Istanbul’s New Clime: Latitude and Human Geography in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Federico Cortigiani (Stanford University) will give a talk titled Istanbul’s New Clime: Latitude and Human Geography in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.

After the Ottomans conquered Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453 and made it their capital, Ottoman astronomers found that the city lay at a more southerly latitude than had been generally reckoned. The new latitude values, I argue, prompted them to move Istanbul to a more central position within the seven climes - the seven latitudinal bands thought to constitute the world’s inhabitable zone. This in turn allowed Ottoman scholars to claim that Istanbul’s inhabitants lived under more benign astral influences, and that because of such influences they boasted sounder bodies and minds compared to most other people on earth. As the Ottoman state expanded, therefore, the adoption of new latitude values for its capital helped bolster its imperial claims. This case suggests that in the early modern world even re-evaluating seemingly minor pieces of information about long-known places could be instrumental to assert ethnic-racial and cultural primacy.