Abstract:

Before the publication of Richard Kreutel’s important work on the Vienna account in Volume 7 of the Seyahatnâme it was thought that Evliyâ Çelebi was unaware of the second siege of Vienna (1683). The Austrian scholar showed that he was aware of this defeat. Evliyâ learned about it in the last years of his life but probably had no detailed knowledge of it and did not narrate it in his work. Only, while relating his experiences when he was in Vienna in 1665 as a member of the Ottoman delegation, he announced the defeat to his readers using a fictional technique: a prophecy, in the form of a negative wish from the mouth of an ecstatic, that the siege that would take place eighteen years later would be unsuccessful (VII.53a21-24).There is one item lacking in Kreutel’s work: Evliyâ Çelebi did not speak openly of a third attempt to conquer Vienna to be made in the future, but he did express this in several places using coded language. Kreutel was unaware of this because of the philological problems connected with the old edition of the Seyahatnâme and because he did not read all ten volumes of the work.In various places of the Seyahatnâme there are notices about a Turkish siege of Vienna the “Red Apple” (Kızılelma), prophecies and warnings as to whether or not the city would be taken, dates of past and future sieges, and codes to decipher these dates. Bringing all of this material together, we can make the following determinations.Based on what he read and heard, Evliyâ gave a detailed account of the first siege of Vienna in 1529, emphasizing that it was a tremendous rout. When he was making the final redaction of his work in the 1680s, 155 years had passed since this event and there was no reason for him to be hesitant about it.It is possible that he had little information about the second siege of Vienna in 1683; but a person like him, who loved to tell stories, could still write something about it. His failure to narrate anything on this topic, only putting it like a prophecy in the mouth of an ecstatic as a wish that the attempt would be unsuccessful, is perhaps due to the fact that the wounds of this defeat were still very fresh. Perhaps Evliyâ did not discuss this failure and the reasons for it in order not to pay any disrespect for Sultan Mehmed IV, who was still alive and reigning.Evliyâ Çelebi had, if not a belief, at least a hope that in the year 1100 of the Hijra Mehmed IV would again try to conquer Vienna and that this attempt would be successful; but this hope was fading. Evliyâ expressed the hope, in several places of his work, in a code using the abjad system of dating (in which the Arabic letters stand for numbers): lafẓ-ı ġanīm = 1100 H = 1688/89 CE. He also put the wish that Vienna (and other “Red Apple” cities) be conquered in 1100 H in the mouth of the legendary shaikh Os̱mān Baba. Evliyâ introduces this shaikh, known in other sources as Otmān Baba, as one of the ghazis who came from Turkistan in the time of Orhan Bey and undertook the conquest of Rumelia. He traveled through the countries of Europe and prayed that Islam would spread everywhere he went. According to the Seyahatnâme, the founder of Vienna was Şemʿūn-ı Ṣafā (St. Peter), one of Jesus’s disciples. He too made a prophecy, telling the Christians that they should not be afraid of the siege undertaken by Iġrando Süleymān in 935 H (= lafẓ-ı ẓılle = 1528/29 CE) but that they should be afraid of the campaign of Mehmed IV (also known as Yûsuf) in 1100 H.When Evliyâ wrote the Seyahatnâme, the year 1000 H (the Islamic millennium, 1591/92 CE) had long passed. In his work he nowhere mentions the year 1000 H or the events that were expected to happen in that year but did not take place. As he was making the final redaction of his work the year 1100 H was approaching. It would be naïve to think that Evliyâ Çelebi actually believed that certain important events would take place in the year 1100 H and that the “Red Apple” Vienna would be conquered. Perhaps he used this date and the coded abjad word for it, ġanīm, to express a hope that was fading. In so doing, he showed literary skill by placing the prophecies of two holy men — one Muslim, the other Christian — regarding the future Turkish conquest of Vienna in widely separated parts of his work (Os̱mān Baba, Volumes 3 and 4; Şemʿūn-ı Ṣafā, Volume 7).

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