Images of the Mediterranean in an Ottoman Pirate Novel From the Late Seventeenth Century

Abstract

The discourse on Warden Captain Mahmud, on [his] victories over the damned dwellers of Hell, the Maltese” is a rare specimen of Ottoman Tiefkultur novel of the late seventeenth century. Allegedly copied from a manumitted slave’s letter to his former master, it describes the former’s adventures when he set off from Alexandria to Istanbul. Written in a simple and lively language, this valuable text gives a great deal of information on intra-religious relationships in the Mediterranean, on the life of corsairs, but also on the ways Mediterranean seamen conceived the geography of the Sea, planned and understood their itineraries, viewed the various nations acting in the Levant, and so forth. After a study of the composition of the text and of its relations with similar texts in Ottoman literature, this paper tries to answer questions such as what type of ‘cognitive/mental map’ would Ottoman seamen have in mind in order to represent a known sea and its itineraries, what geographical markers did they use, how did they perceive a given sea. Analysis takes into account real maps, portolani and isolaria, as well as other similar sources.