Please find the abstract here.
In the year 1559, the first printed world map ever composed in Ottoman Turkish was published in an anonomys Venetian print shopt. Its author, a certain "Tunuslu Hajji Ahmed", claimed to be a learned man from Tunis who had the misfortune of being captured by pirates, sold into slavery, and offered his freedom in exchange for help with the map.
But how trustworthy is his story? Why did he choose to write in Turkish? And what can his map tell us about the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire, the newly self-defined continent of "Europe" and their relationship to one another at a critical moment on the eve of modernity?