The Ottoman Chancery's Role in Diplomacy with Iran

Abstract

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.