Manliness, Male Virtue and History Writing at the Seventeenth‐Century Ottoman Court

When one compares Ottoman chronicles written in the wake of the failed Vienna campaign of 1683 to those composed prior to 1682 and finally to those completed in 1658 one finds, first, that gendered conceptions were central to the authors' depictions of the era and, second, that the model of manliness and male virtue that the authors conceived changed greatly. To authors writing during the first decade of Mehmed IV's reign (1648–58), male virtue was expressed in self‐mastery, the mastery of subordinates, particularly women, and the control of financial resources. Authors in the period between 1658 and 1682 imagined manliness in terms of bravery – manifested in hunting and waging war, labelled interchangeably ghaza or jihad – and Islamic zeal. After 1682, writers again returned to an understanding of male virtue and manliness centred on self‐control. This article explains the reasons for this change in conceptions of manliness and male virtue by relating it to the dynamic competition between courtly factions patronising literary production. The need to curry favour with these factions was reflected in the writers' choice of literary genre, which intervened discursively to offer different images of the sultan and valide sultan (queen mother).