Mehmed the Conqueror: Bridging Sulh-i Kull and Prisca Theologia
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Summary:
The article explores the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror, highlighting his cultural politics and sovereignty, influenced by post-Mongol Iran and Timurid Central Asia. It draws parallels between Mehmed and Akbar the Great, noting their shared aspiration for a model of cosmic sovereignty transcending religious boundaries. The article discusses Mehmed's interest in Neoplatonic philosophy, his patronage of diverse intellectual traditions, and his strategic use of the Hagia Sophia as a symbol of his rule. It also examines Mehmed's innovative governance, blending Byzantine and Islamic elements, to establish a unique form of sovereignty that foreshadowed the Ottoman Empire's later developments.
In their ensemble, this long list of similarities between Mehmed's and Akbar's cultural politics amounts to far more than a case of casual resemblance. Instead, they are evidence that the two rulers, despite the thousands of kilometres and more than a hundred years separating their reigns, both aspired to a model of sovereignty with a common point of origin in the conceptual world of post-Mongol Iran and Timurid central Asia. Indeed, if the influence of this Mongol/Timurid legacy is now more generally recognized with respect to Akbar, it was Mehmed who stood comparatively closer to it, both chronologically and experientially, to the extent that his reign even briefly overlapped with that of Timur's son, Shah Rukh. One result of this, as recent research has shown with increasing clarity, is that scholarly life at Mehmed's court was deeply informed by the Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean, Letterist, and Monist currents sweeping the larger post-Timurid world of the fifteenth century—the same currents that would eventually provide the philosophical underpinnings of Akbar's Sulh-i Kull.Footnote 12
Taken together, what all this evidence points to is something quite distinct from a desire to simply ‘convert’ the Hagia Sophia. Rather, Mehmed's intention was clearly to appropriate and ‘embody’ the sacred power of this ancient monument as an expression of his own sovereignty. A final indication of this impulse can be seen in his use of its name: ‘Hagia Sophia’ or ‘Holy Wisdom’. Featuring the same Greek word from which ‘philosophy’ is derived, the name would have invoked, for a learned contemporary Greek speaker, the blending of gnosis and ancient wisdom that was central the Prisca Theologia. And, virtually uniquely in the long history of churches repurposed as Ottoman mosques, upon its ‘conversion’ this name was not changed but rather incorporated into the name by which the structure is still known today: the Āyā Ṣofya Jāmiʿi, meaning the ‘Mosque of Holy Wisdom’ or even ‘Assemblage of Holy Wisdom’. Through this eclectic mixture of Greek, Arabic, and Turkish, Mehmed gave new life, in a superficially Muslim guise, to this ancient structure.Footnote 48 But in doing so, as we shall see in more detail below, he also signalled his endorsement of an understanding of Islam ultimately rooted not in scripture but in ‘wisdom’—in other words, in the same epistemology of ‘reason’ (‘aql) and ‘verification’ (taḥqīq) that were also the conceptual cornerstones of Akbar's Sulh-i Kull.
When comparing the cultural politics of Mehmed the Conqueror and Akbar the Great, one of the greatest challenges for the historian is the lack of a figure at the Ottoman court who was equivalent to Ebu'l-Fazl, a sort of designated bureaucrat-philosopher who set down, in his monumental ʿAin-i Akbarī, the official cosmology of Akbar's reign. It is, in fact, largely thanks to Ebu'l-Fazl that we are today able to describe and holistically interpret the Sulh-i Kull, particularly with regard to its delicate interrelationship between sacred rulership, rational epistemology, and the politics of ‘Universal Peace’ between members of different religious communities. By contrast, no analogous attempts to systematically interpret Mehmed's years on the throne were undertaken—at least by Muslim authors—until well after his death, first during the reign of his ostentatiously pious son Bayezid II, remembered by posterity as ‘the Saint’, and later during the era of Ottoman ‘Sunnitization’ that began in the latter sixteenth century (the same general period during which the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia seem to have been whitewashed).Footnote 49 Even Mehmed's Kanun-nāme or ‘Law Book’, a text that might have provided something akin to an unadorned, legalistic version of the ʿAin-i Akbarī, today survives only in heavily interpolated versions from the late sixteenth century or later, leaving many unanswered questions about what they actually preserve from the reign of Mehmed himself.Footnote 50
The obvious solution to this problem—a self-serving one from Mehmed's perspective—is for all religious communities to be collectively ruled by an illuminated ‘philosopher-king’, standing super partes and dispensing justice through divinely inspired wisdom. And although Amiroutzes does not directly address this possibility in his ‘Dialogue’, it is precisely to this image of Mehmed that he appeals in a separate collection of texts, a series of panegyric poems to the Sultan steeped in the symbolic language of Neoplatonic renovatio/tajdīd.Footnote 57 In one of these, titled ‘On the Return of My Great Master, the Philosopher’, the City of Constantinople, personified as an old woman, addresses Mehmed directly while welcoming him as ‘the Sun returning after winter’. At the poem's lyric climax, the City hails him as the ‘Ruler of the Romans and King of the Greeks’ and thanks him for ‘having made me, an old crone, as beautiful as a young lady / hiding my wrinkles and covering my face with blush / and dressing me in golden fabrics, just as a queen should be’.Footnote 58 Then, in a separate poem, Amiroutzes directly invokes ‘wisdom’ (Sophia) as the fount of Mehmed's power and the key to his project of imperial and spiritual renewal.
Stated simply, there was, in prior Ottoman history, no precedent for such a model of sovereign power, which originated in the pre-Islamic pagan traditions of the central Asian Khanate. But as Mehmed surely knew well, there was something like a precedent in the history of his own imperial capital, founded by Constantine the Great on the principle that the Roman church would be perpetually subordinate to the authority of the Roman emperor. And in this respect, to return to where this article began, Mehmed's mosque and madrasa complex, built on the exact spot that Constantine had once chosen for his eternal resting place, was the perfect corollary to the Hagia Sophia. The latter, an ancient church believed to be built on the site of an even more ancient fire temple and now ‘renewed’ as a mosque, was an incontrovertible symbol of ‘Muslim Rome’. But the former, an institution of Islamic learning built around a sovereign tomb, was instead an expression of a ‘Roman Islam’, a religion whose intellectual traditions and legal institutions could be ‘renewed’ only through their subordination to the authority of Constantinople's new emperor.