India, located at southern end of the historical network of major trade routes that connected the Mediterranean with China, marked the horizon of terra-cognita for societies in both eastern and western Eurasia. Travelers from both ends of the continent converged on the subcontinent for many reasons; after their return home, they documented the geographical information they had accumulated, and disseminated it among their countrymen; by doing so, they expanded geographic knowledge of the greater Afro-Eurasian world among their people. This paper focuses on West Asia and the mapmakers who developed the region’s knowledge of India between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, during which they drew the world’s most advanced map of Afro-Eurasia to include the Indian subcontinent. In the earliest geographic and cartographic works of ancient Greece and Rome, India generally remained on the eastern edge of their known world (except for Ptolemy’s monumental work). After the advance of Western Asian merchants into eastern Eurasia, India became a major hub of intra-Asian interaction and a route to China. Many scholars have examined Arabic and Persian sources including geographies, travel accounts, and maps to determine the extent of geographic knowledge about India in particular societies at different periods in history. However, this paper adopts a new and comparative approach, analyzing a set of major sources in different genres in order to identify the key changes in West Asian geographic knowledge of India between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Its main focus is on four sources, written for different purposes in Iran and other West Asian regions, which exerted considerable influence on later accounts: the geographic and literary works of professional geographers, especially al-Khwarizmi (died c. 850) and al-Biruni (973–1048), travel literature like the Accounts of China and India, and several Iranian maps drawn during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Applying this comparative perspective, this paper demonstrates that, through geographic and cartographic works produced and circulated in their respective time periods and for different purposes, West Asian societies developed more extensive knowledge of India than of any other region outside West Asia itself.

This paper explores the incorporation of new geographical knowledge into medieval Persian political thought, as articulated in epic poetry. Studies of Firdawsi’s Epic of Kings (Shahnama) have come to view the text as exploring the contradictions and complexities of kingship, and instructing readers in statecraft—in effect, a mirror for princes—rather than as a monument to the kings of Iran, who are not simply Iranian kings, but icons of universal empire. While revision of nationalist readings of the Epic of Kings was necessary, it may still be said that the text tied universal monarchy to a geographical concept of Iranzamin and lieux de memoire therein, and to Iranian royal lineages. The importance of this place-boundedness is attested by the incorporation of much new geographical knowledge into the next generation of epics, including the Garshasbnama of Asadi Tusi and the Kushnama of Iranshah ibn Abi’l-Khayr, as well as later works such as Nizami’s Alexander romance. In these texts, universal kingship is staged across a larger geographical space. It was not enough simply to imagine a world-ruler defeating or subordinating a king of China. Instead, specific regions such as Korea, Spain, and islands of the Indian Ocean were incorporated or even made central to their narratives. Moreover, perceptions of the political culture and histories of these various regions demanded a redefinition of kingship in terms of its relation to various social classes. Thus, Alexander could not simply defeat the king of China, he needed to demonstrate his wisdom in a contest between Greek and Chinese painters, defining kingship in relation to arts. In the Garshasbnama, India and islands of the Indian Ocean function as a stage upon which the title character establishes his identity as a traveler and ur-hero, ancestor to legendary heroes of the Shahnama and also a builder of Sistan, which is thus defined by its proximity to India. During Garshasb’s travels around the Indian Ocean, he is taught by brahmins he encounters in remote places full of wonders; this constructed foreignness is then projected across a wider world, as he encounters a brahmin again in Rum. In the Kushnama, China and Korea play a similar role as origin of both the demonic title character and the messianic Faridun. These epics and of their reception by Ilkhanid and Timurid courts thus speak to the role of geographical knowledge in formulating ideologies of kingship.

The norms and rules underlying contacts and exchanges between political entities in the premodern Islamic world do not always seem clear to readers unfamiliar with the subject. While it would be tempting to apply the common legal understanding, that views ‘international’ interactions through the prism of the dar al-islam vs. dar al-harb opposition exclusively, the texts and accounts at our disposal offer a more complex and nuanced picture. Two things are clear: first, most of them take some kind of sovereignty (mulk, saltanah) as an essential precondition to participate to ‘diplomatic’ exchanges, and second, within that frame, the notion of sovereignty is inevitably attached that of territory. Using instead the concept of ‘diplomacy’ as an analytical frame, the paper aims to investigate the basis of elite communication and relationships between political elites in the premodern Islamic world, as presented by different, but dynamic and interconnected discursive registers. While giving attention to a variety of registers however, the paper will focus on the “spatial” register. The concept of “discourse of place” will be essential to this study. The paper takes as starting point the case of the Mamluk sultanate, ruling in Egypt and Syria from the 13th to 16th centuries, which has left us with the most diverse (but also most numerous) kind of sources. Of prime interest here are the administrative sources produced by secretaries working for the Mamluk state chancery, as well as the copies of letters in their collections. Those sources, combined with the works of the masalik wa’l-mamalik (human geography), offer a window into Mamluk understanding — real or imagined — of their potential interlocutors. Essential for this analysis are the geographic knowledge, representation, and description of those different parties. To illustrate this, the paper will focus on the case of Mamluk-Indian diplomacy, and will show specific cases of how both regions shared a common understanding of their sovereignty, territory and how those would determine — and facilitate — their contacts and relationship, and how this is well illustrated in their shared vocabularies and spatial representations.

Historians of early modern empires have long been investigating the political, intellectual, and economic ties between the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean. Earlier studies focus on the networks of political, economic, and knowledge exchange between these two regions and emphasize the increasing intensity of interactions between the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My paper aims to contribute to this literature by investigating the ways in which the Ottoman geographers and ruling elites located Indian Ocean in the Ottoman geographical consciousness and imperial project in the early modern period. Through a historical analysis of a select body of Ottoman geographical and cartographical works on Indian Ocean from sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, my paper will demonstrate the extent to which Ottoman geographers took part in the early modern global networks of knowledge exchange and how participation in these networks formed their ideas about Indian Ocean and its place in Ottoman geographical knowledge. It will argue that the development of a heightened sensitivity to geographical knowledge about Indian Ocean in this period was intimately related to the articulation of the Ottoman claims to universal imperial sovereignty. By narrating and depicting the geographical features of the Ottoman realm and Indian Ocean, Ottoman geographers repositioned their Empire to the center and established links to the geographical boundaries of the known world.