Сведенията на Енвери за Кера Тамара и хронологията на нейния брак с Мурад I
Enverī’s Account Of Kera Tamara And The Chronology Of Her Marriage With Murad I

Summary/Abstract: The Düstūrnāme, a rhymed Ottoman Turkish universal history composed by Enverī in 1465, contains one of the most idiosyncratic versions of early Ottoman history, which has received surprisingly little attention in modern scholarship. This paper analyzes Enverī’s narrative of the reign of Murad I (1362–1389) with a focus on his marriage with the Bulgarian princess Kera Tamara as reported by the Ottoman author. While referring to real events and personalities, this account has legendary overtones and seems to be based on fifteenth-century Christian and Muslim oral traditions, which have also found some reflection in Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Histories. The analysis shows that Enverī has probably reproduced and versified an already circulating semi-legendary story of Kera Tamara’s appearance at the Ottoman court and the Battle of Kosovo Polje (1389), with the latter event depicted as a direct consequence of the former. In order to make sense of this memory, the second part of the study offers a reconsideration of the chronology of Kera Tamara’s marriage with Murad I – and hence of her brother Ivan Shishman’s acceptance of Ottoman suzerainty – which has been traditionally dated in the 1370s. As most of the scholarly opinions on that matter are based on the inaccurate chronology of an Ottoman tradition going back to the work of Idris Bitlisi (d. 1520), his narrative is revisited to show that he (like Chalkokondyles) actually placed the Bulgarian tsar’s vassalage among events that can be securely dated in the 1380s. A hypothesis is thus put forward to the effect that Ivan Shishman became Murad’s vassal and sent Kera Tamara in his harem after the Ottoman conquest of Sofia ca. 1383–1385.

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