The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization Series

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.

Christopher Markiewicz is Lecturer in Ottoman and Islamic History at the University of Birmingham. He was the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Extra-European History at Exeter College, Oxford between 2015 and 2017. In recognition of his research, he was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award by the Middle East Studies Association in 2016.