Ottoman translations of European history focused on royal biography

Evidence

The choice of books for translation is telling. A very large proportion are biographies: Napoleon, Catherine the Great of Russia, Charles XII of Sweden, and one wonders why a historiographic tradition which never took to royal biography becomes so con­ cerned with the royal biography of others. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1952

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did a tradition that rejected royal biography suddenly want biographies of Europe’s monarchs? This tension deserves investigation.
• SEED: Essay angle: what a tradition’s translation choices reveal about what it fears and admires — biography of the enemy as intelligence gathering.