The 15th Century Ottoman Reception of Rashīd al-Dīn’s Kitāb al-Sulṭāniyya

Rashīd al Dīn (d. 718/1318) is well known as a historian – his Jāmiʿ al tavārīkh has been hailed as the first true world history ever written. Since Étienne de Quatremère’s first attempt in 1836, the entirety of the Jāmiʿ al tavārīkh has been edited, re-edited, translated, and studied by scholars almost without interruption.
His so-called theoretical works, by contrast, while treated in a comprehensive, albeit concise, survey by Josef van Ess more than three decades ago, are less well known. To date, they remain only partially published and poorly studied. While some modern historians of political history have mined Rashīd al Dīn’s theoretical works for the historical facts contained in them, the few historians of thought who have dedicated studies to them have mostly done so without much attention to their historical context or the vision expressed in them. As far as their reception history is concerned, these works have remained entirely unknown territory.
By zooming in on just one of Rashīd al Dīn’s theoretical works and its reception in the late 15th century Ottoman Empire, this paper discusses both the historical vision deployed in one of the theoretical works contained in his theological majmūʿa, and queries the ways in which we modern scholars have conceptualized ‘the historical’ and ‘the theological’ in our modern approach to such works, pleading for a more holistc, and contextual, reading – extending to and including their reception in later centuries.