Mahmoud Raif Efendi

Raif Efendi was the Secretary to the first Ottoman Embassy in London - the first permanent embassy by the Empire to any European country. A talented young bureaucrat with powerful friends in the Ottoman court, he met regularly with the King George III and Queen Charlotte, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, and Foreign Secretary William Grenville. After returning to Istanbul in 1796, Raif Efendi produced the ‘Cedid Atlas’, the first folio atlas published in the Muslim world.