Download PDF | Palmira Brummett - Mapping the Ottomans_ Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean-Cambridge University Press (2015)
401 Pages
Mapping the Ottomans Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean Simple paradigms of Muslim–Christian confrontation and the rise of Europe in the seventeenth century do not suffice to explain the ways in which European mapping envisioned the “Turks” in image and narrative. Rather, maps, travel accounts, compendia of knowledge, and other texts created a picture of the Ottoman Empire through a complex layering of history, ethnography, and eyewitness testimony, which juxtaposed current events to classical and Biblical history; counted space in terms of peoples, routes, and fortresses; and used the land and seascapes of the map to assert ownership, declare victory, and embody imperial power’s reach.
Enriched throughout by examples of Ottoman self-mapping, this book examines how Ottomans and their empire were mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe’s Christian kingdoms. The maps serve as centerpieces for discussions of early modern space, time, borders, stages of travel, information flows, invocations of authority, and cross-cultural relations. Palmira Brummett is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Tennessee, where she was Distinguished Professor of Humanities, and Visiting Professor of History at Brown University. Her publications include Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (1994); Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (2000); The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology and Pilgrimage, 1250–1700 (2009), for which she was the editor and a contributor; and Civilizations Past and Present (2000–2005), for which she was the co-author of multiple editions. She has also written numerous articles on Ottoman, Mediterranean, and world history. She has been the recipient of NEH and ACLS fellowships, a Phi Beta Kappa Faculty Award for Scholarly Achievement, and a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliff University.
“Moving beyond the simple cataloguing of European images of the Ottoman other that has characterized previous scholarship, Palmira Brummett shows the nuanced and diverse range of European responses to the Ottomans, as well as illustrating Ottoman self-mapping practices and the ways in which both emerged from a set of shared precedents and fit into a common early modern cartographic culture. Mapping the Ottomans is an essential addition to the rich body of literature on early modern maps, as well as to our growing understanding of the complex and interconnected character of early modern European and the Mediterranean worlds.” – Eric Dursteler, Brigham Young University “Palmira Brummett’s nuanced account goes well beyond cartography to provide a rich history of how Western Europe viewed Ottoman space. This illuminating study demonstrates how texts and maps together shaped an imaginary of the borderlines between Asia and Europe, Islam, and Christianity. Brummett’s focus on perceptions of space renders the maps she discusses as richly layered and interconnected objects, fully embedded in broader rhetorical, iconographic, and historiographic traditions.” – Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles
Introduction
Thus Christopher Marlowe’s theatrical Mongol ruler (Timur) proclaims that it is the sword (his “pen”) that ultimately determines the mapping of empires. In his play, Tamburlaine, first performed c. 1587, Marlowe (1564–1593) created an artful counterpart to the maps of his day, a sovereign space concocted out of a rather indiscriminate mixing of myth, history, and fiction. He collapsed time and space to place Muhammad and Jove in the same firmament, meld the medieval with the early modern, and jumble the territories of the Afro-Eurasian oikumene into one great imperial backdrop.2 Marlowe’s English audience (elite and common) may or may not have known the historical figures of Timur (r. 1370–1405) and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402). But in the play these rulers’ times, locations, compatriots, and identities were mutable, subject to the vagaries of drama, history, memory, education, artistic convention, and strategic interest.
Just so, 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. Such representations, particularly those found on maps, form the subject of this volume. It examines the rhetorical construction of the Ottomans in the texts and images of the Christian kingdoms of early modern Europe and the inscribing of Ottoman territory, sovereignty, and identity onto maps, employing Ottoman self-mapping as a comparative foil.
Maps, broadly construed, complicate the notion that representing the Ottomans was an evolutionary process that typed the empire as terrible in the sixteenth century and domesticated in the eighteenth. If we dismiss Marlowe’s swirling of character, border, time, and space as merely fanciful or theatrical, we miss the point. For, in the early modern era, mapping was both a pictorial narration of territory and events and a process by which events were subordinated to history, memory, and desire. With their conquest of the great Christian and Muslim capitals, Constantinople in 1453 and Cairo in 1517, the Ottoman Turks captured the imagination of observers across the Afro-Eurasian world, asserting their identity as one of the most powerful empires of the early modern era.
The Ottomans had become a European empire in the fifteenth century, crossing the Danube into Wallachia and extending the territories under their dominion to the borders of Hungary. In the sixteenth century they became a world empire, confronting the Muslim Mamluks and Safavids, in Egypt and Iran respectively, and the Christian kings of Europe, in a broad frontier zone stretching from the western Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Belgrade fell to Ottoman armies in 1521, Rhodes in 1522, and, by 1541, Sultan Suleyman ¨ I (r. 1520–66) had occupied Buda and could claim sovereignty over much of Croatia and Hungary. See Map 1. This expanding empire was the object of careful scrutiny and wild speculation in Christian Europe, its military and spiritual prowess addressed in diplomatic reports, histories, sermon literature, compendia of knowledge, plays, essays, murals, broadsheets, and maps, among other forms of communication. In the Christian kingdoms of Europe the Ottomans were presented as descendants of the “Scythians,” the same “Turks” who swept out of Central Asia and confronted the “Saracens” in the crusading era.3
The “Turks” (a generic designation used to connote the Muslims in Ottoman territory) were then mingled with all the historic Islamic ‘marauders‘ who had tested and trampled the borders of “Christendom.”4 A parade of witnesses passed among the capitals of the Mediterranean world, circulating information about the Ottomans, their society, personnel, customs, beliefs, institutions, texts, identities, and material culture. The audiences for that information ranged from statesmen to merchants, and from scholars to illiterate parishioners, from the readers of cheap broadsheets to the consumers of lavish atlases (see Ch. 2). There was enormous demand for images and knowledge of “the Turks,” whose successes, coinciding with the Renaissance and Reformation, were believed both to exemplify the effectiveness of a brutal, Islamic ‘slave state’ and to signal the wrath of an angry Christian God, perhaps even heralding the advent of the Last Days.
For some observers, the Ottomans, with their ferocious gunpowder infantry, were poised to overrun Europe; for others, they were temporary squatters on classical and sacred space, the redemption of which awaited only the will and unity of the monarchs of Christendom.5 Still others saw the rich and successful empire as a land of opportunity, a potential wellspring for products, patronage, and power. These varying perspectives are reflected in the texts and imagery of the time (roughly the mid sixteenth to the later eighteenth century), complicating and lending nuance to the enduring message of the Ottomans as a threat to Christendom.
Methodology, Historiography, and Objectives
The Ottomans, as an element of the historiography of early modern Europe, often appear in two standard forms: the “empire,” a continent-spanning but rather amorphous imperial entity that functioned as a military great power; and the “Turks,” an embodied plurality that “threatened Christendom,” but was ultimately domesticated, exoticized, and dominated by an ascendant Europe as the early modern era came to an end.
What the Ottomans did to or with early modern Europe has traditionally been couched in terms of the words “impact” and “difference”; and those terms are a logical outcome of the language of early modern texts. Indeed, Ottoman rhetorics of power and sovereignty, like those of their imperial predecessors and European Christian rivals, highlighted difference and military supremacy. But if we turn to the ways in which the Ottomans and their neighbors in “Christendom” visualized and designated space, then we find a rather more complex picture, one that included permeable borders, overlapping interests, and shared societies. The historiographic literature on both the Ottoman empire and Christian Europe’s reception of the “Turk” has become increasingly rich in recent years through the contributions of Ottomanist historians and scholars of European history, literature, and art.6 So, too, considerable interest has been generated on the question of Ottomans on the map, a field that for a long time was limited to the pioneering works of Tom Goodrich, Svat Soucek, and a few others.7
The publication of J. B. Harley and David Woodward’s magisterial History of Cartography (hereafter HOC), along with the staging of cartographic exhibitions such as the 2008 “European Cartographers and the Ottoman World, 1500–1750” at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, have provided textual and visual inspiration on this theme to a wide audience.8 Nonetheless, much of the work currently available on representations of the “Turk” still tends to proceed in well-defined channels (from a focus in cartographic studies on Piri Reis and major European mapmakers on one hand, to the examination of select travel accounts, diplomatic reports, or ‘national’ dramas on the other). Thus there remains much to be said regarding the ways in which those residing in the Christian kingdoms of Europe imagined, narrated, and visualized the Ottomans, their sovereignty, and the spaces they possessed. This work attempts one segment of that larger project. It traces out some of the historical and literary sources for representations of the Ottomans, plotting the dissemination of visions of the “Turk” and perusing the complex matrix of borders, interactions, and identities through which European audiences visualized Ottoman territory. It delineates specific categories (war space, historical space, travel space, and sacred space) employed to inscribe the Ottoman empire on maps.
It also presents the iconography of the “Turk” as displayed on maps, an iconography that painted the Ottomans, alternately and in combination, as commercial partners, epic warriors, and objects of ethnographic scrutiny, as well as marauding barbarians, heretics, and harbingers of the Antichrist. This study devotes particular attention to the image/text interface (that is, the relationship between images and the texts with which they were associated). That interface is especially important because early modern maps derived their characterizations of Ottoman space from the rhetorics and imagery of texts, and because maps often involve an intricate layering (or collage) of text and image derived from other works.9 Just as there was no definitive border between Europe and Asia, or Islam and Christendom, in this era, so too there was no definitive boundary between the map itself and the texts that surrounded, inspired, or were inscribed upon it.
Further, this book contributes to the burgeoning literature on ‘Eastern’ travel. As mapmakers enclosed the land and seascapes of the Ottomans within the map frame, they displayed early modern notions of space measured in terms of cities, fortresses, pilgrimage sites, provisioning stations, and accessible or inaccessible routes. Mapping was thus intimately connected to travel, both actual and imaginary. It had its own logics of possession, movement, and frontiers. The traveler, along with the diplomat and other types of intermediaries, was the eyewitness, the authority invoked by the mapmaker to legitimate his vision of space. Finally, this book, as it examines the diffusion of images of the Ottomans, their sovereignty, their mores, and their armies, adds to the growing historiography on the circulation of knowledge and the translation of culture in the early modern Eurasian world. It is also important here to state what this book does not do.
I am a historian of the intersections between the Ottoman world and surrounding territories; I am neither a cartographer nor an art historian. Thus it is not my intention here to trace the evolution of maps of Ottoman territory or the technical details of map production and artistry. Those tasks have been accomplished or are being accomplished by experts elsewhere, in the History of Cartography and in the journal Imago Mundi, among other sources. Rather than sorting out the direction of cartographic influences, or precedence in discoveries of mapping technology, what I want to know is how mapmakers in different places embodied and circulated ideas of the Ottomans and Ottoman space, and what their images might tell us about their milieu, their audiences, and things such as state power, historic memory, identity, worldview, borders, the visualization of land and sea, and the exigencies of getting from place to place.10
The early modern era was indeed a time when the technologies of charting, engraving, and depicting the world’s spaces were evolving and improving. But technological capability and scientific knowledge were only two factors in the complex intellectual, political, economic, historical, and pictorial process that was mapping.11 Early modern maps, like the texts from which they derive, do not follow a strict evolutionary pattern in depicting the Ottomans and their empire; they are, rather, the products of tropes of narration and conventions of representation, the technical constraints of printmaking, and the knowledge, education, imagination, and demands of a consuming public that is notoriously difficult to pin down, except anecdotally. Most of all, I want to know what Ottoman space looked like to that public. In seeking that objective, I focus on the map itself and its narrative contexts to demonstrate the ongoing tensions over truth-claims and illustrate some of the ways in which Ottoman space was experienced and constructed.
The tales of individual narrators do not, of course, substitute for a close examination of each one of the numerous interpretative communities affected by these maps: how they accepted, misunderstood, acted on, or ignored the messages of the map. But it may be hoped that the traveler witnesses employed here will speak in some small way for their own reading communities, whereas I leave the project of assessing audience reception in specific communities to other scholars. Neither do I propose to trace out the extent of geographic knowledge in the Ottoman world or to present in any comprehensive way the literary and historical contexts out of which mapped images of the Ottomans emerged. A database of cartographic literary allusions grouped by time and region would be a wonderful thing; but it is beyond my capabilities. What I hope to accomplish, rather, is a comparative commentary on the modes and types of representation of Ottoman space deriving from some of the Christian kingdoms of Europe. I place before the reader an array of mappings of the Ottomans (particularly those spaces on the European ‘side’ of the empire) in hopes that they will provoke discussion and refine and expand our sense of the ways in which the Ottomans were imagined and imagined themselves. This material is purposefully selected to range widely, unconstrained by strict chronology or ‘national’ designation. It crosses genres to present a mix of imagery of the “Turk,” similar, perhaps, to that an educated reader might be exposed to. I hope thereby to illustrate the ways in which the map layered historical time and manipulated space, suggest those forms of representation that were enduring and those that were exceptional, and, further, propose that the mappings of the sixteenth and eighteenth century worlds were not as dramatically different as they might sometimes seem.12 This volume is divided into three parts comprising seven chapters plus an afterword. Part One (Chapters 1 and 2) sets the stage by addressing methodology, approach to space and time, categories of analysis, genres of mapping the “Turk,” and the processes by which the Ottomans were made familiar to audiences in the Christian kingdoms of Europe. This first chapter serves as an introduction. It suggests a set of categories by which Ottoman space was understood and introduces some of the possibilities for comparisons to Ottoman self-mapping. It emphasizes the ways in which time and space were collapsed on early modern maps in order to convey political and cultural messages of entitlement and identity. Chapter 2, on “Reading and Placing the ‘Turk,’” introduces some of the genres employed for mapping the Ottomans and speaks (through a set of illustrative examples) about the ways the Ottomans were represented and translated into text and image. It also addresses questions of the circulation of knowledge. Part Two (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) presents the mapping of Ottoman space in terms of borders, fortresses, and the iconography of triumph and submission. Chapter 3 is divided into three sections, which address conceptions of the ends of empire; the transimperial borders among the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Venetian empires; and, finally, the roles played by Constantinople and the Holy Land as annexes of Europe and focal points for prophecy in mapping the division of “Christian” and “Turk” space. Chapter 4 examines the fortress (inland and coastal) as the quintessential marker of space and sovereignty, employing examples concentrated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fortress was the centerpiece of possessed space and of the competition for hegemony in the transimperial zone linking the Ottoman, Venetian, and Hapsburg empires. Chapter 5 continues the examination of conflict imagery in historical texts and map imagery. Possession was counted not only in fortresses but also in images of the conquered foe, his head, his body, his arms, and his symbols. The fallen Turk, deployed on the map, delivered a powerful message of ownership. Part Three (Chapters 6 and 7) elaborates on the literatures and imagery of travel along with the various authorities invoked in an attempt to demonstrate the ‘accuracy’ and ‘truth’ of mapped space. Chapter 6 presents the stages by which travelers and maps charted the movement into and out of Ottoman space. This chapter highlights the journeys from Vienna and Venice to Istanbul by land and sea and illustrates the modes and measures by which Ottoman space was counted. Chapter 7 addresses the threefold foundation of authority (knowledge, text, and eyewitness testimony), used by travelers and transposed onto the map to certify the validity of descriptions of Ottoman domains. The knowledge and texts of ‘classical’ and Biblical pasts were front and center in the imagery of the early modern era. They constituted its history and memory. In this chapter, narratives by Italian and English travelers will be featured and then juxtaposed to the well-known travel narrative of the Ottoman raconteur Evliya C¸ elebi.13 Additionally, in this chapter, I will use travelers’ descriptions of women and their dress as a special element of claims to authority. By way of conclusion, the “Afterword” (Chapter 8) will take up some of the implications of mapping space and identity that have traced through both the volume and the historiography of Ottoman–European relations and that find resonance in both world-historical paradigms and contemporary world struggles.
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