Paul Hepworth: Changing the will: Illuminated endowment deeds of Ottoman royal women

Seventeen manuscripts in the collection of the Turkish Ministry of Religious Foundations were studied and conserved in a project supported by the Barakat Trust. These manuscripts, the endowment deeds of certain Ottoman royal women, were made in the palace workshops and consequently exhibit a level of craftsmanship in their production that clearly indicates the special status of these women. Bindings and calligraphy are of superior quality and the use of illumination, in particular, distinguishes the endowment deeds of these females in the royal family from the un-illuminated ones of other women, whether royal or common. Yet notwithstanding the status of these historical figures, relatively little information is available about them. So another part of the manuscripts’ importance derives from their being the source of much of what is known about these women.

One area of research on the manuscripts focused on the fact that most of the deeds were amended—at least once and often multiple times—after the original deed was produced. For the documents to be legally valid, the name and rank of the requisite authorities and witnesses had to be recorded along with the text of the amendment. However, the addition of amendments posed an interesting challenge in the physical construction of the manuscripts. How could such changes, of variable length and number and at different times, be anticipated in the manuscripts’ original production? Or, if they were not anticipated, then how could they be accommodated when they occurred? This paper will describe the results of close examination of the manuscript structures, which revealed several different approaches used to deal with this challenge. It also demonstrated that sometimes other kinds of changes were made to the deeds long after their legal mandate would have been in operation, changes that are remarkably subtle and easy to miss if one was only looking at the text of the documents. Still they raise fundamental questions about the functioning of the Ottoman legal system: What sorts of changes could be made to legal documents after the fact and how would such changes have been controlled so that the documents’ validity would not be compromised?

The second part of this paper will look at ten of these manuscripts which have a common style of binding that seems to have been produced only in Ottoman imperial workshops. Although representative examples of this type of binding are found in Western collections, it has not been characterized before in terms of the techniques of construction and decoration which define it. A discussion of nomenclature will also consider how the description of these bindings by art historians can mask the many common features that closely relate them to each other.