The Ottoman-Safavid War of 1578-1590 in narrative sources: An evaluation of Hungarian Academy of Sciences manuscript Ms Török O. 176

This thesis evaluates a hitherto unstudied, anonymously authored Ottoman Turkish manuscript titled Tevarih-i Futuh-i Şirvan that describes the 1578 Ottoman military campaign in Georgia and Azerbaijan against the forces of the Safavid Empire. The manuscript consists of approximately thirty folios of about twenty-one lines of text each. The copy under study, and the only known version, was created in 1721-1722. The text is a prose narrative in the genre of gazavatname, or a description of military actions with emphasis on the heroic actions of individuals. This thesis evaluates the Tevarih by close reading the text to understand Ottoman warfare, borderlands, and the internal dynamics of the imperial government during the reign of Sultan Murad III (1574-1595).