This lecture explores a link between Evliya Çelebi’s frequent references to the myth of Queen Kaydafe and Ahmedi’s late fourteenth-century İskendername (Book of Alexander), and it unveils the complex and unexpected ways in which Ahmedi adapted and radically changed the age-old Alexander Romance. In Ahmedi’s telling, Queen Kaydafe stands in for Candace, whose confrontation with Alexander appears in every version of the Romance, East and West. Yet Ahmedi’s İskendername is the first work where the story’s universal “happy ending” turns into a tragedy, fatal to Kaydafe/Candace. Digging through layers of earlier and later texts, Eldem’s investigation reveals how Ahmedi came up with this innovative—and misogynist—twist and laid the foundation for a new and original version of the story, which would spread throughout Ottoman culture and literature at least until the end of the nineteenth century.

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Edhem Eldem (PhD Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, 1989) is a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and the Sakıp Sabancı visiting professor in the history department at Columbia University. He has taught in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University and at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and the École Normale Supérieure. In addition, he has held the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman Studies at the Collège de France, and he has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His fields of interest include the Levant trade in the eighteenth century, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the development of an urban bourgeoisie in Istanbul, the history of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, the history of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire, late nineteenth-century Ottoman first-person narratives and biographies, Westernization and the Tanzimat, and Orientalism.

His publications include French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (1999); A History of the Ottoman Bank (1999); The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (1999, with D. Goffman and B. Masters); Pride and Privilege. A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (2004); Death in Istanbul. Death and Its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic Culture (2005); Consuming the Orient (2007); Un Ottoman en Orient. Osman Hamdi Bey en Irak (1869–1871) (2010); Le voyage à Nemrud Dağı d’Osman Hamdi Bey et Osgan Efendi (2010); Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 (2011, with Z. Bahrani and Z. Çelik); Camera Ottomana. Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1870–1914 (2015, with Z. Çelik); L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident (2018); L’Alhambra. À la croisée des histoires (2021); L’Empire ottoman (2022); The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History (2024).