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Lot Essay
The earliest surviving examples of banners of this type date from sixteenth century and are kept in the Church of San Stefano in Pisa, supposedly having been captured by the Knights of Malta from Ottoman galleons at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. This famous naval defeat was the first in a series of blows which saw the Ottomans pushed out of much of Eastern Europe and into the Balkans. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many more banners were collected by other parties to these wars: the banner in the Wawel State Collections in Krakow, for example, is reputed to have been taken at the Siege of Vienna.
The reason why these banners were so prized by European armies was because of their powerful symbolism. The text - derived the hadith and Qur'anic verses - was intended to inspire soldiers to feats of bravery in their pursuit of holy war. The banner also served to remind soldiers of their duty to the Sultan. The example in the Vienna Heeresheschichtliches Museum was reputedly presented to Sarı Süleyman Paşa by Mehmed IV before the campaign which culminated in the disastrous Second Battle of Mohacs (12 August 1687). Another example in the Islamic Arts Museum in Malaysia, though undated, bears the signature of the Ottoman calligrapher Sami Effendi (1838-1912). Even if soldiers were sent to the farthest reaches of the Ottoman Empire, there was a symbolic importance in the fact that their banners were all woven in the palace of the ruler whom they served.
The fragile silk material meant that these flags would not have survived the strains of military life for long before they were lost, or became too tattered for use and had to be replaced. This explains why those which survive were – like the present lot – mostly woven in the 19th century. Two further banners are in the Khalili Collection, of which one is dated AH 1235/1819-20 AD (J M Rogers, Empire of the Sultans, Geneva, 1995, nos.76 and 77, p.131). Other nineteenth-century examples were sold at Bonhams London, 19 April 2019, lot 96, and in these Rooms, 27 April 2004, lot 54.