The defining marker of global early modernity is the intensified connectivity of different segments of the world and travelogues are often regarded as its archetypical text. As people journeyed ever further they began to record their experiences of encounter with other cultures and lands. The early modern Ottoman Empire both conforms to and confounds this pattern. On one hand, there are a growing number of travelogues, an unrecognized corpus of hundreds of works, but they rarely if ever venture beyond the boundaries of the empire. For example, despite the numerous visits and relations between Ottoman subjects and Venice, there exists only one short, never fully circulated travelogue from the empire to the Most Serene Republic. These asymmetries point to an intriguing problematic in the relationship between circulation and its textual expression that needs to be teased out to disentangle the narrative of global early modernity. In this presentation, I examine the major corpus of travel writing in the Ottoman Empire—the numerous travelogues of the Arab writers describing their journeys initially to Istanbul and then to other major urban cities—by examining them as social and material objects. These travelogues were neither a continuation of earlier medieval Arabic travelogues nor did they conform to our own notions of a travelogue’s structure. They described places not through their geography or peoples but through collections of poems dedicated to those men the writers visited. In particular, I focus on travelogue of Ibn Ma’sum, which describes the author’s travels from Mecca to Hyderabad as a twelve-year old boy in the mid-seventeenth century. Intriguingly, although he was moving to a Persian-speaking court, and knew the language, he only registers the existence of those who spoke Arabic. This travelogue then demonstrates the social role of language and poetry in the logic of these works.