Despite the impact of his secretarial work and historical writings on the ideological dimensions of the Ottoman Sultanate in the early sixteenth century, Bidlisi’s legacy sits uncomfortably within the larger frameworks by which modern historians generally assess the development of a distinctly Ottoman tradition of historical writing. To be sure, Bidlisi’s status as a major voice of the dynasty in the reign of Bayezid II is universally affirmed by modern historians, yet his work as historian is all too often mentioned only in passing and with little consideration of precisely what he offered his contemporary readers and subsequent generations of Ottoman historians and litterateurs.