Treasures of Knowledge - an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library 1502/3-1503/4: Essays + Transliteration and Facsimile, Register of Books Kitab Al-kutub

The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace 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). This unicum inventory preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára Keleti Gyűjtemény, MS Török F. 59) records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles, on virtually every branch of human erudition at the time. The Ottoman palace library housed an unmatched encyclopedic collection of learning and literature; hence, the publication of this unique inventory opens a larger conversation about Ottoman and Islamic intellectual/cultural history. The very creation of such a systematically ordered inventory of books raises broad questions about knowledge production and practices of collecting, readership, librarianship, and the arts of the book at the dawn of the sixteenth century.
The first volume contains twenty-eight interpretative essays on this fascinating document, authored by a team of scholars from diverse disciplines, including Islamic and Ottoman history, history of science, arts of the book and codicology, agriculture, medicine, astrology, astronomy, occultism, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, mysticism, political thought, ethics, literature (Arabic, Persian, Turkish/Turkic), philology, and epistolary. Following the first three essays by the editors on implications of the library inventory as a whole, the other essays focus on particular fields of knowledge under which books are catalogued in MS Török F. 59, each accompanied by annotated lists of entries. The second volume presents a transliteration of the Arabic manuscript, which also features an Ottoman Turkish preface on method, together with a reduced-scale facsimile.

Gülru Necipoğlu (PhD, Harvard University, 1986) is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University. Her books include Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1991), The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (1995), and The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (2005). She recently edited The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures (2017) and A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series (co-editor F. Barry Flood, 2017).
Cemal Kafadar (PhD, McGill University, 1987) is Professor of History and the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies in the History Department at Harvard University. Among his publications are Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (1995); a volume of essays on four “ordinary lives” and on autobiographical writing (in Turkish, 2011); and “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007) (expanded version published as a book in Turkish, 2018). He has also edited (with Halil Inalcik) Süleyman the Second and His Time (1995). His 2014 article on “the history of coffee and the nighttime” is the subject of a current book project.
Cornell H. Fleischer (PhD, Princeton University, 1982) is the Kanuni Süleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies in the departments of History and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A 1988–93 MacArthur Fellow, he is the author, among other publications, of Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali(1986); “The Lawgiver as Messiah,” in Soliman le magnifique et son temps (1992); “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences,” in Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009); and “A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” JESHO 61 (2018). He also supervised post–Dayton Accord elections in the former Yugoslavia, 1996–98.