The Enactment of Millennial Kingship at the Court of Murād III

Recent scholarship, drawing on foundational work done from the early 1990s onwards, has demonstrated how vigorous new imperialisms compelled the articulation of grand visions of universal rule across fifteenth and sixteenth century Eurasia.Footnote ⁴ In an Islamicate world bereft of a living Abbasid caliph to serve as a touchstone of universal sovereignty and dominated by Turkic dynasties seeking to build upon Mongol and Timurid patterns of sacred kingship, ideas of universal rulership were articulated in forms that “sometimes verge[d] on the ad hoc.”Footnote ⁵ Ritual specialists at Islamicate courts, in their search for a fount of sovereignty outside the nomocratic tradition, posited astral conjunctions, heavenly constellations, and the cosmic letters of the Arabic alphabet as the desiderata of Islamic sacred kingship.Footnote ⁶ There is now an increasing appreciation of the fact that the history of Islamic sacred kingship in the lead up to the Islamic millennium “from the Balkans to Bengal”Footnote ⁷ was one of occultist experimentation, messianic fervor, and charismatic articulations of sacred power, almost as much as it was one of state consolidation and the canonization of dynastic and religious law.Footnote ⁸

That being said, much of the recent scholarship on Ottoman sacred kingship has eschewed its staged and aesthetic articulations, choosing instead to decipher it through reading theoretical and scholastic expositions on kingship and government penned by scholar-bureaucrats and by doctors of the law.Footnote ⁹ However, the key to the decipherment of sacred kingship as a genre, that is, as “a behavioral as well as cognitive principle,”Footnote ¹⁰ lies in its embodied, ritual, and ceremonial articulation. As Aziz al-Azmeh has argued, royal power was expressed not only through appeals to the law but, most crucially, also through “direct action upon the bodies of kings and subjects alike” and mandated the use of “special dress, of ordered ritual movement and accouterment, decoration, and the spatial and temporal disposition of bodies and other objects in a space specially circumscribed.”Footnote ¹¹ In other words, kings had recourse to an array of “ritual-symbolic”Footnote ¹² tools through which they could render their bodies and their courts sacred, cosmic, or divine. The anthropologist Luc de Heusch went even further when he argued that sacred kingship was essentially comprised by a “body-fetish of the chief or king [that] articulate[d] the natural and social orders.”Footnote ¹³ As per this formulation, the sacralized king is not the chief political functionary of a legislative state but rather a person apart, “a sacred monster” who is ritually removed from society, given power over the natural world, and made to periodically renew and uphold the cosmic balance of the universe.Footnote ¹⁴ Often at the core of sacred kingship—which may even exist prior to the state—therefore, was its embodied-ritual function rather than its nomocratic function.Footnote ¹⁵

If sacral kingship relies on embodied ritual, so too does its cosmic-messianic iterations. As Mughal historian A. Azfar Moin has argued, the discourse of messianism in the context of early modern Islamic empires was fundamentally “about embodied forms of sacred authority.” Moin continues: “It prophesied the coming of a savior who would end an era of injustice and chaos and usher in a new one of peace and righteousness. This correction was expected to take place, moreover, not primarily by doctrinal intervention or revival of religious law…but rather by the sheer physical presence, the thaumaturgical body, of the messianic being.”Footnote ¹⁶

Or put differently, since the ritual logic of sacred kingship of the messianic variety is to transcend the existing normative order, it entails the embodied enactment of the exceptional nature of sovereign power, proof of which must necessarily reside outside normative texts on Islamic political philosophy composed by a nomocratic scholarly class. Such acts may draw on traditional symbolic repertoires or established archetypes of kingly virtue but must employ these in transgressive ways to affect a decisive rupture in the flow of sacred time. Bloody conquest or temple/shrine desecration can be one way to enact such ruptures, and indeed early modern sovereigns with pretensions to universal rule frequently resorted to such brutal acts of sovereign violence.Footnote ¹⁷ But when the ruler became a sacred, more elevated person and no longer accompanied his armies into battle, court ceremonial and royal rite had to enact the sovereign exception that was the basis of the king’s ritual function. In Alan Strathern’s recent formulation, this is the point where the “heroic” king of the battlefield becomes a ritually entrapped “cosmic” king of the court.Footnote ¹⁸

Such is the story of the transformation of Ottoman kingship in the century and a half after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. During this “long sixteenth century,” rapid imperial conquests and state development gave way to a more grandiose dynastic ideology and a more ritualized court. Once an upstart holy warrior at the fringes of the Byzantine and Seljuk worlds, the Ottoman sultan was, in the later sixteenth century, a palace-bound cosmic pivot, a ritually centered monarch. He was Caliph of the Muslim world, the new Roman emperor in Constantinople, the sultan of Cairo, the custodian of the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and the Lord of the Two Seas (the Mediterranean and the Black). From the perspective of Islamic cosmology and sacred geography, he was the universal sovereign.Footnote ¹⁹

At the far end of this developmental phase was Murād III (r. 1574–1595), whose reign saw unprecedented court production that positioned him as the axis mundi, and his thaumaturgical body as the most perfect locus of divine manifestation.Footnote ²⁰ However, this cosmicization was not simply the inevitable consequence of the intellectual and political consolidations of the prior century. Ruling at the cusp of the thousandth year of the Islamic hijri calendar, Murād was also cognizant of his own place within a millenarian-messianic scheme that promised an imminent renewal of religion and community in the lead up to the End Times.Footnote ²¹ It is within this highly charged moment in history that much of the discourse of embodied sacred kingship upon which this article relies must necessarily be situated. Examples of this discourse included stylized renditions of the royal body in an imperial book of festivities, a royal portrait-cum-physiognomy album, a book of Murād’s own dreams and ecstatic visions, and panegyric poetry in a royally commissioned historical chronicle.Footnote ²²

Towards a Pyropolitics of Sacred Kingship

At the heart of this study is an attempt to expand upon the ways in which historians of Islam have analyzed the articulation of early modern, particularly messianically-inflected, kingship. As intimated above, messianic sacral sovereignty—a veritable extreme of extremes—struggles to be contained within the narrow confines of normative and theoretical texts that have been the primary source base of much of Islamic and Ottoman political thought. The question that emerges therefore is this: if exceptional sacral sovereignty carries a sense of “the outside” or “the edge,” where is it to be located in a discourse of universal empire such as that of the Ottomans, which had no meaningful outside in terrestrial terms? As a burgeoning wave of scholarship is increasingly making clear, the royal patronage of occult and cosmic sciences such as astrology and letterism situated the storehouse of sacral sovereignty in the higher spheres of creation. Another way to transcend the nomocratic and geopolitical frame might be via the mobilization of the mysterious and terrifying medium of fire—the most noble and highest of the natural elements. Far from indulging a niche curiosity, the analytical gesture of transcending the frame of “geopolitics”—an elemental regime of nomocratic rule over earth and water—and embracing the lens of “pyropolitics”—a politico-theological strategy of cosmic transcendence through fire—can more readily enable us to capture, theorize, and render visible the extreme means by which extreme political projects are framed and conducted.Footnote ²³ As philosopher Michael Marder has most recently—and presciently—argued:

Utilizing Marder’s theoretical frame, this paper is an attempt to think about early modern sacred kingship through the medium of fire, and by so doing, return to Ottoman and Islamic sacral sovereignty a sense of the extreme.

The medium of fire and the imperatives of sacred kingship in the early modern era came together most dramatically in the realm of courtly pyrotechnics. As Simon Werrett has shown, before the late eighteenth century, the art of pyrotechnics was often couched in the language of alchemy, and the line separating it from supernatural magic was imperceptibly thin.Footnote ²⁵ Over the course of the sixteenth century in particular, this potential of fireworks to evoke the transcendental and the sublime greatly expanded across the European and Mediterranean world. Novel devices in the form of fire-breathing dragons, slithering serpents, exploding castles, floating sea-creatures, and flying comets were engineered.Footnote ²⁶ And as Werrett has further shown, it was during this period that firework displays also began to constitute the terrain upon which the skills and perspectives of “gunners, magicians, alchemists, and humanists” all began to converge.Footnote ²⁷ From here on, they not only served as miniature imitations of natural phenomena such as comets and meteors but also began to inform the causal explanations of natural philosophers as well as the moral teachings of humanist scholars and theologians. As court culture and sectarian conflict expanded in Europe during the sixteenth century, these devices and their classical or scriptural derived motifs were made to serve the ideological ends of princely courts and institutions like the Catholic Church. As we will see later in greater detail, the themes that often undergirded such pyrotechnic displays, and which were projected onto the bodies of their royal or noble patrons, were often those of socio-political and religious renewal. At the millennial court of Murād III as in those of neighboring Europe, the right firework display could also index the thaumaturgical and regenerative power of his messianic persona.

Fire at Court: Rendering the Pyrotechnical in Word and Image

The site of our investigation is the Ottoman circumcision festival of 1582, by all accounts one of the most spectacular festivals of the early modern era. Though the fifty-five-day festival was ostensibly arranged to celebrate the circumcision of Prince Meḥmed, Murād’s heir-apparent, the actual circumcision event was a private affair conducted behind closed doors. Some Venetian sources even suggest that Prince Meḥmed, who was sixteen and thus unusually old for the procedure in 1582, had been circumcised some three years prior but that Murād’s ill health had not permitted a celebration.Footnote ²⁸ Whatever the truth of the matter, what is clear is that during the festival the prince and the occasion of his coming of age were often obscured by a smorgasbord of parades, acrobatics, and pyrotechnical performances that brought together various social classes and professional guilds as participants and spectators, and had the sultan as their ritual and ceremonial focus. These public celebrations began on the seventh of June, when the sultan went in procession to the Hippodrome. What followed were two days of official and foreign receptions, and the exchange of gifts. On the third day, Prince Meḥmed returned to the square after paying his respects to his mother and the first performances and guild parades were staged in front of the sultan.Footnote ²⁹

This grand festival was the most widely observed of Ottoman festivals, being the subject of several commemorative texts and firsthand accounts penned by both Ottoman and foreign observers. It therefore comes as no surprise that this multi-day extravaganza has frequently attracted the attention of scholars who have variously posited it as a manifestation of Bakhtinian carnival, a display of the dynasty and the empire’s wealth and masculine character, an assertion of agency by a burgeoning class of urban craftsmen and tradesmen, an attempt at a diplomatic coup de théâtre, or simply a diversion from financial instability and social unrest in the capital.Footnote ³⁰ Given the scale of the festivities as well as the number of attendees, participants, and organizers involved, all of these various readings have merit, and no singular interpretation can entirely do justice to the multiple agencies and impulses that informed the way the festival unfolded or how it was apprehended at the time. That said, in their perfectly laudable attempts to tell the story of the festival “at the street level,” extant studies have tended to push sacred kingship and its ritual repertoires out of view.Footnote ³¹ This study begins to offer an initial corrective to this scholarly inclination; however, it will do so through a micro-historical reading of one pyrotechnical performance.

The spectacle of the mountain is noted in a number of sources, both Ottoman and non-Ottoman.Footnote ³² The Bosnian-born poet and court scribe İntiẓāmī (d. 1612), in his officially commissioned Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn (The Imperial Book of Festivities) of 1588, devotes two full folio pages to the event.Footnote ³³ Shaped by the patronage and editorial direction of the chief eunuch Meḥmed Ağa and the dwarf Zeyrek Ağa—both senior officials of the imperial harem and close companions of the sultan—it is written in a high literary style that befitted a royal commission.Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless, this composition should not be considered a direct distillation of the inner court’s reading of the event. The substantive core of the text was probably composed around the time of the festival, when İntiẓāmī was still an unknown scribe from the Balkan provinces. It only acquired the official form of an imperial festivities book after several revisions completed in 1585–1586 and 1588 in collaboration with palace officials as well as the artists of the royal atelier.Footnote ³⁵

The rhetorical technique employed by İntiẓāmī throughout the text can best be described as ekphrasis: a highly descriptive compositional mode that aimed to bring an object, person, or event vividly before the eyes through use of rhymed and ornate language. It begins by describing the machine, which it notes was built and unveiled by the European galley slaves in the employ of the Grand Admiral Ḳılıç ‘Alī Pasha. It pays minute attention to the foliage, pastoral scenes, and the multitude of animals that pervaded the mountain model. It then relates how, upon being ignited, the mountain suddenly went up in flames and rose into the air like a phoenix, causing the surrounding animals and people to become noisy, scattered, and disoriented in the ensuing tumult. Here, however, his description of the effects of the blazing inferno on the lions and wolves in particular turns cosmic. The lions whined and moaned in the direction of the Leo constellation, while the wolves, being ravenous for sheep, directed their bodies towards the Aries constellation.Footnote ³⁶ While it may be tempting to dismiss such imagery as part of the aestheticized qualities of ekphrasis writing, it is worth noting that both the Leo and Aries constellations were associated with the element of fire in both Greek and Islamic astrological knowledge (the other one being Sagittarius). Read from this perspective, these lines from İntiẓāmī serve to highlight how fire united sub-lunar creatures and celestial bodies along a great chain of being and transferred influences between them. İntiẓāmī ends by registering his incredulity at the wonderous spectacle, noting how afterwards, when a gust of wind rose where the mountain once stood, the meaning of the common saying “the might of men can move mountains” became manifested.Footnote ³⁷

İntiẓāmī’s text is accompanied by an illustration, made by the court painter Naḳḳāş ‘Os̱mān and his atelier, of the mountain model being rolled out in front of the sultan. None of the fiery commotion that pervades the richly evocative text is present in this image however (see figure 1). The mountain is depicted as it may have been prior to detonation while the multitudes of flora and fauna vividly described by İntiẓāmī are whittled down to a few choice examples. Such restraint in painting—however disappointing it may be to modern viewers—was entirely in keeping with an emerging Ottoman style of miniature painting, of which Naḳḳāş ‘Os̱mān was a chief architect. In a deviation from the Persianate style of early sixteenth century Ottoman painting, the more static setting of the court increasingly came to replace the more fluid settings of the military campaign. More crucially, the old style’s high level of surface ornamentation and the playful depiction of multiple focal points, characters, and narratives give way to paintings with a more prominent protagonist (often the sultan) set against a more legible and less ornate (and thus less distracting) backdrop.Footnote ³⁸ To quote Emine Fetvacı: this emergent style “emphasized order and structure in [its] aesthetic properties, and privileged stability over playfulness.”Footnote ³⁹ Such emphases also served to articulate and enshrine a particular ritual-cosmic order at the Ottoman court: they created ceremonial space where the broad contours of ritual emplacement are worked out and subsequently recorded for posterity. In other words, it is not just an aesthetic codification that is at stake here but a ritual codification as well. While the fiery spectacle of the performance and the myriad details of the pyrotechnical machine are diminished in the painting, the placement of the sultan vis-à-vis the mountain as it moved in procession towards him—as well as the implied interplay between them—is made abundantly clear.

Figure 1.

An artificial mountain is presented to the Sultan, Surnāme-i Hümāyūn, Topkapı Palace Museum Hazine no. 1344, fols. 58b–59a. Reproduced with permission of The Directorate of National Palaces, Istanbul, Türkiye.

The Ottoman bureaucrat and intellectual Muṣṭafā ‘Ālī (d. 1599) also describes this performance at length in his versified account of the festival titled the Cāmi‘u’l-buḥūr der mecālis-i sūr (Gathering of the Seas on the Scenes of Celebration, ca. 1583). In contrast with İntiẓāmī’s work, ‘Ālī’s text is all in verse and is arranged thematically as opposed to chronologically. Like the Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn, however, it employs descriptive ekphrasis to vividly render the entire scene before the reader’s eyes. He describes the mountain with brilliant detail, likening it to the Qāf mountain of Perso-Islamic mythology being circumambulated by dragons, and endows it with an almost otherworldly aura. After the mountain is lit, ‘Ālī narrates:

‘Ālī therefore conveys the same sense of wonder at the spectacle that İntiẓāmī did, though his poetic composition appears to implicate the light of the sultan’s countenance as a motive force for the fire and subtly likens it to a manifestation of the divine. While one may chalk such language up to ‘Ālī’s desire to advance a stagnating career by obsequiously appealing to Murād’s sacred-cosmic sensibilities,Footnote ⁴¹ it is also possible to see in these verses a message regarding the royal presence that some at court had wanted to project. To be able to properly appraise such a reading of this pyrotechnical performance, however, we need to move beyond accounts of the 1582 festival and trace the motif of the burning, melting, moving mountain across the textual production of Murād’s court.

The Sultan’s Miracle

As noted earlier, in the lead up to the Islamic Millennium the court of Murād III saw an unprecedented level of textual and material production at court that served to sacralize his body and cosmicize his brand of messianic kingship. A major example of this was the Ḳıyāfetü’l-insāniyye fī şemā’ili’l-‘Os̱māniyye (Human Physiognomy in the Descriptions of the Ottomans), a hybrid work featuring portraiture and physical descriptions of all the sultans of the Ottoman dynasty, from its founder ‘Os̱mān Gāzī (d.1326) up to Murād III.Footnote ⁴² Patronized and facilitated by the powerful Grand Vizier Ṣoḳullū Meḥmed Pasha (d. 1579), the work was composed by the şehnāmecī Footnote ⁴³ Seyyid Loḳmān (d. 1601) while the portraiture was completed by the atelier of the aforementioned Naḳḳāş ‘Os̱mān. The current scholarship on this work, much of which is art historical in nature, has tended to view it as royal propaganda that served to legitimize Ottoman rule at a time when the sultan neither appeared in public nor led military campaigns in person, that is, as a tool that sought to make an otherwise absent ruler present.

However, when the work is analyzed closely, it becomes clear that the work served a ritual purpose: that of sacralizing the bodies of the Ottoman sultans and framing them as icons of veneration for devotees of the ruler-saint’s cult. This is particularly apparent in the entry devoted to Murād III, the ultimate patron and ritual focus of the whole work. In it his physical description is described as ḥilye—a form of physical description that had hitherto been used exclusively for the prophet Muḥammad—and is composed of language that rendered the sultan simultaneously concrete and abstract. His hue is likened to the rose, his cheeks are brighter than the sun, his moles are likened to stellar constellations, his eyebrows are compared to a line of revealed Quranic verse, and his nose and lips were described using metaphors of musk, lily buds, and pistachios, descriptions that echoed the bodily characteristics of the prophet Muḥammad as described in the Ottoman ḥilye tradition.Footnote ⁴⁴ The use of such corporeal and sensuous imagery, and the explication of the part at the expense of the whole, was characteristic of ekphrasis of royal and saintly figures in late Antique Byzantium. The purpose was to place a mystically-inflected visualization of a personage in the mind’s eye of the reader, hereby enabling a deeper, spiritual linkage between the two. It is an expository mode that sacralizes its chosen object, and transforms it into a cascade of theophanies, at once tangibly immanent and intangibly transcendent.Footnote ⁴⁵ As will become clear in a moment, it is as part of a mimesis of Muḥammad that we should understand the following word-image of Murād’s body: “He is of great dimensions, exalted body, shrewd, strong, saintly and a master of the earth (to such an extent) that from fear of him seas could dry up and mountains could melt, iron could become wax, [and] the hot wind of the desert could become poisoned and afflict the lives of his enemies.…”Footnote ⁴⁶

The imagery of drying the seas, poisoning and controlling the winds, liquefying metals, and—indeed—melting mountains serves to condition the reader’s apprehension of Murād’s bodily strength and his mastery of the earth. Thus, whereas the evocative language used to describe the parts of his face cuts a resplendently beautiful if allusive figure, the imagery associated with the rest of his body cultivates an altogether more frightening view. We cannot dismiss these as mere metaphors or ornamental flourishes because they do index a very real aspect of sovereign self-fashioning: the power to violently and magically affect a rupture in the natural order of things.

Interestingly, a variation on the trifecta of roiling seas, collapsing mountains, and shifting winds also appeared to Murād in a dream. It is located in the Kitābü‘l-menāmāt (The Book of Dreams) of 1591–1592, a larger compilation of the sultan’s dreams, visions, and ecstatic experiences that he had related to his spiritual mentor Şeyḫ Şücā‘ from 1574 until the latter’s death in 1588.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is narrated as follows:

As per this dream, reciting from Muḥammad’s Qur’ān could shatter a giant rock (yüce kaya), bring tumult to the sea, and cause the wind to change direction. While differing in a few details from the aforementioned image in the Ḳıyāfetü’l-insāniyye, this image is nevertheless similar in that it also vests the sultan’s body with the power—again associated with Muḥammad—to magically influence the natural elements (earth, fire, air, and water). The whole dream narrative, which is one amongst many other such narratives of relic transfer between the sultan and the heavenly realm, is an oneiric narration of the sultan’s embodied assumption of the knowledge of the prophet (‘ilm-i nebī), a process which endows his body with miraculous powers and ultimately confirms his status as God’s caliph on earth and as millennial renewer of faith. It also casts Muḥammad in a cosmic, perhaps even a “pyropolitical” mold, and not merely as the deliverer of Muslim scripture and the founder of the first Muslim community.

This connection between prophetic, divine charisma and the miraculous ability to command the natural elements is well attested to in Islamic prophetic lore. The Qur’ān refers to how, when Muḥammad and his followers were besieged in Medina by a Meccan-led confederation (“The Battle of the Trench” 5.A.H./627 C.E.), the siege was broken by “a wind and forces you could not see.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This miraculous intervention is also referenced in a ḥadīth, in which Muḥammad claims: “I was aided by the easterly wind and the people of ‘AdFootnote ⁵⁰ were destroyed by the westerly wind.”Footnote ⁵¹ The power to move mountains is particularly associated with Muḥammad. For example, the mammoth illustrated recension of the Siyer-i Nebī (The Life of the Prophet) of Muṣṭafā Ḍarīr that was commissioned by Murād III and finished in the waning years of his reign relates a miracle story in which Muḥammad slays a dragon by commanding two mountains to move in and crush it.Footnote ⁵² Several canonical ḥadīth also report how mountains trembled beneath Muḥammad’s feet as he scaled them.Footnote ⁵³ The image of moving mountains appears in another ḥadīth that particularly intrigued Murād, prompting him to query Şeyḫ Şücā‘ about it in a letter included in the aforementioned compilation of his dreams and visions: “if you know God with the perfection of His knowledge, your words can move mountains.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In yet another dream narrative, Murād accomplishes a similar feat. Words from a dervish he meets in a wilderness send him into an ecstatic state (bir cezbe gelūr), causing him to cry out “Allāh” with such intensity that nearby mountains warped.Footnote ⁵⁵ Then the dervish proclaims that God had granted His sainthood and all His miracles to Murād.Footnote ⁵⁶ The ability to cause the movement of the sea is, of course, famously associated with Moses, who, as we shall see later, is a pivotal figure in the sultan’s dreams and visions. There is thus a subtle attempt here at mimicking prophetic power. From such unparalleled vantage points into the psyche and intimate personal communications of an early modern ruler, we can discern a topos current at his court: a divinely ordained philosopher-king being able to control nature.

That Murād sought to channel the prophet Muḥammad in the cultivation of his sacred persona fits with broader trends in the post-Mongol period, which saw Muḥammad emerge as a visual model for kingly deportment and a fount of regal sovereignty in the Islamic world.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the extent of his obsession with Muḥammad was a clear outlier, as demonstrated by his ritual preoccupation with prophetic relics.Footnote ⁵⁸ Though many of these were brought to Istanbul by Selīm I after his conquest of Mamluk Egypt and the Hijaz in 1517, it was Murād who converted the royal bedchamber in the third court of the Topkapı palace into a shrine for relics like the mantle (ḫirḳa) of the prophet.Footnote ⁵⁹ This ritual move echoed one of the sultan’s dreams in which this important relic was draped upon his shoulders.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1592–1593, he also had a gold-plated and bejeweled ebony cupboard made for storing the mantle.Footnote ⁶¹ In a similar vein, Murād’s receipt of the sword of the prophet Muḥammad in the context of a dreamFootnote ⁶² echoes the time when he was given such a sword relic by a Sufi şeyḫ soon after his ascension to the throne in 1574.Footnote ⁶³ His possession of such a sword then became a distinguishing feature of his self-image, appearing in Seyyid Loḳmān’s Şehanşāhnāme (Book of the Emperor) of 1581 as well as in the text and portrait of Murād in the aforementioned Ḳıyāfetü’l-insāniyye of 1579.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, Murād’s oneiric and visionary encounters tended to manifest at the Ottoman court in concrete ways. Moreover, all of these ritual acts were geared towards harnessing the spiritual charisma of the prophet Muḥammad, creating an ideological imbrication between the prophet and the Ottoman dynasty that historian Gottfried Hagen has recently termed the pietas Ottomanica. Footnote ⁶⁵

The third instance of the image of the melting, collapsing mountain comes from the Şecā‘atnāme (“Book of Courage, ca. 1586–1587) of the court historian Āṣafī Dal Meḥmed Çelebi. Commissioned by Murād III himself, the text is a ġazavātnāme (an epic detailing the military exploits of a person) that described and extolled Özdemiroğlu ‘Os̱mān Pasha’s (d. 1585) campaigns against the Safavids in verse. Though not centered on the person of the sultan, it does eulogize him extensively and prefaces the pasha’s exploits with Murād’s sage decision to appoint him to the vizierate and dispatch him to the eastern front. Towards the final sections of the work, Āṣafī again takes up the question of Murād III’s special qualities, and gives us the following verses:

Āṣafī thus furnishes us with an image of the sultan being able to miraculously melt a mountain “like sugar” by merely looking at it. However, here he also employs the language of Twelver Shī‘ism—the official creed of the rival Safavid dynasty—to give this image a decidedly messianic gloss. The sultan, who is the twelfth sultan of the Ottoman dynasty, is explicitly called a manifestation of Muḥammad al-Mahdī (maḥżar-ı Mahdī), the twelfth Shī‘i Imām whom Twelver Shī‘is believe to be in occultation since 874 C.E., and whose triumphal return near the end times is expected. The cosmological titles Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction (ṣāḥib-ḳirān) and the Pole of Poles (ḳuṭbu’l-aḳṭāb, i.e., the axis mundi)—all titles carrying millenarian, chiliastic, and messianic implications—also prominently preface this image. In this context then the sultan’s miracle is tied to his power to create a messianic peace through his defeat of the heretical Safavids and the absorption of their lands and peoples. That the pyrotechnic performance may have carried an anti-Safavid undertone is consistent with the fact that a number of spectacles and mock battles staged at the festival of 1582 were explicitly choreographed to humiliate the Safavid mission that had arrived to negotiate an end to the war that Murād had launched against them in 1578.Footnote ⁶⁷

Once read as a messianic motif with a Muhammadomimetic (perhaps even Deiomimetic) tenor, the burning mountain’s pyrotechnical instantiation at the 1582 festival begins to appear more meaningful. 1582/990 A.H. was merely a decade away from the Islamic Millennium. Moreover, this was the year in which Jupiter and Saturn (whose conjunction is indexed by the aforementioned title ṣāḥib-ḳirān) were to enter a special conjunction in the same astrological position as at the birth of Islam and the fall of the Sassanian Empire in the seventh century. This then was the moment in time during which the inauguration and victory of a new and final religious dispensation was expected.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, it was such cosmological considerations that had compelled Murād’s competitor for the title of universal sovereign of Islamdom, the Mughal emperor Akbar, to hold lavish festivities at his court, issue gold coins with the word thousand (alf) inscribed on them, commission a thousand-year history beginning with the death of the prophet Muḥammad and ending with Akbar (appropriately titled Tarīkh-i Alfī, Millennial History), and launch a syncretic religious dispensation with himself at its cultic center.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the Ottoman context too, the year 990 A.H. was cosmically significant. Two key figures in the development of sixteenth-century Ottoman apocalyptic and messianic thought, the scholar ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 1454) and Süleymān’s own geomancer (remmāl) Ḥaydar, viewed this year as pivotal in their astrologically-informed apocalyptic schemas.Footnote ⁷⁰ Given the highly charged atmosphere of expectation and possibility in this cosmologically seminal year across “the Balkans to Bengal,” could fire— and its alchemically-inflected associations with rupture, transformation, and renewal—be performing the same ritual-symbolic function in the spectacle of the burning mountain that was staged in front of the sultan?

Here we need not rely on Āṣafī’s Şecā‘atnāme alone to demonstrate the theophanic or apocalyptic-messianic resonances attendant in the image of burning or collapsing mountains; it figures prominently in Muslim scripture as well. In fact, the closest one gets to God’s self-manifestationFootnote ⁷¹ in the Qur’ān is a passage (7:143) that employs exactly this image: “When Moses came at the appointed time and his Lord spoke to him, he asked, ‘My Lord! Reveal Yourself to me so I may see You.’ Allāh answered, ‘You cannot see Me! But look at the mountain. If it remains firm in its place, only then will you see Me.’ When his Lord appeared [or manifested His majesty] to the mountain, He leveled it to dust and Moses collapsed unconscious. When he recovered, he cried, ‘Glory be to You! I turn to You in repentance and I am the first of the believers.’”Footnote ⁷²

In this verse, which is evocative of Exodus 33:18–23 and 19:17–18 as well as 1 Kings 19:11–16, the verb used for God manifesting Himself is tajallā. It is derived from the Arabic root j—l—w, which carries the meanings of becoming clear, manifest, evident, or revealed. Tajallā, however, can also be translated as “He manifested his Jalāl, Majesty,”Footnote ⁷³ which as the eminent Qur’ān scholar Mustansir Mir has shown, is the closest term in the Qur’ān that can evoke the concept of Glory. Its use in Qur’ān 7:143 is thus “suggestive of effulgence.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, this is how some exegetes, who would rather admit to the appearance on earth of one of God’s attributes as opposed to His essence, have preferred to translate it. Read in this way, it is evocative of Muṣṭafā ‘Ālī’s aforementioned verses on the spectacle of the burning mountain, though ‘Ālī ties the tajallī/tecellī that lit the mountain to the “effulgence of the ruler’s visage” (şāhuñ tāb-i dīdārı).Footnote ⁷⁵ We know from references in the text of Kitābü‘l-menāmāt that Murād was intimately aware of this Quranic verse, as he no doubt was with much of the Quranic lore about Moses.Footnote ⁷⁶

Crucially, however, the image of collapsing mountains is markedly apocalyptical in the Qur’ān. In numerous references to the Last Day—when time will seize and God will descend to earth to pass judgment on all of humankind—this image is present. To take one example, verses 1–15 in a surah titled aṭ-Ṭūr (“the Mount”) provide the following picture of the Day of Judgment: “By mount Ṭūr, and by the book written on open pages for all to read, and by the sacred House frequently visited, and by the canopy, raised high, and by the seas set on fire! Indeed, the punishment of your Lord will come to pass—None will avert it—On the Day the heavens will be shaken violently, and the mountains will be blown away entirely. Then woe on that Day to the deniers—those who amuse themselves with falsehood! It is the Day they will be fiercely shoved into the fire of hell. They will be told, ‘This is the Fire which you used to deny. Is this magic, or do you not see?’”Footnote ⁷⁷

In other places in the Qur’ān, it is promised that at the apocalypse the mountains shall “be like carded wool,”Footnote ⁷⁸ “be scattered to the wind as dust,”Footnote ⁷⁹ “be as a heap of sand poured out and flowing down,”Footnote ⁸⁰ “be crushed to powder at one stroke,”Footnote ⁸¹ “be crushed to pieces,”Footnote ⁸² “vanish as if they were a mirage,”Footnote ⁸³ and “fall down in utter ruin.”Footnote ⁸⁴ One such passage, which talks about how God will make the “firmly fixed” mountains move “just like clouds” on “the day the horn will be blown [i.e. the Day of Judgment]”Footnote ⁸⁵, particularly intrigued Murād, who queried his spiritual mentor about it in a letter.Footnote ⁸⁶ In this apocalyptical context too, this motif is tied to final resolution and reset of the cosmic order.

The Holy Roman Emperor as Reformer-Alchemist

By viewing this pyrotechnical performance in the light of references in scripture and near-contemporaneous textual sources, we can begin to piece together the complex meanings that may have been read into it at the Ottoman court of the late sixteenth century. However, given that pyrotechnic devices strikingly similar to the Ottoman example are known to have been unveiled at European royal festivals from the late sixteenth century onwards,Footnote ⁸⁷ it is worth asking whether these can provide further purchase on unfamiliar systems of thought undergirding the mobilization of the pyrotechnic arts at the early modern court. Such a move, however, is not advanced with an eye towards flattening interpretation of these performances and seeing them as one and the same. Pyrotechnic devices across the early modern Mediterranean were highly adaptive and polysemic constructions, and as such, could evoke a plethora of mythic narratives, symbols, and concepts in tune with the socio-cultural backgrounds of particular audiences. However, as we shall see, a core point of similarity is how often volcano-like pyrotechnic devices were likened by court and lay audiences to the dispositions and the bodily qualities of their royal patrons, and how often they were tied to themes of religious and political renewal and regeneration by contemporary observers.

The pyrotechnic displays that bear the most striking resemblances to the Ottoman example were those commissioned to mark the election of the Hapsburg Ferdinand III, King of Hungary and Bohemia, as Holy Roman Emperor in 1637. The exact makeup of the devices involved, the scene and course of their execution, as well as their reception by spectators are all recorded in a printed festival book written by priest and scholar Luigi Manzini (d. 1657), which also includes etchings by the artist Luca Ciamberlano (d. 1641) (see figures 2a-c).Footnote ⁸⁸ It depicts a complex fireworks machine based on Mount Etna that underwent spectacular transformations over the course of three evenings so as to illustrate three kinds of victory of the Catholic House of Hapsburg: (1) against its rebellious (Protestant) subjects, (2) against the scourge of heresy, and (3) against its Ottoman rivals.Footnote ⁸⁹ Since it is probable that both the Ottoman and Italian devices emerged from a shared symbolic, artistic, and technological milieu, the Italian example from 1637 may offer some clues for the Ottoman machine from 1582 as well.

Figure 2a-c.

left to right: (a) Machine representing the emperor’s victory over his rebellious subjects. (b) Machine representing his victory over heresy. (c) Machine representing his victory over the Ottoman Turks. From Manzini, Applausi festivi (Rome: n.p., 1637), 40, 52, and 70.

Ciamberlano’s etchings show an evolving mountain device harboring caverns, trees, animals, dragons, and serpentine creatures, all of which echo features on the Ottoman pyrotechnical machine as described by İntiẓāmī and ‘Ālī. The presence of a large orb above the final iteration of the machine evokes a flaming spherical element that had reportedly been suspended above the Ottoman example, as per the account of one Nicholas Von Haunolth, a nobleman from Breslau (present day Wrocław in Poland) who may have observed the performance as part of the entourage of the Hapsburg ambassador.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the etchings of the orb above the Italian example we can see signs of the zodiac and the constellations that are based on the celestial map made by the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (d.1528) using Arabic sources. If the two machines were indeed of a type, this raises the tantalizing possibility that the astrologically based elements of İntiẓāmī’s text (discussed above) were descriptions of the surrounding animals’ engagements with zodiacal signs on an actual flaming orb suspended above the machine. In any case, what is clear is that similar celestial symbolism was read into both performances. The heraldic double-headed eagle of the Hapsburgs, standing in for the emperor himself, battles the Ottoman Empire (which, Manzini notes, was represented by the device of the crescent moon)Footnote ⁹¹ and induces fire in the mountain-like device below by marshaling cosmic-alchemical forces (perhaps further indexed by the alchemical symbol of the three crowns, which stood for the three alchemical primes of sulfur, mercury, and salt).

Unlike with the Ottoman example, however, where several references in contemporaneous texts reveal the complex meanings and symbolism that may have been read into the pyrotechnical display at the Ottoman court, Manzini’s text is more explicit about the emperor’s connection to the pyrotechnical assemblage. For one, he informs us that Ferdinand III was concerned that the public would not be able to grasp the complex symbolism of the performance, and therefore “he desired that each night programs be distributed, the contents of which would reveal to the eyes the artifice and the aim of the macchina there proposed.”Footnote ⁹² Manzini then explicitly ties the emperor to the flames by summing the spectators’ reaction to spectacle: “some said that so many times had the image of His Magnificence been rendered in marble, silver, gold, and bronze, here, for once, was his effigy in flames.”Footnote ⁹³ He then notes how “Others claimed to see the renewal of the world predicted under his happy reign; the sign of this being the competition of all elements together: fire lit from powder (which is also earth) in order to soar skyward, while water, raining down, filled the air; because here, with happy confusion, all four elements commingled, representing a joyful and prodigious, but regulated, chaos.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Thus, Manzini—perhaps embellishing the views of the spectators to chime with the learned symbolism of the pre-circulated literature—sees in the spectacle the thaumaturgical power of the emperor that like sovereignty itself “straddles the boundary between chaos and order.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Moreover, through the language of the warring elements, and perhaps with the employment of the alchemical image of the three crowns, he also articulates a discourse of alchemical transformation, of explosive chaos as well as its regulation, of the elimination of socio-religious divisions, and of the renewal of the world, all themes at the heart of millenarian and messianic politico-theological projects.

While the design of this pyrotechnical device would have certainly drawn on earlier mountain-based devices that were employed at European courts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there is cause to believe that this pyrotechnical device was also based, in part, upon alchemical drawings in circulation in central Europe, such as the one (see figure 3) included in the short but influential work titled Cabala: Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia, published in 1615 in Augsburg by the German doctor Stefan Michelspacher of Tyrol.Footnote ⁹⁶ Produced by the engraver Raphael Custos (d. 1664)—son of engraver Dominicus Custos who also served the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II—the image (presented under the title of “Conjunction”, i.e., the union of opposites) is a “mirror” for the processes (depicted as scalable steps on a mountain) needed to achieve the philosopher’s stone (represented by a phoenix perched on a temple). All these elements are positioned between the natural elements, as well as the planets and the constellations. The phoenix in this image finds its parallel in the double-headed heraldic eagle of the Hapsburgs, while the underlying operation, the “union of opposites,” speaks to the messianic theme of the resolution of all contradictions and religious divisions, which, as we have seen, was also the overarching message of the pyrotechnic machine.

Figure 3.

A Mirror for the Alchemical Process, included in Michelspacher, Cabala: Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia (Augsburg: n.p., 1615).

That such a performance executed for Ferdinand III should be an allegory for the alchemical processes of renewal and reconciliation is not surprising. As the pioneering work of R. J. W. Evans, Pamela Smith, and Bruce Moran has shown, the courts of Central Europe, from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, were the sites of perhaps the most prodigious patronage of alchemy in early modern Europe.Footnote ⁹⁷ Compelled by fiscal crises, sectarian strife between Catholics and Protestants, and the threat of impending invasion by the Ottomans, Holy Roman Emperors and some members of the German nobility turned to alchemy, not only for its economic promise, but also for its metaphysical value. For example, Rudolf II patronized alchemical tracts and transmutations at court as cosmo-soteriological endeavors that could unlock the inner workings of nature, and through this divine knowledge, effect an “intellectual reconciliation between the contraries of the Catholic and Protestant confessions as well as among the growing divisions in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Moreover, as Moran has shown, a similarly chiliastic and reconciliatory impulse to unite Lutherans and Calvinists in his domains guided the occult patronage and its display in the form of pyrotechnics at the court of Moritz of Hessen-Kassel (d. 1637).Footnote ⁹⁹

Rudolf’s successors, in particular Ferdinand III and Leopold I, despite abandoning Rudolf’s irenic ideology in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, nevertheless also patronized alchemy as a tool of the Counter-Reformation and of dynastic self-assertion. Not so much a harmonious melding together of separate confessions within the empire under an overarching prisca theologia, theirs was the forceful assertion of the most “noble” alliance of the House of Hapsburg and the Catholic Church over the “baser” elements of Protestantism. The transmutations of base metals to nobler ones that were conducted in the presence of the emperors became tangible demonstrations of the piety, grandiosity, and sheer philosophical prowess of the emperors, that is, of the ritual efficacy of the emerging pietas austriaca itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This pairing of alchemical knowhow demonstrated at court and the emperor’s person was sometimes given further ritual-symbolic form, when the transmuted metal would be shaped into medallions bearing the likeness and the lineage of the emperor.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, when Manzini employed the language of alchemy to describe the pyrotechnic display on the occasion of Ferdinand III’s election and linked it to his thaumaturgical power to eliminate confessional divides in his domains, he was drawing on a well-established and widely understood discourse at the Hapsburg court.

In this context, such alchemical discourse was employed, not as a well-defined and discrete disciplinary “other” to Renaissance science, religion, art, economy, and political culture, but as a broader “language of mediation” with the power to shape all these areas of thought, belief, and practice. As Smith has argued for the case of the Hapsburg and Central European courts in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “We should not be surprised that alchemy was a quintessential noble activity; it involved, after all, the ennoblement of base metals. In the process of burning away the dross to leave an eternally unchanging noble metal, the eternity of family line and of noble rule could be read. The notion that alchemical knowledge was bestowed by God complemented the ideology of divine right, and the image of alchemy as esoteric knowledge reserved for the very few signified the power of the prince over knowledge just as much as his imprimatur on printed books.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Alchemy then was a noble and “cosmic pursuit.” It was “simultaneously a practice, a theory, and a soteriological activity, [which] involved textual and experiential knowledge and promised divine illumination to the alchemist.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Moreover, as “a particularly flexible discourse that simultaneously possessed a material and metaphysical dimension,” alchemical language could be marshaled to variously evoke dynastic perfection, societal unification, cultural regeneration, and the power to create material abundance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While the transmutation of base metals to more noble varieties in the presence of the ruler was one way to foster such associations between alchemical knowledge and the king’s body, pyrotechnical devices could also provide the means for a more spectacular projection of such ideas of purification and regeneration through fire to a much wider audience.

Towards Connections and Comparisons

The Ottoman machine now seems less unusual than it appeared at first glance, being one amongst quite a few such mountain-like devices unveiled and ignited at the courts of neighboring Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Indeed, it is likely that both the Ottoman and Italian devices emerged from overlapping symbolic, artistic, and technological milieus. As mentioned earlier, the mountain device was constructed and unveiled by the European galley slaves of the Grand Admiral Ḳılıç ‘Alī Pasha, who himself was a renegade from Calabria. The miniature painting in İntiẓāmī’s Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn depicts these galley slaves, who are easily distinguishable by their European garb, presenting the device to the sultan. The mountain device was also not the only one at the festival that was made by foreign slave labor. In his travel account, Edward Webbe, an English-born master gunner who had been a mercenary in Europe before ending up as an Ottoman galley slave in October of 1572, recalled how he was made to devise “a cunning piece of fire work framed in form like to ye Ark of Noy [Ark of Noah]” for the festival of 1582.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Despite the subsequent development of a local guild of firework makers in Istanbul, which was described by the Ottoman traveler and wit Evliyā Çelebi in his account (1638) of Istanbul’s guild processions,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ the use of European expertise at the Ottoman court continued. John Covel, an English clergyman who had traveled to the Ottoman lands in 1675, reported meeting two recent converts—a Dutchman and a Venetian—who made some of the fireworks for a royal festival held in Edirne that year.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The use of similar types of pyrotechnic displays, involving dragons, fortresses, comets, spinning wheels, and underwater devices in both Ottoman and European royal festivals also point to how technical expertise, conceptual vocabularies, and symbolic repertoires of pyrotechnology must have flowed across confessional, cultural, and geographic divides in the early modern Mediterranean.

This raises the possibility that the mountain device represented an Ottoman attempt to use a European art form to project dynastic power on the international stage.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, invitations to the festival, most of which were accepted, were sent to courts of the Sultan of Fez and Morocco, the Safavid Shah, the Khans of Crimea, the Holy Roman Emperor, France, the Tsar of Moscow, Poland, the Republic of Venice, Ragusa, and the Voivodes of Transylvania, Moldovia, and Wallachia. Apart from extant first-hand accounts of the festival penned by foreign observers, the presence of European diplomatic entourages as spectators can also be gleaned from the miniatures of the Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn, which show men dressed in distinctive European coats and hats sitting in the specially prepared viewing stalls next to the Hippodrome. Both Ottoman and non-Ottoman sources also detail the various objections raised by the ambassadors of “the evil-doing king of Vienna” [the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II] and the French king Henry III, regarding their lowly seating positions and the inadequacy of their accommodations.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is probable therefore that the polysemic spectacle of the burning mountain was directed as much at them as at their Safavid counterparts.

If so, it would not have been the first time that interconnecting networks of artistic patronage, as well as cultures of royal pageantry, festivity, and ceremonial were mobilized in the service of Ottoman sacred kingship during a time of intense geopolitical rivalry and war. Perhaps the most famous example of such intersection was the regalia made in Venice for Süleymān “the Magnificent” during the early part of his reign (1520–1536). This was a time when his rivalry for universal rulership with the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hapsburg Charles V (r. 1519–1558), was at its height. Most notable among these objects—which included horse furnishings, a lavish throne, and a royal scepter—was a bejeweled ceremonial helmet that brought together elements from Hapsburg ceremonial helms, the emperor’s mitre-crown, and the pope’s multi-tiered tiara. The work of Gülrü Necipoğlu has demonstrated that the commission and presentation of the helmet to Süleymān, though once considered to be a project with no Ottoman input, involved his chief treasurer Iskender Çelebi, his childhood friend and confidant the Grand Vizier Ibrāhīm Pasha, and Alvise Gritti, the illegitimate son of the Venetian Doge and a “Turkified Venetian” who formed a key node in the trade of jewels and art objects between Venice and Istanbul.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Once acquired, the helmet would be used by Ibrāhīm Pasha as a key part of the ceremonial pageantry—closely modeled on Charles V’s 1529 entry into Bologna—that had accompanied Süleymān’s 1532 march to Vienna.Footnote ¹¹¹

Neither was this the only instance of an Ottoman-Venetian artistic collaboration being geared towards the articulation of sacred kingship during the sixteenth century. As a number of historians of Ottoman art have shown, before Naḳḳāş ‘Os̱mān and the artists of his atelier produced the royal portraits of the aforementioned Ḳıyāfetü’l-insāniyye, they consulted serial portraiture of the Ottoman sultans printed in Lyon, Rome, and Venice, in addition to the physiognomic descriptions and paintings of the sultans produced at the Ottoman court. The portraits rendered on the basis of these sources were then checked against the royal portraits made within the circle of the Venetian painter Paolo Veronese (d. 1588), which had been painstakingly acquired by the Grand Vizier Ṣoḳullū Meḥmed Pasha via the Venetian Bailo Niccolò Barbarigo in 1579.Footnote ¹¹² Thus, the production was patronized and facilitated at the highest levels of the Ottoman court and was a logistical operation on an international scale. Like the ceremonial helmet and other regalia made for Süleyman, it was another instance where European models and techniques were actively embraced to create a new visual vocabulary of Ottoman kingship in the late sixteenth century.

While the performance of 1582 would likely have carried somewhat different resonances—informed by Quranic, prophetological, or Turko-Persian mythological sources—for Ottoman observers than those staged in Rome in 1637 did for their intended audiences, the latter can also assist in providing us with a useful comparative optic to view the former, and vice versa. First, it invites us to extend the symbolic-communicative potential of the Ottoman pyrotechnic performance beyond its entertainment value or its ability to obliquely index the martial prowess of the state. As evinced in both Manzini’s and ‘Ālī’s descriptions of the performances, elaborate pyrotechnic devices employed in courtly settings could be used to articulate the supernatural powers of the body of the cosmic king. This tendency persisted into the eighteenth century, when pyrotechnic devices modeled on Mount Etna and/or Vesuvius became a recurring part of the eighteenth century Roman “Festival of the Chinea,” which marked the transfer of tribute from the King of Naples and Sicily to the Pope.Footnote ¹¹³ One account of the festivities of the 1727 festival, for example, poetically described the machines’ violent eruptions as being “adapted to describe the effects of His Majesty’s [the King of the Two Sicilies’] Magnanimous Heart.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Second, it allows us to appreciate how the theme of messianic renewal could be read into the image of the inflamed cosmic mountain in both contexts, even when they are arrived upon via culturally specific intellectual trajectories. Such similarities may be explained by recourse to the influence of analogous scriptural narratives in both Islamic and Christian contexts, and/or via the laying out of a history of diffusion—of people, narratives, motifs, and pyrotechnical devices—across the eastern Mediterranean zone. However, the comparative enterprise can also be placed on a firmer footing by conducting what historian of religion Bruce Lincoln has termed “weak comparison”.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is a method that entails situating a limited number of specialized comparanda in their particular contexts, taking difference as seriously as similarity, and situating the latter within “similar socio-economic, political, and discursive dynamics” as opposed to being the result of unconscious universal archetypes, the prehistoric unity of certain myths, and/or ancient networks of diffusion.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Earlier, renowned Indologist Wendy Doniger made a somewhat analogous methodological intervention in the comparative study of myth when she eschewed the “top-down” comparisons of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and James Frazer in favor of a “bottom up” approach. Such an approach, she argued, assumed “certain continuities not about overarching human universals but about particular narrative details concerning the body, sexual desire, procreation, parenting, pain, and death, details which, though unable to avoid mediation by culture entirely, are at least less culturally mediated than the broader conceputal categories of the universalists.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ A way to conduct such a bottom-up comparison involves cleaving the mythic comparanda in question into two parts: (i) a core part that operates across cultures and shares key elements over time (what Doniger calls the “micromyth”), and (ii) the specialized array of symbolic, ornamental, and narrative details that accrue around the story during various tellings and retellings across space and time (the “macromyth”). Paying attention to the micromyth “makes it possible for us to find meanings shared by all the cultures that share the myth, meanings over and behind the individual cultural inflections.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The macromyth, on the other hand, “makes possible the cross-cultural rather than the universalist enterprise.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Both are indispensable to the comparative endeavor since they enable us to see how a micromythic construction endeavors to provide answers to shared, perennial human concerns, such as birth, death, mortality, or salvation, and how its macromythic elaboration attunes to the specific needs of a particular cultural context and moment in historical time.

The micromythic construction in our case is a mountain lit and transformed by a fire of sacred or otherworldly provenance, while the macromyth might involve extra actors and details like prophets, God, the phoenix, three crowns, and the zodiacal sphere, all of which would cast the image variously in a mytho-scriptural and/or an ecoterico-alchemical mold. Within the core, micromythic construction, the verdant mountain represents solidity, stability, and permanence. In fact, the predominant view of mountains in the Qur’ān as the “firmly fixed pegs” that stabilized the earth’s surface so that living things could thrive therein, speaks exactly to such emphases.Footnote ¹²⁰ The numerous animal species and bucolic scenes redolent of the countryside that animate the pyrotechnic machines—vividly described by İntiẓāmī and Manzini in words and visually rendered by both Naḳḳāş ‘Os̱mān and Ciambarlano—also evoke the unchanging order of nature and the cosmos created by God. On the contrary, fire is mercurial, unstable, destructive, but also a potent symbol and agent of regeneration and rebirth across cultures. In John Durham Peters evocative phrasing, “fire is a way to negate the world, and thus a way to make it a place we can live in…it is nature’s eraser.”Footnote ¹²¹ That the former suddenly gives way to the latter then speaks powerfully, not only of transformation as such, but of sudden, violent change. Yearning for such a dramatic rupture in the state of things has been a stable constant in human history, manifesting either as a drive for the messianic renewal of the earth, or more recently as “revolutionary fervor,” which Marder argues is “the secularized rendition of a flaming theological ideal.”Footnote ¹²²