Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Coğrafya ve Kartografya
Ottoman Europe in Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Marian ComanThis chapter analyzes Abraham Ortelius’s different strategies for mapping the Ottoman Empire in his seminal Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considering the atlas in its entirety, as well as the additions and amendments made to subsequent editions. The first section examines the absence of explicit references to the Ottoman-ruled provinces in the European section of the Theatrum, contrasting it with Ortelius’s detailed knowledge and interest of Ottomans’ recent history and of their expansion into Europe. Despite closely following the news of Ottoman expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, Ortelius chose to obscure it cartographically in the most important section of his atlas, the one dedicated to “our Christian” Europe. The second section of the chapter focuses on the map of Romania, which found its way in the Theatrum beginning with the 1584 edition. Romania was a fictional humanist cartographical frame rooted in the classical antiquity that used the Roman past as a cover for the Ottoman eyalet of Rumelia, thus concealing the imperial and religious frontier between Ottoman and Christian Europe. In the geographical worldview of the Dutch cartographer, the Ottomans had no place on the map of Europe. The Ottomans’ “foreign” nature confined them to the non-European sections of the atlas, and Ortelius used this as an opportunity to include in his Theatrum a full-map of their empire, comprising all tri-continental territories: Turcici Imperii Descriptio. Placed near the end of the atlas, in the Asian section, in between the maps of Persia and of the Holy Land, the map of the Ottoman Empire was visually arresting. When viewed on its own, the map may give the false impression of acknowledging the Ottoman Empire’s territorial structure. However, placed back in its original context and interpreted as part of the atlas for which it was created, the map reveals its true meaning: a cartographical representation of an empire that had grown into a geographical monstrosity. The main contention of the chapter is that Ortelius’s innovative mapping should be placed at the origin of a lineage of successive cartographic frames, such as “Turkey in Europe,” “Turkey of Europe,” “Eastern Europe,” and “Balkans,” as the first conceptual attempt to map a unified Christian Europe, despite the Ottomans’ rule over large parts of the continent.
