The Seljuks of Anatolia: their history and culture according to local Muslim sources PDF
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The Seljuks of Anatolia : Their History and title: Culture According to Local Muslim Sources author: Köprülü, Mehmet Fuat.; Leiser, Gary publisher: University of Utah Press isbn10 | asin: 0874804035 print isbn13: 9780874804034 ebook isbn13: 9780585106823 language: English Seljuks--Turkey--History--Sources, Turkey- subject -History--To 1453--Sources. publication date: 1992 lcc: DS27.K5813 1992eb ddc: 956.1/014 Seljuks--Turkey--History--Sources, Turkey- subject: -History--To 1453--Sources. Page iii The Seljuks of Anatolia Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources by Mehmed Fuad Köprülü Translated and Edited by Gary Leiser University of Utah Press Salt Lake City Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. Copyright © 1992 University of Utah All rights reserved This symbol indicates books printed on paper that meets the minimum requirements ot American National Standard for Information ServicesPermanence of Paper Library Materials, ANSI A39.38-1984. Cover: A silver dirham struck by the last independent Seljuk sultan of Anatolia, Ghiyath al-Din Kai-Khusraw II (634-44/1237-45 or 1246). The inscription reads: al-Imam al-Mustansir bi'llah Amir al Mu'minin (the Abbasid caliph at that time). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN- PUBLICATION DATA Köprülü, Mehmed Fuat, 1890-1966. [Anadolu Selçuklulari tarihi'nin yerli kaynaklari. English] The Seljuks of Anatolia : their history and culture according to local Muslim sources / by Mehmed Fuad Köprülü ; translated and edited by Gary Leiser. p. cm. "Translation and edition of . . . Anadolu Selçuklulari tarihi'nin yerli kaynaklari, . . . originally published in Belleten 7 (1943)"Pref. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87480-403-5 I. SeljuksTurkeyHistorySources. 2. TurkeyHistoryTo 1453Sources. I. Leiser, Gary, 1946- . II. Title. DS27.K5813 1992 956.1'014dc20 92-53611 CIP Page v This Translation is Dedicated to Anne and Terry Page vii Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xii 1. The Importance of Local Sources; Published Local 1 Sources 2. Unpublished Sources 5 3. Chronicles 9 4. Lost Chronicles 15 5. Diplomatic Sources 23 6. Other Literary Sources 31 Notes 65 Bibliography 89 Index 99 Page ix Preface I present here a translation and edition of a long article in Turkish by Mehmed Fuad Köprülü entitled "Anadolu Selçuklulari tarihi'nin yerli kaynaklari" [Local sources for the history of the Seljuks of Anatolia], which was originally published in Belleten 7 (1943), 379-458. This article was intended to be the introduction to a series of studies in which Köprülü planned to describe, one by one, the most important surviving local sources for the history of the Seljuks of Anatolia. The only such study to appear, however, was an appendix to this article in Belleten (pp. 459-519) on Qadi Burhan al- Din al-Anawi's Anis al-qulub. There Köprülü described the life of the author and the manuscript of his work and its historical value, then presented an edition of the Persian text. In the course of the introduction translated here, Köprülü frequently promised future publications on various subjects in addition to those in the series, but they too never appeared. All these works remained unfinished chiefly because Köprülü's attention was drawn to other pursuits. After 1940, he devoted most of his scholarly energy to publishing the Islâm* Ansiklopedisi and, at the same time, he became increasingly involved in Turkish politics. Indeed, by 1950, when he helped found the Democratic Party, his major interests had shifted completely from scholarship to politics. This introduction was one of his last substantial publications before his death in 1966 at the age of seventy- six.1 Köprülü was the most dynamic Turkish intellectual of this century. His prolific and scholarly writings on the study of Turkish literature and history had a profound influence on the development of these disciplines in Turkey and rapidly earned him an international reputation. Nearly all Page x of his publications were in Turkish, so his reputation was limited essentially to specialists in Turkish literature and history. The latter were primarily Ottomanists rather than medievalists (i.e., historians of medieval Islam), who were not particularly interested in his work on pre-Ottoman Turkish history. Thus, most of his work on this period has never reached a non-Turkish audience. Medieval Islamicists generally included pre-Ottoman Turkish history in their purview, but because virtually none of the sources for this history were in Turkish they believed they had no compelling need to learn that language. Even today, despite the growing body of work produced by Turkish specialists on pre-Ottoman Turkish history, very few of these medievalists bother to learn Turkish and are therefore mostly oblivious to scholarship in Turkey. As a result, there are both actual and potential shortcomings in some of their works. To study the history of the Seljuks, for example, without being able to read modern Turkish is somewhat like studying the history of medieval North Africa without being able to read French. It is with this problem in mind that I have undertaken the translation of several contemporary works of Turkish scholarship on the Seljuks, especially the Seljuks of Anatolia. 2 I hope on the one hand to encourage at least a few non-Turkish medievalists to take greater account of the work of their Turkish colleagues and, on the other, to make some significant Turkish scholarship available for wider criticism. The work translated here represents a kind of watershed in the modern historical study of the Seljuks of Anatolia. It was the first, and so far only, attempt to assess the "state of the art" and the first attempt to define, categorize, and analyze the local Muslim sources for the history of this dynasty. After almost half a century, it is still the starting point for research on this subject. Naturally, Köprülü's study has begun to show its age somewhat. It has been superseded in a few respects and I have therefore tried to bring it up to date, adding to the author's already extensive notes. Köprülü also published an earlier study, never completed, that supplements this one to a considerable degree: "Anadolu'da islamiyet: Türk istilasindan* sonra Anadolu tarih-i dinisine bir nazar ve bu tarihin menbalari*" [Islam in Anatolia: A review of the religious history of Anatolia after the Turkish invasion and the sources for this history] in Darülfünün Edebiyat Fakültesi Mecmuasi* 2 (1922). Still in ''Ottoman" Turkish, that is, in Arabic script, it has been virtually lost to modern scholarship. I have recently translated this work and shall publish it shortly.
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