Gülru Necipo?lu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, eds. Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. by Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer Konrad Hirschler Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, eds. Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Vol 1: xiv+1080 pp. Vol. 2: viii+242 pp. 181 pp. facs. pls. Cloth, $164. ISBN: 978-9004402485. In the early sixteenth century, Sultan Bayezid II ordered al-ʿAtufi, the librarian of his book collection in the Topkapı Palace’s treasury, to prepare an inventory. The resulting register lists over 7,000 titles, and it is the only large-scale inventory of an Ottoman palace library that we possess today. The importance of this inventory, especially for the fields of the history of ideas and library studies, has been known for a long time. It is preserved in Budapest (we do not know how it came to be there) and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall probably already saw it in the early nineteenth century. It comes as no surprise that the great doyen of Ottoman library studies, İsmail Erünsal, introduced it to modern scholarship. Yet, apart from an article by Miklós Maróth in 2003 it has failed to elicit sustained interest. After years of preparation we now have the book that finally gives the inventory its rightful place. Together with more than twenty colleagues, Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell Fleischer have worked for years to bring this collaborative project to fruition. The result is, to cut a long story short, a wonderful book that is a must-read for anyone interested in Ottoman studies or the history of ideas or libraries. The massive first volume of more than 1,000 pages consists of a series of essays on various aspects of the inventory, the library and its contents. The second volume has the facsimile and transliteration of this “Book of the Books” as the librarian called his inventory. Quite appropriately, this book on the “Book of the Books” is a work of beautiful craftsmanship with numerous high-quality illustrations of individual manuscripts that once sat on the shelves of the library of Bayezid II. [End Page 244] The first volume starts with a series of six essays of a general nature prior to twenty-two essays that discuss specific thematic sections of the inventory. Gülru Necipoğlu starts the general section with a formidably wide-ranging essay that opens up numerous fascinating angles to analyze this inventory. Making transregional comparisons and drawing on codicological evidence as well as her intimate knowledge of the palace’s history, Necipoğlu argues that this library was not just a storehouse and has to be seen as an active place of intellectual engagement. The library’s astonishingly diverse holdings reflect an imperial cosmopolitanism that was encyclopaedic in scope before cultural exchanges with the East diminished and before the process of Ottomanization set in under Sultan Süleyman I. The dominance of post-Mongol manuscripts from the eastern Islamic lands mirrors interconnected regional and transregional courtly-scholarly networks that were to diminish in the subsequent decades. She also shows that the inventory was used to record subsequent acquisitions but that the pristine condition of the inventory means that further documents must have been kept to register movements of books such as loans. Cemal Kafadar uses the inventory to build a much wider argument in order to restore a more complex and fine-grained image of Beyazid II. He does so by following the prince’s career from Amasya, the leading cultural and political center of Bilad al-Rum, to the throne. The inventory appears here as a post-expansion project after the sultan had cut his teeth and now turned to the order of the realm where education clearly featured highly. Kafadar devotes a second section to ʿAtufi and his organizational practices in the catalogue, showing the care that went into it and the problems the librarian faced when dealing, for instance, with multiple-text and composite manuscripts. An appendix backs up this section and discusses individual manuscripts...