The Confessions Of An Ottoman ‘Irregular’: Self-Representation And Ottoman Interpretive Communities In The Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This paper will therefore examine how the author inscribes his place in Ottoman society as he describes his long journey and adventures from the eastern Anatolian frontier west to the Rumeli frontier as an itinerant Ottoman soldier. Deli Mustafa’s ego-document is rare in the sense that it points to how someone from “below” coped with and responded to the fickle patronage of his superiors, how he explained the moral compromises and violence that marked his way of life, as well as how he fashioned himself (both materially and symbolically) as a lower-order Ottoman warrior with an apparent knack for telling a good story