Aga Khan Lecture Series: Serpil Bağcı "Picturing the İskendername: Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Manuscripts"

Speaker: Serpil Bağcı (AKPIA Fellow; Professor, Department of History, Bilkent University)

The Anatolian poet Ahmedi’s (d. 1413) Iskendernāme is a Turkish verse legend of Alexander the Great. Although his account is primarily based on the Alexander legends developed in the Islamic World, Ahmedi skillfully incorporated sections on religion, philosophy, ethics, geography, astronomy, medicine, and history into his main text, lending his poem a distinctive character. In addition to more than one hundred unillustrated copies, twenty-four illustrated volumes and several detached illustrated folios of the Iskendernāme  survive. They were produced in a large geographical area (from Edirne to Herat) confirm the text’s popularity among Turkish speaking patrons. Five of the surviving volumes were made for Ottoman patrons and one for a Mamluk owner. The remaining eighteen illustrated copies were produced in Iran, mainly in Shiraz, for Aqqoyunlu and Safavid Turkmen patrons. 

These manuscripts thus constitute a medium in which Ottoman, Aqqoyunlu, and Safavid literary and visual conventions converge, a rare instance of cultural coexistence.  In this talk, after introducing the Ottoman copies briefly, Prof. Bağcı will focus on the fifteenth and sixteenth-century manuscripts produced in Iran. They were made for owners whose political-religious culture differed markedly from that of Ottoman readers. This explains how Ahmedi’s text was altered in line with the needs of patrons of these artistic copies.
 

Image: İskender and philosophers consulting Khizr on tawḥīd, Ahmedi, İskendername, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, cod. or. 90 (=57), fol. 31a.