During the rule of the Ottoman Sultans the Turks gave little sign of literary inventiveness and the two great schools, the old and the new, into which we may divide their literature were closely modelled, the one after the classics of Persia and the other after those of modern Europe, and more especially of France. The last 3o years have seen a steady development of the new school which, from being at first imitative or adaptive, has now struck out a line of its own. Turkish literature has not however yet had time to manifest its reaction to recent drastic political and religious changes. Its most modern writers all belong to the period preceding the rise of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, and even the most advanced thinkers among Turkey's men of letters have never ventured under former regimes even to hint at such reforms as have been carried out by the order of one man. The old school may be conveniently divided into three periods, which may be termed respectively the pre-classical, the classical and the post classical. Of these the first extends from the early days of the empire to the accession of Suleiman I., 1301-1520 (700-926); the second from that event to the accession of Mahmild I., 152o (926-1143) ; and the third from that date to the accession of `Abd-u1-tAziz, 1730-1861 The Pre-classical Period.—The works of the old school in all its periods are entirely Persian in tone, sentiment and form. Some two centuries before the arrival of the Turks in Asia Minor the Seljuks, then a mere horde of nomads, had overrun Persia, where they settled and adopted the civilization of the people they had subdued. Thus Persian became the language of their court and Government, and when by-and-by they pushed their conquests into Asia Minor, and founded there the Seljuk empire of Rum, they carried with them their Persian culture, and diffused it among the peoples newly brought under their sway. It was among the descendants of those Persianized Seljuks that so-called Ottoman Turks rose to power in the middle of the 13th century (see TURKS). The Ottomans naturally absorbed the culture of the Seljuks, and an extraordinary love of precedent, apparent in all Islamic literature, was sufficient to keep their writers loyal to their early guide for centuries till at length the allegiance, though not the fashion of it, changed and, about the middle of the last century, Paris replaced Shiraz as the shrine towards which the Ottoman scholar turned. The poetry of the old school is greatly superior to the prose.
Ottoman literature may be said to open with a few mystic lines, the work of Sultan Veled, son of Maurani Jelal-ud-Din, the author of the great Persian poem the Mathnawi. Sultan Veled flourished during the reign of 'Osman I., though he did not reside in the territory under the rule of that prince. Another mystic poet of this early time was `Ashik Pasha, who left a long poem in rhym ing couplets, which is called, inappropriately enough, his Divan. The nocturnal expedition across the Hellespont by which Sulei man, the son of Orkhan, won Gallipoli and therewith a foothold in Europe for his race, was shared in and celebrated in verse by a Turkish noble or chieftain named Ghazi Fazil. Sheikhi of Kermi yan, a contemporary of Mohammed I. and Murad II., wrote a lengthy and still esteemed mesnevi on the ancient Persian romance of Khusrev and Shirin ; and about the same time Yaziji-oghlu gave to the world a long versified history of the Prophet, the Muhammediya. The writers mentioned above are the most im
portant previous to the capture of Constantinople; but there is little literature of real merit prior to that event. The most notable prose work of this period is an old collection of stories, the History of the Forty Vezirs, said to have been compiled by a certain Sheikh-zada and dedicated to Murad II. A few years after Constantinople had passed into the hands of the Ottomans, some ghazels, the work of the contemporary Tatar prince, Mir `Ali Shir, who under the nom de plume of Neval wrote much that shows true talent and poetic feeling, found their way to the Ottoman capital, where they were seen and copied by Ahmed Pasha, one of the viziers of Mohammed II. The poems of this statesman, though possessing little merit of their own, being for the most part translations from Neval, form one of the land marks in the history of Ottoman literature. They set the fashion of ghazel-writing; and their appearance was the signal for a more regular cultivation of poetry and a greater attention to literary style and to refinement of language. In Sinan Pasha (d. 1420), another minister of Mohammed the Conqueror, Otto man prose found its first exponent of ability ; he left a religious treatise entitled Tazarruicit (Supplications), which, notwithstand ing a too lavish employment of the resources of Persian rhetoric, is as remarkable for its clear and lucid style as for the beauty of many of the thoughts it contains. Twenty-one out of the 34 sovereigns who have occupied the throne of 'Osman have left verses, and among these Selim I. stands as the most gifted and most original poet. The most prominent man of letters under this sovereign was the legist Kemal Pasha-z5.da, who left a romantic poem on the loves of Yusuf and Zuleykha, and a work entitled Nigeiristan, which is modelled both in style and matter on the Gulistan of SAIL His contemporary, Mesihi, whose beautiful verses on spring are perhaps better known in Europe than any other Turkish poem, deserves a passing mention.
Lami Nevi, the janissary Yahya Beg, the mufti Eba Su'ud and Selim II. all won deserved distinction as poets. During the reign of Ahmed I. arose the second of the great poets of the old Ottoman school, Nefei of Erzerum, who owes his pre-eminence to the brilliance of his kasidas. Nabi (d. 1712), who flourished under Ibrahim and Mohammed IV. was a prolific author who im parted into Ottoman literature, a didactic style of ghazel-writing which was then being introduced in Persia by the poet Sall); indeed, it is not always easy to know that his lines are intended to be Turkish. A number of poets took Nabi for their model. The glory of the classical period ending with Nedim, dates roughly from the accession of Ahmed I. 1603 (1012), to the deposition of Ahmed III., 1730 (1143).