The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

200 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
written a first draft which encompassed Ottoman Rumelia, Bosnia and Hungary,
according to his own statement Kâtib Çelebi gave up the project ‘when he realized
he would not find sufficient material in oriental geographic literature to
describe the lands of the infidel’. 74 However, he continued adding to this draft as
information became available to him. When, in 1653/1063–4, Kâtib Çelebi
obtained access to the Atlas Minor of Gerhard Mercator, he first produced a
translation into Ottoman with the help of a former Christian priest now converted
to Islam. Furthermore, as a result of this encounter, he decided that his own work
needed a complete rewriting, which he began in 1654/1064–5, but Kâtib Çelebi
died rather suddenly before he could complete the project. In accordance with the
outline of the Atlas Minor, the description of the world as given in the second
version of the Cihannüma begins in eastern Asia and proceeds westwards. As the
second draft ended at the eastern borders of the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia was
never covered by Kâtib Çelebi himself, but his collaborators produced a description
organized according to the administrative structure prevailing in the
seventeenth century. 75 Thus the Ottoman translation of the Atlas Minor and the
second version of the Cihannüma provided those readers who could gain access
to them with a notion of the Asian landmass, including hitherto scarcely known
countries such as Japan and China.
In this particular context, Kâtib Çelebi was closely concerned with locating
and assimilating novel geographic sources. Thus his assumption that the important
features of human life were those which had existed ‘since Noah’s Flood’,
did not mean that geographical knowledge was fixed once and for all. Possibly
the Ottoman geographer felt that where his medieval Islamic colleagues had had
ample opportunity for observation, their accounts were acceptable; but his work
on the Dutch atlases had demonstrated that there were vast swathes of territory
on which these scholars had nothing to say. Put differently, while the really
important things in life may have all been of ancient vintage, by no means had all
such ‘ancient things’ yet been discovered. Therefore obtaining access to the ‘old’
meant tireless hunting for the ‘new’. But this reconstruction of Kâtib Çelebi’s
mindset is hypothetical, to be proven or disproved by future scholarship.
~ Non-Muslim Ottoman subjects and their travel writing
Doubtless the texts written in the various languages of Ottoman non-Muslims did
not normally become accessible to Muslim Ottomans, and thus did not have any
direct influence on the manner in which the latter viewed the world. But, first of
all, Christians and Jews formed a substantial section of the Ottoman population,
so what they could learn about the outside world is of interest in its own right. In
addition, as we have seen, in the intellectual world of Istanbul as inhabited by the
geographers, the cultural walls separating Muslims and non-Muslims were not as
high as in other sectors of society. We thus should ask ourselves whether some of