Özet:

Katib Çelebi, who had an exceptional place in the Ottoman Empire’s 17th century historiography, translated and annotated Gerardus Mercator’s famous geography-history work known as Atlas Minor under the title Levâmi‘u’n-Nûr fî-Zulmet-i Atlas Minor in order to use it as a source. This work mentions the historical geography in accordance with the general classification of the continents, and at the same time includes historical, geographic, political, legal and legendary information about the whole world, starting with Europe. In this context, some information about Turkish history, geography, culture, political structure and civilization has been transferred to Ottoman Turkish in independent sections or in retail sentences with the work. The information contained in the content of the work is written from ancient sources until 1595, when the work was first published, or compiled from close witnesses to the event. Katib Çelebi criticized the work of Mercator as explaining the information about Turkish history as a whole or to annotated it with critical words. In addition, in some sections, he was quoted in the same way without commenting as if leaving it to the reader. In this context, it is valuable for Ottoman history studies to reveal how Turkish history was evaluated by Mercator, one of the 16th century European scholars, and how it was conveyed and criticized by Katib Çelebi. The aim of the article is to compile the information found in important works in terms of both European and Ottoman history and present them to the academic world, and to evaluate and compare the given information in the light of current sources about the period. At this point, Katib Çelebi’s criticism of the information in Atlas Minor is also included.

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