The subject of this double-volume publication is an inventory of the holdings of the Topkapı Palace book treasury in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502–3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503–4). Preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára Keleti Gyűjtemény, MS Török F. 59), it was introduced to scholarship by İsmail Erünsal in articles that announced his auspicious discovery of this invaluable primary source.1 Erünsal focused only on the prefatory folios of the inventory, which precede its catalogue of book titles, and on the librarian’s entries on Turkish literature. He expressed the hope that future studies would take up the task of scrutinizing this unique manuscript in greater detail:
“[A]s a list of Sultan Bayezid II’s Palace library it can offer us much useful information not only on literary and scientific tastes of the Ottoman rulers but also on the subsequent movement of books which were relocated from the Palace library to other libraries. It will also allow us to confirm the existence of certain books which are no longer extant. It is hoped that further articles will deal with these aspects of this important catalogue.”2
Our collective study seeks to fulfill his hope, while at the same time inspiring further research.
Without reference to Erünsal’s previous articles, another preliminary study on MS Török F. 59 was published in 2003 by Miklós Maróth, who discussed only its “history books and related historical topics.”3 We would like to express regret that neither of these pioneering scholars accepted our invitation to participate in this collaborative publication. In 2004, with the precious help of András Riedlmayer, a microfilm of the 365-page manuscript of MS Török F. 59 was obtained from Hungary to be consulted by Gülru Necipoğlu while preparing her keynote lecture for an exhibition-related conference on “Bellini and the East.” Published, with a delay, in 2012, her study briefly analyzed some books in Bayezid II’s palace library inventory that were collected by his father Mehmed II.4
Realizing that MS Török F. 59 deserved a detailed study of its own, Gülru Necipoğlu and Cemal Kafadar decided to co-edit it as part of an interdisciplinary group project that would be published under the auspices of the Harvard University Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. In 2010 permission was obtained to publish this primary source in Supplements to Muqarnas, a series largely dedicated to sourcebooks on the cultural and artistic history of the Islamic lands. Simultaneously and independently, Cornell Fleischer had begun an informal project to work through the same document with students and colleagues. Hence, it was decided to join forces and pursue this undertaking as a Harvard University and University of Chicago collaborative project, carried out mostly by contributors affiliated with these two institutions or closely associated with the same academic circles.
The important task of transliterating and preparing an edition of the Arabic manuscript, which also features an Ottoman Turkish preface, was undertaken by another Harvard University colleague, Himmet Taşkömür, in cooperation with Hesna Ergun Taşkömür. Their transliteration of the document is published in the second volume, together with a reduced-scale facsimile; these are accompanied in the first volume by essays and a critical apparatus consisting of annotated lists of entries, authored by a team of scholars from diverse disciplines. The published essays are expanded versions of papers presented by invited scholars in a three-day interdisciplinary workshop convened April 4–6, 2014 at Harvard University.
Following introductory observations on the work as a whole by the editors, the workshop lectures were organized according to the subject categories under which the books are catalogued in MS Török F. 59, echoing the exact sequence of the library inventory itself, as if participants were reading the document together as a group. We asked the participants to evaluate the contents of the inventory in specific disciplines, appraising what was collected in the Ottoman palace library as well as commenting on what was omitted. The primary focus of the workshop, then, was an assessment of Ottoman intellectual and book culture from the viewpoint of the royal palace library collection as it existed at the turn of the sixteenth century, exactly fifty years after the conquest of Constantinople and, presumably, the creation of the palace library. The first group of lectures departed from this norm as the sole art historical talks, which attempted to contextualize and interpret the wider artistic and cultural ramifications of the document.
With a few modifications, the same format has been adopted in the present publication. The first volume begins with a section titled “Overview and Significance of the Palace Library Inventory,” comprising more extensive essays by the three editors that interpret and contextualize the inventory as a whole. The second section, “The Palace Library as a Collection and the Book Arts,” features essays discussing the contents and aesthetic dimensions of the book collection. The essays in the last section on “Book Titles and Their Disciplines in the Palace Library Inventory” closely conform to the order of the workshop presentations, but each is accompanied by a list of entries identifying the book titles cited in the inventory within specific disciplines. The volume ends with appendices on “Some Identified Manuscripts Stamped with Bayezid II’s Seal” (Appendices I–III) and “English Translations of the Librarian ʿAtufi’s Ottoman Turkish and Arabic Prefaces to the Palace Library Inventory” (Appendices IV–V). The color plates that accompany Appendix III illustrate selected pages and bindings from some manuscript copies of works listed in ʿAtufi’s inventory that survive at the Topkapı Palace Museum Library.
The first volume of this publication includes additional essays not presented in the workshop itself, by the three editors and by Noah Gardiner, Christopher Markiewicz, Judith Pfeiffer, Jamil Ragep (with the McGill Astral Science Team: Sally Ragep, Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan, Fateme Savadi, Hasan Umut), and Aleksandar Shopov. Unfortunately, two invited speakers were unable to contribute to this publication. One of them was Snježana Buzov who, due to health problems, could neither attend the workshop nor send us her planned paper on “Books of Prayers and the Science of Talismans.” Guy Burak kindly accepted our request to write an essay evaluating that section of the library inventory. Shahab Ahmed, who delivered a superb paper in the workshop, titled “Books on Interpretations of the Qurʾan and the Science of Qurʾanic Recitation,” tragically passed away in the meantime. It is especially meaningful that one of his esteemed graduate students at Harvard, Mohsen Goudarzi, agreed to cover this subject with an essay written in grateful memory of his mentor. We would like to use this opportunity to express how deeply we mourn the demise of our dear colleague, a major loss to scholarship on Islamic Studies.
The preparation of this two-volume publication required a prolonged period of gestation. We editors would like to extend thanks to all the authors who participated in our collective enterprise with patience and enthusiasm. Without their learned contributions this interdisciplinary project could not possibly have been realized. In editing their individual contributions to volume one, we decided not to impose a unified transliteration system, given the multiplicity of languages involved (Arabic, Persian, Turkish/Turkic) and the personal preferences of authors. Authors were afforded some degree of flexibility in transliterating and translating the book titles in their essays, and in their organization of accompanying lists of entries. In the essays and lists of entries, cross references to book titles cited in MS Török F. 59 are specified with page and line numbers (e.g., 3 {4–5}, referring to page 3, lines 4 and 5). Some overlaps in content were inevitable, and desirable as well. Rather than aiming at standardized uniformity throughout volume one, then, we aimed at consistency within each author’s contribution, treated as an autonomous piece (following the Muqarnas article style). Standardized principles observed in transliterating MS Török F. 59 have been explained at the beginning of volume two, which contains the transliteration and facsimile in reduced scale.
Our special thanks go to Kinga Dévényi, former Keeper of the Oriental Collection Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who granted us permission to publish this document and provided its high-resolution digital scan for the facsimile edition. We also thank Peri Bearman, who helped standardize and proofread the transliteration of MS Török F. 59, as well as checking the internal coherence of lists of entries appended to essays in volume one. We are particularly grateful to Maria Metzler, our copy editor, and to Damla Özakay and András Riedlmayer, who provided editorial assistance in checking endnotes and transliterations. Gürzat Kami translated Appendices I and II from Turkish into English, along with transliterating the book titles cited therein, which were subsequently edited by the editors. Manuscript references added to Appendix I later in the process were transliterated by Eda Özel, to whom we are also indebted for many other forms of kind assistance, including proofreading the appendices and the lists of entries appended to essays, after Peri Bearman’s preliminary suggestions to authors for internal consistency. Finally, we extend our appreciation to the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the History of Art and Architecture Department of Harvard University for sponsorship of both the 2014 workshop and the present publication.5
Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University
Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University
Cornell Fleischer, University of Chicago
NOTES
1. İsmail E. Erünsal, “959/1552 Tarihli Defter-i Kütüb,” Erdem 4, no. 10 (1988): 181–93; and his following publications: “The Catalogue of Bayezid II’s Palace Library,” İstanbul Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi Kütüphanecilik Dergisi 3 (1992): 5–66; “A Brief Survey of the Development of Turkish Library Catalogues,” in M. Uğur Derman Festschrift, ed. İrvin Cemil Schick (Istanbul, 2000), 271–83. In his monograph on Ottoman libraries, İsmail E. Erünsal updated his previous observations on MS Török F. 59: Osmanlı Vakıf Kütüphaneleri (Ankara, 2008), esp. 94, 117, 128, 460–65, 650–58. See also his article published in the same year: “Türk Edebiyatı Tarihinin Arşiv Kaynakları 6: 909/1503 Tarihli Defter-i Kütüb,” Journal of Turkish Studies: In Memoriam Şinasi Tekin = Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları: Şinasi Tekin Armağanı 3/32 sayı 1 (2008): 213–19; and “909/1503 Tarihli Defter-i Kütüb,” in Türk Edebiyatı Tarihinin Arşiv Kaynakları (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 251–69. A revised and expanded version of this article appeared in a recent volume of his collected essays, “909/1503 Tarihli Saray Kütüphanesi Kataloğu ve Türk Edebiyatı Tarihine Kaynak Olarak Önemi,” in Edebiyat Tarihi Yazıları: Arşiv Kayıtları, Yazma Eserler, ve Kayıp Metinler (Istanbul, 2016), 257–83.
2. Erünsal, “The Catalogue of Bayezid II’s Palace Library,” 59.
3. Miklós Maróth, “The Library of Sultan Bayazit II,” in Irano-Turkic Cultural Contact in the 11th–17th Centuries, ed. Éva M. Jeremiás (Piliscsaba, Hungary, 2003), 113–32.
4. Versions of Necipoğlu’s lecture were delivered at two international conferences, one in Boston and the other in London, in conjunction with the traveling exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the National Gallery; exhibition catalogue: Caroline Campbell, Alan Chong, et al., Bellini and the East (Boston and London, 2005). Due to the postponed publication of the joint conference proceedings, Gülru Necipoğlu opted to publish her article (submitted in 2007) with new bibliographic references as “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constantinople” in Muqarnas 29 (2012): 1–81.
5. Many thanks go to the program administrator Cecily Pollard for her invaluable help in organizing the meeting. We are also grateful to the former administrator of the Harvard History of Art and Architecture Department, Deanna Dalrymple, for her administrative support, and to our research assistant Zeynep Oğuz who was present throughout the workshop to assist anyone who needed help.