Fair Boys and Wicked Ladies: peoples of the Balkans in the work of Enderunlu Fazıl Bey

In this chapter, I examine Enderunlu’s description of women and young men from the Balkans in both works. Fazıl Bey’s poetics were initially denigrated as uninteresting by E. J.W. Gibb, but they have since found a new audience and a new importance, both among scholars and the broader public. Beyond the literary virtues of his writing, I explore the discriminatory, (homo)erotic and patriarchal undertones of the works, relying on recent scholarship around Fazıl Bey’s oeuvre, as well as erotic and instructional Ottoman literature more broadly. I stress the nexus of desire, derision and distrust that informed elite conceptions of Balkan societies, and seek antecedents or causes for it in earlier Ottoman literary manuals, as well as the socio-political situation of the poet’s time. In doing so, I extract valuable insights into Fazıl Bey’s contribution to a tradition of characterisation of the peoples of the Balkans.