From Samarqand to Istanbul: The Cultivation of the Persian Astral Tradition at the Late 15th- and Early 16th-Century Ottoman Court

Scholarly exchange between the lands of Rum and Iran was a salient feature of the late medieval and early modern Turco-Persian cultural zone. Before the territorial and confessional consolidation of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires in the sixteenth century, political instability and confessional ambiguity facilitated the high circulation of scholars from Central Asia and Iran to Anatolia and the Balkans. The power vacuum in the post-Timurid political context of late fifteenth-century Iran encouraged an influx of scholars into Ottoman lands even as the eclectic strategies of the Ottoman dynasty to establish itself as a legitimate power offered scholars incentives for migration. This paper will treat the science of the stars and its experts as a case study of the scholarly exchanges between the lands of Rum and Iran by exploring the following questions: What was the role of Persian astral knowledge, particularly the traditions of Maragha and Samarqand, in the formation of an Ottoman astronomical and astrological professional cadre and scholarly corpus? Who were the main actors in transmitting and reproducing this scientific legacy and how did indigenous Ottoman experts of astral knowledge receive them? What were the ideological and political reasons for the investment of the Ottoman court in the cultivation of the science of the stars in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries? With reference to a wide array of sources –almanacs and annual astrological prognostications, horoscopes, and ephemerides – this paper examines the dynamics underlying i) the application of Persian scientific endeavors on the heavens in the Ottoman context, and ii) the representation of Istanbul as a new center for “science,” which eventually replaced the traditional centers of astral knowledge in Samarqand and Maragha.