Mapping the Empire in verse: toponyms, imperial imagination, and poetic prestige in sixteenth-century Ottoman poetry

In classical Ottoman poetry, toponyms (place names) do not merely designate place; they also help construct ideas of sovereignty, prestige, beauty, and belonging. This article examines selected couplets as case studies to show how toponyms in sixteenth-century Ottoman poetry acquire different functions depending on the poem’s speaker, genre, and rhetorical purpose. Its central axis is the poetry of Süleyman I (Muḥibbī), Selim I (Selīmī), Bayezid II (ʿAdlī), and Selim II (Selīmī), in which toponyms become one of the principal means through which imperial geography is articulated in the dynasty’s own poetic voice. This ruler-poet corpus is compared with courtly qasida and the ghazal. By distinguishing actual Ottoman territories from rival, legendary, and aesthetic geographies, the article shows how place names may articulate sovereignty, magnify patrons, relocate cultural prestige, or organize beauty and desire. Ottoman poetry thus does not merely name geography; it transforms it into a hierarchy of poetic value.