My paper aims to investigate the close relationship between geographical knowledge and imperial politics in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century. During this period, different parts of the world experienced Enlightenments, in other words, movements of philosophical, geographical, and historical inquiry which changed societies and governments. Recent studies try to understand these Enlightenments as responses to “cross-border interaction and global integration.” So far, the Ottoman Empire has been completely omitted from these discussions. The studies, which adopted global historical analysis, tend to focus on the accomplishments of the Muslim intellectuals prior to the thirteenth century and discuss their contribution to the European Enlightenment. These studies argue that the early modern Ottoman Empire represents the dark age of the Muslim scientific inquiry. According to this analysis, Ottoman involvement with modern science and technology did not begin until the nineteenth century when the Ottoman state enacted a series of reforms in education, economy, and military. My paper aims to challenge this traditional understanding and argues that Ottoman ruling elites and geographers did indeed participate in intellectual and political networks of the eighteenth century. The knowledge exchange between the Ottoman geographers and their contemporaries around the world laid the foundations of the Ottoman Enlightenment. Among these Ottoman geographers were Katip Çelebi (d. 1657), who translated Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas Minor and wrote the first Ottoman encyclopedic work on world geography, Cihannüma and Ebu Bekir ibn Behram ed-Dimashki (d. 1691) who translated Dutch cartographer Joan Bleu’s Atlas Maior into Ottoman Turkish. These works informed the Ottoman imperial court of the world’s geography and the importance of geographical knowledge for the affairs of the Empire. In their works, both geographers offered an organized and explicit definition of the science of geography for their readers and emphasized the usefulness of geographical knowledge in resolving political and military conflicts. These geographers informed the Ottoman imperial court of the latest developments in geographical knowledge while also helping the ruling elites to reevaluate the role of the Ottoman Empire on the world stage during a period that is typically regarded as the beginning of Ottoman decline. Through a historical analysis of the works of Dimashki and Katip Çelebi, my paper will aim to demonstrate the extent to which Ottoman geographers took part in global networks of knowledge and politics and how participation in those networks formed their ideas about the role of geographical knowledge in state and society.