Shafii al-Sharif’s Subhat-al-Akhbar in the Medici Collection: Visualizing Royal Genealogy in the Persico-Islamic and the Medici Courts

Abstract

THIS ESSAY IS THE FIRST INVESTIGATION of a rare sixteenth-century Ottoman genealogical scroll that is archived in the Laurentian Library in Florence, the Subhat-al-Akhbar. The scroll’s preface identifies the author as Shafii al-Sharif, who addresses Sultan Süleyman as the sitting padshah, or king of kings. No reliable historiographical or biographical information on the production or provenance of al-Sharif ’s scroll exists. Three later versions of Subhat-al-Akhbar from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that are based on al-Sharif ’s are preserved in theViennaNational Library and theMetropolitanMuseum inNewYork. An early example of the genealogy of Ottoman rulers, al-Sharif ’s Laurentian scroll was produced