Historians of the Ottoman Empire
Historians of the Ottoman Empire is a project intending to produce a ‘Bio-bibliographical Reference Work for Ottoman Literature’, covering all Ottoman works. The editorial committee consists of Hakan Karateke and Cornell Fleischer from the University of Chicago, and Cemal Kafadar form Harvard University. In the course of 2003 an international advisory board, constituting fifteen recognized scholars in the field, was established.
Objective
Historians of the Ottoman Empire aims to become a reference work that will constitute an updated and improved version of Franz Babinger’s Die Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen und ihre Werke. The main weakness in Babinger’s work was, as its reviewers noted, that he could not make use of the Istanbul manuscript libraries adequately simply because, although he had access to the printed catalogues of the libraries, he did not have the opportunity to see the manuscripts. Babinger was also criticized for the method he used in selecting the authors. Although the title of his book refers to “Ottoman History Writers” (Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen), he added to the mix geographers, compilers of biographical dictionaries and others who did not compose a historical work in the strictest sense. Historians of the Ottoman Empire covers the individuals having lived in the Ottoman Empire and having written narrative works that consciously include a significant “historical” content, regardless of the language in which those texts were composed. This includes chroniclers, of course, but also the authors of such works as biographical material (literary, hagiographic, etc.), geographies, military narratives (gazavatnames, fethnames) etc.
Funding
Historians of the Ottoman Empire is made possible by a grant from the Packard Humanities Institute.