Ambition and the Limits of Technology: Sultan Bayezid’s Silk

This paper considers the earliest known Ottoman textile, probably woven sometime in the 1390s. Its inscriptions name Sultan Bayezid (d. 1403) while also incorporating lines of generic blessings fit for an Islamic ruler. The textile is a unicum, separated by more than sixty years from the next known Ottoman silks. Its motifs include those of Mongol or Yuan origin, as well as those which might be deemed more Mediterranean or Islamic. Its attribution is uncertain, but it incorporates a substantial quantity of gold thread with a high content of precious metal and was made on a large and complex loom operated by highly skilled artisans. However, close examination of its inscriptions, and an understanding of the loom-mounted mechanisms which allowed them, reveals that the Sultan’s titles were in fact shoe-horned into the design. This in turn suggests that this massive silk hanging was not a special commission but rather a rush job and may be linked with the ambitions of an absolutist ruler. In a larger context, the Bayezid textile is evidence for the roots of Ottoman silk sector, which itself was built with the expertises of artisans who arrived from Syria, Iran, and eastern Europe. Its difference from later objects also shows how weaving technologies in the Empire did not evolve along steady trajectories—long a feature of nationalist narratives—but were rather irregularly spurred by injections of new technologies brought from elsewhere.