Page 36 - The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent

and for his muselsel, a style of writing in which the letters are tifs rendered in considerable relief. The best examples, made
joined together (see 9-11). Hamdullah used nesih in his Ko- for the Korans of Karahisari and for the collected poems and
rans while Karahisari employed several styles, contrasting the illustrated histories of the sultan (see 27), were obviously by
larger scripts with the smaller ones. the hand of the chief bookbinder, Mehmed b. Ahmed.
The katiban also employed the Persian styles of divani, nas- There are also lacquered bookbindings that must have been
talik, (which they called talik), and siyakat. Divani, applied to painted by nakka§hane artists (see 18 a and 33b). Some are dec-
transcribing fermans, soon developed into a characteristic Ot- orated with the same themes used in manuscript illumina-
toman style. Talik was generally used in literary texts and at tions, while others show pictorial scenes related to the illus-
times rendered in kaati, that is, in découpage with the letters trations in literary texts. 18 At times the lacquer was applied to
cut out of colored papers and pasted on folios tinted with both the exterior and interior surfaces; at others it was used
contrasting tones (see 18 and 30). Siyakat, reserved for archi- only on the doublures. An interesting collaboration between
val documents, came to be an Ottoman code or shorthand, the two societies appears in several examples, which have
today decipherable only by specialists. The calligraphers also stamped and gilded areas set apart by lacquered fields.
wrote in gubari, a minuscule script generally used in the tiny The decorative themes and techniques of early sixteenth-
volumes called sancak Korans, which were suspended from century Ottoman bindings are extremely close to those pro-
banners (see 17 and 21). duced in Herat and Tabriz, reflecting the conservatism of the
Although the names of over a hundred katiban are tradition. Examples dating after 1530 can generally be distin-
known, 16 only a handful can be identified with actual works. guished by their saz scrolls, naturalistic blossoms, and çinte-
These include Abdullah b. ilyas and Mehmed Tahir, who mani patterns.
transcribed Korans in nesih and gubari; Abdülhayf Ali and Some bookbindings were made of precious materials, fre-
Mehmed b. Gazanfer, who practised kaati; and Pir Ahmed b. quently employing jade plaques inlaid with gold and en-
iskender, §ahsuvar Selimi, and Mehmed §erif, the talik mas- crusted with such stones as emeralds and rubies (see 9, 20,
ters who worked on literary texts and the collected poems of and 21). Produced by the Cemaat-i Zergeran (Society of
Selim I and Süleyman. One should add to this list Nasuh, Goldsmiths) in collaboration with the Cemaat-i Hakkakin
who not only illustrated his own texts but also transcribed (Society of Gemstone Carvers), these are truly dazzling and
them in a fairly good nesih. were made exclusively for Korans, with one exception: the
The payroll registers and other documents pertaining to the binding of the Divan-i Muradi, the collected poems of Murad
Ehl-i Hiref also list the members of the Cemaat-i Mucellidan III, which is inscribed with the name of the maker, Mehmed,
19
(Society of Bookbinders). 17 A remarkable family headed by and dated 1588. The tradition of precious materials used in
the patriarch Ahmed, who was recorded as being an imperial the court will be discussed in the next chapter.
master at the time of his death in 1518, dominated the soci- The chronological sequence and the stylistic development
ety of the bookbinders for over a century. Ahmed's four sons, of these jeweled Koran bindings cannot be properly deter-
Mustafa, Hasan, Hüseyin, and Mehmed, are listed in the reg- mined since they are not dated and the majority are sepa-
isters dated between 1526 and 1566; Mehmed b. Ahmed was
the head of the society between 1545 and 1566 and his de-
scendants continued the tradition well into the second quar-
ter of the seventeenth century. Another master bookbinder,
Hurrem-i Rum, was employed between 1545 and 1596; his
son also worked in the imperial society. A third master,
Ahmed Kamil, active between 1545 and 1558, was also fol-
lowed by sons. As with those of the painters, the works of
the bookbinders remain anonymous, although the most spec-
tacular examples must have been produced by Mehmed b.
Ahmed, who was the head of the society for over two
decades.
The bookbinders, whose society constituted eight to twelve
men between 1526 and 1566, were considerably more fam-
ily-oriented and homogeneous than the nakkacan, with only
one Bosnian, Austrian, or Circassian enrolled at a time. Most
of their works follow the traditional Islamic format with
stamped and gilded leather exteriors and filigree interiors.
Some of these are exquisitely decorated and display superb Fig. 12. Circular panel from the Süleymaniye Mosque, composed by Ahmed
technique, in which the field is deeply recessed and the mo- Karahisari, c. 1557

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