Arabic Geography and Sixteenth-Century Cartography: Guillaume Postel and the History of Abū al-Fidāʾ’s Manuscript

The French scholar Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) brought the first manuscript copy of Abū al-Fidāʾ’s (672/1273–732/1331) mathematical geography, the Taqwīm al-buldān, to Europe. The codex widely circulated among sixteenth-century geographers and cartographers as well as among seventeenth-century Arabists. This article investigates the circulation of Postel’s exemplar of the Taqwīm al-buldān, looking at reading practices and manuscript exchanges. In particular, the article argues that Postel’s annotations are consistent with many later scholars’ observations on geographical data, showing that seventeenth-century Arabists shared the same interests in Abū al-Fidāʾ’s coordinates and Arabic toponyms as sixteenth-century cosmographers, geographers, and cartographers.