Forgotten Experts
About This Book
Forgotten Experts is a history of the court astrologers who served the Ottoman state and of how their authority and standing rose and fell across the long sixteenth century. These men offered the court expertise in the mathematical, astronomical, and astrological sciences, and they set themselves apart from other occult practitioners and esoteric specialists. Prophecy and prognostication both try to chart the future, but the astrologers did not present their work as spiritual prophecy. They relied on methods of prediction built from data and patterns, set out in technical and scientific writings. A. Tunç Şen draws on a wide body of manuscript and archival records in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. The result is a history of science, state formation, and bureaucracy, told within the larger story of how the Ottoman empire took shape and how its protocols developed. Readers follow the uneven careers of astrologers who practiced a contested science, and see how this learned class built its scientific authority despite cultural, societal, and epistemic obstacles. Understanding what court astrologers knew and did also reveals the social relationships between men of knowledge and men of rule, and between expertise and statecraft, in the early modern Ottoman empire.
ISBN: 9781503642652
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