Ottoman Frontier in The 16zh and 17th Century

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Part I
Frontier Fortifications
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The Fortress: Defining and Mapping the
Ottoman Frontier in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
PALMIRA BRUMMETT
THE FRONTIERS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, like frontiers elsewhere in the early modern
world, were not defined and represented in terms of linear boundaries. They were
defined, instead, in terms of physical features, sovereign claims, units of taxation, the
reach of armies, and the memories of elderly residents. Within that matrix of defining
elements, in the narratives and maps of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Eurasian world, the fortress occupied a special position. It was the quintessential
marker of frontier space; it marked not so much the edge of empire as points of
control in both land and seascapes. The fortress was possessed space, occupied by the
soldiers or subordinates (long-term or temporary) of a sovereign entity; it could be
designated ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’ and marked accordingly; it could be won or lost. Control
of territory and of trade routes was ‘counted’, in terms of the submission of fortresses;
and the occupation of fortresses was recorded in the histories and commemorated in
the maps as an indicator of the success and failure of empires and their commanders.
It is that ‘counting’ and mapping which this chapter proposes to consider.
Maps were not simply registers of geography in the early modern world; they were
(as they are today) a special form of knowledge and communication. Maps of
fortresses might function as news (conveying to an audience what purported to be true
and accurate images of sieges as they happened), as strategic plans designed for navi-
gational or military purposes, or as artistic representations, with pleasing landscapes or
historical vignettes. Early modern fortress images vary from the architecturally ‘cor-
rect’, complete with keys to various features, to the highly impressionistic, to the
simply iconic.1 But maps also show us the rhetorical fortress —an emblem of possession.
1
Many maps of the era advertise themselves in their legends as ‘true and accurate’ representations. Fortresses were
depicted with greater or lesser degrees of architectural accuracy (e.g. towers, numbers of bastions, major edifices
inside), so ‘correct’ here is a relative term. But it is important to note the devices (direct and indirect) used to
suggest ‘accuracy’ to a distant audience of map consumers.
Proceedings of the British Academy 156, 31–55. © The British Academy 2009.
32 Palmira Brummett
In almost every case, they suggest owned space, which is somehow labelled or marked
with the sign of its ‘owners’ as space which can be enjoyed, defended, exploited and
conquered. To illustrate that characteristic, this chapter will present a set of maps of
fortresses on the Ottoman–Hapsburg–Venetian frontier. These images suggest the
ways in which the fortress served to define Ottoman frontiers in the early modern
imagination and to stamp sovereignty onto contested regional space.
Imagining Empire and its Limits
The Ottoman Empire was imagined in a variety of ways in the literatures of early mod-
ern Europe: as a dynasty inserted into the capital of Constantine; as a Muslim power
established on three continents and controlling an empire that spanned thousands of
miles and thousands of souls; as a potential trading partner and ally in European wars
for political and religious hegemony; and as a monolithic Muslim threat, among other
options. Its boundaries were conceptualised as contested or ambiguous —that is, depic-
tions of where Europe ‘ended’ and where the Ottoman Empire ‘began’ were highly vari-
able —but the Ottomans were certainly construed as occupying or pressing into the
territories of Christendom. If one assesses those various representations and the
ways in which the Ottomans were crafted in space by their contemporaries, one can
speak about the Ottoman Empire as an entity measured in terms of a set of land- and
sea-based points of encounter, aggression, exchange and defence.
Those visible points of encounter were fortresses, variously defined —fixed spaces
that changed hands, and possessed multiple and often ambiguous identities. Such
fortresses —located at sea ports, near mountain passes, in commercial centres or in
expanses of agricultural land —were limit-points. They were mapped as possessed
space that ‘belonged’, however tangentially, to sovereigns who were labelled ‘Christian’
and ‘Turk’ —primarily the Hapsburg emperor and the Ottoman sultan, but also the
Republic of Venice, and a series of petty kings and warlords. ‘Fortress’, of course, is a
term which is broadly construed; but I think ‘stronghold’ is a useful definition: a place
built of wood, earth and stone (ranging from an outpost to a city) that serves to garrison
troops and to defend and celebrate the limits and resources of sovereign space.
Sites of Confrontation
Sometimes fortresses were depicted as tranquil sites, devoid of action, embedded in

bucolic landscapes. But the mapped fortress was often contested space, the focal point
for a series of confrontations and claims in the Ottoman–Hapsburg–Venetian struggle
for hegemony along a combined land and sea front reaching from the Adriatic to the
Black Sea. News maps depicting battle scenes, especially sieges, became quite popular
THE FORTRESS: DEFINING AND MAPPING THE OTTOMAN FRONTIER 33
in Italy, for example, in the second half of the sixteenth century and particularly in the
aftermath of the land-battle of Szigetvár in 1566 and the sea-battle of Lepanto in
1571.2 German map-makers were active in this trade as well; and both Italian and
German maps were disseminated to Holland, France and England. News (in maps and
broadsheets) of battle with the ‘Turks’ thus travelled relatively fast, providing ammuni-
tion for political tracts and sermon literature, particularly in the context of the
Ottoman–Hapsburg Long War of 1593–1606.3 For European publics and officials, such
maps served to notify, to inflame, to educate, to commemorate, and possibly even to
enhance Christian solidarity, although that was a difficult task in the context of the
Reformation era’s complex, inter-European, political–religious struggles.
A German siege map, complete with key, for example, commemorates the defeat of
the Ottomans at Hatvan, north-east of Budapest (Figure 2.1).4 It shows the fortified
town set into the countryside surrounded by the tents, military units, and bulwarks and
entrenchments of defenders and attackers. Those attackers are identified in both key
and legend as ‘Christian’. The crosses on their flags also declare that identity.5 The
stronghold under siege is marked as Ottoman, indicated by a crescent flag hanging
from the castle tower. The legend banner across the top of the map suggests the imme-
diacy of events, providing the date of the conflict as 3 September 1596. The key and the
2
Brendan Dooley, ‘The wages of war: battles, prints and entrepreneurs in late seventeenth-century Venice’, Word
and Image, 17 (2001), 7–24; and Mario Infelice, ‘The war, the news, and the curious: military gazettes in Italy’, in
Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron (eds.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London:
Routledge, 2001), 216–35. Also on the function and dissemination of maps, see George Tolias, ‘Nikolaos
Sophiano’s Totius Graeciae Descriptio: the resources, diffusion, and function of a sixteenth century antiquarian
map of Greece’, Imago Mundi, 58 (2006), 150–82. On Lepanto, see Andrew Hess, ‘The Battle of Lepanto and its
place in Mediterranean history’, Past & Present, 57 (1972), 53–73. See also Halil İnalc ık, ‘Lepanto in the Ottoman
documents’, in Gino Benzoni (ed.), Il Mediterraneo nella seconda metà del ’500 alla luce di Lepanto (Florence: Leo
S. Olschki, 1974), 185–92; and John Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean
Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 221–52.
3
On the Ottoman–Hapsburg wars, see Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: The Ottoman Military
Campaigns in Hungary, 1593–1606 (Vienna: VWGÖ, 1988). See also Ferenc Szakály, ‘The early Ottoman period,
including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606’, in Peter Sugar et al. (eds.), A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 83–99; Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Hungarian-Ottoman Military and Diplomatic
Relations in the Age of Süleyman the Magnificent (Budapest: ELTE, 1994); Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.),
Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest
(Leiden: Brill, 2000). Virginia Aksan, Ottomans and Europeans: Contacts and Conflicts (Istanbul: Isis, 2004), 154–5,
characterises the ‘effective fighting force of palace troops in this period’ (1593–1606) as about 50,000 infantry and
cavalry. It is often difficult to tell exactly how fast such news and images travelled. Many maps and broadsheets are
undated. But Venice, for example, received news of Balkan sieges via couriers from cities like Ragusa/Dubrovnik
and agents posted on the battlefields.
4
J. S., ‘Abris der Vöstung Hadtwan, Von den Christen Belegert und Eröbert. Den. 2 Septemb: A: 1596’, 1596.
British Library, Maps. C.7.e.2(.31). The key marks the encampments of the general and commanders; rivers, roads,
moat and entrenchments, and the attackers’ gun emplacements with cannon and mortars.
5
On mapping the emblems of ‘Christian’ and ‘Turk’, see Palmira Brummett, ‘ “Turks” and “Christians”: the
iconography of possession in the depiction of the Ottoman-Venetian-Hapsburg frontiers, 1550–1689’, in Matthew
Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (eds.), The Religions of the Book: Co-existence and Conflict, 1400–1660
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming).
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Figure 2.1. Defeat on the Ottomans at Hatvan. J. S., ‘Abris der Vöstung Hadtwan’, [1596]. British Library,
Maps C.7.e.2(.31). Copyright British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.
animated figures spread across the siege map, firing cannon and riding horses, and draw
the distant viewer into the conflict, both suggesting an eyewitness presentation of
events and allowing the reader to savour the victory. One more point of encounter, one
more segment of territory has been reallocated to the ‘Christian’ side.
Another German map, by Alexander Mair, published in Augsburg, also shows the
moving of the frontiers (Figure 2.2).6 On this map, yet another ‘Christian’ force cap-
tures Iavarinum (Győr or Yanık) on the Danube and Raab rivers in 1598.7 Here the
besieging army is rather more generic and less animated than that in the previous siege
map. But unlike that previous map, this fortress is presented to the viewer in a some-
what broader geographical context and embedded in a more elaborate set of celebra-
tory Latin and explanatory German texts. An effort is made to depict the contours of
fortress architecture with its angled bastions, thereby lending the image a sense of
‘accuracy’.8 A fire, presumably from gunpowder stores blowing, lights up one of the
bastions. This is a fairly common figural device, lending further immediacy to the news
map’s portrayal. And the fortress is shown situated at the confluence of the Danube
and Raab channels, thus signalling its strategic importance. Though the modes of
artistic representation are quite different, these siege maps of Hatvan and Győr taken
together suggest some standard options for the envisioning of contested space on the
Ottoman–Hapsburg frontier at the end of the sixteenth century. Their focus on the
individual fortress highlights the notion that the frontiers are measured in the points
where armies meet, not in blocks of territory. One does not see a system of defensive
sites or a line of military advance; rather one sees sovereign power condensed into a set
of walls, bastions, towers and flags.
On Mair’s map, the celebratory mood is made more explicit with text as well as
iconography. A flag with a large cross has been raised over the wall, denoting Christian
identity. Other large banners show the Hapsburg double-headed eagle, and the coat of
arms of Hungary. But an even more prominent symbol of possession is located in the
foreground, where one finds a cartouche in the form of a monument. It is dedicated to
Adolph Schwarzenberg (1547–1600), one of the ‘liberators’ of the citadel, and invokes
the name of the Hapsburg Rudolph II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612).9 On this
monument, an angel raises two victory wreaths over two ‘classically’ inspired obelisks.
Tied beneath her feet are captive Turks, one wearing a turban and another wearing the
6
Alexander Mair, ‘Iavarinum sive Raab a Christianis captum 29 die Martij Anno Christi 1598’, 1598. British
Library, Maps 28225–5.
7
See Szakály, ‘The early Ottoman period’, 96–7.
8
Of course, many such representations are formulaic or iconic rather than expressive of the individual fortress’s
actual lines. Generic models were often used for fortresses and any given map image might or might not reflect a
sense of that fortress’s actual site, geographic context and fortifications. Szakály, ‘The early Ottoman period’, 97,
gives the date of the conquest as 19 March, whereas the map legend says 29 March. For a series of images of
fortresses and a treatment of siege warfare in this area, see Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the
Early Modern World (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 191–219.
9
In the upper left, a smaller legend offers the map to ‘Mariae Fuggerae’, possibly a patron of the map-maker.
36
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Figure 2.3. The conquest of Győr from the Ottomans. Alexander Mair, ‘Iavarinum sive Raab’, [1598].
British Library, Maps 28225-5. Copyright British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.
peaked headgear of the Janissary. Győr had been captured by the Ottoman general
Sinan Pasha in September 1594, and the forces of royal Hungary had tried to retake it
in 1597 without success. The town was thus emblematic of the advancing Ottoman
frontier. Its reconquest in 1598 was a symbol of salvation. That salvation, in turn,
became a vision of the frontier —stamped onto a map and circulated to an audience
preoccupied with the question of how far the Ottoman armies might go and how far
they might be pushed back.10 To seal the message of salvation (and punishment) a
Latin passage from the Vulgate serves as a legend across the bottom of the map, and as
a reminder of those to whom the ultimate victory must belong. It reads: ‘Just like the
fire which burns down the forest, and just like a flame burning up the mountains, thus
will you destroy them in your fury, and scatter them utterly in your rage’ (Sicut ignis qui
comburit silvam, et sicut flamma comburens montes; ita persequêris illos in tempestate
tua, et in ira tua turbabis eos).11
Almost 100 years later, conventions for mapping the Ottoman–Hapsburg frontier
had not radically altered.12 A Venetian map by Giovanni Battista Chiarello (Figure 2.3)
shows the 1685 siege of Nayhaysel (Neuhäusel or Uyvar), on the River Neutra (Nitra),
in Royal Hungary, two years after the failed battle for Vienna. The map is one of several
in Chiarello’s 1687 history of the Hapsburg wars against what he calls ‘rebels and
Ottomans’.13 In the dedication to his book, Chiarello touts the cause of Christendom,
and fervently hopes for the return of the Cross to the Orient, which has been subject to
‘the tyranny of Muslim impiety’ under the ‘Turks’.14 In a note to his readers (Cortese
Lettore), Chiarello characterises the combatants in these wars: on one side are the
Christian potentates and on the other is the ‘universal enemy’, the Ottoman sultan.15
10
That, of course, was a question for the Ottomans as well, who had to keep an eye on the Safavid front in the
east, where warfare was soon to resume.
11
Vulgate, 82:15–16. Another legend ribbon at the top of the map, the relevance of which is more obscure, cites a
passage from 1 Samuel 3:11.
12
Indeed, the plates for many such fortress plans were recycled or copied over the years. This is not to say that late
seventeenth-century maps did not benefit from technical improvements in measurement and production. Rather it
is to say that many of the conventions of representation remained in place or were employed together with newer
conventions (such as more formal and exacting demarcation of state borders). Designs of fortifications, whether
in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, might be exacting or fanciful. See, for two examples, Cartographic
Treasures of the Newberry Library (Chicago: Newberry Library, 2001), 44–5, plates 35 and 36, showing an early
news map of the Battle of Pavia in 1525, and one of Alexander de Groote’s fortification designs with imagined
battle from 1617.
13
Giovanni Battista Chiarello, Historia degl’avvenimenti dell’armi Imperiali contro a’ Ribelli, et Ottomani,
Confederationi, e Trattati sequiti frà le Potenze di Ceasre, Polonia, Venetia, e Moscovia, Negotiati, & Aleanze del
Conte Tekely con la Porta Ottomana. Accampamenti, Guerre, Assedij, Piazze, e Conquiste di Città, e Provincie.
Battaglie, Rotte, e Vittorie variamente successe nelle quatro Campagne degl’Anni 1683, 1684, 1685, 1686 (Venice:
Presso Steffani Curti. Con Licenza de’ Superiori, e Privilegio, 1687). Map: ‘Spiegatione dell’Assedio di Nayhay sel
Seguito l’Anno MDCLXXXV’, located after page 346. Folger Shakespeare Library, 246080. The first siege of
Vienna was in 1529.
14
Chiarello, Historia, unnumbered page, first dedication.
15
Ibid., second dedication.
38 Palmira Brummett
Figure 2.3. Giovanni Battista Chiarello, Pianta della Fortezza di Nayhaysel, in Historia degl’avveni-
menti dell’armi imperiali contro a’ ribelli, et Ottomani . . . 1687, Folger Shakespeare Library, 246080.
By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The borders between the two, he suggests, are necessarily contested and variable,
because ‘the sceptre does not rest securely in the right hand of the monarch unless,
together with the sceptre, he also grips the sword.’16
16
Ibid., unnumbered section entitled ‘Notitie Historiche e Geografiche del Regno dell’Hungaria, Schiavonia,
e Croatia’, which is located after the first map, ‘Hungaria Millitaria’, in the front matter.
In this particular map, one of several in Chiarello’s text, that gripping of the sword
is embodied in the struggle for Nayhaysel. Here we see a schematic design of the
bastioned fortress surrounded by iconographic units of soldiers. Like the map of
Hatvan, this map includes a key, explaining the action of the siege. It indicates points
of attack, locations of artillery, routes of approach, some military units, waterways,
and natural features like hills and swamps. The fortress itself is empty of buildings or
people, stripped of its human identity. But that human dimension is embodied in a car-
touche celebrating the defeat of the ‘Turks’, represented by characters whose facial
expressions are visible. Two lie, fallen in battle, at the base of the cartouche (which takes
the form of a drape or banner). Another ‘Turk’ figure rubs his head in dismay and
points to his comrades. At the top right of the cartouche, not so readily visible, are the
heads of two ‘Turks’ mounted on pikes, one head wearing a turban, the other shaved
and top-knotted. Just beneath those heads is the smiling face of an unknown figure,
pleased apparently at this display of trophies. Chiarello’s fortress, like many other such
images, floats in undesignated space. Without the cartouche and key this could be any
one of many early modern European fortress images —places where battles were fought
against Muslim or Christian foes. But labelled and dated it becomes a specific point of
possession, part of the broader frontier and of one sovereign entity or another, now
Hapsburg, now Ottoman. It is the text and its decoration of heads, a specific kind of
head, that is, which place the fortress in context, giving it a history, and providing it
with an identity.
Another interesting map-pairing may be found in two images (not shown here),
published a century apart, of the fortress of Agria (Erlau, Eger, Ott. Egri) in northern
Hungary. One, dated 1568, shows a defensive wall with seven rounded bastions and a
central fortress flying the double-headed eagle flag of the Hapsburgs.17 A river flows in
front of the fortress and the cartographer notes on a mountain behind the fortress that
this elevation is higher than that of the fortress (a strategic consideration). A second
map of the same fortress from a century later provides a different view, and more
detail.18 This map has a combination of rounded and pointed bastions. The river flows
around and also through the city, which is set on two levels with the ‘castle’ on a higher
plane. A key at the bottom of the map locates the castle, the river, the ‘city’, the cathe-
dral and the Palace of the Magistrates. Interestingly, in terms of indicators of posses-
sion, the tall buildings (including the cathedral and the castle) all have crescents
mounted at their tops, marking the city as Ottoman. Turbaned figures ride in the coun-
tryside as if to reaffirm that identity and date the map to the period of Ottoman rule
17
L. P., ‘Agria, fortezza nel paese di Ongheria nel modo che a presente si trova, 1568’, British Library K.Top.
110.112. Defenders had fought off an Ottoman siege in 1552.
18
Agria, [1683?], British Library K.Top. 110.113. The Ottomans took the fortress in 1596 and surrendered it in
1687.
40 Palmira Brummett
(1596–1687). From one map to the other, Eger, a significant point in the frontier zone,
thus shifts from the Hapsburg to the Ottoman ‘side’.
The problematic nature of location and sovereignty in images that may be detached
from their texts and from surrounding regional contexts is apparent in a map of the
fortress of Nicosia on Cyprus (Figure 2.4) which is contained in a Venetian atlas, the
isolario (book of islands) of Simon Pinargenti.19 The isolario, if intact, provides a geo-
graphic frame, a progression of sites (ports and islands) in the sea frontier zone between
Venice and Istanbul. Looking at the map of Nicosia alone, however, its cartouche
unfinished, one could easily assume that it showed a city embedded in the Balkan
peninsula, rather than the central point of an island kingdom. Although the fortress
remains a focal point for imagining sovereignty, and, just like the fortresses depicted
earlier in this essay, it is subject to attack and the transfer of power, the besieging
armies must arrive and depart in ships. And so they had arrived, in 1570, landing on
the south coast of the island of Cyprus and marching to Nicosia, which fell to the
Ottomans after a forty-five-day siege.20 Pinargenti’s 1573 isolario commemorates a
series of such battles along the long Ottoman Venetian sea frontier —one island, one
fortress, one port at a time —invoking the struggle between ‘Christians’ and ‘Turks’,
and the movement between one imperial capital and another, for a readership which
saw those distant, contested, sea spaces as part of its own history and destiny.
In this version of Pinargenti’s isolario, which like other such atlases, contains a
variety of maps by different map-makers, the fortress is generic. Its central space, how-
ever, is filled with defenders, and buildings, including the major church, Santa Sofia,
which is labelled as if to let the reader know that this is indeed Nicosia, as the legend
proclaims.21 Outside the fortress wall, yet another battle rages. The fortress is sur-
rounded by Ottoman attackers, identified by the crescents on their tents and banners.
The viewer sees the puffs of smoke issuing from cannon which are aimed at the
apparently formidable walls. Individual military units are labelled according to type or
function (Janissaries, cavalry, archers). In the foreground two groups of figures,
sketched out only very roughly, confront each other. Unwilling to leave identity to the
imagination of the viewer or to the iconography of crescent flags, the map-maker has
labelled one force ‘Turchi’ and one ‘Cristiani.’ Thus the map returns its readers to the
notion of religious confrontation. This is not simply a siege taking place in some
19
Simon Pinargenti, Isole che son da Venetia nella Dalmatia, et per tutto l’Archipelago, fino a Costantinopoli, con le
loro Fortezze e con le terre piu notabili di Dalmatia, nuovamente poste in disegno a beneficio de gli Studiosi di
Geografia (Vinegia: Appresso Simon Pinargenti et compagni, 1573). British Library, Maps C.24.g.10(.42).
20
John Julius Norwich, Venice: The Greatness and the Fall (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 215–17.
21
The Leventis Foundation on Nicosia has published various treatments of the fortress (unseen by this author),
for example, G. M. Perbellini, The Fortress of Nicosia: Prototype of European Military Architecture (Nicosia:
Anastasios G. Leventis Foundation, 1994).
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THE FORTRESS: DEFINING AND MAPPING THE OTTOMAN FRONTIER
Figure 2.4. Simon Pinargenti, Nicosia, in Isole che son da Venetia nella Dalmatia . . ., 1573. British Library, Maps
C.24.g.10(.42). Copyright British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.
41
42 Palmira Brummett
far-off place, it is a struggle between Christians and Turks. If the Turks succeed, one
more point of Christendom will be lost.22
The church of Santa Sofia and its surrounding buildings appear again, in Giuseppe
Rosaccio’s 1598 illustrated narrative of the journey from Venice to Constantinople.23
But in Rosaccio’s map of Nicosia there is no siege and no indication of possession. The
fortress presents a tranquil cityscape in a bucolic countryside, and the Ottomans are
nowhere in evidence, despite their having been in command of the city since 1570 and
of the island since 1571 (Figure 2.5).24 No crescents deck the walls or buildings. Thus,
who in fact possesses this fortified site is unclear or even hidden. Nicosia might be one
timeless space in the chain of cities the traveller visited or witnessed on the long jour-
ney from Venice to Istanbul. As in Pinargenti’s map of Nicosia, there is no indication
that this fortress is located on an island, one point of encounter in a chain of such
points defining the Mediterranean sea frontier contested by Porte and Signoria.25 In
fact, in only one of his series of maps does Rosaccio suggest, by means of a dotted line,
the broader sea-based frontiers (confini) dividing his opposing sides, the same ‘sides’
advanced by Chiarello: ‘Turks’ and ‘Christian princes’. The reader must look beyond
the individual maps to the author’s narrative descriptions of place to find a more
elaborate delineation of which spaces belong to whom.
In the full title of his book, Viaggio da Venetia, a Costantinopoli per Mare, e per
Terra, & insieme quello di Terra Santa. Da Gioseppe Rosaccio con Brevita Descritto nel
quale, oltre à Settantadui Disegni, di Geografia, e Corografia si discorre, quanto in esso
Viaggio, si ritrova. Cioè Città, Castelli, Porti, Golfi, Isole, Monti, Fiumi, é Mari, Opera
22
Of course, the real ethno-religious identities of the participants in such struggles along the long Ottoman fron-
tiers were quite complex. Conversions and intermarriage were common; and those living in frontier areas were
often cited as people of questionable loyalties. See, for example, the Ottoman raconteur Evliya Çelebi’s often snide
comments as he travels through the southern Balkan peninsula: Evliya, Seyahatname, 8: 302, 304, 324, and Evliya
Çelebi in Albania and Adjacent Regions (Kosovo, Montenegro, Ohrid: The Relevant Sections of the Seyahatname),
ed. and trans. Robert Dankoff and Robert Elsie (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 85, 93, 191. Identities were also malleable
over time, space and situation, depending on social, economic and political variables. Even the designations
‘Christian’ and ‘Turk’ suggest the lumping of many peoples into simple (if not homogenising) categories.
23
See Gioseppe Rosaccio, Viaggio da Venetia, a Costantinopoli per Mare, e per Terra, & insieme quello di Terra
Santa. Da Gioseppe Rosaccio con Brevita Descritto nel quale, oltre à Settantadui Disegni, di Geografia, e Corografia
si discorre, quanto in esso Viaggio, si ritrova. Cioè Città, Castelli, Porti, Golfi, Isole, Monti, Fiumi, é Mari, Opera
utile, à Mercanti Marinari, & à Studiosi di Geografia ([Seal:] Con Privileggio. Venice: Appresso Giacomo Franco,
1598). Such narratives of the stages of travel, often illustrated with maps, were a particular genre of the day,
especially detailing the land and sea journeys from Vienna or Venice to Istanbul or Jerusalem.
24
Rosaccio, Viaggio, ‘Nicosia’, British Library, Maps C.27.b.26(.46). Note that there are different editions of
Rosaccio’s Viaggio; as with other similar narratives and isolarii, the number and order of the maps may be differ-
ent from version to version, a function both of multiple editions and of volumes compiled to the specifications of
customers.
25
On the Ottoman–Venetian sea frontiers, see Maria Pia Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, Quaderni di Studi Arabi,
Studi e Testi, 5 (Venice: Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia and Herder Editrice, 2002), esp. 39–51, on fortresses. See
also, for details on coastal fortifications in North Africa, Neji Djelloul, Les Fortifications côtières ottomanes de la
Régence de Tunis (XVIe–XIXe Siècles) (Zaghouan: FTERSI, 1995).
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Figure 2.5. Giuseppe Rosaccio, Nicosia, in Viaggio da Venetia, a Costantinopoli per mare . . . 1598. British Library, Maps C.27.b.26(.46).
Copyright British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.
43
44 Palmira Brummett
utile, à Mercanti Marinari, & à Studiosi di Geografia, Rosaccio notes the units by
which the early modern space is measured: cities, castles, ports, gulfs, islands,
mountains, rivers and seas. The ‘castles’ and ‘cities’ are the equivalent of our
fortresses, the sites of occupation which (along with routes of travel and trade)
determine sovereign possession, especially in the broad frontier zones, as opposed
to sovereignty, which was claimed in terms of blocks of territory (or in units of
taxable land).26
For a fortress placed in broader context, demonstrating a sea frontier, we have the
Venetian cosmographer, Vincenzo Coronelli’s late seventeenth-century map of another
space in the contested Ottoman–Venetian frontier zone: Santa Maura (on the Ionian
island of Levkas). In this map, which zooms out from the fortress and the island itself
to show the surrounding seas, the viewer gets a sense of geographic context without los-
ing the sense of past or impending military confrontation (Figure 2.6). The island fills
most of the map space, its connection to the Ionian mainland (along with the location
of the fortress) indicated in the upper right-hand corner of the map. Each of the other
three corners is occupied by a cartouche. One elaborate cartouche, in the upper left-
hand corner, presents the fortress of Santa Maura (Figure 2.7).27 It includes a fine little
schematic of the walls and fortifications and a decorative owl bearing a scale of passi
Veneti to indicate the size of the fortress in paces or steps. This inset emphasises the
location of the fortress (at the northern end of the island) with the lagoon on one side
and the mainland on the other.
The map is undated but presumably was produced to celebrate Venice’s taking of
the island from the Ottomans in 1684. That conquest is indicated, in rather grizzly fash-
ion, by the legend cartouche in the lower right-hand corner of the map (Figure 2.8).
The legend is emblazoned upon the skinned body of a ‘Turk’ held in the teeth of the
winged lion of St Mark, mascot of Venice. That ‘Turk’ identity is signified by the
figure’s shaved head and topknot and by the crescent upon which the lion rests his
foot. Coronelli dedicated the map to Matteo Sanuto, procuratore of Venice. But no
doubt he also had in mind Marcantonio Bragadino, commander of Famagusta on
Cyprus when it was forced to surrender to the Ottomans in 1571. At that time, the vic-
torious Mustafa Pasha had Bragadino flayed alive and his skin sent to the sultan.28
That humiliation rankled —even 100 years later —thus, through this cartouche,
26
As Gabor Ágoston, ‘A flexible empire: authority and its limits on the Ottoman frontiers’, in Kemal H. Karpat
with Robert W. Zens (eds.), Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities, and Political Changes (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2003), esp. 23–7, has demonstrated, the Ottoman and Hapsburg sovereigns or their underlings
could and did tax the same units of space in the frontier zone, causing significant complaints among the populace.
Rural populations in such frontier zones also suffered plundering by the garrisons from border fortresses on both
‘sides’.
27
Vincenzo Coronelli, ‘Fortezza di S. Maura’, [1695], British Library, Maps, C.27.g.16(.61).
28
Norwich, Venice, 220–1.
Figure 2.6. Vincenzo Coronelli, Isola di Santa Maura. British Library, Maps C.27.g.16(.61).
Copyright British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.
46 Palmira Brummett
Figure 2.7. Vincenzo Coronelli, Isola di Santa Maura, inset, fortress detail. British Library, Maps
Coronelli gained a bit of vengeance for his Venetian audience. Such cartouches on early
modern European maps, whether the relatively mild depiction of dominance included
in Mair’s Győr, the understated but grisly image of defeat in Chiarello’s map of
Nayhaysel, or the sly and vicious ‘parchment’ in Coronelli’s Santa Maura, framed the
fortress in the context of a ‘universal’ struggle between the representatives of Christian
and Muslim kings. Just as these fortress images simplified architectural, geographical,
and military realities, so their rhetorics of possession might reduce the complex cultural,
Figure 2.8. Vincenzo Coronelli, Isola di Santa Maura, inset, title cartouche. British Library, Maps
48 Palmira Brummett
political and ethno-religious realities of the broad land and sea frontiers to a contest
between ‘Christians’ and ‘Turks’.29
The notion that the Ottoman–Hapsburg or Ottoman–Venetian frontiers were neatly
divided between Christians and Turks is, of course, just as simplistic as the notion that
they were neatly divided into land and sea frontiers. One might, rather, divide frontiers
into those that were subject to attacks mounted overland and those that were subject
to attack via sea-based (or sea-transported) forces. In the island–coast zones of the
Adriatic and Aegean, forces mobilised at sea often penetrated inland, assisted by local
forces. Such was the case in the years 1645 to 1648 when the fleet of the Venetian com-
mander, Leonardo Foscolo, conducted a series of raids along the Adriatic coast.30 That
campaign culminated in the Venetian conquest of Clissa (Klis) a few miles south-east
of Spalato (Split). The conquest is commemorated in a series of coloured maps (assem-
bled in an ‘atlas’ dedicated to the Molina family) which portray siege warfare in a rather
more direct and personal manner than that envisioned in the maps treated so far. One
such image, showing more realistic people (that is, those drawn as two-dimensional
individuals, rather than as iconographic military units) attacking Clissa, combines a
variety of artistic and cartographic techniques (Figure 2.9).31 The fortress, parts of
which are labelled in the key, is shown in profile mounted on a hill while the Venetian
forces fire upon it with their batteries. Crescents mark the banners and the mosque of
the town, clearly indicating whose territory is under siege. The key notes the location of
the mosque. Scattered on the ground in front of the advancing forces are what look like
books and two lanterns (or receptacles) with crescents on top. It is unclear what these
objects represent; they are marked for the key with the letter ‘G’, but I am unable to
make out the identification. Even without identification, however, their crescents mark
them as iconic representations of Muslim faith and of the Ottoman polity. Thus the
map designates this assault not simply as a victory, but as a victory over Islam and its
representatives.
Although the Ottomans controlled the bulk of the Balkan peninsula for well over a
hundred years, location near the sea made fortresses vulnerable to the fleets of attack-
ers on either side. It was far easier to offload cannons from ships than it was to haul
29
On some of the complexities of frontier zones, see: Colin Heywood, ‘The frontier in Ottoman history: old ideas
and new myths’, in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands 700–1700
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 228–50, reprinted in C. Heywood, Writing Ottoman History: Documents and
Interpretations (Aldershot: Variorum, 2002); Colin Imber, Keiko Kiyotake and Rhoads Murphey (eds.), Frontiers
of Ottoman Studies, II: State, Province, and the West (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005); Géza Pálffy, ‘The origins and
development of the border defense system against the Ottoman Empire in Hungary (up to the early eighteenth
century)’, in Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The
Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3–70.
30
Norwich, Venice, 300.
31
‘Clissa’, The Molina Family Atlas [mid-seventeenth century]. British Library, K.Top. 78.31.b (Table 6, no. 5).
The coat of arms on this map, repeated elsewhere in the atlas, would seem to be the coat of arms of the Molina
family, whose participation or at least interest in the siege is reflected in the atlas itself.
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Page 49
Figure 2.9. Clissa, ‘Molina Family Atlas’, [mid-seventeenth century]. British Library, K.Top. 78.31.b (Table 6, no. 5). Copyright British
Library Board. All Rights Reserved.
49
50 Palmira Brummett
them overland from Istanbul, Venice or Vienna. Once taken, Clissa would be gar-
risoned by its conquerors who would then withdraw back to their ships.32 For the
moment, however, the siege of Clissa is frozen in time in this elaborately decorated
image, right down to the sight lines showing the trajectory of balls hurled from the
attackers’ cannon. While the crescents of the defenders still stand defiant atop the
major edifices of the fortress, the message here is that they will not (or did not) endure
for long.33
The images treated so far are a small sample of the options for mapping Ottoman
frontiers and the fortresses that stood as markers of sovereign space in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Such maps, I would argue, not only recorded events but
embodied a sense of possession, making it real, personal and palpable. This was espe-
cially the case when fortress maps were accompanied by surrounding texts and narra-
tives which provided historical vignettes and biblical allusions, highlighted points of
contact and conflict, and elaborated upon the divisions between Christian and ‘Turk’.34
Possession was visualised in terms of these contested, conquerable points of urban
space. Sovereign territory was, of course, also measured in routes, and stages of a jour-
ney through the frontier. Thus the isolario of Pinargenti and the Viaggio of Rosaccio
charted movement from port to island to port in the journey from the lands of the
‘Christians’ to the lands of the ‘Turk’, in the process incorporating their fortresses into
a larger matrix of travel, trade and imperial reach.
Ottoman Mappings
Ottoman maps also envisioned space in terms of movement from port to port, or
fortress to fortress, particularly in the narration of campaigns. Ottoman campaign
‘maps’, showing the stages of the campaign journey, took different forms in such nar-
rations, which were designed to glorify the Ottoman sultans and to demonstrate
their entitlement to conquered territories. For example, Lokman ibn Seyyid Hüseyin
(d. 1601/2), the Ottoman court panegyrist, in his Book of Accomplishments
(Hünername), shows the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent moving through
the Balkans from one fortress to another, at each one demanding and receiving acts of
submission from his vassals (old or new).35 In one such image the young prince of
32
One could say that one of the ways that Ottomans ‘mapped’ space was through a counting of garrison troops,
the personnel whereby fortresses were defended and maintained. For one such example, of a ‘roll-call’ register, see
Ottoman Garrisons on the Middle Danube: Based on Austrian National Library MS MXT 562 of 956/1549–1550,
ed. and trans. Asparuch Velkov and Evgeniy Radushev (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1996), 12–27. Such registers
were a counterpart of the tahrir surveys for tax purposes, both avenues for managing conquered space.
33
The map and others in this atlas give the impression of sketches from an eyewitness artist. That impression,
however, may be an illusion.
34
This is true even when the maps have been detached from their texts.
35
See on Lokman, H. Sohrweide, ‘Lukman b. Sayyid Husayn’, EI 2, 5: 813–14. On the Hünername, see Metin And,
Turkish Miniature Painting: The Ottoman Period (Istanbul: Dost, 1987), 32, 105–10, 114. Most of its images are
Transylvania, John Sigismund Zapolya, is brought before the sultan in 1541, after
Süleyman had redeemed Buda from an assault by the Hapsburg King Ferdinand I
(Figure 2.10). The child’s father, John Zapolya, had controlled part of Hungary as
an Ottoman vassal, and the sultan here accepts the son’s submission and grants his
family’s claim to tributary status in the principality of Transylvania.36
What is interesting for our purposes, however, is not the complex family dynamics
of the struggle for Balkan lands but the miniature’s image of the fortified town, with
the sultan’s tents and cannons sprawled before it, acting as backdrop for the certifica-
tion of sovereignty.37 Süleyman’s cannon are still ‘aimed’ at the city walls, and Buda
itself bristles with cannon, a threatened and contested space. But, at least temporarily,
the struggle has ceased.38 Muezzins give the call to prayer from a minaret within the
city, confirming the sense of Ottoman possession and identity. The soldiers of the
sultan, and the inhabitants of the town (at left centre) look on —witnesses to
Süleyman’s hegemony. It is at such stopping places, the fortresses within the frontier
zone, that the main action of the story of Ottoman expansion takes place. Sovereignty
attributed to Üstad Osman and his workshop. See also Selmin Kangal (ed.), The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the
House of Osman (Istanbul: İşbank, 1999); and Esin At ıl, ‘The image of Süleymân in Ottoman art’, in Halil Inalc ık
and Cemal Kafadar (eds.), Süleymân the Second and His Time (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), 333–41. On the rhetorics
of such acts of submission, see Palmira Brummett, ‘A kiss is just a kiss: rituals of submission along the east-west
divide’, in Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock (eds.), Cultural Encounters Between East and West:
1453–1699 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 107–31; and Rhoads Murphey, ‘The cultural
and political meaning of Ottoman rituals of welcome: a text-linked analysis based on accounts by three key
Ottoman historians’, in Markus Köhbach, Gisela Procházka-Eisl and Claudia Römer (eds.), Acta Viennesisa
Ottomanica, Akten des 13 CIEPO-Symposiums (Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes),
vom 21 bis 25 September, 1998 (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Instituts für Orientalistik, 1999), 247–55.
36
Lokman, Hünername, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, MS Hazine 1524, fol. 266a. Buda, in Hungary, on the right bank
of the Danube, was held by the Ottomans from 154 to 1686. This rite of submission took place on 29 August 1541,
and the miniature takes some liberties with the scene as John Sigismund was in fact only an infant at the time. On
John Zapolya, see Gábor Barta, ‘IV. The first period of the principality of Transylvania (1526–1606)’, in Béla
Köpecki and Bennett Kovrig (eds.), History of Transylvania, trans. Péter Szaffkó (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001), 1: 606–19.
37
For two different types of Ottoman siege views, see the 1565 map, or siege (kuşatma) plan of Mustafa Pasha for
Malta and the illustration of the siege of Inebaht ı from Katib Çelebi’s Tuhfet ül-kibar, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, MS
R. 1192, fol. 17a, in Idris Bostan, Kürekli ve Yelkenli Osmanlı Gemileri (Istanbul: Bilge, 2005), 78–9, 88–9.
Although we have few Ottoman maps from the sixteenth century, it is clear that the Ottomans drew strategic maps
for treaty and military purposes and did systematic ‘mapping’ for tax purposes in tahrir surveys. Gábor Ágoston
has noted the surprisingly accurate map of the region around Kanije/Kanizsa prepared by Üveys Pasha, Ottoman
governor of Buda from 1578 to 1580; see Chapter 3 below, pp. 000–000, and idem, ‘Information, ideology, and lim-
its of imperial policy: Ottoman grand strategy in the context of Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry’, in Virginia H. Aksan
and Daniel Goffman (eds.), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 89.
38
Süleyman’s army came to the relief of Buda, which had been attacked by King Ferdinand. Gábor Ágoston, Guns
for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 194, has noted: ‘Until well into the seventeenth century, but especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, Ottoman artillery proved to be superior against European fortifications . . . Between 1521 and 1566 only
thirteen Hungarian forts were able to resist Ottoman firepower for more than ten days, merely nine castles for more
than twenty days, and altogether four fortresses were able fully to withstand Ottoman assaults.’
52 Palmira Brummett
Figure 2.10. The submission of Prince John Sigismund Zapolya of Transylvania to Sultan Süleyman
I. Lokman ibn Seyyid Hüseyin, Hünername, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, MS Hazine 1524, fol. 266a.
Courtesy of T. C. Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi.
is thus mapped, through miniatures, across the Balkans, from Istanbul all the way, or
almost, to Vienna. And it is that declaration of sovereignty, rather than Buda’s shape,
location, or the nature of its defences, which is important in these representations. Like
those in many European maps, the fortress images in the Hünername (despite their
different artistic styles) tend to emphasise strength or weakness and the exchange of
possession rather than the specifics of fortification or defence.39
Another type of campaign mapping was produced in the elaborately illustrated
works of Matrakç ı Nasuh (d. 1564), an Ottoman pasha who accompanied Sultan
Süleyman on his Baghdad campaign in the 1530s, and participated in later campaigns
on the European front.40 Matrakç ı was particularly concerned to show the stages of the
campaign journey; in fact his work is often referred to by the simple shortened title,
Menazil (stages).41 Unlike the miniatures in Lokman’s text, however, Matrakç ı’s maps
are devoid of people.42 They show the phases of the journey in terms of cities,
fortresses, shrines, wells, palaces, roads, rivers and mountain passes. It is left to the
surrounding text to provide the cast of characters, the celebration of Ottoman power,
and the assertion of territorial entitlement and possession. Matrakç ı’s fortresses are set
in the surrounding countryside and directly linked to the routes of passage from one
stopping place to another. For example, one of his illustrations —and the only one in
the Menazil which bears a legend denoting a frontier (serhad) —shows the border zone
between Arab and Persian Iraq, and between the Ottoman and Safavid empires (Figure
2.11).43 This ‘border’ is not imagined as a line but as a claimed territorial space delim-
ited by physical features and by edifices: the fortress (kale) of Yeni Imam at the top,
39
Evliya Çelebi provides some interesting word-pictures of fortresses in his various narratives of travels. See
Seyahatname, 5: 295; 8: 315, 327, and Evliya Çelebi in Albania, 25, 147, 205. On the fortress of Kaçanik, in Kosova,
for example, he writes: ‘Sinan Pasha, the conqueror of Yemen, constructed a beautiful stonework fortress at the
mouth of the gorge and on the banks of the Lepenca river. It is square in shape and 800 paces in circumference.
One drawback is that it is situated in the valley and so has many higher points surrounding it. The castle has a war-
den, 50 garrison soldiers, two cannons, and one gate. Inside are 40 or 50 houses to accommodate the soldiers, but
no public buildings. Outside the wall there are another 100 houses, all with tiled roofs and gardens’ (Seyahatname,
5: 295; trans. from Evliya Çelebi in Albania, 25).
40
See on Matrakçi Nasuh, Halil Sahillioglu, ‘Dördüncü Muradın Bagdat Seferi Menzilnamesi’, Belgeler 2/3–4
(1965), 1–36; and Hedda Reindl, ‘Zu einigen Miniaturen und Karten aus Handschriften Matraqcı Nasuh’s’,
Islamkundliche Abhandlungen, Beiträge zur Kenntnis Südosteuropas und des Nahen Orients, 17 (1974 ), 146–71.
41
See for the Turkish edition, Nasuhü’s-Silahi (Matrakç ı), Beyan-ı menazil-i sefer-i {Irakeyn-i Süleyman Han, ed.
H. G. Yurdaydın (Ankara: TTK, 1976).
42
For a set of variations on Ottoman mapping and other fortress views in an Ottoman context see J. M. Rogers,
‘Itineraries and town views in Ottoman histories’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of
Cartography, II/1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 228–55, esp. 234–45; and Kathryn Ebel, ‘City Views, Imperial Visions: Cartography and the
Visual Culture of Urban Space in the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1603’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of
Texas, 2002).
43
Matrakçı Nasuh, Menazil-i Sefer-i {Irakeyn, İstanbul Üniversite Kütüphanesi, MS TY5964, fol. 42b. On the
Ottoman–Safavid frontier, see Rudi Matthee, ‘The Safavid-Ottoman frontier: Iraq-[Arab as seen by the Safavids’,
in Karpat and Zens (eds.), Ottoman Borderlands, 157–73. Matrakçı also included illustrations of fortresses and
routes in his accounts of the Balkan campaigns, but I do not have a suitable image from one of those accounts.
54 Palmira Brummett
Figure 2.11. The Ottoman–Safavid border. Matrakçı Nasuh, Menazil-i Sefer-i {Irakeyn, İstanbul
Üniversite Kütüphanesi, MSS TY5964, fol. 42b. Courtesy of T. C. İstanbul Üniversite Kütüphanesi.
Kasr-ı Şirin —a ‘sweet’ summer palace or castle —in the middle section, and the town
of Hanekiyye, in the bottom section of the map, which is marked with the legend box
denoting its name as well as the serhad designation. These are the spaces past which
Süleyman’s armies marched on the way to Baghdad and back, over the roads and rivers
and through the mountain passes. Matrakç ı shows each way station in the journey as
part of the larger whole of empire, linked to the imperial capital by the systems of
conquest and of artistic patronage in which he himself was an active participant.44
As we can see from these few examples, the options for mapping possessed and
contested space on the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era var-
ied according to cultural and artistic norms, individual artists, the texts in which the
maps were embedded (if they were embedded in texts at all and not distributed as
broadsheets), and the objectives of the maps’ makers and their audiences. But the
fortress was the centrepiece, in the early modern imagination, for the marking of fron-
tiers and possession. It is the point of battle, the meeting place of Christendom and
Islam, the way station for travellers, the scene of ceremonies of transfer, submission,
defeat or acquiescence. Mapped, it may be the site of the action or a tranquil edifice
in designated or undesignated space, its history (and predictions of its future) supplied
by the imagination of the viewer and suggested by the iconic symbols and legends of
possession.
44
Matrakçı’s campaign volume was not meant as a strategic plan or roadmap (in the modern sense) for the
journey to Baghdad; like Lokman’s work it was both a history and a celebration of sovereign power. But it does
constitute a commemoration of a journey portrayed in such a way as to show the important markers of space.

Ottoman Frontier in The 16zh and 17th Century

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Imagining Empire and its Limits

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