The beginnings of printing in the Ottoman capital

Printing and circulation of printed texts in the Eastern Mediterranean have become central to the study of the history of the book in recent years. Despite the substantial research on Ottoman printing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in different locales, the beginnings of printing in Istanbul and the Ottoman practices concerning the circulation of printed books in the early modern period is an area that remains largely unexplored. This paper examines the appearance of the printed book in the city after the fall of the Byzantine Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, which coincided with the establishment of Gutenberg’s press, and before the founding of the first ‘official’ Ottoman press in 1727. The paper investigates incunabula printing, book production and the first non-Muslim presses run by Jewish, Armenian and Greek publishers in Istanbul with a particular emphasis on the Orthodox monk Nikodemos Metaxas’s printing activities.