Tughra of Sultan Süleiman the Magnificent

Istanbul, around 1555. An imagined morning in the imperial chancery.

The master has already drawn the name. It came first, before anyone was allowed near the sheet with a brush: three tall shafts rising side by side like masts, two great loops swinging out to the left, one inside the other, a long arm reaching away to the right across nearly the whole width of the paper. Read correctly, the strokes spell out the sultan’s monogram, Süleiman, son of Selim Khan, ever victorious. The young illuminator has been told that the letters are not his business. The spaces are.

He works on the inner loop first, with gold. Not a wash of gold, which would be easy, but a field of tiny spiralling stems, each one ending in a bud or a leaf or a flower no larger than a lentil. Between the gold he lays blue: small blossoms, a cobalt dot, a curl. The pattern has to look grown, never placed. Where the outer loop opens, he lets the spirals breathe a little wider. In the narrow bands of the shafts he packs them close, and they climb.

Every so often he puts the brush down and looks at his own fingertips, which have to be clean. A fingerprint on this would be noticed by people who notice everything.

The finished page will head an imperial decree. The tughra goes at the top, larger than any word of the text, so that whoever unrolls it in a provincial court or a governor’s house knows in one glance whose voice is speaking. It is the sultan’s mark, but it is not his handwriting. Süleiman never drew a line of this. The chancery made it for him, on paper like this, in ink and opaque colour and gold, again and again across his long reign.

Four and a half centuries on, the decree’s business has long been settled or forgotten. What remains on the museum wall is the mark itself, more than sixty centimetres wide, blue outlines crisp against the paper, the gold spirals still turning in their loops. Below it, at the left, a line of finer script in gold and blue begins.

The illuminator’s name is not recorded. His flowers are, every one.