ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with a number of little-known texts composed under the cultural patronage of the Çobanoğlu dynasty to look at aspects of socio-political life in 13th-century Anatolia. The main focus is the genre of letter-writing and chancellery letter (Inshāʾ) that was popular in the land of the Chobanida. In the first section of the chapter, we will explore some samples of letter-writing commissioned by the Chobanid rulers to Husam al-Din Khu’i (d. c. 1309) and use them to analyse the implications that this type of letter had in the search for a ‘political identity’ among this Turkmen dynasty. These practically unexamined texts also help us to explore the idea of the pedagogical aims of these texts in trying to offer Turkmen warlords a set of dialectical tools to create the foundation of a Perso-Islamic state. The second part of the chapter continues looking at letter-writing, but from a different perspective. It explores a unique text composed in 13th-century Kastamonu that is available in a single manuscript (Fatih 5406, work 5) and contains a number of letters written by an Iranian medical doctor living in north-western Anatolia. The letters offer a unique and vivid description of the socio-economic conditions of north-western Anatolia in the 13th century from a personal perspective that provides some exceptional insight into the social history of the region.
