The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

8 ~ Sources of information on the
outside world
Devising policies and campaigns, establishing business contacts, purchasing or
freeing slaves, escorting pilgrims … all these activities were predicated on the
availability of at least a modicum of data concerning the world outside the sultan’s
realm. Compared to the information more or less accessible to an Ottoman
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sources that a person living
between 1540/946–7 and 1770/1183–4 might turn to were doubtless limited, and
the information obtained often out of date and not necessarily reliable. 1
But then recent studies of the supposedly empirical travel accounts written by
Europeans of the sixteenth century have shown that in these works as well, misinformation,
to say nothing of occasional disinformation, was rife. Renaissance
travellers from France, England or the Germanies had the greatest trouble imaginable
distancing themselves from the authority of the geographers and
philosophers of the Greco-Roman world. Eyewitnesses of people and places
often found it hard to overcome their veneration for ‘ancient wisdom’, even
when the authorities so much revered had not visited the places about which they
wrote, and made claims that were manifestly false. 2 In consequence, forming
world views and making decisions on the basis of poor information was by no
means an Ottoman peculiarity.
In the present chapter, we will discuss the sources of knowledge about Asia,
Europe and, intermittently, the Americas that were available to three different
categories of people; for it would be naive to assume that what was known to one
particular group would automatically be diffused within Ottoman society at
large. To begin with, there were the high-ranking members of the sultan’s court
and administration who had access to whatever transpired in discussions between
foreign ambassadors on the one hand, and on the other, the grand vizier and other
officials including the chief scribe (re’isülküttab, re’is efendi) and the senior
translator (baş tercüman). 3 From the early eighteenth century onwards, Ottoman
ambassadors who visited the courts of Iran, Vienna, St Petersburg, Paris and, at
the very end of our period, also Madrid and Berlin were officially encouraged to
write about their experiences. Quite a few of these accounts (sefaretnames) have
been located, even though only a minority is accessible in print. 4 The information
brought back by these ambassadors will form a special category, that of the
arcana imperii accessible only to a few high officials; at least for the first few
years after writing, they were out of bounds to anyone less.
The second category will consist of scholars or educated men with an interest
in travel and geography. This group includes famous personages such as Kâtib