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himself to secretarial duties and a governmental clerkship under Hunched

Süleyman Pasha, into whose service he’d managed to enter. Four years later,

when Our Sultan died, and with the ascension of Sultan Mehmed, who turned

his back entirely on all artistry, Black’s enthusiasm for illumination and

painting turned from an openly celebrated pleasure into a private secret

pursued behind closed doors. There were times when he’d open one of the

books left to us by my father, and stare, guilty and sad, at an illustration made

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during the era of Tamerlane’s sons in Herat—yes, Shirin falling in love with

Hüsrev after seeing his picture—not as if it were part of a happy game of

talent still being played in palace circles, but as if he were dwelling upon a

sweet secret long surrendered to memory.

In the third year of Our Sultan’s reign, the Queen of England sent His

Excellency a miraculous clock that contained a musical instrument with a

bellows. An English delegation assembled this enormous clock after weeks of

toil with various pieces, cogs, pictures and statuettes that they brought with

them from England, erecting it on a slope of the Royal Private Garden facing

the Golden Horn. The crowds that collected on the slopes of the Golden Horn

or came in ca?ques to watch, astonished and awed, saw how the life-size

statues and ornaments spun around each other purposefully when the huge

clock played its noisy and terrifying music, how they danced elegantly and

meaningfully by themselves in time to the melody as if they were creations of

God rather than of His servants, and how the clock announced the time to all

Istanbul with a chime that resembled the sounding of a bell.

Black and Esther told me on different occasions how the clock, as well as

being the focus of endless astonishment on the part of Istanbul’s riffraff and

dull-witted mobs, was understandably a source of discomfort to the pious and

to Our Sultan because it symbolized the power of the infidel. In a time when

rumors of this sort abounded, Sultan Ahmed, the subsequent sovereign, woke

up in the middle of the night under Allah’s instigation, seized His mace and

descended from the harem to the Private Garden where He shattered the clock

and its statues to pieces. Those who brought us the news and the rumors

explained how as Our Sultan slept, He saw the sacred face of Our Exalted

Prophet bathed in holy light and how the Apostle of God warned Him: If Our

Sultan allowed his subjects to be awed by pictures and, worse yet, by objects

that mimicked Mankind and thus competed with Allah’s creations, the

sovereign would be diverging from divine will. They also added that Our

Sultan had taken up His mace while still dreaming. This was more or less how

Our Sultan dictated the event to His faithful historian. He had this book,

entitled The Quintessence of Histories, prepared by calligraphers, upon whom

He lavished purses full of gold, though He forbade its illustration by

miniaturists.

Thus withered the red rose of the joy of painting and illumination that had

bloomed for a century in Istanbul, nurtured by inspiration from the lands of

Persia. The conflict between the methods of the old masters of Herat and the

Frankish masters that paved the way for quarrels among artists and endless

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quandries was never resolved. For painting itself was abandoned; artists

painted neither like Easterners nor Westerners. The miniaturists did not grow

angry and revolt, but like old men who quietly succumb to an illness, they

gradually accepted the situation with humble grief and resignation. They were

neither curious about nor dreamed about the work of the great masters of

Herat and Tabriz, whom they once followed with awe, or the Frankish masters,

whose innovative methods they aspired to, caught indecisively between envy

and hatred. Just as the doors of houses are closed of an evening and the city is

left to darkness, painting was also abandoned. It was mercilessly forgotten that

we’d once looked upon our world quite differently.

My father’s book, sadly, remained unfinished. From where Hasan scattered

the completed pages on the ground, they were transferred to the Treasury;

there, an efficient and fastidious librarian had them bound together with

other unrelated illustrations belonging to the workshop, and thus they were

separated into several bound albums. Hasan fled Istanbul, and disappeared,

never to be heard from again. Shevket and Orhan never forgot that it wasn’t

Black but their Uncle Hasan who was the one who killed my father’s murderer.

In place of Master Osman, who died two years after going blind, Stork

became Head Illuminator. Butterfly, who was also quite in awe of my late

father’s talents, devoted the rest of his life to drawing ornamental designs for

carpets, cloths and tents. The young assistant masters of the workshop gave

themselves over to similar work. No one behaved as though abandoning

illustration were any great loss. Perhaps because nobody had ever seen his own

face done justice on the page.

My whole life, I’ve secretly very much wanted two paintings made, which

I’ve never mentioned to anybody:

1. My own portrait; but I knew however hard the Sultan’s miniaturists

tried, they’d fail, because even if they could see my beauty, woefully, none of

them would believe a woman’s face was beautiful without depicting her eyes

and lips like a Chinese woman’s. Had they represented me as a Chinese beauty,

the way the old masters of Herat would’ve, perhaps those who saw it and

recognized me could discern my face behind the face of that Chinese beauty.

But later generations, even if they realized my eyes weren’t really slanted,

could never determine what my face truly looked like. How happy I’d be

today, in my old age—which I live out through the comfort of my children—if

I had a youthful portrait of myself!

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2. A picture of bliss: What the poet Blond Naz?m of Ran had pondered in

one of his verses. I know quite well how this painting ought to be made.

Imagine the picture of a mother with her two children; the younger one,

whom she cradles in her arms, nursing him as she smiles, suckles happily at

her bountiful breast, smiling as well. The eyes of the slightly jealous older

brother and those of the mother should be locked. I’d like to be the mother in

that picture. I’d want the bird in the sky to be depicted as if flying, and at the

same time, happily and eternally suspended there, in the style of the old

masters of Herat who were able to stop time. I know it’s not easy.

My son Orhan, who’s foolish enough to be logical in all matters, reminds

me on the one hand that the time-halting masters of Herat could never depict

me as I am, and on the other hand, that the Frankish masters who perpetually

painted mother-with-child portraits could never stop time. He’s been insisting

for years that my picture of bliss could never be painted anyhow.

Perhaps he’s right. In actuality, we don’t look for smiles in pictures of bliss,

but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is

precisely what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing

for the joy of life.

In the hopes that he might pen this story, which is beyond depiction, I’ve

told it to my son Orhan. Without hesitation I gave him the letters Hasan and

Black sent me, along with the rough horse illustrations with the smeared ink,

which were found on poor Elegant Effendi. Above all, don’t be taken in by

Orhan if he’s drawn Black more absentminded than he is, made our lives

harder than they are, Shevket worse and me prettier and harsher than I am.

For the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn’t a lie Orhan

wouldn’t deign to tell.

1990–92, 1994–98

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336–330 B.C.: Darius ruled in Persia. He was the last king of the

Achaemenids, losing his empire to Alexander the Great.

336–323 B.C.: Alexander the Great established his empire. He conquered

Persia and invaded India. His exploits as hero and monarch were legendary

throughout the Islamic world even until modern times.

622: The Hegira. The emigration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca

to Medina, and the beginning of the Muslim calendar.

1010: Firdusi’s Book of Kings. The Persian poet Firdusi (lived circa 935–

1020) presented his Book of Kings to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. Its episodes

on Persian myth and history—including Alexander’s invasion, tales of the hero

Rüstem and the struggle between Persia and Turan—have inspired miniaturists

since the fourteenth century.

1206–1227: The reign of Mongol ruler Genghis Khan. He invaded Persia,

Russia and China, and extended his empire from Mongolia to Europe.

C. 1141–1209: The Persian poet Nizami lived. He wrote the romantic epic the

Quintet, comprised of the following stories, all of which have inspired

miniaturist painters: The Treasury of Mysteries, Hüsrev and Shirin, Leyla and

Mejnun, The Seven Beauties and The Book of Alexander the Great.

1258: The Sack of Baghdad. Hulagu (reigned 1251–1265), the grandson of

Genghis Khan, conquered Baghdad.

1300–1922: The Ottoman Empire, a Sunni Muslim power, ruled south-

eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. At its greatest extent, the

empire reached the gates of Vienna and Persia.

1370–1405: Reign of the Turkic ruler Tamerlane. Subdued the areas that the

Blacksheep ruled in Persia. Tamerlane conquered areas from Mongolia to the

Mediterranean including parts of Russia, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and

Anatolia (where he defeated the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I in 1402).

1370–1526: The Timurid Dynasty, established by Tamerlane, fostered a

brilliant revival of artistic and intellectual life, and ruled in Persia, central Asia

and Transoxiana. The schools of miniature painting at Shiraz, Tabriz and Herat

flourished under the Timurids. In the early fifteenth century Herat was the

center of painting in the Islamic world and home to the great master Bihzad.

1375–1467: The Blacksheep, a Turkmen tribal federation, ruled over parts of

Iraq, eastern Anatolia and Iran. Jihan Shah (reigned 1438–67), the last

Blacksheep ruler, was defeated by the Whitesheep Tall Hasan in 1467.

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1378–1502: The Whitesheep federation of Turkmen tribes ruled northern

Iraq, Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia. Whitesheep ruler Tall Hasan (reigned

1452–78) failed in his attempts to contain the eastward expansion of the

Ottomans, but he defeated the Blacksheep Jihan Shah in 1467 and the Timurid

Abu Said in 1468, extending his dominions to Baghdad, Herat, and the Persian

Gulf.

1453: Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror took Istanbul. Demise of

the Byzantine Empire. Sultan Mehmet later commissioned his portrait from

Bellini.

1501–1736: The Safavid Empire ruled in Persia. The establishment of Shia

Islam as the state religion helped unify the empire. The seat of the empire was

at first located in Tabriz, then moved to Kazvin, and later, to Isfahan. The first

Safavid ruler, Shah Ismail (reigned 1501–24), subdued the areas that the

Whitesheep ruled in Azerbaijan and Persia. Persia weakened appreciably during

the rule of Shah Tahmasp I (reigned 1524–76).

1512: The Flight of Bihzad. The great miniaturist Bihzad emigrated from

Herat to Tabriz.

1514: The Plunder of the Seven Heavens Palace. The Ottoman Sultan

Selim the Grim, after defeating the Safavid army at Chaldiran, plundered the

Seven Heavens Palace in Tabriz. He returned to Istanbul with an exquisite

collection of Persian miniatures and books.

1520–66: Süleyman the Magnificent and the Golden Age of Ottoman

Culture. The reign of Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Important

conquests expanded the empire to the east and the west, including the first

seige of Vienna (1529) and the capture of Baghdad from the Safavids (1535).

1556–1605: Reign of Akbar, Emperor of Hindustan, a descendant of

Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. He established miniaturists’ workshops in Agra.

1566–74: The reign of Ottoman Sultan Selim II. Peace treaties signed with

Austria and Persia.

1571: The Battle of Lepanto. A four-hour naval battle between allied

Christian forces and the Ottomans subsequent to the Ottoman invasion of

Cyprus (1570). Though the Ottomans were defeated, Venice surrendered

Cyprus to the Ottomans in 1573. The battle had great impact on European

morale and was the subject of paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

1574–95: The reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III (during whose rule the

events of our novel take place). His rule witnessed a series of struggles between

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1578–90 known as the Ottoman-Safavid wars. He was the Ottoman sultan

most interested in miniatures and books, and he had the Book of Skills, the

Book of Festivities and the Book of Victories produced in Istanbul. The most

prominent Ottoman miniaturists, including Osman the Miniaturist (Master

Osman) and his disciples, contributed to them.

1576: Shah Tahmasp’s Peace Offering to the Ottomans. After decades of

hostility, Safavid Shah Tahmasp made a present to the Ottoman Sultan Selim II

upon the death of Süleyman the Magnificent in an attempt to foster future

peace. Among the gifts sent to Edirne is an exceptional copy of the Book of

Kings, produced over a period of twenty-five years. The book was later