Emergence and development of the ahdname form in Ottoman diplomatics (XIV-XVI. centuries)

This thesis discusses the ahdnames, which are a group of documents that emerged as a result of the diplomatic activities carried out since the establishment of the Ottoman Empire and determine the fundamental principles of international law. The subject of this thesis is limited to the ahdnames that have been preserved in their originals or copies have survived to the present day in a period of about 300 years, from the foundation of the state to the end of the 16th century. The primary objective of this thesis is to examine the emergence and development of the Turkish ahdname form in a historical integrity. In this thesis, Ottoman ahdnames from 1300 to 1600 were systematically and chronologically examined. The first chapter discusses the development of ahdname type documents in terms of the changes it has undergone during the Seljuk and principality period and its development in the Ottoman period. In the second chapter the diplomatic characteristics of Ottoman ahdnames are described from the first example that they started to appear in the Ottoman documents in the historical process. These diplomatic characteristics in Ottoman ahdnames are examined in terms of development and structural aspects. The third part of the thesis is devoted to the metadata used in the archival description of ahdnames and the analysis of these metadata. The fourth through ninth chapters focused at the Ottoman-Venetian ahidnames first, and the Ottoman-Austrian, Ottoman-Polish, Ottoman-Hungarian, Ottoman-French, and English, Florence, and Chios ahidnames are evaluated as a whole in terms of their historical process, diplomatic features and texts.