First Paragraph: The absence of a comprehensive list of Ottoman manuscripts on political thought poses a serious obstacle to using and analyzing sources in the field in a consistent fashion. Modern catalogues exist for various geographies and periods of the Islamic world, yet they lapse into silence when it comes to Ottoman political thought. Chief among the reasons for this silence are the relative paucity of Turkish-speaking scholars compared to Persian and Arabic and the scattered manner in which political texts have been categorized under different disciplines in Turkish libraries, especially in the Süleymaniye Library.