During the six hundred years of its existence, innumerable of manuscripts with, mostly, Turkish texts were produced in the Ottoman Empire. These are mainly preserved in libraries in the countries that once were part of that extended empire; a lesser number of such manuscripts ha…
Ahmed Vefik Paşa (Aḥmed Vefīq Pasha, 1238–1308/1823–91) was an Ottoman translator, statesman, turcologist, and a prominent man of letters. Born into a family of interpreters, he accompanied his father, the diplomat Ruheddin Mehmed Efendi (Rūḥeddīn Meḥmed Efendi), to Paris where …
Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali (Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī) (948–1008/1541–1600) was an Ottoman poet, littérateur, historian, and civil servant. His full name was Mustafa ibn Ahmed ibn Abdülmevla (Muṣṭafā b. Aḥmed b. ʿAbdülmevlā), and Ali was his adopted pen name. Born in Gelibolu (Gallipoli) as the …
Enderuni Fazıl (Fāḍıl Bey Enderūnī, d. 1224/1809–10) was an Ottoman poet who was born in ʿAkkā (Acre), into an Arab family originally of Medina. His grandfather, Tahir (Ṭāhir) Bey, was governor of both ʿAkkā and Ṣafad. Tahir Bey was able to maintain a semi-independent state in t…
Anthologies were a wide-spread phenomenon in the Ottoman Empire. They are best known under the term mecmua ( mecmūʿa , lit. “manuscript of mixed content”; in modern Turkish the word is mostly used in the meaning of “periodical” or “magazine”). Other terms used in this respect ar…