Towards a Narrative Sketch of a History of Conquest of Egypt in 1517 by Bosnian Poet Ali-Bey Hercegovic Shiri

Abstract

The paper presents the manuscript Tārīh-i Feth-i Mısr (A History of Conquest of Egypt). The author is Ali-bey Hercegovic Shiri, son of the Grand Vizier Ahmed-pasha Hercegovic (Hersek-zade), or grandson both of Duke Stjepan Kosača and Sultan Bayazid II. The manuscript is kept at Topkapi Saray (Topkapı Saray_ Muzesi - Emanet Hazinesi, TY Nr. 1433/II). It has 99 pages (218b-267b), with an average of 15 couplets (30 lines) per page and a total of 1,433 couplets (2,866 lines). With respect to its structure and content, Shiri's poetic work A History of Conquest of Egypt (Tārīh-i Feth-i Mısr) is reminiscent of all other prose and poetic works dedicated to Sultan Selim Yavuz, in literature and history known as Selimnamahs (works about Sultan Selim). Ali-bey Hercegovic Shiri's work is one of the early poetized chronicles in Bosniak literature in the Turkish language. The narrative work A History of Conquest of Egypt, written by Ali-bey Hercegovic Shiri, consists of different narrative levels with interchanging substitute descriptive units, so that understanding the narrative units is also subject to stratified receptive penetration into various narrative figures in the text.