Topkapi Palace Library

Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library

Topkapı Palace-Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan

Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4) is a key reference work for research on the history of libraries in the post-medieval Ottoman and Muslim world.¹ The inventory was preserved in Budapest at the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Treasures of Knowledge records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles. The Topkapi palace library inventory tells much about knowledge production, practices of collecting, readership, librarianship, and the arts of the book at the dawn of the sixteenth century.²

In the early sixteenth century, Sultan Bayezid II ordered Hayrüddin Hizir ʿAtufi, the royal librarian to prepare the inventory, the only large-scale inventory of an Ottoman palace library that exists today.

1. Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, eds. Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

2. Hirschler, Konrad. Review of Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. by Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer. Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 7, no. 1 (2020): 244-249.