The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON THE OUTSIDE WORLD ~ 209
When attempting an overview of the kind given here, it hard to escape the
impression of a considerable discontinuity in the study of geography by Ottoman
subjects. Information about the outside world was acquired by many writers
more or less as a personal initiative, and only in the case of Kâtib Çelebi and his
colleagues can we follow a transfer of knowledge across generations. 98
Moreover,
if the stories of Ottoman derring-do in a fictionalized environment were at
all acceptable to those whom Evliya Çelebi targeted as his presumptive readers,
we might conclude that the concrete information obtained, at considerable effort,
by the author of the Tarih-i Hind-i garbi or else by Kâtib Çelebi, did not readily
‘filter down’ to the educated Ottoman public. Experiences of this type are unfortunately
very familiar down to the present day, especially to scholars who try to
disseminate information on the Ottoman world among an ‘educated public’ in
Europe or North America.
But of course this is only one possible interpretation among several: after all,
down to the 1970s, even though factual information on North America was readily
available, audiences all over the world enjoyed the fictional ‘Wild West’ in
comics and movies. Who knows whether an analogous state of mind was not
widespread among Ottoman readers? Furthermore, we do not really know how
valid is our impression that there yawned an abyss of discontinuity between the
‘solid information’ generated by authors such as Kâtib Çelebi and the romancing
probably preferred by ‘the average reader or rather listener’. There may well
have been intermediate stages between the two extremes, resulting from transfers
of knowledge that we have not as yet been able to discern.
When it comes to the reports of the ambassadors and also the accounts of
quasi-ambassadors such as Seyyidî ‘Ali Re’îs, they were one of the surest
sources of knowledge about foreign lands available to those privileged Muslim
Ottomans who were able to access them. Therefore it is an urgent desideratum to
research what might be called the ‘publishing history’ of these texts. Even in
those writings whose authors concentrated on highlighting the successes of their
respective missions to the exclusion of other matters, we find itineraries and
recorded impressions of the attitudes foreign court dignitaries adopted towards
the Ottoman sultans, and all this information must have served as input when
images of the outside world were created. To some readers, this approach may
appear overly positivistic; and certainly, concrete information is only one of several
‘ingredients’ needed by a person or group embarking upon the formation of
political attitudes towards the outside world. But on the other hand, such attitudes
can only be operational if they have some kind of connection to events in
the ‘real world’ – whatever ‘real’ may signify.
Sophisticated observers such as Seyyidî ‘Ali Re’îs, Mehmed Emni Beyefendi
or Ebubekir Râtib Efendi, moreover, provided a great deal more. Here we find
evaluations of the political attitudes of the Russian or Habsburg courts, discussions
of cultural institutions such as gardens, libraries and even the theatre, or
else indications of how the Ottomans might culturally ‘put themselves on the
map’ in an international context. As Seyyidî ‘Ali Re’îs knew well, at Iranian or