My paper titled “Genres in Transit: Movement of Geographical Forms in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,” studies the mobility of geographical works in the early modern intellectual world. Focusing on four geographical genres, namely cosmography, the book of routes and realms, portolan charts, and the atlas, I trace the movement of geographical method, scope, and stylistic elements in the early modern context. From the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, cosmographical treatises dominated Ottomans’ understanding of geography. This genre of scholarship served as an encyclopedia of its time, providing “comprehensive and accessible compendia of essential knowledge.” The book of routes and realms can also traced back to early Islamic mapping, which based on a regional division of space. The remnants of this regionalism resonate in the seventeenth century Ottoman geographical works, where strip maps of regions are drawn in the margins of manuscripts. Along similar lines, stylistic elements, too, moved across geographical genres. For instance, the compass rose, the wind rose, and the rhumb lines are regarded to be stylistic characteristics of the portolan charts. All these features of what has come to be identified as a portolan chart were essential for the practical purposes these charts served for: the rhumb lines demonstrated the course in lines, the compass provided the sailors to position themselves vis-à-vis the chart. Yet still, these images found in their way into the Ottoman atlas¬. The legacy of the compass and the compass rose reflects in İbrahim Müteferrika’s work, especially in his edition of Kâtib Çelebi’s Cihannümâ. All in all, focusing on the movement of various geographical genres, namely cosmography, portolan charts, the book of routes and realms, and atlases, my paper traces continuity and change in geographical knowledge and demonstrates how the act of knowing—the form of a geographical work—shaped knowledge in early modernity.

The Ottoman imperial court of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was far from a strictly static institution, setting, or collection of persons devoted to the undertaking of administrative decision-making. To the contrary, by the middle of the Ottoman era the court had become a populous, biodiverse, and at times highly mobile “society” composed of humans and non-human animals organized into complex hierarchies of rank and function that interacted with the ecological and built environments of its geographic range in multifaceted ways. However, while the relationship between courtly residence and “everyday life” in Ottoman Istanbul, and to a lesser extent Ottoman Edirne, has been the subject of concerted historical study in recent years, there is a dearth of scholarship on the court’s engagement with the variety of other municipalities it frequented amidst centuries of inter-local peregrinations. To be sure, imperial residence at other places within the court’s shifting range of mobility tended to be much briefer than in the empire’s “throne cities” (Istanbul, Edirne, Bursa). This said, numerous engagements between the court and the other settlements in the path of its itineraries are nevertheless mentioned in Ottoman sources. As a means to further this research agenda, this paper examines the “social history of monarchy” in Ottoman Yenişehir (i.e., modern Larissa) during Sultan Mehmed IV’s (r. 1648-87) extended residence there as part of the empire’s campaign against the Republic of Venice in 1668-69. Based on a close reading of the Ottoman historian Abdurrahman Abdi Paşa’s (d. 1692) Book of Events, I argue that the court’s lengthy stay in Yenişehir brought a number of social-historical factors to bear on the city and its population that were uniquely experienced by locales visited by Ottoman imperial retinues. These included local access to courtly expenditure and patronage, subject participation in large-scale hunting operations and quartering practices, as well as honorary gift and death economies through the circulation of robes of honor and the severed heads of enemy soldiers. Given the significant role of courtly residence in maintaining Constantinople/Istanbul’s status as one of the world’s wealthiest and most populous cities from the Roman era through the collapse of Ottoman power in the 1920s, attending to the “everyday” consequences of Ottoman courtly residence patterns promises to further our understanding of the multitudinous settlements that lie in the post-Ottoman space, and especially those that were significantly exposed to the multifaceted influence of courtly mobility.

Sometime before 1689, a pilgrim named Ignatios returned home, having earned the honorific title mahdesi, an appellation reserved for those who travelled to Jerusalem. This definitive moment in his life (and later, career) was not written in a colophon or logged in tax or census ledgers, but rather, documented on the surface of a printed altar cloth prepared in his hometown of Tokat—a burgeoning industrial center in the northern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In a series of images and inscriptions that span the length of the curtain (approximately three and a half meters), Ignatios documents his movements to and through holy sites and spaces, identifying, in his own words, where he was and what he saw. In addition to preserving his pilgrimage journey in both text and image, the majority of the curtain’s surface is stamped with an overwhelming number of liturgical objects and actors. Once in place, this altar curtain joined those same liturgical wares to conduct the holy Armenian rite, or patarag, a dramatic and sensually affective spectacle, which held its viewers in suspense as a means of spiritual access. This paper weighs Ignatios’ choice to identify as mahdesi against the production and function of the object on which it appears. I elaborate on the technical peculiarities, function and audience of his commission and discuss it as a microcosm of Ottoman-Armenian industry, pilgrimage and liturgy. I treat the Tokat curtain and its iconography as emerging from overlapping visual, material, and literary cultures—an object symptomatic of the interconnected industries, faiths and communities co-existing within the empire. While the curtain functioned statically as a virtual pilgrim guide by projecting far-off places, its liturgical context created micro-architectural spaces within a church and a temporary visual boundary during ritual. I marry these two notions and argue that the Tokat altar curtain reflects an evolving early-modern devotional structure that was centered on sensual experience during the performance of the Armenian rite.

For the past 20-30 years, the narratives of Europeans captured by North Africans have attracted considerable attention from historians of the early modern Mediterranean. They have been sought after for the light they shed on cross-cultural contact between captors and abductees as well as the insight they provide into premodern individuals’ shaping of their own individual identities. In the hands of global historians, captivity narratives have helped to make “mobility” a catchword of early modernity. This paper focuses on one such text: the autobiography of an Ottoman-Armenian bishop held captive by the Spanish Inquisition and the Kingdom of France. Its author, Awetik' of Tokat, was abducted by French diplomats in 1706 after he opposed the work of Catholic missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. Over four years, Awetik' was held prisoner in Sicily, Marseille, Normandy, and Paris. While in the Bastille, he recorded his life story in Armenian for his captors. Soon after, he converted to Catholicism and was released. Awetik'’s autobiography is useful for discussing both narrow historical and broad methodological questions: How should historians use such a text? Should they read it suspiciously, believing nothing its author says? or trustingly, accepting the information it contains with gratitude considering its rarity? And what can we glean about this man’s experience of forced mobility to foreign shores, his forced immobility while imprisoned, and his role in bringing about his own release? My paper answers these questions by first introducing the scholarship on early modern captivity narratives and then explicating the conditions under which Awetik' wrote his own. It argues that historians ought not to ignore captivity narratives because of the suspicious conditions under which they were usually produced; most of Awetik'’s account is corroborated by contemporaneous records in Ottoman Turkish, vernacular Armenian, Classical Armenian, and French. Next, the paper delves into the single, but large, lacuna in Awetik'’s work: his experience’s French-Catholic dimension. Awetik'’s claim to have secretly been a Catholic all along and to have harboured a powerful love and reverence for King Louis XIV were almost certainly false. The paper concludes that Awetik'’s autobiography should be read as a strategic appeal to his French-Catholic captors and that it should be seen as a tool for undoing his forced mobility and immobility. At the same time, it insists upon the usefulness of such texts for historical research and upon the need to find and publish more like them.