Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2021
This study first considers how master secretaries of the Ottoman Imperial Council went beyond their field of scribal business and began to have a share in carrying out the empire's foreign policy by putting it into words. Next, it deals with the specific genre of documents that took shape step by step as one chancery office worked up an incoming writ and forwarded it to another bureau. It thereby shows how we can indeed unearth new knowledge on political history by looking into these outputs of the chancery's practice of writing and keeping financial transactions between dignitaries, superintendents, petitioners, and departments. The study then tackles in what ways one can link these trends to the early modern growth of the chancery and the branching out in government, and how the state's lordship rights and making, as well as keeping, logs were understood in those times. A document belonging to the handled genre is reproduced, transcribed, and translated at the end.
Dr. Selim Güngörürler is a research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work deals with early modern Ottoman diplomacy, diplomatics, and palaeography, while his ongoing research focuses on Ottoman–Safavid relations. For consistency and convenience, transcription from Ottoman Turkish follows the rules of modern Turkish spelling, notwithstanding whether a word is of Turkic, Persian, or Arabic stock. But whereas today's practice seldom distinguishes long vowels from short ones in writing, they are often marked here with a circumflex, again for convenience.