In 1648, the Ottoman polymath and scholar Katip Celebi sought to compile a massive geographical work called the Cihannuma, encompassing all of the known world. However, he abandoned his initial draft of the manuscript after he realized the degree to which his Ottoman contemporaries had fallen behind in the study of geography. With the help of bi-lingual contemporaries who assisted him in acquiring and translating geographical works from European sources such as Dutch atlases and Spanish treatises on the western hemisphere, Katip Celebi began a second draft of the manuscript in 1654. He incorporated this new material into a well-established tradition of Muslim geographical literature dating back to the formative period of Islamic history. However, Katip Celebi's scholarly career was often diverted into other projects aimed at meeting the pressing needs of an Ottoman state beset by mid-seventeenth-century political and economic crisis. This chaotic environment, followed by his sudden and untimely death at the age of 47, kept him from completing the work. The manuscript draft was later refined and edited by the noted Ottoman printer Ibrahim Muteferrika and re-issued as one of the first printed books in the Ottoman Empire after 1720. However, the work has remained largely untapped as a source until fairly recently. This paper aims to analyze what types of information Katip Celebi sought to integrate into the Cihannuma for his Ottoman audience, with a particular emphasis on the parts of the world about which the Ottomans had little prior knowledge. One of the issues that Katip Celebi deemed important for this work was to record the nature and types of medical remedies and other useful substances found in these newly-discovered regions. This paper will highlight the role of pharmaceutical substances as they emerged in the trade networks of the early modern world by surveying the chapters in the Cihannuma that deal with the Americas and parts of the Far East such as the Spice Islands, China, Japan and others. Furthermore, it will identify what a prominent Ottoman figure thought was critical for the advancement of his society in a era of great instability. Finally, we will acquire important insights about the process of knowledge transmission between early modern European sources and Muslim Ottomans in the period before the full integration of the Ottoman Empire into an increasingly globalizing world.