Aden, a coastal city in Yemen, was sieged by the Portuguese in 1513 and was disputed by the Portuguese and Ottoman empires throughout the sixteenth century. Braun and Hogenberg illustrated the city in the first edition of Civitates Orbis Terrarum in 1572. Mohamed Mohamed El Amrousi finds the view consistent with Captain H. Cornwall’s 1782 map of Aden because both depictions show a busy port and minarets in certain locations.[1] The atlas was published as its European audience was only just beginning to familiarize itself with international geography in coincidence with expanding European empires. John Rennie Short names several non-European views of Braun and Hogenberg, to include Aden, and declares that the atlas reveals a “global economy of urban nodes and a trading world of cities.”[2] Amidst Portuguese global expansion and conflict with the Sultan, who ruled the city after the Ottoman Empire, Giancarlo Casale uses the Braun and Hogenberg depiction to denote Aden as one of the most fortified port cities in maritime Asia,[3] further justifying why empires fought against one another for Aden’s control.
[1] Mohamed Mohamed El Amrousi, Beyond Muslim Space : Jeddah, Muscat, Aden and Port Said (2001., 2001), https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE003250715.
[2] John Rennie Short, Global Metropolitan : Globalizing Cities in a Capitalist World, Questioning Cities Series ; 1 (New York, NY : Routledge, 2004., 2004), https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE008517075.
[3] Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010., 2010), https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE005382540.