Learning Galleons from Mânis: The Evalutation of Information About Ottoman Galleonsin Ramazan-nâme

Abstract

Ottoman naval history has emerged and attracted attention as a field of history that is comprehensively studied. One of its primary subjects is unsurprisingly the Ottoman Navy. The academic research in this field is generally based on the archival documents. Besides these, however, Ottoman literary works also contain valuable and rich information regarding the Ottoman Naval History, which also include mânis of folk literature. Published by Âmil Çelebioğlu, Ramazan-nâme is a manuscript that contains mânis, and one of them mentions the galleons of the Ottoman navy in the 18th century. It offers us a different kind of source through which the naval history might be reevaluated. This paper studies the descriptions of the galleons mentioned in the mâni based on the archival documents and modern works. The dating of this text is also established with the aid of historical research on the galleons in question. Available archival documents reveal that these galleons were available in the Ottoman naval inventory until the 1750s at the latest. Furthermore, it is also revealed that the fact that the names of the galleons were subjects of such a literary mâni stemmed partly from the successful Ottoman Mora campaign (1716-1718).