SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 119northern rim draws into our picture the Caucasus and the seas which flank it,
the Black Sea and the Caspian, in other words the sensitive northern frontier
of the Irano- Roman world. By the same token, assigning due weight to the
Mountain Arena’s southern sector, Arabia, opens us up onto the Red Sea, the
Persian Gulf and above all the Indian Ocean, another immense, autonomous,
interconnected world,^100 a second “Great Sea”^101 quite as implicated in the
symbolism of kingship^102 as was the Mediterranean. The sixteenth- century
Ottoman Empire pursued a number of these possibilities, projecting naval
power from its base in Istanbul right across the Mediterranean and, at the
same time, into the Black Sea and even—briefly—the Caspian on its north-
ern fringes, and southward into the Red Sea and, less successfully, the Persian
Gulf and Indian Ocean (in which latter Portuguese competition was
formidable).^103
Against all this, though, we have to weigh the undeniable influence ex-
erted by the East- West axis of the Mediterranean Sea,^104 by trade routes that
are strongly impacted by geography, but also by the East- West spread of our
three monotheisms, the Roman Empire, and the Caliphate, cultural and po-
litical developments that are much more loosely linked to geographical fac-
tors. We need to be frank: the refocusing of space I am proposing here is all
to do with understanding the cultural and political developments of the First
Millennium, and owes much less to geographical determinism, even though
it acknowledges the force, at times, of such considerations.
The physical and geographical analysis of the Mountain Arena here of-
fered is strengthened when we recall two things: first, that contemporary
rulers and strategists saw things the same way, and acted accordingly; and
100 Bhacker, in Potter (ed.), Persian Gulf [4:2] 163–71.
101 S. P. Brock, “A Syriac life of John of Dailam,” Parole de l’Orient 10 (1981–82) 173.
102 Apparently the Indian Ocean is intended when a Sasanid text exhorts the dynasty’s founder,
Ardashir I (224–42), to go and behold the sea with his own eyes, that he may never again fear an enemy.
Iranian tradition held that the quintessence of kingly glory, or farr, was kept by the gods in the sea, at least
when the throne had no legal occupant. See F. Grenet, “Lecture commentée du Kârnâmag î Ardakhshêr î
Pâ ba g â n,” Annuaire: École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des sciences religieuses 109 (2000–2001)
227–29; G. Gnoli, “Farr(ah),” EIr 9.314; A. Tafazzoli, “Frāxkard,” EIr 10.201.
103 D. E. Pitcher, An historical geography of the Ottoman Empire (Leiden 1972) 116–23; S. Özba-
ran, “Ottoman naval policy in the South,” in M. Kunt and C. Woodhead (eds), Süleyman the Magnificent
and his age (London 1995) 55–70; S. Soucek, Studies in Ottoman naval history and maritime geography
(Istanbul 2008) 7–29; D. R. Heedrick, Power over peoples: Technolog y, environments, and Western imperi-
alism, 1400 to the present (Princeton 2010) 68–74; G. Casale, The Ottoman age of exploration (Oxford
2010) (this last reference kindly supplied by André Wink). Note how traditional Muslim including Ot-
toman cartographers placed the Indian Ocean at the top of their world maps, i.e., on a south- north rather
than north- south axis, and in an overwhelmingly dominant posture vis- à- vis the Mediterranean: K. Pinto,
“The maps are the message: Mehmet II’s patronage of an ‘Ottoman cluster,’ ” Imago mundi 63 (2011)
155–79.
104 Cf. G. W. Bowersock, “The East- West orientation of Mediterranean studies and the meaning
of North and South in Antiquity,” in Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean [3:109] 167–78.