Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
İNTERPRETATİONS OF HİSTORY, New York, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 08 Aralık 2000, ss.1-42
Abstract
Ottoman authors expressed their views on Ottoman conditions in various ways. One of the common critical views of Ottoman conditions that they were produced was in the form of Nasihatname (mirror for princes) writing. The most known Nasihatnames are written from sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As a literary genre, Nasihatnames have a unique form of approaching the Ottoman conditions. They view the Ottoman polity as a system of whole (nizam) and orderliness and presents their criticism as elements that are harmful to such system. As such, Nasihatnames are a significant source for contemporary historians to analyze the Ottoman intellectual world, specifically political thought. Modern authors studied Nasihatnames at various capacities. In this article I will discuss textual representation of the reaya in a dozen of known Nasihatnames from 1554 to 1715. Reaya is the term used in Ottoman literature to correspond the tax-paying subject of Ottoman State. The term includes peasant and various kinds of craftsmen, merchants and professional businesses. However, we can roughly describe the Ottoman reaya as peasant. Although nasihatnames or mirror for princes literature is used among Ottoman historians as a historical source to understand Ottoman state and society, to my knowledge, Ottoman historians did not study representation of the reaya in nasihatnames as a specific subject. The study will answer the question of change in reaya representation within the frame of textual constructions of mirror writings. Paper will analyze eight nasihatnames, which are written during 1550s-1720s. At textual level, the paper will show that the representation of reaya in nasihatnames changed over the time, and in fact gained more place in later nasihatnames than the earlier ones which shows a partisan view of the authors of nasihatnames.