The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON THE OUTSIDE WORLD ~ 197
a miniature illustrating a literary text. As to the peninsula on which Istanbul is
located, it is shown as a square rather than as a triangle, in order to better accommodate
the sultan’s palace, the Aya Sofya and the open space of the At Meydanı/
Hippodrome, which still possessed a range of columns that has since disappeared.
In contrast with these stylized images, quite a few monuments are shown
in such a fashion that with some imagination they are recognizable even today.
At the same time the stylized depiction of buildings was accompanied by considerable
care in showing the spatial relationships of the buildings to one another;
here the miniature artist became the map-maker.
That Matrakçı Nasuh worked for courtiers is clearly apparent from his emphasis
on public buildings: mosques, fortresses and palaces were given pride of
place, while private dwellings are little in evidence. This aspect of Matrakçı’s
work is consonant with what the manufacturers of sixteenth-century town models
for Central European princes also tended to do, showing public buildings
larger than they were in relation to the houses surrounding them. However, there
is one major difference: while in Central Europe streets and squares also were
often overstressed, the opposite is true in Matrakçı’s paintings. Istanbul’s only
open space is the At Meydanı, and even the ancient thoroughfare of the Divanyolu
remains invisible. Such a mode of depiction presumably reflected the
priorities of sixteenth-century Ottoman urbanism: the erection of monumental
structures as cores for town quarters yet to be established, and a limited interest
in traffic flow.
With only slight exaggeration, we can say that what really counted for Matrakçı
were the towns and cities, while the open countryside was paid much less
attention. Different from what can be observed in his depiction of Istanbul’s
buildings, the watercourses, mountains, swamps and defiles of Anatolia were
drawn without a great deal of attention to their spatial relationships. As rivers
and streams so often follow a more or less horizontal course, dividing the miniatures
into bands, it is likely that they were arranged according to compositional
rather than according to geographical criteria; perhaps the idea was to depict the
inexorable progress of Sultan Süleyman’s ever victorious army.
~ Taking notice of the Americas
However, among sixteenth-century Ottoman geographers, the work of Piri Re’is
is probably more famous today than that of Matrakçı Nasuh, due to the former’s
early knowledge of a Columbus map surviving only in this Ottoman rendition of
1513/918–19. 62 But Piri Re’is’ geographical studies were for the most part undertaken
long before 1540/946–7 and are thus outside the purview of our study; the
author apparently was over eighty years old when he was executed in 1552–3/
959–61. 63 Piri Re’is had been an admiral himself, and thus must have collected
his information with some practical purpose in mind. 64 Yet scholarly discussion