Spis o ustrojstvu Osmanskog Dvora Nikole Matije Iljanovića
Document on the structure of the Ottoman court by Nikola Matija Iljanović

Summary/Abstract: In his essay the author discusses the life and work of Nikola Matija Iljanović, an imperial soldier from the 17th century and the author of a short document on the Ottoman Empire published in Vienna in 1679. Until now nothing has been written on Iljanović, which can be explained by the fact his work on the Ottoman Empire isn’t large and it doesn’t give any new or interesting views on the internal structure of the Empire during the 17th century. As a result of the fact that nobody has concerned himself with Iljanović there is absolutely no mention of him in any special literature. The only place where you can find any facts concerning his person is a list of Croatian authors that wrote in latin, that was made by Šime Jurić, Zlatko Herkov and Dane Čučković. Even the life of the author remained until recent a complete mystery. However, the author of this article has found in the archives of Vienna (the Kriegsarchiv and the Hofkammerarchiv) a lot of material concerning the last period of Iljanović’s life (late 17th century). Documents on Iljanović tell us a very fascinating tale of his life in that period of time and mention contacts he had with famous people who had excellent contacts at court (Kollonitsch, Meninski), people with whom he also occasionally disagreed. All that material, nevertheless, does not help us to unrevel the life and ways of the author of Relatio status Ottomanicae domus. Since it was already very difficult, in spite of all archival research, to unrevel the myterious life of Iljanović, the author of this article has tried to analize each and every part of his work and critically evaluate it by placing it in a historical context. After the part where the author gives an overview of most important literal works on the Ottoman Empire, that were existed in Croatia from the 15th century until the end of the 17th century, the author concentrates on fact concerning the Ottoman Empire that are mentioned in Iljanović’s work. In doing so he tries to compare them with facts that are mentioned by contemporary Ottoman literature. It is very interesting to notice that IljanoviÊ in fact does mention rather accurately different court-services of the Serail, with their names in the Turco-Ottoman language. The geographical discription of the Ottoman empire, nevertheless, has a lot of faults and wrongly written names of places and regions. At the end of Iljanović’s work is the Exhortatio contra Turcam, a belligent speech by Iljanović with which he urges emperor Leopold I - to whom he has dedicated his work - to make war against the Turks and expel them from Europe. This speech is written in the classical humanist sense of the “anti-Turkish speeches” and contains all stereotypes that are usually mentioned in simular works from the first time they began to appear as a specific genre at the beginning of the 15th century.

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