Kātip Çelebi’s Maps and the Visualization of Space in Ottoman Culture

Abstract

While Kâtip Çelebi, the great Ottoman intellectual and geographer (1609- 57), is also often celebrated as a cartographer, this article critically assesses the maps found in his autographs, excluding those that can be identified as copies of European maps. I argue that Kâtip Çelebi did not have a mathematical method to draw maps, and often resorted to reproducing a type of mental mapping which represents space not in a Ptolemaic ‘bird’s eye’ perspective centered on a fixed observer, but based on the assumption of a movement through space, creating a web of road- or network maps.