Two Paths to Power: Sokolluzade Hasan Paşa and Hadım Yusuf Paşa and Their Art Patronage in Early-Seventeenth-Century Baghdad

Abstract

In the final decade of the sixteenth century a lively art market flourished in Baghdad. This article focuses on two governors, Sokolluzade Hasan Paşa (d. 1602) and Yusuf Paşa (d. 1614), who greatly contributed to this artistic flowering by commissioning unique works: an illustrated universal history and an illustrated travelogue-cum-campaign logbook, respectively. These texts, composed around the same time and written for Hasan Paşa and Yusuf Paşa, show the different directions the two viziers took as they strived to establish their power base in Baghdad at a time when art and cultural life was burgeoning, but also when there was much unrest locally and on the international front. It argues that Hasan Paşa’s patrilineal links with the eminent Sokollu Mehmed Paşa prompted a grander, universal vision of history that placed the governor as the culmination of history. Compared to this bolder work, Yusuf Paşa’s travelogue presents an image of the vizier as a pious pilgrim, who, at the same time, bravely tackles bandits in and around Basra.