76

THE TAESCHNER COLLECTION (Or. 12.357, cont.)

work, the author explains the circumstances of his dismissal as (the first Ottoman) minister of foreign affairs in 1252 (1836) and accuses his opponents, the minister of finanr.fi, Pertev Pa§a, in particular for exaggerating an unimportant incident as a pretext for getting rid of him. This incident was the so-called Churchill affair . Alfred Churchill (1825-70, cf. DNB X), a British journalist, dismissed by the author as a ‘scoundrel’ (habfs, 2b)’, had, while hunting, injured a Muslim boy who was pasturing sheep near Kadiköy with buckshot. He had been imprisoned and, reportedly, maltreated. Consequently, the foreign ambassadors had gathered and'lodged an official complaint with the Porte (for the complicated details, see Tanpinar’s article). The work consists of a brief introduction (lb-2a), followed by a preface (mukaddime, 2a). The work is also said to contain a further two chapters (mebhas), but only a part of the first chapter (from 27a) was completed. Some marginal additions. Bound in gold-tooled brown leather boards and kept in a cardboard holder, covered in green paper with leaf patterns and brown leather edges, and containing a purple ribbon; fine glazed light brown paper with watermark ‘BON’; (l)+34+2+(l) folios; 189x117 mm and 124x68 mm; 15 lines; catchwords; small calligraphic ta‘Uk\ red lines; borders in gold within black lines; a magnificent headpiece with floral patterns in gold, pink, purple, green, blue and white on f. lb (see plate); without date (but cf. above) and the name of a copyist, the inscription ‘Franz Taeschner Ms. Nr. 33’ by the owner himself occurs on f. la; a note by Taeschner on the title, name of the author and the purchase (from Nasrflllah in 1925), written on a separate piece of paper, is found in the MS. Begins (lb): a^jLudS j 03$ fJU. 42^ 3 ... u-i »■_! tjLaj Ends (34b): Jj Lt JXUu ->'■ Ai-JLl [S] 3 Aili# JJLiiJ >* U» u-A - • ^ .\i ill jjr-S 111 ’ Catalogue entries: Flemming 210-1 and Götz II, 226, where other MSS are mentioned; see also Fihris 479 (I, pp. 123-4). Editions: Istanbul 1300, 1305 (cf. Özege 19181). Translation: Arthur Alric, Un diplomate ottoman en 1836 (Paris 1892).