Early in the seventeenth century a certain monk, Hagop Karnets’i (James of Karin) produced a geography of a region that he called “Upper Armenia” but which was actually a description of the vast Pashalik of Erzurum, an Ottoman military jurisdiction established after the Ottoman conquest of Eastern Anatolia ca. 1535. This relatively brief work has been translated into French by Frederic Macler (1869-1938), one-time holder of the Chair of Armenian at the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes at the University of Paris, but the only publication of the original Armenian text is found in Volume II of the two-volume anthology “Manr Zhamanakutiun” (“Minor Chronicles“) published by the Armenian Academy of Sciences in the 1950s. On the surface a simple text, the fact is that Karnets’i’s opuscule is a rather sophisticated work compared to earlier geographical texts written in Armenia prior to his time such as the seventh-century “Geography” now attributed to Ananias of Shirak, or the thirteenth-century “Geography” of Vardan Arewelts‘i, and seems to suggest an acquaintance with examples of Western scholarship perhaps encountered through exposure to such works available in Armenia in his time. Not only does the author cite the various administrative divisions of the pashalik, but he also gives economic, ethnographic, and ecclesiastical data that greatly enrich our knowledge of the region, as well as a historical conclusion of considerable value for students of local history within the Ottoman Empire. Although we are uncertain as to what administrative changes took place within the pashalik of Erzurum over the first century of its existence, there is no doubt that, grosso modo, it remained relatively stable. Taken together, the data of Karnets’i provide a broad background for anyone studying the routes and cities of Eastern Anatolia in the first century of Ottoman rule, the main concern of this panel.