ABSTRACT
"Mirrors for princes", works which offer advice on the art of being a king, some-what paradoxically constitute both one of the best known yet also least researched branches of literature in the classical Islamic languages-Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The emergence of this mirrors for princes tradition in early thirteenth-century Anatolia paralleled other developments in culture and literature. Like most mirrors for princes, however, the Rahat al-Sudur is especially concerned with emphasizing the need for the Seljuk sultans to be just, both through exhortations and through the exemplary behavior of earlier Seljuk sultans described by Rawandi. This chapter attempts to survey in particular those works composed in the period preceding the Mongol conquest of Anatolia in 1243. The aim of these early mirrors was not simply to advise the Seljuk sultans how to appropriate the Perso-Islamic political heritage, but also to advertise the rulers' espousal of these values to an international audience.
