CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Kapusuz, Muberra |
|---|---|
| Title | A Study on Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî's Mirror of the Worlds (Mir’atü’l-Avalim): Patronage, Politics, and Millennial Anxieties at the Court of Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1596) |
| Summary | This thesis is a historical study on Mir'â tü’ l-Avâlim (The Mirror of the Worlds), an often-overlooked treatise written in 1587 by the famous Ottoman historian and bureaucrat, Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali. The Mirror was commissioned during the reign of Sultan Murad III (r. 1574-95) by Governor-General Doğancı Mehmed Pasha, who was the sultan’s chief royal favorite and power-broker between 1584-1589. It is my contention that the Mirror sheds light on the patterns of royal patronage as well as new dynamics in court politics during the sultanate of Murad III. I further argue that the content of the Mirror explicates the late sixteenth-century apocalyptic expectations at the Ottoman imperial court and capital in relation to the impending first Islamic Millennium in the year 1000 AH (1591-1592 CE). Accordingly, through a historical contextual and context analysis of the Mirror, I aim to demonstrate how some literary works produced under royal patronage at this particular moment in Ottoman/Islamic history served as instruments of political fashioning for the Ottoman sultan’s messianic/millennial image, which had been a salient feature of premodern Ottoman kingship since the late fifteenth century. |
| Supervisor | Börekçi, Günhan; Krstić, Tijana (second reader) |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/kapusuz_muberra.pdf |
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