The Ottoman geographer Osman B. Abdülmennan and his vision of the world in Tecrüme-i Kitab-ı Coğrafya (ca. 1749-1750)

Abstract

This thesis examines a little known example of eighteenth-century Ottoman geographical literature: Tercüme-i Kitâb-ı Coğrafya, a comprehensive world atlas with extensive references to Copernican theory. Osman B. Abdülmennan, who was a convert to Islam and who was most probably of western European origin, completed this geographic treatise ca. 1749-1750, while he was the second official translator of the Belgrade Council. Through a careful analysis of selected parts of the Tercüme-i Kitâb-ı Coğrafya, this study demonstrates that Osman b. Abdülmennan̕s book was a translation of the combined edition of the works of Bernhard Varenius̕ Geographia Generalis and Nicolas Sanson̕s Geographic Description of all the World, and not solely of the first of these texts, as has been previously claimed. At the same time, however, Osman b.Abdülmennan exercised an authorial function. He transferred only specific parts of the original texts, while he changed the presentation form and added significant information. By examining carefully the editorial choices and authorial interventions made by Osman b. Abdülmennan, this study further argues that the Tercüme-i Kitâb-ı Coğrafya was deeply informed by the author̕s role as cultural intermediary on the one hand and by theintellectual and political concerns of the Ottoman ruling elite, with whom he was affiliated, on the other. In a more general sense, the goal of this thesis is to show that the geographic quest of the first half of the eighteenth century, namely "mass" atlas production and translations of western European geographical works, was the outcome of wider social and political processes. Against the dated notion of "westernization" and without regarding the Ottoman cartographers /geographers as simple mouth pieces of western European thought, it is further argued that the Ottoman geographic literature ofthis period was shaped as much by global as by local currents and in this regard bears acloser resemblance to the new geographic turn taken in western Europe than is generally accepted.