Spring versus Autumn: A Dispute in the Meadows of Thoughts

Summary

The Persian presence in Ottoman civilisation has never been so pervasive as it was in the sixteenth century. To modern readers Orhan Pamuk's novel Benim adım Kırmızı (“My name is Red”) offers a fascinating picture of the admiration the painters at the Sultan's court of this century harboured for Persian painting, especially from the Timurid and early Safavid periods. In the article contributed by Petra de Bruijn to the present volume it is shown how carefully Pamuk studied the works of Bihzād and other masters of Herat, Tabriz and Shiraz in order to provide his fiction with a credible historical background. However, miniature painting is merely one aspect of this remarkable instance of cultural fertilisation, which affected virtually every aspect of Ottoman-Turkish culture. If we restrict ourselves to the domain of letters, the strong Persian influence is particularly noticeable in the vast production of manuscripts of Persian texts copied by Ottoman scribes, the translations and commentaries of the Persian classics, composed by Sūdī, Shimʿī and Surūrī and others, and the Persianised style of the Turkish writers and poets of this period, the poetry of Bāqī (1526– 1600) – the “maggior rappresentante della lirica erotico-mistica ottoman” as Alessio Bombaci qualified him – providing the most splendid example. What should be added to this are the original literary texts in Persian which were written in the realm of the Ottoman Sultans during this century.

A name deserving special mention in this context is that of Sheikh Maḥmūd b. ʿUthmān Lāmiʿī (1472–1531) who, not without justice, has been distinguished by the epithet of “Jāmī of Rūm.” He earned this honorific first of all because of his renderings and imitations of some of the major works of Mullā Jāmī (1414–1492) of Herat, the dominating mystic, poet and writer of the Timurid period. In several publications Barbara Flemming has stressed the originality of Lāmiʿī in spite of his indebtedness to his Persian predecessors, which even exceeded that of the Ottoman painters described in Pamuk's novel.

Lāmiʿī spent his entire life in Bursa, the residence of the Ottoman Sultans until the mid-fifteenth century when Mehmed II made the newly conquered Constantinople into the capital city of the Empire.