Empires of Knowledge

Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World

Paula Findlen, Paula Findlen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429867927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were.

Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions.

Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.

Part I

Brokers of knowledge

1A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe

Robert Morrison

For several decades, historians of astronomy have been aware of circumstantial evidence that Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) drew, without acknowledgment, on the achievements of the astronomers of Islamic civilization, particularly Ibn al-Shāṭir (d. 1375).¹ Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer, in their 1984 book Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus,” saw Copernicus as the last astronomer in the tradition of the astronomy of the Marāgha Observatory in northwest Iran.² Recently, F. J. Ragep has found that the work of ‘Alī Qushjī (d. 1474), an astronomer in the Ottoman Empire, was relevant for understanding Copernicus’s transformation of a geocentric system into a heliocentric one.³ As a start to explaining the numerous, overwhelming similarities between Copernicus’s work and that of the Islamic world, Neugebauer and Swerdlow proposed a Greek transmission of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) lunar model via Gregory Chioniades.⁴ Beginning in the 1990s, George Saliba found substantial evidence of the transmission of scientific manuscripts from the Islamic world to Renaissance Europe in the mid sixteenth century, including Guillaume Postel’s (1510–1581) copy of Ṭūsī’s Tadhkira. Although Copernicus did acknowledge some astronomers from the Islamic world, none of them was later than al-Biṭrūjī (fl. c.1200).⁵ Copernicus mentioned Biṭrūjī once in De revolutionibus, regarding the placement of Venus and Mercury with respect to the sun.⁶ But since there is a consensus that Copernicus relied on the work of Regiomontanus (d. 1476), though he did not actually mention Regiomontanus by name, the issue of other uncited sources for Copernicus’s work remains.⁷

When exploring why the findings of Saliba, Neugebauer, E. S. Kennedy, and Swerdlow have not had much of an impact on the research of historians of European science, Ragep has noted that historians of science have found Copernicus’s most important innovation to be the heliocentric arrangement, a hypothesis absent in the work of the astronomers of the Islamic world.⁸ But while there is no evidence of any astronomer in Islamic civilization proposing a heliocentric astronomy, discussions of a rotating earth did exist.⁹ And Qushjī’s proof of the possibility of transformation of epicyclic models to eccentric models in the models of the lower planets has been recognized by Owen Gingerich as relevant to the history of the heliocentric arrangement.¹⁰ Ragep, for his part, has recently argued that developments in the conception of the discipline of ‘ilm al-hay’a (astronomy) reassessed the relationship of mathematical astronomy to Peripatetic philosophy and should be seen as part of the conceptual background of Copernicus’s work. This chapter will show that the range of circumstantial connections between the theoretical astronomy of the Islamic world and Renaissance astronomy extends beyond the appearance of the innovations of astronomers of the Islamic world in Copernicus’s work. Then, the chapter will describe a network of scholars that not only accounts for this wider range of circumstantial connections, but also expands our understanding of the specific context for Copernicus’s work.¹¹ Searching for cross-cultural points of contact to explain the circumstantial evidence has the potential to tell us more about the rise of Renaissance astronomy in general and about the dimensions of Copernicus’s work that have less to do with the science of the Islamic world.

In the past decade there has been significant research detailing scientific and cultural exchanges between Europe and the Islamic world beginning in the mid sixteenth century.¹² Though research into contacts between Renaissance Europe and the Islamic world does focus on a wide range of communities, Jewish communities may be a particularly promising direction of research.¹³ The persecution and then final expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 both further dispersed and created connections among these transnational communities, rendering them a conduit for scientific knowledge.¹⁴ For instance, members of an Ibn Naḥmias family went from Castille to Albania, and then to Salonika, before moving to Venice by the 1600s. Members of that family also established the earliest printing press in the Ottoman Empire, by the end of the fifteenth century, probably in 1493.¹⁵ In fields such as medicine and philosophy, Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire all contributed to the transmission of knowledge from the Islamic world to Renaissance Europe.¹⁶ In particular, we know that Jews were a means of communication between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.¹⁷ As non-Muslims, Jews could be connected to the Ottoman Empire without Europeans perceiving them to be associated with Europe’s most significant enemy; hence, Jews were more viable colleagues for European scholars. As negative portrayals of the Ottomans were politically motivated, not due to intellectual disdain, Europeans’ interest in scientific and philosophical texts from the Islamic world continued unabated.¹⁸

The subject of this chapter is Moses Galeano, who wrote in Arabic under the name Mūsā Jālīnūs, a potential transmitter of scientific information between the Ottoman Empire and the Veneto, primarily between 1497 and 1502.¹⁹ Galeano brought with him knowledge of scientific theories that appeared not only in Copernicus’s work, but also in the homocentric astronomy (where each celestial body maintained a fixed distance from a static earth) of Giovanni Battista Amico (d. 1538) and Girolamo Fracastoro (d. 1553), two other astronomers writing at the University of Padua. The question of Galeano’s contact with Christian scholars during his time in the Veneto is significant because Copernicus spent time (1501–1503) at the University of Padua studying medicine.²⁰ And Galeano’s knowledge of and preference for homocentric astronomy broadens the investigation of his role as an intermediary beyond a possible connection with the work of Copernicus.²¹ Galeano’s Hebrew and Arabic writings increase the circumstantial evidence for his having had contact with Christian scholars in the Veneto. The circumstantial evidence extends beyond the parallels between Copernicus and the astronomers of Islamic societies, to include the homocentric astronomy that appeared in the work of other astronomers at the University of Padua. Galeano also turns out to be part of a network of scholars who did have contact with Christians in Europe. Further investigation of the possibility of his connections with the University of Padua is important because there was a long history of Jews studying in the Faculty of Medicine, which included philosophy, at that university, which graduated its first Jewish physician in 1409. In 1501, the Polish legate to Rome reported that he knew “of six Jews of Polish origin who were attending the university under assumed names.” Beyond the long-standing presence of Jews at the University of Padua, there was, as well, a significant Jewish community in the city. In 1508, Elijah Capsali (d. 1555), the Chief Rabbi of Candia, came to Padua to study at the yeshiva there.²² Unfortunately, the War of the Cambrai, which took place between 1508 and 1516 and cut short Capsali’s time in Padua, means that the archives of the University of Padua are thin for precisely the period in which we are interested.

Galeano also spent a significant amount of time in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and named Elijah Mizraḥi (d. 1526), the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul in the early 1500s, as a teacher. In a major work in Hebrew, Ta‘alumot ḥokmah [Puzzles of Wisdom], composed around 1500, Galeano described events at the court of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit II (r. 1481–1512). In a different text, one that favored homocentric models for astronomy, he likened the order of the planets to the way people sit before the Sultan.²³ The latter text is now found in the Ahmet III collection of the Topkapi Library, the personal library of Sultan Ahmet III (r. 1703–1730). While Galeano’s presence at the Sultan’s court is noteworthy, his was not a unique case, as he was not the only Jew associated with scientific activity at the court of Bayezit II. Ilyās ibn Ibrāhīm al-Yahūdī (d. after 1512), known as ‘Abd al-Salām al-Muhtadī or ‘Abd al-Salām al-Daftarī after his conversion to Islam, came from Andalus to the court of Bayezit II and wrote a text in Hebrew about how to use an astronomical instrument that he invented, known as al-Dābid.²⁴ Then he translated the text into Arabic at the Sultan’s request in 1502. Also under Bayezit II, the court physicians were members of the Hamon family, originally of Granada, and were caught up in court intrigue.²⁵ Even half a century earlier, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror’s (d. 1481) personal physician was Jewish, named Yacub (i.e., Jacob) Pasha. We have a firmān from 1452 from Mehmet the Conqueror that exempted Jacob and his offspring from the payment of many different taxes.²⁶ Jacob was originally from Gaeta, a city in central Italy; hence he was also seen by the Venetians as a possible opening to the Sultan.²⁷

Jews held positions of parallel importance at the papal court. Jacob ben Immanuel (Bonet da Lattes), originally of Provence, became the personal physician of Pope Alexander VI (d. 1503), who was probably pope during Galeano’s visit to Italy. Jacob ben Immanuel dedicated to the pope an astronomical instrument known as Gemma’s rings and wrote an astrological prognostication for Rome, which he dedicated to Cardinals Valentiani and Borgia, as well as annual astrological prognostications from 1493 to 1498. He also studied at Pisa with Giovanni de Medici, the future Leo X. Jacob ben Immanuel eventually became the Chief Rabbi of Rome, indicating that his associations with the papal court did not entail a corresponding loss of contact with his co-religionists. His influence was such that Johann Reuchlin (d. 1522), a Christian Hebraist interested in the Qabbalah, called on him in 1513 to intervene on his behalf in a dispute.²⁸

Jewish scholars in the Ottoman Empire in the generation before Galeano evinced an interest and skill in astronomy that brought them into contact with Muslims and Christians. Mordechai Comtino (d. before 1487), who was Elijah Mizraḥi’s teacher, attained a level of proficiency with astronomical instruments that brought him to the attention of a kadiasker, an Ottoman chief military judge.²⁹ Comtino donated an instrument to that judge. Comtino’s Commentary on the Persian Tables was addressed to a Christian critic, indicating that, even by Comtino’s lifetime, astronomy was a space for exchange among Jews (including between Karaites and Rabbanites), Christians, and Muslims in...