Why was the location labeled as A on the map significant to European traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

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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 navigational or military purposes, or as artistic representations, with pleasing landscapes or historical vignettes. Early modern fortress images vary from the architecturally ‘correct’, 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. 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.

The Ottoman Empire was imagined in a variety of ways in the literatures of early modern 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, depictions of where Europe ‘ended’ and where the Ottoman Empire ‘began’ were highly variable—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.

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 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 ammunition 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 identity5 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 immediacy of events, providing the date of the conflict as 3 September 1596. The key and the animated figures spread across the siege map, firing cannon and riding horses, 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.

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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 captures 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 somewhat broader geographical context and embedded in a more elaborate set of celebratory 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.

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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 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.15The 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

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Giovanni Battista Chiarello, Pianta della Fortezza di Nayhaysel, in Historia degl’avvenimenti dell’armi Imperiali contro a’ Ribelli, et Ottomani…1687, Folger Shakespeare Library, 246080. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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 cartouche 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 cathedral and the Palace of the Magistrates. Interestingly, in terms of indicators of possession, 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 countryside as if to reaffirm that identity and date the map to the period of Ottoman rule (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 geographic 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.

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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, however, 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 surrounded 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 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 journey 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.

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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 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 losing 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.

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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 fashion, 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 victorious 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, 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, political and ethno-religious realities of the broad land and sea frontiers to a contest between ‘Christians’ and ‘Turks’.29

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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 commander, 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 (assembled 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.

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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 attackers on either side. It was far easier to offload cannons from ships than it was to haul them overland from Istanbul, Venice or Vienna. Once taken, Clissa would be garrisoned 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 especially the case when fortress maps were accompanied by surrounding texts and narratives 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 journey 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 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 narrations, 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 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

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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.

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 certification of sovereignty37 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 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 Matrakçı 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 Matrakçı 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, Matrakçı’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. Matrakçı’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 delimited by physical features and by edifices: the fortress (kale) of Yeni Imam at the top, 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. Matrakçı 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

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The Ottoman–Safavid border. Matrakçı Nasuh, Menazil-i Sefer-i ‘Irakeyn, İstanbul Universite Kütüphanesi, MSS TY5964, fol. 42b. Courtesy of T. C. İstanbul Üniversite Kütüphanesi.

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 varied 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 frontiers 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.