<i>The Pyropolitics of Sacred Kingship</i> : Fireworks and the Performance of Messianic Sovereignty in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Abstract What made a sovereign, and a messianic one at that? Such questions were repeatedly posed in the sixteenth century, when vigorous new imperialisms compelled the articulation of grand visions of universal rule across Eurasia. In the Islamic world, now bereft of a living Abbasid caliph to serve as a touchstone of sovereignty and ruled by Turkic dynasties seeking to emulate Mongol and Timurid patterns of sacred kingship, the answers to these questions were articulated in ad hoc and heterodox ways. Indeed, there is now increased appreciation of the fact that the history of Muslim sacred kingship in the lead up to the Islamic millennium (ca. 1591–92) was one of occultist experimentation, messianic fervor, and charismatic demonstrations of sacred power, almost as much as it was one of state consolidation and canonization of the law. But where recent studies have shed light on how astral conjunctions, heavenly constellations, and the cosmic letters of the Arabic alphabet constituted the theoretical desiderata of Ottoman sacral kingship, they have tended to eschew royal spectacle and performance in favor of close readings of texts of mystical-occultist political theory. This study offers a close reading of a pyrotechnical performance staged in front of Ottoman sultan Murād III in 1582. Through drawing productive comparisons and connections with a similar, near-contemporaneous pyrotechnical performance staged in early modern Europe for the Holy Roman Emperor, it will argue for courtly pyrotechnics as a means of communicating the “wholly other” nature of the sovereign’s body at times of great cosmic import.