Conclusion

Summary

Bidlisi, Shah Qasim Tabrizi, and the other Persian émigré secretaries introduced in these pages shared certain features of educational upbringing, professional experience, and political outlook that suggest their participation in a distinct bureaucratic subculture within the Ottoman court in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Their experiences as valued contributors to Ottoman chancery, administrative, and literary products were central to the trajectory of Ottoman imperial ideology at a critical juncture in the history of the sultanate. More generally, perhaps as a consequence of their insistence on Persian for the articulation of such ideology, these secretaries had a role in the emergence of a confident Ottoman imperial idiom that accepted the literary sensibilities of the Persian chancery style, even if ultimately it settled upon Ottoman Turkish as the principal language of refined communication and belles lettres. Their experiences are also key to approaching again the question first raised at the beginning of this book: Wherefrom did the widespread and novel discourse on sacral and cosmic kingship of the sixteenth century originate and how did it come to be a common feature of kingship among the major Muslim empires of the sixteenth century?