Ottoman administrative knowledge of subject Christians never entered its literature

Evidence

Ottoman awareness of Christian Europe was somewhat greater than that of their medieval Saracen predecessors, but was still very limited. Ottoman officials were of course well-informed about the Christian European peoples under their rule, and the documents preserved in the imperial Ottoman archives in Istanbul reflect in some detail the day-by-day dealings of the Ottoman authorities with these communities at all levels. But there is little reflection of this in Ottoman literature or even historiography. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 666

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did rich Ottoman administrative documentation of Christians stay out of literary/historiographical production? A structural question about how imperial knowledge becomes (or fails to become) legible — directly parallel to Orientalist knowledge production.
• XREF: connects to: Elizabethan England never conceived colonizing the Ottomans or Moors — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 113