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The İskendernâme (Epic of Alexander) is a poem by the Turkish poet Taceddin Ahmedi (1334–1413), completed in the early fifteenth century. It is the first work of Ottoman historiography and the first rendition of the Alexander Romance in Turkish.
The text begins with the life of Alexander (whose identity is intertwined with the Quranic figure of Dhu al-Qarnayn), before moving into describing the reigns of the long list of rulers succeeding him. Arriving at the Islamic era, a lengthy section describes the reign of Muhammad, followed by the first four caliphs, then the Umayyad Caliphate and then the Abbasid Caliphate. After this, Ahmedi describes the reign of the Mongols beginning with Genghis Khan and then the Ilkhanate (the Khanate established in the southwestern section of the Mongol Empire), their successors of the Mongol Jalayirid Sultanate, and finally the Ottoman rulers up until the accession of Mehmed I, the ruler of his own time when he completed the work.[1]
Ahmedi was the most prolific Turkish poet of his time, and yet the İskendernâme was still his longest mathnawi, exceeding 8,000 couplets in length. The longest manuscript of the text of the seventy-five that are known, TY 921 located at the Istanbul University Library, is 8,754 couplets kong. Ahmedi uses the Alexander legend "as a vehicle for delivering a series of discourses on theology, mysticism, philosophy, medicine, geography, astronomy, and other topics."[2]
- ^ Tezcan, Baki (2013). "The Memory of the Mongols in Early Ottoman Historiography". In Çıpa, H. Erdem; Fetvaci, Emine (eds.). Writing history at the Ottoman court: editing the past, fashioning the future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-253-00857-2.
- ^ Silay, Kemal (1992). "Aḥmedī's History of the Ottoman Dynasty" (PDF). Journal of Turkish Studies. 16: 129–200.