Geographical Knowledge and Imperial Culture in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire by Pinar Emiralioğlu (review)

Geographical works were used as tools of imperial propaganda and projection of imperial world perspectives in the early modern world. In her brilliantly written book, Pinar Emiralioğlu explores these geographical “instruments of power” within the Ottoman context with a particular attention to the Ottoman’s military and political rivals, the Habsburgs, Portuguese, and Safavids.

The production and dissemination of world maps and global geographical knowledge reached unprecedented levels not only in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, but also in Europe, where the number of travel accounts and maps depicting Europe, Africa, Asia and the New World rose. Despite the fact that there was no official cartographer and cartographical school devoted to mapmaking in the Ottoman Empire, members of its court and elite were readers of geographical and cartographical accounts. Examining the practical and symbolic meaning of this phenomenon, Emiralioğlu argues that growing Ottoman interest in geographical knowledge was intimately related to the consolidation of Ottoman claims to world conquest and universal imperial sovereignty (p. 5). This universal claim, or imperial project, the author states, was not shaped in a vacuum, but in a space between the Hapsburgs in the west and the Safavids in the east. Her argument is in line with the flourishing scholarship in the Ottoman studies (a subject that fits nicely within the growing field of world history), which emphasizes the formation of a distinct Ottoman imperial ideology in the sixteenth century by examining the juxtapositions of Ottoman political, legal, economic, architectural, artistic, historical, and messianic discourses. Emiralioğlu’s work on the Ottoman fusion of geographical and political discourses is yet another fine addition to this literature.

The book is based mainly on an historical analysis of the geographical accounts that circulated in Constantinople in the sixteenth century. These include portolan charts and atlases, world maps, travel accounts, coordinate tables, Ottoman chronicles, and campaign diaries, all of which offer insights about the Ottoman understanding of the world around them (p. 7). Beginning with a study of political interaction among the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Safavids, Emiralioğlu goes on to examine the scholarly practice of sixteenth-century Ottoman geographical knowledge and shows how the Ottomans engaged intellectually and politically with territorial and geographical expansion (p. 9). The author continues by investigating several important Ottoman geographical and cartographical works, such as those of Piri Reis, Nasuh, Haji Ahmed, and Seydi Ali Reis, demonstrating how the texts and its producers shaped the Ottoman courts’ political agenda in a dialogue with pre-Ottoman Muslim and European conventions and practices (p. 22). Central to these works was the idea that the Ottoman Empire was the center of the universe and that the sultan, at the time Suleiman the Magnificent, was the new world conqueror, the expected Last Emperor, a universal ruler who could unite all mankind under one leader and one religion before the Day of Judgment (p. 31). As early as in 1537, for example, Nasuh’s work, Beyan-i Menazil, which was presented to Suleiman, was articulating the centrality of Constantinople in the service of the imperial court’s political agenda.

The other chapters are organized more thematically along the lines of the Ottoman taxonomies of the world. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans envisioned the world in terms of a nucleus (Constantinople), a core (Mediterranean), and peripheries (Indian Ocean and the New World). After examining the centrality of Constantinople in both Christian and Islamic apocalyptic and political traditions, Emiralioğlu analyzes the place of the Mediterranean in the Ottoman and Habsburg imaginations and focuses on the ways in which Ottomans sought to counterbalance the Christian rule of both Charles V and Phillip II. Without controlling the Mediterranean, which Braudel called “the center of the world,” these emperors knew that their universal imperial claims could not be realized. In the last chapter, the author rightly claims that the Ottoman court and its ruling elites were not as...