Page 126 - sfogliabile 49

392 Evrim Türkçelik

century that there existed a sultanic order and that the seizure of Tunis
was supported by the sultan. However, this earliest account of the
conquest of Tunis, in fact, became the first and the last account in the
sixteenth century to express clearly the sultan’s involvement. Beginning
from the 1540s, the contest over Tunis was either omitted from the
histories or, if included, it was narrated differently. Senâyî’s omission of
Tunis from his Süleymannâme of 1540 can be considered as the first alarm
bell indicating a problem in the perception of the conquest of Tunis.
Around 1543, Seyyid Murad explicitly denied in the Gazavât that
Barbarossa had any plan or intention beforehand to carry out an attack
on Tunis. This idea, however, remained limited to the Gazavât, perhaps as
a populist defence put forward by Barbarossa that avoided implicating the
sultan and himself, and was not adopted by any other source.
The decisive change in the discourse occurred in the 1550s. Lutfi
Pasha accused Barbarossa of arbitrarily overstepping the geographical
limitations of the sultan’s orders by attacking Tunis. Ârif Çelebi
emphasized the recovery of Koron as the principal aim and described the
conquest of Tunis as the outcome of Barbarossa’s personal ambitions.
After the 1560s, there were only two choices in front of Ottoman
historians: either to omit the event from their histories or to imply that it
was not authorized by the sultan. Thus, Celâlzâde opted for the first
choice. If one reads his Tabakât, an authoritative and canonical chronicle
on the reign of Süleyman, it would be impossible to learn anything about
one of the most important events in the Mediterranean for that period.
The second choice was adopted by Seyyid Lokmân, who isolated the
sultan from the defeat at Tunis in all of his works until the end of his
tenure as şehnâmeci. However, in spite of such historiographical
interventions in the sixteenth century, the event was reinterpreted in the
seventeenth century, with fresh information and a critical examination
that reconsidered the sultan’s involvement.
This chronology points out that the discourse of different works
within a particular genre dealing with the same topic also changed
over time. This is especially seen in the narratives of the
Süleymannâme-style historical works. The drastic difference between
the earlier and later Süleymannâmes is indicative of the problematic
nature of official historical narratives concerned with controversial
historical events. Bostan Çelebi probably experienced more autonomy
in his historiographical practice than his later counterparts, who
played different historiographical roles. Although he lived until 1570,
Bostan Çelebi completed the last copy of his Süleymannâme in 1547
before the appearance of those composing the court şehnâme whose
ultimate task was the glorification of Ottoman dynastic power. Recent
studies have shown that the preliminary drafts of the historical

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Agosto 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)