In the winter of 1488 a gift arrived from Florence for Sultan Bayezid II, son of Mehmed the Conqueror of Constantinople, and for his brother, Cem. It was a book, the Septe giornate della geographia, penned by the Florentine humanist Francesco Berlinghieri and accompanied by approved maps indicating the terrain traversed by the author. Printed in 1482, the narrative poem, in terze rime, presented the author’s weeklong trip across the known world, the first to be widely disseminated by the printing press. Why did Lorenzo de’ Medici and his agents choose this book, an example of the fifteenth-century fascination with Ptolemy, to send as a diplomatic gift? What sort of connection existed at this time between Florence and Constantinople, between early modern Italy and the Islamic world? The act suggests that the Mediterranean world was totally charted by Ptolemaic maps. Berlinghieri and his contemporaries understood their project as emulating and inventively restaging the activities of ancient geographers for a new intellectual and religious world. It marks the path of transition from the authority of the manuscript to that of print. The gift of this book sought to anchor materially the beneficial relationships among authors, printers, readers, and dedicatees. The present book offers ways in which both Florentines and Ottomans represent their world in maps, pictures, and words. Chapter 4 probes the contours of a world in which coexistence did not imply tolerance and in which hostility never fully precluded forms of comprehension.

The Renaissance was a very wide European Mediterranean event. The book — the gift — served as a connection linking the reader materially with his objects of study. The appearance of Ptolemy’s coordinates is interpreted here as being longer and not as direct in the later transformation of cartography and geography, and its long-term effect less decisive. The book’s table of contents well explains and corrects the somewhat mystifying nature of the title. More explicit and specific signs would be useful regarding the relationship between Florence and Constantinople. That a relationship existed at all is to a great extent effected by the contextual sensitivity of the discipline of art history for otherwise overlooked minutiae. Indeed the introduction to this book serves well not only to lay out what will follow, but also to situate Florence’s literary and visual culture within a wider Mediterranean world.