This article investigates the close relationship between geographical knowledge and imperial politics in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through an analysis of an anonymous portolan chart from 1652 and geographical accounts of Katip Çelebi, Ebu Bekir b. Behram el-Dimaşki and Osman b. Abdülmennan, it examines the circulation of ‘geography’ and ‘geographical knowledge’ in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it aims to integrate the Ottoman Empire into the recently developing historical treatment of Enlightenment as a response to cross-border interaction and global integration. According to the traditional understanding, Ottoman involvement with modern science and technology did not begin until the nineteenth century when the Ottoman state enacted a series of reforms in education, economy, and military. This article aims to challenge this traditional understanding and argues that Ottoman ruling elites and scholars did indeed participate in intellectual discussions and political developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The knowledge exchange between the Ottoman geographers and their European contemporaries during this period laid the foundations of what I call ‘the Ottoman Enlightenment.’ The works discussed in this article informed the Ottoman imperial court and literate urbanites of the changes in the spatial understanding of the world and of the universe while also helping them to reevaluate the role of the Ottoman Empire globally during a period typically regarded as the beginning of Ottoman decline.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AbdülmennanOsman b.Atlas Terceme li Cografya. Suleymaniye Library, Esad Efendi2041.
2.
Abou-El-HajRifa’at A.1967. ‘Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 89(3): 498–512.
3.
Abou-El-HajRifa’at A.1969. ‘The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in Europe, 1699–1703.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 89(3): 467–75.
4.
AksanVirginia. 1999. ‘Locating the Ottomans Among Early Modern Empires.’ Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 3: 103–34.
5.
AksanVirginia. 2013. The Ottoman Wars: An Empire Besieged, second edition. New York, NY: Routledge.
AstigarragaJesusUsozJavier. 2013. ‘The Enlightenment in Translation: Antonio Genovesi’s Political Economy in Spain, 1778–1800.’ Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. 28(1): 24–45.
8.
BergMaxine. 2007. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9.
BrentjesSonja. 2010. ‘On the Relations between the Ottoman Empire and the West European Republic of Letters (17th–18th Centuries)’, in eadem, Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th–17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge, Section II, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, Variorum Reprints: 121–48.
10.
BrentjesSonja. 2012. ‘On Two Manuscripts by Abu Bakr b. Bahram al-Dimashqi (d. 1102/1691) Related to W. and J. Blaeu’s Atlas Maior.’ The Journal of Ottoman Studies/Osmanlı Araştırmaları, vol. XL: 183–91.
11.
CassirerErnst. 1951. The Philosophy of Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
12.
CavazzaM.2002. ‘The Institute of Science of Bologna and the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century.’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 56(1): 3–25.
13.
ConradSebastian. 2012. ‘Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique.’ American Historical Review, vol. 117(4): 999–1004.
14.
Ebu Bekir ibn Behram el-Dimaşki. Nusretü’l-İslam ve’s-Surur fi Takrir-i Atlas Mayur. Nuruosmaniye, 2996.
15.
El-RouyahebKhaled. 2015. Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
16.
FaroqhiSuraiya. 2004. The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It. New York: I. B. Tauris.
17.
GayPeter. 1966–69. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. New York: Knopf.
18.
HagenGottfried. 2003. Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit: Entstehung und Gedankenwelt von Katib Çelebis Cihannüma. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag.
HeywoodColin. 1999. ‘The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths’, in Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700, edited by PowerDanielStandenNaomi. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc.: 228–51.
21.
HuffTobby E.2003. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22.
İhsanoğluEkmeleddin, ed. 2000. A Case Study. Osmanlı Coğrafya Literatürü Tarihi, 2 vols. Istanbul: IRCICA.
23.
İhsanoğluEkmeleddin. 2004. ‘The Introduction of Western Science to the Ottoman World: A Case study of Modern Astronomy’, in idem, Science, Technology, and Learning in the Ottoman Empire Western Influence, Local Institutions, and the Transfer of Knowledge. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company.
24.
IsraelJonathan I.2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
25.
IsraelJonathan I.2008. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
26.
KaramustafaAhmet. 1992. ‘Scholarly Maps and Plans’, in The History of Cartography, Vol. 2, Bk. 1, edited by. HarleyJ. B.WoodwardDavid. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 209–28.
Katib Çelebi. 2009. Kitab-ı Cihannüma li Katip Çelebi, 2 vols. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu.
29.
KrogtPeter van der. 1996. ‘Amsterdam Atlas Production in the 1630s: A Bibliographer’s Nightmare.’ Imago Mundi, vol. 48: 149–59.
30.
McConnellAnita. 1986. ‘L. F. Marsgili’s Voyage to London and Holland, 1721–1722.’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 41(1): 39–76.
31.
NussbaumFelicity A., ed. 2003. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
32.
OutramDorinda. 2005. Enlightenment, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
33.
PagdenAnthony. 2013. The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters. New York, NY: Random House.
34.
PocockJ. G. A.1999–2011. Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35.
QuataertDonald. 2005. The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
36.
ReinertSophus. 2012. Translating Empire: Emulation and Origins of Political Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
37.
RobertsonJohn. 1997. ‘The Enlightenment Above National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples.’ The Historical Journal, vol. 40(3): 667–97.
38.
SabevOrlin. 2007. ‘The First Ottoman Turkish Printing Enterprise: Success or Failure’, in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, edited by SajdiDana. London: I. B. Tauris: 63–89.
39.
Sansond’Abbeville Nicolas. 1658. Cartes Générales de Toutes les Parties du Monde. Paris: Sanson and Pierre Mariette.
40.
StoyeJohn. 1994. Marsigli’s Europe 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press.
41.
TaeschnerFranz. 1926. ‘Zur Geschichte des Djihannuma.’ Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen, vol. 2(29): 99–110.
42.
TezcanBaki. 2012. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43.
ThanasakisKonstantinos. 2006. ‘The Ottoman Geographer Osman b. Abdulmennan and his Vision of the World in Tercüme-i Kitab-i Coğrafya (ca. 1749–1750).’ MA Thesis, Bogazici University.
44.
TörökZsolt. 2006. ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730) and Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography’, in Térkép—tudomány/Map—Science, edited by ZentaiL.GyörrfyJ.TörökZs.Budapest: ELTE Térképtudományi és Geoinformatikai Tanszék: 403–13.
45.
VeresMadalina-Valeria. 2014. ‘Redefining Imperial Borders: Marking the Eastern Border of the Habsburg Monarchy in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in History of Cartography, Lecture Notes in Geo-information and Cartography, edited by LiebenbergE.CollierP.TörökZs.Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag: 3–23.
46.
WithersCharles W.2007. Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
47.
WithersCharlesMayhewRobert J.2011. ‘Geography: Space, Place and Intellectual History in the Eighteenth Century.’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34(4): 445–52.
48.
ZossEmily. 2010. ‘An Ottoman View of the World: The Kitab Cihannüma and its Cartographic Contexts’, in The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, edited by GruberChristiane J.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press: 194–219.
