The aim of this course is to provide students with the correct reading of various Ottoman archival documents and to comprehend the ways of producing information from the relevant document. In summary, it is to teach the use of Ottoman chronicles and archival documents as a data source by reading them.

Diplomatic: Documents produced regarding the incident at the time the incident occurred are important news sources for us. The most important feature of these is that they are not designed to convey news to the future. They were created for a functional purpose at the time they were produced. That's why they are extremely valuable news sources for historians. Since these were generally stored in a certain classification at the time, archives containing these sources were formed. An important field of technical knowledge for historians to evaluate these archives and the documents stored in them is "diplomatika", which means "document knowledge". Text Facility (Edition Critique): Another group of sources that inform us about past events are "works" designed to provide information about the developments of a certain period. These resources, called "copyright works", have been preserved in libraries, unlike other documents. Since these works were designed to provide information to those who came after them or to those who lived in other places, they have to be subjected to a different evaluation process. Due to the subject of this course, throughout the semester; Emphasis will be on diplomatic, that is, document knowledge. A state; It issues documents in a common form and style within the bureaucracy it has created since its establishment, in a practice that will last for centuries. Those who produce these documents, in other words, those who play an active role in the creation process of the documents, are bureaucrats. These bureaucrats form the group called "kalemiyye" in the Ottoman Empire. Members of Kalemiyye, clerks who generally belong to a "pen" or a "room" and rise in the relevant office over time, fed by various cultural sources, are important actors of this activity. The first thing to do in a work related to diplomacy is; To understand and make sense of this organization well. For this reason, it is necessary to underline two important organizations for the Ottoman central bureaucracy: Defterhane-i Amire and Reisülküttab Chambers. The rooms that undertake different functions within both organizations and the documents produced by the clerks in these rooms; It differs from one another with its language and styles that differ according to period. For this reason, the historian must master the language of the documents of the period he studies. The main subject of this course is to introduce the language of documents to students/researchers through as many different examples as possible. For this purpose, some examples will be focused on, both from the documents produced by the Imperial Council's pens and from the documents that emerged in the provincial kadi courts and state councils throughout the period. In this context, Mübahat Kütükoğlu's work titled The Language of Ottoman Documents is an important reference work that can be used throughout the entire semester for this course.