Turkey

Turkey occupies a cartographic position unlike almost any other country: straddling Europe and Asia, commanding the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and serving for six centuries as the seat of one of history’s great empires, it has been mapped obsessively by European powers whose political, commercial and military interests were deeply entangled with the Ottoman world. The antique maps that survive from this engagement form a rich and varied archive, ranging from early speculative representations of Asia Minor to the precise military surveys of the nineteenth century.

The earliest printed maps of the region drew on Ptolemy’s Geographia, which described Asia Minor in considerable detail based on the accumulated knowledge of the ancient world. The Renaissance recovery of Ptolemy gave European cartographers a framework onto which they grafted the more recent knowledge of Venetian and Genoese merchants, Byzantine scholars and the first Ottoman geographers. By the mid-sixteenth century, the great Flemish publishers had produced maps of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire that, while still imprecise by modern standards, represented a genuine synthesis of classical learning and contemporary intelligence.

Constantinople — Istanbul from 1930 — attracted particular cartographic attention as the hinge between Europe and Asia and the capital of a power that dominated the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. City plans and prospect views of Constantinople appear in the major atlas series from the sixteenth century onwards, many of them of extraordinary beauty, with elaborate depictions of the great mosques, the Bosphorus and the surrounding hills. These plans document the city at specific moments in its history and are among the most evocative of all early urban cartography.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw intensifying European interest in Turkey as the Ottoman Empire weakened and the great powers competed for influence over its territories and trade routes. French, British, Austrian and Russian cartographers all produced detailed surveys of various regions, motivated variously by commercial, strategic and scholarly concerns. The Greek War of Independence, the Crimean War and the successive crises of the Eastern Question each generated a burst of cartographic production that reflected the political anxieties of the moment.

For collectors, antique maps of Turkey offer an exceptionally broad range of material. At one end of the scale are the decorative atlas maps of the Dutch Golden Age, printed on fine paper with hand-applied colour and elaborate engraving; at the other are the precise topographic sheets of nineteenth-century military surveys, valued more for their geographic accuracy than their decorative qualities but of considerable historical importance. Between these extremes lies a large body of material spanning every period of the printed map tradition.

The geographic scope of this collection encompasses Turkey as both a modern nation-state and as the heart of the Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent — covering Anatolia, Thrace, the Aegean coast, the Black Sea littoral and the regions immediately adjacent. Maps in this collection span the full range of European cartographic engagement with the region, from the first printed atlases of the sixteenth century to the surveys and thematic maps of the early twentieth.