Prose of the Ottoman Empire

Roughly speaking, the prose of the Ottoman Empire can be divided along the lines of two broad periods: early Ottoman prose, written prior to the 19th century CE and exclusively nonfictional in nature; and later Ottoman prose, which extended from the mid-19th century Tanzimat period of reform to the final fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, and in which prose fiction was first introduced.

Early Ottoman Prose

Early Ottoman prose, before the 19th century CE, never developed to the extent that the contemporary Divan poetry did. A large part of the reason for this was that much prose of the time was expected to adhere to the rules of "seci", or rhymed prose, a type of writing descended from Arabic literature ("saj'") and which prescribed that between each adjective and noun in a sentence, there must be a rhyme.

Nevertheless, there was a long tradition of prose in the Ottoman Empire. This tradition was, for centuries, exclusively nonfictional in nature—the fiction tradition was limited to narrative poetry. A number of such nonfictional prose genres developed:
* the "seyahâtnâme", or travelogue, of which the outstanding example is the 17th-century "Seyahâtnâme" of Evliya Çelebi
* the "sefâretnâme", a related genre that is a sort of travelogue of the journeys and experiences of an Ottoman ambassador, and which is best exemplified by the 1718–1720 "Paris Sefâretnâmesi" of Yirmisekiz Mehmet Çelebi Efendi, ambassador to the court of Louis XV of France
* the "siyâsetnâme", a kind of political treatise describing the functionings of state and offering advice for rulers, an early Seljuk example of which is the 11th-century "Siyāsatnāma", written in Persian by Nizam al-Mulk, vizier to the Seljuk rulers Alp Arslan and Malik Shah I
* the "tezkire", a collection of short biographies of notable figures, some of the most notable of which were the 16th-century "tezkiretü'ş-şuara"s, or biographies of poets, by Latîfî and Aşık Çelebi
* the "münşeât", a collection of writings and letters similar to the Western tradition of "belles-lettres"
* the "münazara", a collection of debates of either a religious or a philosophical nature

Later Ottoman Prose