• As the Ottoman Empire expanded, soldiers, officers, and administrators were dispatched to distant lands. Just as European travelers wrote of their adventures and the unusual customs they encountered, so too did Ottoman travelers. The first excerpt from such travel writing comes from Sidi Ali Reis (1498–1563), an Ottoman admiral whose ship was blown off course and shipwrecked in northwest India. With the winds against him, he returned overland through India, Afghanistan, and Persia, the journey taking three years (1554–1556). The second excerpt is from Mustafa Ali’s “Description of Cairo,” written in 1599. Ali was a career official who held a series of posts as a financial administrator and worked on a history of the world. Although he had requested an assignment in Egypt, thinking it would help him with his world history, he found much of which he did not approve there. The final excerpt is from the lengthy travel writings of Evliya Celebi (1611–1682). In this passage he reports on Tabriz, then under Safavid control, which he visited in 1640 in the entourage of an envoy. This region was predominantly Shi’a, which attracted Celebi’s attention.

Sidi Ali Reis on His Journey Across India,

“The Sultan offered to give me an escort by the way of Lahore, warning me to be on my guard against the Djats, a hostile tribe which had its abode there. But whichever route I chose I should have to wait a while yet, and as a matter of fact I waited for a whole month. One night in my dream I saw my mother, who told me that she had seen her highness Fatima in a dream, and had learned from her the glad news that I should soon be coming home, safe and sound.

When next morning I told this dream to my companions they were full of good courage. Sultan Mahmud, when he heard of it, at once consented to my departure. He gave me a beautiful horse, a team of camels, a large and a small tent, and money for the journey. He also provided me with a letter of recommendation to Humayun, and an escort of 250 mounted camel-drivers from Sind. . . . On the second day we came to the spring, but found no water, and many of my companions nearly succumbed with heat and thirst. I gave them some Teriak [opium], of the very best quality, and on the second day they were recovered. After this experience we deemed it advisable to leave the desert and to return to Mav, for the proverb says truly, “A stranger is an ignorant man.”

The people of Sind gave us permission to proceed as far as the Machvara, and this river was crossed by boats. On the other side we found 500 Djats awaiting us, but our firearms frightened them and they did not attack. We advanced unmolested, and reached the town of Multan on the fifteenth of Ramazan.”

Mustafa Ali’s “Description of Cairo,” 1599

“Their women, all of them, ride donkeys! Even the spouses of some notables ride on donkeys to the Bulak promenade. Week after week they mount their donkeys and dismount like soldiers. Moreover, when they marry a daughter off they let her ride on a donkey and seventy or eighty women ride [with her], while the only things visible in terms of weapons are their shields. People of intelligence find that this unbecoming behavior constitutes a serious defect for the city of Cairo, because in other lands they put prostitutes on a donkey as a punishment. In Cairo the women mount donkeys by their own free will and expose themselves [to the eyes of the public]; therefore it appears appropriate that for punishment they be put on camels.”

Evliya Celebi on His 1640 Visit to Tabriz

“Painters, architects, goldsmiths, and tailors are nowhere to be found so perfect as here. Precious stuffs manufactured here go all over the world; the velvet is much renowned. . . . Among the abundance of delicious fruits are particularly the pears and exquisite apricots; they are not found in such perfection even at Constantinople.

On New Year’s day or the beginning of spring, battles are fought in this place by horses trained in the dark during forty or fifty days, by camels, buffaloes, sheep, asses, dogs, and cocks. These fights are peculiar to Persia. Every year on the tenth of the first month, being the feast of A’ashura, all the population of the town assemble under tents. . . . The finest show is in the variegated tent of the Khân, where all the great men of Tabriz are assembled, and where a Hymn on the death of Hussein is recited, in the same manner as the Hymn on the Prophet’s birthday is in the Turkish mosques. The hearers listen, sighing and lamenting, but when the reciter arrives at the passage where Hussein is killed by accursed Shabr, a curtain opens behind him, and a severed head and trunk of a body, representing that of the Imam when dead, is thrown on the ground, when there rises such an uproar of cries and lamentations that everybody loses his wits. At this moment some hundred men mingle in the crowd with razors, with which they cut the arms and breasts of all loving believers, who desire to shed their blood on this day in remembrance of the blood shed by the Imam; they make such deep incisions and scars, that the ground appears as if it was blooming with tulips.”

Sources: Ármin Vámbéry, trans., The Travels and Adventures of the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali Reïs in India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Persia, During the Years 1553–1556 (London: Luzac, 1899); Andreas Tietze, trans., Mustafa Ali’s Description of Cairo of 1599 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975), p. 41; Evliya Effendi, Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Joseph von Hammer (London: William H. Allen, 1834), pp. 137–138, slightly modified.

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