-mends printing to provide well-drawn and correct maps. He also argues that geographical works should be used when reading history to get a bet-ter sense of the places and peoples described. He advises against com-pletely abandoning the maps currently available, albeit incomplete and inaccurate; they still have uses. They should be updated as much as pos-sible. It is particularly important to use the information of local people in drawing borders.74

One other publication of İbrahim Müteferrika, Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi [History of the West Indies], is difffĳicult to classify in terms of genre, but he saw it as a work of geography, so it is best to evaluate it as such. This work, İbrahim asserts in his introduction, which was presented to the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1595), has information on the discov-ery of the New World in the year 903 / 1497–1498 and on the events that occurred fĳifty years after its conquest. Müteferrika seems to be referring to Amerigo Vespucci’s fĳirst expedition, not that of Columbus. He also says that he published this work in order to strengthen the sword of Islam and present America as a new target for the Ottomans.75 Although it has long been attributed to Katip Çelebi because of his well-known expertise in geography, the style of this book bears no resemblance to that of Katip Çelebi. It has now become clear that its real author is Mehmed bin Emir el-Hasan el-Suudi (d. 1591).76 Thomas Goodrich argues that there were no direct connections of any historical signifĳicance between the Ottoman

74 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1144 [1732]), 154–162.

75 Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi veya Hadis-i Nev (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1142 [1730]), 2b. This work was translated into English by Thomas D. Goodrich and a facsimile of one manuscript was published in Turkish along with a summary of the text. See Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi and Sixteenth-century Ottoman-Americana (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1990); the original was reprinted: Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi veya Hadis-i Nev (Ankara: Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Turkish Republic, 1987).

76 For his biography and works see Cevat İzgi, “Mehmed Suudi Efendi,” Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, 28.



Empire and the New World during the colonial era nor any indications of offfĳicial Ottoman interest beyond the British islands.77 He also argues that, although there were some bits and pieces of information about the Americas before the fĳirst emergence of this book in the 1580s, in Piri Reis’s Kitab-ı Bahriye, Seydi Ali Reis’s al-Muhit, the geography of Tunuslu Ahmet, and the mappa mundi of Ali Macar Reis, Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi was the only major source of Ottoman information about American colonial history and the great maritime powers after the 1580s.78 The main purpose of the work seems to be introducing the New World to the Ottomans by providing information on discoveries and conquests under Spanish aegis based mainly on Italian sources.79 The passages selected for translation describe the history, flora and fauna, salient features, and the people of the newly discovered lands.80 There are also many depictions of animals, flowers, and humans included in the printed edition, most of them seem-ingly products of the imagination which are far from any known reality about the Americas. It is true that after an initial Ottoman interest in the New World in the sixteenth century, it remained limited, at least in intel-lectual terms. The reasons Müteferrika chose this work and not a better text should be sought in the limited availability of works on the Americas, as well as Müteferrika’s genuine interest in the history of the maritime revolution, which we discuss below.

Müteferrika valued the discipline of history above any other fĳield of enquiry. As soon as he started his printing venture he published chroni-cles that were relevant for his time and suited his historical perspective. Müteferrika clearly expressed in his introduction to the history of Naima (1655–1716), the fĳirst court historian who wrote the history of the Ottoman dynasty, that his purpose was to collect and publish the offfĳicial histories of the Ottoman Empire in their totality (“Osmanlı devletine ait vekayiinin bir kül haline getirilmesi”),81 a goal he never realised. He published only Katip Çelebi’s Takvimü’t Tevarih82 and Naima’s history (Ravzatü’l- Hüseyin),83

77 Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks, 7.78 Ibid., 9–16.79 Giancarlo Casale sees this work as an attempt at beginning a new expansionist front

in the Indian Ocean under the leadership of vizier Koca Sinan Pasha. Giancarlo Casale, “Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World,” Journal of World History 18, no. 3 (2007): 285–287.

80 Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks, 17–18.81 Mustafa Naima, Naima Tarihi, ed. Zuhuri Danışman (Istanbul: Zuhuri Danışman

Yayınevi, 1967), 1:25. 82 Kâtip Çelebi, Takvimü’t Tevarih (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1146 [1733]). 83 Naima, Tarih-i Naima.

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along with the histories of the court historians Raşid Efendi (d. 1735) and Küçükçelebizade Asım (1685–1760).84 He also wished to complete the pic-ture with a history of Egypt;85 a regional history centred on Baghdad;86 a history of the collapse in the early eighteenth century of the Ottomans’ long-time rival, the Safavids;87 and a history of the mediæval Turkic con-queror Tamerlane, or Timur.88 Two patterns emerge in Müteferrika’s choices: fĳirst, his choice of Naima instead of another well-known Otto-man history, such as the Tacü’t Tevarih of Sadeddin, suggests that Müt-eferrika shared Naima’s historical perspective, which is dealt with below. Second, he chose works on the rivals of the Ottomans, notably the Safa-vids, Mamluks, Habsburgs, and Timurids, but he attempted to achieve a historiographical balance by utilising external instead of internal sources. Tarih-i Seyyah, the work on the Afghan invasion of Iran and collapse of the Safavids, was written by the Jesuit missionary Judas Thaddaeus Krusinski (1675–1756), who served as the translator and scribe of the Isfa-han episcopate.89 İbrahim was personally involved in the publication of this work: he translated it from Latin, and edited it, correcting numer-ous mistakes.90 It seems Müteferrika took advantage of the interest in the Afghan invasion and the collapse of the Safavids and printed 1,200 copies, the highest number among his publications, of this work at an afffordable price. Although Franz Babinger insists that İbrahim was not profĳicient enough in Latin to translate such a work,91 thirty-six Latin titles identifĳied

84 Mehmed Raşid, Tarih-i Raşid, 3 vols. (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1153 [1741]); Küçükçelebizade İsmail Asım, Tarih-i Çelebizade (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1153 [1741]).

85 Süheyli, Tarih-i Mısr-ı Kadim ve Mısr-ı Cedid (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1142 [1730]). This is also available in manuscript as Süheylî Efendi, Tevārīh-i Mısīr [sic] ul-Kadīm, Süleymaniye Library, MS Fatih 4229.

86 Nazmizade Murtaza bin Ali, Gülşen-i Hulefa (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1143 [1730]).

87 Judas Thaddaeus Krusinski, Tarih-i Seyyah der Beyan-ı Ağnaviyan ve Sebeb-i Inhidam-ı Bina-i Devlet-i Şahan-ı Safaviyan, trans. İbrahim Müteferrika (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1142 [1729]).

88 Ahmed bin Muhammed bin Abdullah İbn-i Arabşah, Tarih-i Timur Gürkan li Nazmizade, trans. Nazmizade Murtaza bin Ali (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1142 [1730]).

89 Babinger, Müteferrika, 20.90 Orlin Sabev argues that this translation was done by Krusinski and not Müteferrika

and he sees it as plagiarism. However, unless we have a clear indication that Krusinski was sufffĳiciently well-versed in Turkish to translate such a work, it is difffĳicult to settle this matter. Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, 191.

91 Babinger, Müteferrika, 21.



in Müteferrika’s probate inventory call his claim into question.92 In his introduction to Usulü’l Hikem, he also points out his familiarity with Latin. Latin was taught in Hungarian schools from at least the mediæval period and it continued to be a signifĳicant asset for those who sought employ-ment in the government, church, or academia.93 Therefore, it is almost certain that İbrahim Müteferrika was well-versed in this language. From his printing activities and from the curriculum that he developed, one can easily recognise that his knowledge of Latin and the classical heritage expanded his horizons.

Müteferrika’s contribution to the history of recent developments did not end with the Tarih-i Seyyah. He also published a gazavatname, or conquest account, by the former Bosnian judge Ömer Efendi entitled Ahval-ı Gazavat-ı der diyar-ı Bosna,94 which dealt with the war between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires over Bosnian territory between 1736 and 1739.95 In this conflict, in which the Ottomans faced Habsburg and Russian forces, the Ottomans won a decisive victory. The treaty of Belgrade was signed in 1739 between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. The Ottomans regained from the Habsburg Empire a number of towns, Belgrade being the most important, which had been lost by the treaty of Passarowitz in 1718.96 Ömer Efendi collected his data from the narratives of eyewitnesses to the war. Müteferrika composed an introduction to the work, in which he notes that he cross-checked Ömer Efendi’s information with the accounts of “honest” people who participated in this war. He also praised the Bosnian people for their courage and obedience. By publishing a gazavatname of a successful campaign, Müteferrika wanted to raise the morale of the Ottoman army and to quench the thirst for information on this very recent war. This book was translated into German in 1789, and

92 Събев: Първото, 396. 93 Hugh F. Graham, “Latin in Hungary,” Classical Journal 63, no. 4 (1968): 163–165. 94 For a discussion on the authenticity, relevance and importance of gazavat for the

Bosnian war, see Michael Robert Hickok, Ottoman Military Administration in Eighteenth-century Bosnia (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 1–10.

95 Ömer Bosnavi, Ahval-ı Gazavat-ı der Diyar-ı Bosna (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1154 [1741]). There are two modern Turkish translations of this work: Ömer Bosnavi, Bosna Tarihi (Tarih-i Bosna der Diyar-i Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa), ed. Kamil Su (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1979); Ömer Efendi, Bosna Savaşları, ed. Mehmet Açıkgözlü (Istanbul: Ötüken, 1977).

96 Münir Aktepe, “Mahmud I,” EI2. In this article the date of the Treaty of Belgrade is miswritten as 1737: it should be 1739.

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into English by Charles Fraser, the translator of Naima, in 1830 under the title History of the War in Bosnia during the Years 1737 to 1738 and 1739.97

The fĳirst step in Müteferrika’s project of publishing offfĳicial Ottoman histories was his edition of the Tarih-i Naima, also known as Ravzat el Hüseyin fĳi hulasat ahbar el Hafĳikeyn, which traces the history of the Otto-mans between 1000 (1591) and 1070 (1659). In this work, before launching into the chronology, Naima summarises his perception of history, which is based on the civilisational theory of the North African historian Ibn Ḫaldūn (1332–1406).98 Giambattista Toderini, who composed a valuable study of the literature of the Turks approximately forty years after İbrahim Müteferrika’s death, asks why İbrahim did not begin his offfĳicial historian project with Sadeddin’s (1536–1599) Tacü‘t Tevarih, which was very beauti-ful in style and organisation; he speculated that İbrahim could not fĳind a reliable version of this history.99 However, Müteferrika’s choice of Naima was deliberate and well thought out, even though all he says with direct reference to his choice is that he published Naima’s history because it is very beautifully written, scarce, and priceless.100 Compared to Saded-din, Naima wrote in simple Turkish, whereas Sadeddin, being the son of a former Persian refugee, preferred composite Ottoman Turkish. Sadeddin represented an age in which writing histories based on Persian models was highly valued. Naima, on the other hand, represented a new wave of historical composition, which prioritised clarity, simplicity, and meaning over style and lavishness. Moreover, Naima was a representative of proto-scientifĳic history-writing, which emphasised the historian’s integrity, mod-

97 Babinger, Müteferrika, 30. 98 Ibn Ḫaldūn is now accepted as the pioneer of sociological study and one of the

few authors in the mediæval period who brought forth a consistent philosophy of his-tory. According to Ibn Ḫaldūn, civilisations achieve full power and prosperity at a certain point, and this goes hand in hand with a dominant culture; however, every civilisation eventually declines and collapses owing to the invasion of barbaric forces of some sort. Gradually, these barbaric people also get used to the benefĳits of civilisation and they also are destroyed by some other force. This cyclical process continues forever. There are usu-ally many signs prior to the collapse of a civilisation, including luxurious and lavish life-styles. This simplifĳied version of Ibn Ḫaldūn’s theory of civilisations was widely accepted by Muslim thinkers after the Middle Ages. See Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophic Foundation of the Science of Culture (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957). Ottoman intellectuals after the sixteenth century especially found Ibn Ḫaldūn’s theory relevant for their own times, which they thought were the age of “decline” and “collapse.” See Cornell Fleischer, “Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism and ʿIbn Khaldunism’ in Sixteenth-century Ottoman Letters,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 18, nos. 3–4 (1983): 199.

99 Toderini, İbrahim Müteferrika Matbaası, 94. 100 Naima, Tarih-i Naima, 1:1b–2a.



eration in evaluating historical events, and source criticism. Müteferrika chose Naima in order to demonstrate the value he attached to Naima’s historical perspective, which was parallel to his own.101 Naima also wrote his history in a time very close to Müteferrika’s own: it therefore seemed more up-to-date to Müteferrika.

In his preface to his edition of the history, Müteferrika demonstrates that he shares Naima’s Ibn Khaldunian views. In addition, Müteferrika diffferentiates between laws based on religion and laws promulgated by a secular state, and he acknowledges that the laws of the Christian Euro-pean powers of his day are based on reason, while the laws of the Muslim states are largely based on the will of God as expressed in the šarīʿa. He praises the Ottomans for their struggle in the name of Islam and asserts that histories are necessary to memorialise the Ottomans’ “glorious past.” The broad appeal of Naima’s history is indicated by the fact that it was translated into English in 1832 and 1836 by Charles Fraser, under the title Annals of the Turkish Empire from 1591 to 1659 of the Christian Era by Naima.102

Müteferrika also published the histories of Raşid and Asım, who con-tinued the history of the Ottoman Empire where Naima left offf. He also intended to publish the histories of Mustafa Sami (d. 1733) and Hüseyin Şakir (d. 1742)—also court historians—but this venture was realised only years after his death, when his press was reopened in 1783/84.103

History was a teacher for many early modern intellectuals, and Müt-eferrika was no exception.104 He published Tarih-i Timur Gürgan by the Arab historian Ibn ʿArabšāh (1392–1450), which was translated into Turk-ish by Nazmizade Murtaza in 1698–99, for this purpose. The original title of this work is ʿAǧāʾib al-maqdūr fĳi nawāʾib Tīmūr. Ibn ʿArabšāh was a con-temporary of Timur (r. 1370–1405), and was among the inhabitants moved from Damascus to Samarkand by Timur in the year 1400/01. Later, he became a confĳidant of Sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–1421) in Edirne and was said to have translated some works for him. He also worked as Mehmed I’s

101 For Naima’s views on history, see L. V. Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed. Norman Itz-kowitz (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 110–119.

102 Babinger, Müteferrika, 29. 103 Mustafa Sami and Hüseyin Şakir, Tevarih-i Sami ve Subhi ve Şakir (Istanbul: Dār-i

Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1783/1784). 104 Intriguingly, a hero of the European “theological Enlightenment,” the German Prot-

estant theologian Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten shared Müteferrika’s views on the uses of history. See David Sorkin, “Reclaiming Theology for the Enlightenment: the Case of Sieg-mund Jacob Baumgarten (1706– 1757),” Central European History 36, no. 4 (2003): 513–523.

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personal correspondent (sır katibi) in composing and translating works from Arabic, Persian, Mongolian, and Turkish.105 Ibn ʿArabšāh’s history was well-known in Europe: it had been published in the original Arabic, with a Latin preface, by Jacobus Golius in Leiden in 1636.106 In his own preface, Müteferrika explains that while Timur, the “haughty and evil,” is an unpleasant topic, it is necessary to be informed about the upheavals of his thirty-six-year reign so as to appreciate the benefĳits of life under Ottoman rule. In this work, Timur is depicted as a cruel tyrant, although some of his other qualities were named at the end.107 This seems to be an important work on Timur because it was composed by one of his con-temporaries who spent quite some time in his capital and was well-versed in all four languages of the region at that time. Therefore, Müteferrika’s choice was well-made. Müteferrika also deserves credit for publishing a book on the early Ottomans’ arch-enemy, who defeated the Ottomans dramatically in the early fĳifteenth century. He certainly wanted to pres-ent history as it was, triumphal or sorrowful. He furthered his interest in the enemies of the Ottomans by publishing a two-volume history of Egypt, whose second volume was dedicated to the conflict in 1516–17 between Selim I and the Mamluk sultan Qānṣūh al-Ghawri. (The fĳirst volume was a standard Islamicised general history of Egypt from Noah’s flood to the emergence of the Circassian Mamluk sultans in 1382.) Tarih-i Mısr-ı Kadim ve Mısr-ı Cedid of Süheyli Efendi,108 who was a scribe attached to the gov-erning council (divan) of Ottoman Egypt in the early seventeenth century, was printed in 1729/30, the same year as Ibn ʿArabšāh’s history of Timur. Müteferrika also published a regional history focusing on Baghdad under the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. Gülşen-i Hulefa was written by Nazmizade Murtaza (d. 1723), a native of Baghdad who was educated there and who served the Ottoman governors in various capacities;109 he also translated the his-tory of Timur mentioned above. İbrahim mentions in his preface to this work that it is a history of Iran, Iraq, Anatolia, Damascus, and Egypt from 127 to 1130 (745–1718).110 At that time, this was the only detailed work on Baghdad under Ottoman control and it included extensive information

105 J. Pedersen, “Ibn ʿArabshāh,” EI2. See also Abdülkadir Yuvalı, “İbn-i Arabşah,” Diya-net İslam Ansiklopedisi, 19:314.

106 Babinger, Müteferrika, 23. 107 Pedersen, “Ibn ʿArabshāh.”108 Şerife Yalçınkaya, “Süheyli, Ahmed,” Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, 38:32–33. 109 For his biography and works see Tahsin Özcan, “Nazmizade Murtaza Efendi,” Diya-

net İslam Ansiklopedisi, 38:461–463. 110 Nazmizade Murtaza, Gülşen-i Hulefa, 4a–4b.



on Ottoman governors who served there. So Müteferrika seems to have chosen a valuable and up-to-date work to publish on this city. His selec-tion of two Nazmizade editions also displays his respect for this scholar, whom he may have met before the latter’s death in 1723. In his choice of history books to publish Müteferrika strived for a broad regional and chronological knowledge and attempted to link the history of the Otto-mans to the histories of earlier Muslim dynasties as well as to their con-temporaries. Although he could not wholly fulfĳil his desire to create a complete history of the Ottomans, he achieved a partial but notable suc-cess in this project.

Mufti Ahmed Efendi urged Müteferrika, in the later stages of his print-ing venture, to publish the second volume of the Cihannüma, which included all the countries in the world and their conditions. Müteferrika demurred, emphasising the expense and time necessary to compile a proper edition of this work. Instead he continued to publish histories that he believed were “useful and virtuous.” As an introduction to his complete Ottoman history project, he published Katip Çelebi’s Takvimü‘t Tevarih, a calendar of important dates from creation until 1648 (1058 AH). This work had already been translated into Italian in 1697 by the translator of the Venetian ambassador to the Porte, Giovanni Rinaldo Conte Carli.111 Other editions in Latin and French followed.112 In editing the book, Mütefer-rika included the additions of Mehmed Efendi (d. 1732), shaykh of the Emir Buhari takka (a Sufĳi lodge), who brought the calendar up to 1731–1732 (1144 AH), then personally added events for 1732 and 1733 (1145 and 1146 AH) thus ending with a complete calendar of world history up to his own time.

In 1731–32, the Müteferrika Press published a book on magnetism, Füyuzat-ı Miknatisiye, which reflects Müteferrika’s passion for new scien-tifĳic developments and his desire to spread them to a wider public.113 In the introduction, Müteferrika notes that he compiled the book himself from Latin sources; in fact, most of the book consists of a translation of an article written in 1721 in Leipzig. The book traces the invention and

111 Babinger, Müteferrika, 29. 112 Gottfried Hagen, “Kātib Çelebi, Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbdullāh, Ḥācī Ḫalīfe (b. 1609; d. 1657),”

in Historians of the Ottoman Empire, ed. C. Kafadar, H. Karateke, and C. Fleischer, online: http://www.ottomanhistorians.com/database/pdf/katibcelebi_en.pdf: 12 (accessed 17 Octo-ber 2012).

113 İbrahim Müteferrika, Füyuzat-ı Miknatisiyye (Istanbul: Dār-i Ṭibāʿa-yi ʿĀmira, 1144 [1732]). For a Latin-alphabet transcription, see Şahap Demirel, “İbrahim Müteferrika’nın Füyuzat-ı Mıknatisiye Adlı Kitabı,” 265–330.

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development of the compass and new fĳindings concerning its use in deter-mining latitude and longitude. By recognising the surprising and strange behaviour of the compass, the individual afffĳirms the miracles of God, according to İbrahim, but it is also a good means of expanding commerce, a good navigational guide, and a tool for education in geography. The press likewise published four diffferent maps (of the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea, Iran, and Egypt) for the purpose of geographical education.114

Müteferrika’s printing venture had a lasting impact on printing in the Muslim world. In 1794–95, when the Mühendishane Press opened in Istanbul, it followed a path similar to that of the Müteferrika Press, publishing titles in geography, military tactics, and engineering.115 But the Mühendishane Press preferred religious works to history. The books that the Müteferrika Press published also gave European intellectuals access to these works for the fĳirst time. As a result, many translations of them were published by European printing houses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These clearly show that Müteferrika was successful in incorporating the Ottoman corpus into the European one. Thus his goal of making these works accessible to a wider readership seems to have been realised. Müteferrika also opened another avenue of innovation in the Ottoman Empire by urging the Ottoman sultan to open a paper mill in the city of Yalova. He began working on this project and brought three skilled workers from Poland for the job.

Müteferrika’s printing venture clearly shows that he worked like an encyclopaedist by critically editing, expanding, and commenting on the works he published.116 He also publicised works that were signifĳicant for him, such as Katip Çelebi’s Cihannüma or Naima’s history. He made these authors’ works accessible and their approaches to geography and history more credible.

114 These maps can be found in Kut and Türe (eds.), Yazmadan Basmaya, 22–29. For further details about these maps, see Vefa Erginbaş, “Forerunner of the Ottoman Enlight-enment: İbrahim Müteferrika and his Intellectual Landscape” (Master’s thesis, Sabanci University, Istanbul, 2005), 39–40.

115 For the books published by the Mühendishane Press, see Kemal Beydilli, Türk Bilim ve Matbaacılık Tarihinde Mühendishane, Mühendishane Matbaası ve Kütüphanesi (1776–1826) (Istanbul: Eren, 1995). For an interpretation of the Müteferrika and Mühendishane presses, see Vefa Erginbaş, “Forerunner,” 40–41.

116 I owe this to Jane Hathaway.



Müteferrika as Part of an Enlightened Elite

It would not be an exaggeration to claim that there was an enlightened circle at the Ottoman court in the fĳirst decades of the eighteenth century. İbrahim Müteferrika was part of this circle, which contributed a great deal to his intellectual upbringing. The most controversial member of this enlightened group was no doubt the grand vizier who presided over the so-called “Tulip Age,” Damad İbrahim Paşa. He was the signatory to the 1718 treaty of Passarowitz, which put an end to warfare between the Ottomans and Habsburgs for two decades. Afterward, İbrahim Paşa and the wealthy elites of the Ottoman capital, in an attempt to strengthen public morale, indulged in the construction of beautiful palaces and kiosks, as well as the urban restructuring of Istanbul. Until he was brought down by the Patrona Halil rebellion, which was led by a disgruntled mercenary offfĳicer, Damad İbrahim attempted to create a cultural florescence in the capital by establishing libraries and forming a translation committee to trans-late major works of classical Islamic scholarship as well as major Euro-pean works.117 Revisionist studies have now established that the Patrona Halil rebellion resulted not from the “fanaticism” of Ottoman society but from a class struggle between the newly emerging commercial bourgeoi-sie and traditional artisans and craftsmen.118 Damad İbrahim supported Müteferrika’s printing venture.

The second influential personality in Müteferrika’s enlightened circle was the progressive şeyhülislam (mufti) Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi, who supported the press with a religious verdict, which Müteferrika included in most of his editions.119

117 See Mehmet İpşirli, “Lale Devrinde Teşkil Edilen Tercüme Heyeti’ne Dair Bazı Gözlemler,” Osmanlı İlmi ve Mesleki Cemiyetleri: 1. Milli Türk Bilim Tarihi Sempozyumu, 3/5 Nisan 1987, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi İslam Konferansı Teşkilatı, İslam Tarih Sanat ve Kültür Araştırma Merkezi, 1987), 33–39.

118 Robert Olson, “The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics?” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974): 329–344. See also Faik Reşit Unat, 1730 Patrona İsyanı Hakkında bir Eser: Abdi Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1943); Münir Aktepe, Patrona İsyanı, 1730 (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1958); Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, Destâri Sâlih tarihi: Patrona Halil Ayaklanması hakkında bir kaynak (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1962).

119 For some of the progressive fetvas of Abdullah Efendi, see Mehmet İpşirli, “Lale Devrinde Yenilikçi Bir Alim: Şeyhülislam Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi,” İstanbul Armağanı (4): Lale Devri, ed. Mustafa Armağan (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlığı Yayınları, 2000): 249–259.

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The role of Said Efendi (the son of Mehmed Efendi mentioned above), a grand vizier in the second half of the eighteenth century, in Mütefer-rika’s venture is obscure. He was given the authority to open a press along with Müteferrika in the original imperial order ( ferman) issued for this purpose by Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1718–1730). However, when Müteferrika’s permission was extended by the new Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754) in 1732, Said Efendi was not mentioned, while Müteferrika was granted sole authority.120 It seems that Said Efendi became preoccupied with other appointments, and did not help Müteferrika as much as expected. How-ever, Said Efendi’s initial investment and initiation make clear that he was one of the enlightened fĳigures in Müteferrika’s circle.

Although Müteferrika took pride in editing most works that he pub-lished, he was assisted in his job by a group of intellectuals. Among those employed in “correction” (tashih), roughly equivalent to copy-editing, by the imperial order which allowed the opening of Müteferrika’s printing press, were the former Salonica judge Mevlana Sahib (Pirizade), also a former şeyhülislam, who translated the fĳirst fĳive chapters of Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Muqaddima into Turkish (the sixth was translated a century later by Ahmed Cevdet Paşa); the former Galata judge Mevlana Esad; the sheikh of the Kasımpaşa Mevlevi lodge, Mevlana Musa; and the former Istanbul judge Mevlana İshak.

Müteferrika’s enlightened circle was not confĳined to his friends among the Ottoman intelligentsia; he also established friendships with foreign ambassadors in Istanbul, such as the French ambassador Villeneuve, with whom he exchanged ideas. He took an interest in the religious men of the non-Muslim communities, such as the Jesuits in Istanbul.121 He worked with Comte de Bonneval,122 known as Humbaracı Ahmet Paşa, to pro-mote an Ottoman-Swedish alliance123 and no doubt exchanged ideas with him about the military organisation of the Ottoman Empire.

Müteferrika’s enlightened circle thus included Muslim as well as non-Muslim bureaucrats, religious dignitaries, scholars, linguists, command-ers, soldiers, and scientists. In this enlightened environment, Müteferrika became the man he was through a syncretic approach: he combined sci-entism with practicality, Islamic thought with rationality, historical imag-

120 Kut, “Matbaa: in Turkey,” EI2. 121 Duverdier, “Savary de Brèves et Ibrahim Müteferrika,” 346–347; idem, “Ilk Türk Basi-

mevinin,” 298.122 Bowen, “Ahmad Pasha Bonneval,” EI2. 123 Berkes, “İbrahim Müteferrika,” EI2.



ination with state transformation. He became an Ottoman man of the Enlightenment in a unique way by striving to disseminate Enlightenment ideas such as scientifĳic thinking, rationality and modern state structure.

Enlightening the Corps through Military Reform: Usulü’l Hikem and Its Influence

Müteferrika’s printing venture literally made his name: he was known in Ottoman society as “printer” (basmacı) İbrahim Efendi. However, Mütefer-rika was not simply a printer; he was involved in every title he published as an editor, translator or continuator/author. The books he published belong as much to İbrahim Müteferrika as they did to their authors. He also composed and printed his own entirely original book, entitled Usulü’l Hikem fĳi Nizamü’l Ümem [Essentials of rule in the order of the nations].124 It was written at the outbreak of the Patrona Halil rebellion, which shook the imperial capital in 1730, resulting in the deposition of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1718–30) and the execution of his grand vizier, Damad İbrahim Paşa. He stated that he wrote this book to present it to the new sultan, Mahmud I (r. 1730–54), and to statesmen in the hope that his advice might be put into practice.125 He printed fĳive hundred copies, clearly aiming to reach out to a wider readership than a small clique in the palace.

The book has many subsections: the fĳirst deals with the importance and benefĳits of order in the army; the second the signifĳicance of the sci-ence of geography; and the third the organisation, rules, and ceremonies of the Christian armies. Usulü’l Hikem, however, is not just another reform treatise. It includes not only proposed solutions to the Ottoman military collapse and keen observations, but also Müteferrika’s political philoso-phy. He expounds on political systems, noting the need of humans for rulers. He argues that some people who are superior to others in power, wealth, and property have a tendency to make their inferiors subservi-ent to their authority and to exploit them. Rulers exist in order to pre-vent conflict arising from this inequality by rendering everyone satisfĳied with his lot.126 Müteferrika’s articulation of this solution clearly derives

124 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem. Unless specifĳied, Usulü’l Hikem in the footnotes refers to the transciption of the text printed in Adil Şen, İbrahim Müteferrika. There is also a simplifĳied version of this work: İbrahim Müteferrika, Milletlerin Düzeninde İlmi Usuller, ed. Ömer Okutan (Istanbul: MEB, 1990).

125 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem, 127. 126 Ibid., 128–130.

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from generations of Islamic political theorists. The similarity of his views to Ibn Ḫaldūn’s is particularly striking. Ottoman intellectuals discovered the work of the North African philosopher-historian Ibn Ḫaldūn in the seventeenth century; his ideas became widespread among the Ottoman intelligentsia thereafter. Müteferrika, like Katip Çelebi and the historian Naima, was one of the intellectuals who internalised Ibn Ḫaldūn’s political framework. One of the peculiar features of humans, who are political by nature, according to Ibn Ḫaldūn, was their “need for restraining influence and strong authority,”127 a concept Müteferrika duly adopted. Elsewhere, I also suggest that there is an overwhelming similarity between the ideas of İbrahim Müteferrika and Thomas Hobbes.128 Like Hobbes, Müteferrika believed that human beings were born into a “state of nature.” In the Hobbesian state of nature, humans are driven to conflict naturally and fĳighting determines who is stronger among them.129 Müteferrika, when he explains the need for rulers in society, highlights the greed in human nature and people’s natural tendency to attack each other. Rulers were not an exception to this rule.130 In the introduction, he also describes the three dominant political regimes in European civilisation: monarchy,

127 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987): 42–43. Ibn Ḫaldūn summarises this as follows: “When mankind has achieved social organization, as we have stated, and when civilization in the world has thus become a fact, people need someone to exercise a restraining influence and keep them apart, for aggressiveness and injustice are in the animal nature of man. The weapons made for the defence of human beings against the aggressiveness of dumb ani-mals do not sufffĳice against the aggressiveness of human beings toward each other because all of them possess these weapons. Thus something else is needed for the defense against the aggressiveness of human beings toward each other. It could not come from outside because all the other animals fall short of human perceptions and inspiration. The per-son who exercises a restraining influence, therefore, must be one of themselves. He must dominate them and have power and authority over them, so that no one of them will be able to attack another.” Ibid., 47.

128 Vefa Erginbaş, “Forerunner.” 129 Hobbes formulates his theory in the following manner: “In the state of nature, there

is in all men a will to do harm, but not for the same reason or with equal culpability . . . But the most frequent cause why men want to hurt each other arises when many want the same thing at the same time, without being able to enjoy it in common or to divide it. The consequence is that it must go to the stronger. But who is the stronger? Fighting must decide . . . Therefore the fĳirst foundation of natural right is that each man protect his life and limbs as much as he can . . . He has also right to use any means and to do any action by which he can preserve himself.” Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25–27.

130 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem, 132.



aristocracy, and democracy, although he seems somewhat confused about the origins of these regimes.131

Although in the eighteenth century Ottoman fortunes were mixed on the battlefĳield, the overall lack of progress was a real concern for many such as Müteferrika. The main theme of his book is the problems of the Ottoman military and how they should be fĳixed. His main quest is to understand the reasons behind European success and Ottoman failure. Müteferrika asserts that the soldiers of the past were dramatically difffer-ent from those of today. He explains how traditional armies, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, worked in the past,132 and adds that today the Otto-man army should be organised along European lines. Although his efffort certainly shows the influence of earlier “advice to princes” literature, as discussed below, he difffers from these advice writers in regarding change as positive, rather than seeking to return the Ottoman Empire to a bygone “perfect order.”133 Earlier critics of the Ottoman decline wholeheartedly believed that by going back to the practices of a bygone “golden age,” be it Mehmed II’s, Selim I’s or Süleyman’s time, the Empire would solve its problems. Müteferrika, in contrast, difffered from them gravely. He argued that change was necessary and time was no longer the cure. He studied in detail the reasons behind the Ottoman military failures against the Hab-sburgs and Russians by reading books in Latin about military organisation, in addition to various histories, and war manuals. He also talked to various experts in military science, Muslim and non-Muslim, in order to be truly informed. His thirst for knowledge made him the Enlightenment man he was: he collected a wide variety of information without considering the “baseness of the ground” (süfliyet-i zemin bahane olunmayub), referring to the origin of some of his information in the work of non-Muslim and even enemy military experts. He deemed the knowledge itself valuable, regard-less of its origin or producer.

131 Ibid., 130–131. In his distinction between these three regimes, he seems to be influ-enced by Katip Çelebi, İrşadü’l Hayara ila tarihü’l Yunan ve’n nasara. Katip Çelebi‘den Seçmeler, ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay (Istanbul: MEB, 1968), 16. Niyazi Berkes claims that İbrahim implied that democracy is superior to all other regimes. Berkes, Türkiyede Çağdaşlaşma, 53. However, I do not see any such implication in this text. On the con-trary, İbrahim describes these three forms of government neutrally. Berkes’s interpretation derives from his grand narrative of Turkish history, which according to him has progressed inexorably toward modernisation/secularism.

132 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem, 134–137.133 Ibid., 125.

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As mentioned earlier, when Müteferrika composed his work, the Pat-rona Halil Rebellion had displaced the old power elite, as well as the sul-tan of the infamous “Tulip Age,” Ahmed III. Müteferrika’s work reflects his anxiety at the anarchy he witnessed when the Patrona rebellion shook the capital. Throughout Usulü’l Hikem, he uses words denoting “order” and “anarchy” or their equivalents in diffferent contexts on more than two hun-dred occasions. He argues that neither the concepts of Plato nor those of Aristotle can solve the problems associated with anarchy; strength, cour-age, and large numbers are useful only if the armies are organised in an orderly fashion. The fĳirst part of his book is devoted to a discussion of tra-ditional warfare based on courage, swordsmanship, and chivalry, and an explanation of why it is no longer sustainable. He notes that the Christian European powers organised their armies according to a new dispensation (tertib-i cedid) and urges the Muslims, by which he means the Ottomans, to be aware of the characteristics of their rivals’ armies.

Müteferrika summarises his solution to the military problem of the Ottomans in the following manner: the fĳirst and foremost requirement in an army is order (“Belki şart-ı azam ve cümleden elzem ve ehemm olan hüsn-i nizam-ı tertib-i pür intizamdır”). Disorder in the army is the ultimate cause of the collapse of the treasury and the devastation of the country. He does not prescribe order in the army only as a solution to the draining of the treasury and devastation of the country: he further implies that the maintenance of orderly armed forces in peacetime is the real solution to the rebellions that cause enormous mischief among the subjects of the empire.

The structure of the Ottoman army drastically changed over the centu-ries. With the dissolution of Ottoman fĳief system and the increasing inef-fectiveness of the Janissaries, creating an Ottoman army in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required unconventional thinking. In the wars that took place in these centuries, the Ottoman army consisted of many contracted soldiers, or local militias (levends) who were recruited from the countryside on a campaign-by-campaign basis; this army, which naturally included many less rigorously trained soldiers, had a diffferent organisa-tion from the army of the earlier centuries of Ottoman rule. Consequently, maintaining order in this type of army was much more challenging than it had ever been before. Müteferrika’s concerns were therefore justifĳied.

It is also clear that Müteferrika’s obsession with the idea of “order,” in the form of a well-organised and disciplined army, amounted to a mod-ern military concept. He had a keen eye on the operation of the Otto-man army and its weaknesses because he himself was part of this military



organisation. Being part of the corps which had a special position in the Ottoman askeri class, İbrahim Müteferrika kept a critical eye on the cam-paigns and the everyday operation of the soldiers. Thanks to his post he was able to develop his scheme to reorder the Ottoman military structure. His observations were indeed critical; even late in the eighteenth century, the Europeans were pointing out the lack of order in the Ottoman army as the biggest problem.134

He also prescribes the creation of a well-organised army as a cure for social anarchy. In keeping with his habit of providing parallel examples from European and world history, he cites the examples of the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire. He gives a short background on each, then argues that both worked exceptionally well until disorder in the military took the better of both and led to the devastation of their subjects. Both were fĳinally dominated by a superior force: Frankish kings in the case of the Romans and the Ottomans in the case of the Byzantines.135 The Otto-mans not only inherited the Byzantine legacy in Constantinople, but they also saw themselves as the true heirs to the Roman Empire. By bringing forth examples closest to the Ottoman mind, Müteferrika attempted to show the Ottomans what would happen if they did not prevent disorder in and the collapse of the army. He was well-read in European history, as he mentions many times throughout the work, though his knowledge was not always accurate. He also refers to many examples from European his-tory, such as the French-Spanish war and Russian expansion. It is evident that in his criticism of the Muslim army, he is referring to the Janissaries, not to a group of imaginary soldiers. He goes on to make specifĳic recom-mendations on how the Ottoman army should be organised, based on his knowledge of European armies, about which he had read from various sources in Latin, and based on his own observations.

It is apparent that what Müteferrika suggests for the Ottoman army is the strict application of the organisation of European armies after the

134 Virginia Aksan points out that creating an orderly army required more than a reform. It required a substantial change in the whole system of governance. In parallel with Aksan’s argument, there is much reason to believe that change in the Ottoman army required a “systemic” change. As early as the sixteenth century, Ottoman reform writers observed many problems in the army and offfered feasible solutions, but they were not put into practice until the nineteenth century. The Ottomans’ problem was not diagnosis; the change required in the army was so systemic that it would bring a complete reversal of the ideals of the Ottoman enterprise. See Virginia Aksan, “Breaking the Spell of the Baron de Tott,” 170.

135 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem, 149–152.

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military revolution. The books that he suggests should be read were those concerning the military revolution in Europe—war manuals and various histories that explain the development of new tactics and formations. He was particularly interested in the role of army offfĳicers and believed that the disorder and the problems in the offfĳicer ranks are the main reason behind the failure of the Ottoman army. He also strongly believed in the benefĳits of a meritocratic organisation of the army, and suggested that this would solve most of the problems between the soldiers and their offfĳicers.

Müteferrika’s Advice to Princes: Enlightening the Empire through State Transformation

İbrahim Müteferrika’s observations on the problems of the Ottoman Empire and their causes, as reflected in his Usulü’l Hikem, are greatly influenced by earlier “mirror for princes,” or “counsel for sultans” (nasi-hatname) literature. For him, the main problems of Ottoman politics derived from the following: (1) incompetence in the application of reli-gious law, (2) ignorance in the practice of justice, (3) lack of discipline in the enforcement of the principles of good governance, (4) the assignment of important tasks to undeserving people, (5) the lack of consultation and disregard for intelligent decisions, (6) failure to put into practice the advice of experienced and sagacious people, (7) the loose organisation of soldiers and ignorance of new military developments, (8) the soldiers’ lack of fear of their offfĳicers and their inclination to take bribes, and (9) worst of all, lack of knowledge of the soldiers’ conditions and the reasons for their laxity.136 These points had already been made by the “decline writ-ers” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Revisionist scholarship on the Ottoman “decline paradigm” points, in many cases, to these observa-tions as reflections of these earlier intellectuals’ frustration with the Otto-man administrative hierarchy and their inability to advance within it.137 Müteferrika did not share these career frustrations; moreover, he offfered diffferent solutions to the problems of the Ottoman political system. In general, he proposed change in the political structure instead of a change in agents or individual offfĳicials. The well-known “decline writers,” such as

136 Ibid., 171. 137 Mustafa Ali’s criticisms are evaluated in this context in Cornell Fleischer, Bureacrat

and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541–1600) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).



Lütfĳi Paşa (1488–1563), Mustafa Ali (1541–1600), Koçi Bey (d. 1654), Katip Çelebi (1609–57), Defterdar Mehmed Paşa (d. 1717), Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi (1600–78), and Naima (1655–1716) concentrated on the qualities of individuals, such as viziers and commanders, or the sultan himself. According to them, if high government posts were allocated to people who were talented and deserving, and if bribery and favouritism were prevented, the problems would be solved. İbrahim Müteferrika, in con-trast, recommended a change in the structure of the state, especially in its military organisation. Unlike Ali or Defterdar Mehmed, he never named names or used actual offfĳicials as examples. Nor did he refer to the past as a golden period that should be revived; instead, he chose to reckon with the present, with its vices and virtues.

Müteferrika agreed with the nasihatname authors that social strati-fĳication was natural and should be preserved. Like his predecessors, he divided society into four classes—men of the sword, men of the pen, men of agriculture, and men of commerce—of which the fĳirst class was most important. By listening to the advice brought forth by the men of the pen, men of the sword should organise and discipline the afffairs of the other two classes. It is especially important to set soldiers and subjects apart from each other; neither should be asked to undertake each other’s responsibilities. Mingling of the classes was a prescription for anarchy, he believed.138 He likewise adopted other ideas from his predecessors: the view that soldiers should be “few but strong” from Lütfĳi Paşa,139 the anony mous (?) author of Kitab-ı Müstetab140 and Koçi Bey;141 the emphasis on spies and awareness of the enemy’s circumstances from Mustafa Ali,142 Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi,143 and Defterdar Mehmed;144 the advocacy of military uniforms, which would make trouble-makers readily identifĳiable,

138 For a comprehensive evaluation of nasihatname writers’ take on the military prob-lems of the Ottoman Empire, see Erginbaş, “Forerunner,” 93–102.

139 For the full text of this treatise, see Lütfĳi Paşa, Asafname, ed. Ahmet Uğur (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1982).

140 Kitab-ı Müstetab, ed. Yaşar Yücel (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1974), 5–9.

141 Koçi Bey, Koçi Bey Risalesi, ed. Ali Kemal Aksüt (Istanbul, 1939), 51. 142 Mustafa Ali, Naṣīḥat al-salāṭīn = Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s Counsel for sultans of 1581, ed. and

trans. Andreas Tietze (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1982), 2:9–19.

143 Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi, Telhisü’l Beyan. 144 Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa, Ottoman Statecraft. The Book of Counsel for Vezirs and

Governors, Nasaihü’l vüzera ve’l ümera of Sarı Mehmed Pasha, the Defterdar, ed. Walter Livingston Wright (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), 121.

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from the author of the Kitab-i Mesalih.145 More than a century and half earlier, Hasan Kâfĳi Akhisari had emphasised the importance of using the new military technology of the Christian European powers and pointed out the ramifĳications of disorder in the army. In fact, Müteferrika took the title of his book from him and extensively used the ideas contained in Akhisari’s Usulü’l Hikem fĳi Nizamü’l Alem.146

Enlightening the People through Social Critique

One of the distinguishing features of İbrahim Müteferrika’s writing is his intelligent employment of political language. He developed a critique of Ottoman society. In his quest for the reasons for military and political failure in the Islamic world, he points out the impact of the maritime revolution. Locked and disabled in the Mediterranean because of the rising power of the Ottomans, the Portuguese and the Spanish crowns looked for ways to go around the tip of Africa and ultimately to reach India without paying customs or fees to the Muslims on the way. For this purpose, they invested in new maritime technologies, such as new and durable ships, advanced compasses and astrolabes, and they sponsored voyages in the Atlantic. Their effforts proved fruitful, and by the mid-sixteenth century, they were able to reach the riches of the New World (Americas) by organising transatlantic expeditions. The Ottomans did not compete with the European expeditions because they were content with what they had in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean and focused on those. İbrahim Müteferrika, being aware of the impact of this revolution, attributes European military success against Muslims to two major fac-tors: the European discovery of the New World and the fanaticism of the Muslims. The fĳirst factor was discussed extensively in the Ottoman intel-lectual circles in the seventeenth century; Katip Çelebi was one of those intellectuals who wrote on this. İbrahim Müteferrika, however, brought a fresh perspective to an age-old problem. He claimed that Muslims neglected learning about European Christian societies because of their

145 Kitab-ı masalih ül-Müslimin ve menafĳi ül-müminin, ed. Yaşar Yücel (Ankara: DTCF, 1980), 93.

146 For Hasan Kafĳi’s text, see Mehmet İpşirli, “Hasan Kâfĳi El-Akhisari ve Devlet Düze-nine ait Eseri Usulü’l Hikem fĳi Nizami’l Alem,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi 10–11 (1979), 239–278. Müteferrika also adopted Hasan Kafĳi’s organisation and framework. For the close connection between Müteferrika and Kafĳi, see Erginbaş, “Forerunner,” 103–105.



fanatical hatred of Christians. Instead, they should have become familiar with European state organisation and laws, to which he provided indica-tions in his Usulü’l Hikem. Müteferrika’s complaints suggest that, as early as the 1700s, Muslim intellectuals were engaged in self-critique and were aware of the “rise of the West.” His favourite role model was the principal-ity of Muscovy, which was weak when it fĳirst won independence from the Mongols in the fĳifteenth century, but progressed remarkably in a short period of time because it adopted new military technologies. The Russian tsars (Peter the Great specifĳically, whose career Müteferrika must have been following) made great strides, especially in the navy, by adopting new shipbuilding technologies and scouting and hiring British and Dutch engineers. This led to their domination fĳirst of the Baltic Sea and then to their complete control of the Caspian.147

The historian Lewis Thomas argues that the Ottomans’ major difffĳiculty at this time was not that they did not have ideas on how to fĳix the prob-lems of the state, but that they “failed to pay the indispensable minimum attention to the ‘heathen.’”148 Evidence, however, belies Thomas’s claim: beginning with Katip Çelebi in the middle seventeenth century and con-tinuing with fĳigures such as Ebubekir Dimaşki and İbrahim Müteferrika, there developed among the Ottoman intellectuals a current which defended the idea that one should intensively study the European states and their conditions, and which found this crucial for the stability of the Ottoman Empire. İbrahim criticises the Muslim community for their fanaticism (taassup), though it is not really clear if he means religious fanaticism specifĳically. He accepts the fact that events happen according to God’s will, but only if people pay due attention to immediate causes. His solution to this fanaticism is to increase knowledge and awareness among the Muslim community.

Reason and rationality were key terms in understanding the Europeans, according to Müteferrika. Also, since the Hebrew Bible and the New Tes-tament, in contrast to the Qurʾān, do not contain specifĳic rules for social organisation, he argues, the non-Muslims had to base their civilisation on rational principles instead of religious ones. They do not fĳight for a transcendent cause in the war, but for worldly gains and pleasures. Mus-lims, on the other hand, have a clear and detailed religious law. They are commissioned by God to fĳight for the cause of religion, and rewards await

147 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem, 189–190. 148 Thomas, Study of Naima, 82.

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them in this world and hereafter. He argues that by creation Muslims are naturally steadfast, courageous, and agile, whereas unbelievers are fear-ful and weak; they are heavily armoured because of the fear of death.149 Müteferrika fĳinds religious law sufffĳicient for the daily lives of Muslims but his interpretation opens a door for innovation: he implies that if certain things are not specifĳied in the religious law, then Muslims should seek rational solutions. This is why he fĳits well within the concept of moderate/conservative Enlightenment. He continues to respect tradition and reli-gious views, but he also argues that fanaticism was getting the better of Muslims by pushing them into the depths of ignorance. By using reason and knowledge, they could understand the cures for their problems and thrive against their rivals.

The Case for an Ottoman Enlightenment

In recent decades, studies on the Enlightenment in diffferent European contexts have opened new horizons for the conceptualisation of intel-lectual activity in this important period. The common theme, although not unchallenged, in these studies has been the importance of framing the Enlightenment in diffferent national/thematic contexts. The study of the Enlightenment in local frameworks has allowed historians to extend the concept of the Enlightenment to the entire European conti-nent, thus enabling historians to conceive of multiple Enlightenments. As a result, “Enlightenment” no longer refers solely to the intellectual activities of the French philosophes of the eighteenth century. Under-standing the Enlightenment in a wider European context allows compari-sons among diffferent national trends in eighteenth-century thought and demonstrates the difffusion of ideas on a wider scale. This new approach to the Enlightenment takes the emphasis offf the elites and establishes that the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was a wider intellec-tual phenomenon than the productions of the French philosophers. In the mid-twentieth century Peter Gay identifĳied anti-clerical/anti-religious aspects of Enlightenment thinkers as a unifying factor among them. How-ever, revisionist scholarship challenged his ideas and argued that there were at least two currents of Enlightenment thought: one was radical and one was moderate/mainstream. Moderate Enlightenment fĳigures were not always anti-religious, although they could be anti-clerical or anti-Christian.

149 İbrahim Müteferrika, Usulü’l Hikem, 164–165.



Some among them even held strong religious beliefs. Studies by David Sorkin and others display the importance of religious thinkers and reli-gion in the making of Enlightenment thought.

In an efffort to extend the sphere of the Enlightenment to the Islamic world, this article has attempted to analyse one of the enlightened think-ers of the Ottoman eighteenth century. By analysing İbrahim Müteferri-ka’s printing venture, his opinions on Ottoman military organisation, and his critical take on the Ottoman society of his time, I have tried to make a case for the Enlightenment in the Ottoman context. I argue that this developed according to a “middle way.” The Ottoman intellectuals tried to incorporate ideas similar to those espoused by the Enlightenment fĳigures in Europe, but in a peculiar way: they brought these progressive ideas into a society where religion was still the dominant force, and thus they adapted these ideas to be successful in this society. I argue that the seeds of Enlightenment thought circulated in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire and were propounded by members of the intelligentsia, such as İbrahim Müteferrika, who hoped to disseminate these ideas to a wider readership. The ideas defended by Müteferrika were scientism, seeking the causes of events and rational solutions to problems which were not specifĳied in religious law, a positive attitude toward change and renewal, and the dissemination of knowledge, especially humanistic and scientifĳic knowledge, through printing. These ideas made İbrahim Müteferrika a man of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman context. His activities as a printer, publisher, scientist, and intellectual confĳirm his adherence to these ideas, which he promoted in an environment where he was surrounded by an enlightened elite. Although the Ottoman Enlightenment did not fully resemble its European counterparts, we can still see the seeds of enlight-ened thought in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. If there was an Ottoman Enlightenment, İbrahim Müteferrika was unquestionably one of its founding fathers.

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Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: İbrahim Muteferrika and his Intellectual Landscape

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