The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam
Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty

Explores how a new conception of kingship helped transform the Ottoman Empire, from regional dynastic sultanate to global empire.

Christopher Markiewicz (Author)

9781108710572, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 September 2020

364 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 1.9 cm, 0.538 kg

'Markiewicz's reworking of his PhD thesis has produced a book that is complex in its ideas and argument, beautifully structured, written in clear and well-signposted prose, and cleanly produced in the Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization series.' Amy Singer, Speculum

In the early sixteenth century, the political landscape of West Asia was completely transformed: of the previous four major powers, only one - the Ottoman Empire - continued to exist. Ottoman survival was, in part, predicated on transition to a new mode of kingship, enabling its transformation from regional dynastic sultanate to empire of global stature. In this book, Christopher Markiewicz uses as a departure point the life and thought of Idris Bidlisi (1457–1520), one of the most dynamic scholars and statesmen of the period. Through this examination, he highlights the series of ideological and administrative crises in the fifteenth-century sultanates of Islamic lands that gave rise to this new conception of kingship and became the basis for sovereign authority not only within the Ottoman Empire but also across other Muslim empires in the early modern period.

Introduction
Part I: 1. The realm of generation and decay: Bidlisi in Iran, 1457–1502
2. Patronage and place among the Ottomans: Bidlisi and the Court of Bayezid II, 1502–1511
3. The return East (1511–1520)
Part II: 4. The Timurid vocabulary of sovereignty
5. The canons of conventional histories
6. Ottoman sovereignty on the cusp of Universal Empire
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]