The depiction of the Mediterranean in Islamic cartography (11th –16th centuries): The suras (images) of the Mediterranean from the bureaucrats to the sea captains

De-constructing a spatial and/or historical harmonious paradigm such as The Mediterranean would be a difficult claim unless is discussed from the point of view of its pre-modern representations, which the core issue of my dissertation The Depiction of the Mediterranean in Islamic Cartography . By focusing on a corpus of little studied cartographic sources from the Islamic world depicting the Mediterranean between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries I was able to emphasize the contribution of visual sources in understanding this intra-cultural space during a period of dynamic change. My project has been to question the concept of the Braudelean Mediterranean, which is dominant enough that it survives even in its critics. The latter is in so many ways a statement about a positivist true Mediterranean mainly through its textual sources that have rarely been examined as narrative constructions. Here I am interested in how the pre-modern Mediterranean existed in the minds of its inhabitants; notably, but not solely, its Muslim denizens and visitors. When put together, the textual and visual representations of these groups construct a Mediterranean that is essentially different than the Braudelean historical Mediterranean . Yet it might be as large as the latter is, and has been. Until the most recent decades the study of Islamic cartography was often confused with the historiography of Islamic geography. The cartographic corpus was mostly portrayed as a peripheral support of the textual discourse since historical geography was the driver of the study of Islamic geography. Only lately has the identification and explanation of an Islamic cartography becomes part of the Islamicists\u27 agenda. Thus, the Islamic maritime maps (nautical charts) were the least probable examples to concern these scholars since they are in many cases independent from textual commentaries. My dissertation, which treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean from the examples of the medieval (Ibn Hawqal and al-Idrisi in the tenth and twelfth centuries) to the early modern cartographers (al-Sharfi and Piri Reis in the sixteenth century), intends to unveil the Muslims\u27 cartographic eye essentially from samples of maritime maps of the same space we keep redefining: the Mediterranean. The samples I have selected include also a series of Maghribi maritime maps made during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, and most of the Ottomans\u27 cartographic productions that tended to reproduce the Mediterranean. But many other cartographic samples are hidden in manuscripts from the late medieval period. The Ottoman examples (as opposed to the Maghribi examples inscribed in Arabic) are not limited, however, to the much discussed Piri Reis\u27 atlas but they include recently discovered Ottoman maritime maps and atlases from the second half of the sixteenth century, which will provide a much broader picture of the Islamic cartographic depiction of the Mediterranean especially when they are seen in conjunction with the North African (`Al i al-Sharfi\u27s) contemporary productions. After preliminary surveys it appeared that many sources, especially manuscripts that include cartographic representations, need closer attention. The sixteenth century cartographic developments seem to have shadowed the possible role of late medieval works, which do not have to be innovative but they certainly show a continuous pattern of cartographic knowledge up until the sixteenth century. Another crucial aspect that such manuscripts show is its close interaction with a larger visual context including scientific and historical Islamic miniature painting notably in the Ottoman workshops. It is indeed a more established approach in the studies of visual culture to view the formal and epistemological interplay between artworks, maps, and scientific drawings. Thus, it is highly tempting to investigate the usefulness in this specific case of a paradigm attested in Italian Renaissance and early modern Dutch painting such as the period eye Emphasizing the actual images of the Mediterranean is just another window into its wide imaginaire life. The close contact I have with Roger Chartier, a leading historian of early modern reading, and a member of my dissertation\u27s committee, notably through his seminar How to read texts? , had a major impact in approaching the topic of my dissertation. The geographic texts and images of the Islamic sources show how the reader\u27s expectations were instructing their own making. Because regardless of the cultural and structural specificities, be it an Islamo-Arabic or a European, a textual or a visual representation, the pre-modern making of the concept of the Mediterranean involved an intimate and specific process. A process of authoring and drawing shaped by certain expectations of reading and viewing. It is only with the appropriate consideration of this register that the necessary de-construction of our modern Mediterranean would be possible