Mapping the Ottomans

Maps are only partial representations of reality, but usually they give us as much reality as we need anyway, like the schematic New York City subway map. Historical dramas also take liberties with the narrative, but they can convey a deeper truth, or at least a truth that suits the audience. ‘Just so,’ writes Palmira Brummett, ‘as early modern Europeans created representations of territory, they employed those same factors to delineate an Ottoman imperial space (and identity) that was as much a function of cultural imagination as it was a product of contemporary technologies of print and measurement’ (p. 1). Brummett has studied the entire corpus of maps of the Ottoman Empire produced between 1548 and the 1780s, not only European charts, but also ‘employing Ottoman self-mapping as a comparative foil’, although these are few and far between (p. 2). This is a book about the maps themselves, the author leaving ‘the project of assessing audience reception in specific communities to other scholars’ (p. 6). Her goal is also ‘to present a mix of imagery of the “Turk”, similar, perhaps, to that an educated reader might be exposed to’ (p. 6). Many of these images appeared on early modern maps, helping to convince viewers that the cartography was based on someone actually having been to the places whose names appeared in the drawing

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