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PoD, 1490: Bayazed II, receiving some additional information on how the printing press has benefited government among the Franks and decided that it would be a useful tool for the Bureaucracy in Constantinople, however the uelma and his own religious feelings frowned on it's use as pertained to the language of the Holy Qur'an. With some thought the solution was clear, and after a closed-door meeting with the Patriarch it was agreed that the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople would obtain a Greek-language press and lease it's use to the Topkapi Palace (the bulk of the civil servants were ex-Christians who knew said language).

This was considered, at the time, an internal labor-saving device for the sake of convenience (Persian-influenced Turkish using diwani calligraphy remained obligatory for official edicts for another 250 years); but not only did businesses in and around the capitol make use of the presses but Greek increasingly became a working language to the point where Bayazid's grandson, hearing of Karl von Hasburg's famed multilingualism, bragged that he himself spoke, "Arabic to God, Persian to Poets, Turkish to Soldiers, Greek to Civil Servants, Latin to honored Frankish embassies, and German to the King of Spain."*

(*: According to the Venetian ambassador who reported this, he switched languages as appropriate and as far as he could tell was at least passable across the board)

Later Sultans were not so proficient, but for temporal purposes it was Ottoman Turkish that suffered as literacy was spread by the most readily produced reading materials. Public proclamations that were not posted alongside Greek (and/or Armenian, which started a press in 1530) translations were written with space for same on said sheet, and even the tughras of the sultan were accompanied by (or in the case of the most artistic incorporated) Greek signatures.

It is not confirmed that a Qadi named Yusef noted a student born of a family that had been Muslim from the time of the Seljuks could not follow more than a few rote passages of hadith without referring to a phrase-book, but upon his appointment as Grand Mufti in 1657 he managed to override the scribal guilds and establish a network of Perso-Arabic presses. However while the printing-houses of Damascus are credited with keeping the developing Greek, Armenian, and Latin orthographies for Levantine Arabic marginalized; for the dominance of the language of Osman Bey in the lands of his successors it was too little and too late.

By 1750, there was more printing along the Bosporus than there was in Vienna. A solid majority of it (ranging from original Muslim theology to technical works out of 'Frankish' universities to phil-hellenic speculations seeking to reconcile the glories of pre-Macedonian city-states with Islam) was in Greek, Armenian took nearly half the remainder, and Chancellery Turkish was outpaced by what purists still sneered at as Karamanili. Most people in the countryside and towns alike north of the Taurus Mountains had familiarity with Greek letters in day-to-day life, even in the Anatolian interior where less-poetic versions of Turkish were spoken as much or more than the Greek that had largely supplanted it on the coasts and in cities.
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