‘Forgotten Experts’ by A. Tunç Şen review

In the late 15th century the future sultan Bayezid II wrote to his father, Mehmed II, to insist that the designer drugs he had been sampling at courtly parties – opium, cannabis, and opium-laced cannabis – were taken merely for the sake of losing weight. Mehmed was furious. Having posted Bayezid to the vibrant Silk Road city of Amasya as governor, he now heard how drugs stole his son’s ‘humanity’ and ‘noble character’. His response was to dispatch investigators to identify, then execute, those responsible for leading his son astray.

The main culprit turned out to be Bayezid’s childhood friend, Müeyyedzade Abdurrahman Çelebi (1456-1516). A few years younger than Bayezid, Müeyyedzade had studied writing and fine arts alongside the future sultan, before both men began to move in elite literary circles. Mehmed’s warrant, however, forced him to flee to Aleppo, then Shiraz, separating them until 1481, when Bayezid’s ascension to the throne allowed them to reunite in Constantinople.

There, Müeyyedzade’s influence on Bayezid extended beyond narcotic experimentation. The two friends shared a taste not only for stimulants and narcotics, but also for the mathematical sciences and, in particular, astrology. This was a field of study that Bayezid patronised with zeal throughout his time as sultan (1481-1512). As A. Tunç Şen shows, before the late 15th century the Ottoman court had often appointed astrologers to compile almanacs, advise on timekeeping, identify auspicious moments, and offer astrological advice on imperial strategy. But it was under Bayezid that this ad hoc approach was replaced by the institution of a permanent post for astrologers in the court. Remarkably, this office remained active until the Empire’s dissolution in the 20th century. The focus of Forgotten Experts, however, is the long 16th century, a period in which court astrologers were part and parcel of efforts to turn the Ottoman Empire into a bureaucratic machine, running on a vast web of experts: lawyers to litigate territorial expansion, architect-engineers to erect monuments, and astrologers to advise decision-makers.

The term for astrologer used in the Ottoman Empire was the Arabic word munajjim. Şen is clear that we must not associate the work of munajjims with that of modern ‘crystal-gazers and psychic shops’. Instead, like their counterparts in premodern Europe, munajjims were experts with high levels of mathematical and astronomical skill. They received a monthly salary and performed ‘a routinized set of functions and duties’. Given that the Ottoman court loved a paper trail, there is a large amount of primary material attesting to its reliance on the erudition and skill of its astrologers.

Despite being continuously sought after by those in power, however, the munajjims’ expertise was ambivalent in Ottoman culture. Astrologers were ‘among the most unwelcome learned men in the medieval and early modern Islamicate world’. Their art was always subject to religious critique and censure, but it was also in competition with other ways of predicting the future. Its competitors (including geomancy, lettrism, and bibliomancy) tended to carry more spiritual and moral weight. Moreover, unlike in Europe, there was no stable institution for astrological education, as the art was only intermittently taught in madrasas. Munajjims did not have access to the flourishing book trade enjoyed by European astrologers, nor the guilds relied upon by other Ottoman experts.

In such circumstances, the imperial court proved fundamental to the transmission and maintenance of astrological expertise. It provided practitioners with access to resources, from astrological texts to costly instruments such as astrolabes. It also offered space and financial backing for the private apprenticeships necessary to keep the office of chief munajjim occupied at all times. What this meant, however, was that more than any other contemporary experts, astrologers were deeply dependent on royal favour. The sultan could give, but he could also take away. While Bayezid II favoured munajjims’ advice, some rulers, not least his successor Suleiman I (‘the Magnificent’), were more interested in divinatory techniques such as lettrism, leading to a decrease in the number of court munajjims – and their salaries. This precarity meant that astrology was not a particularly appealing career for young scholars.

Predicting the future is a risky business. Sixteenth-century munajjims strove to be cautious, rarely if ever claiming certainty for their prognostications, and preferring to give vague advice about auspicious and inauspicious moments for performing certain activities. This stood in distinction to the lettrists, whose forecasts about prominent deaths and defeats were often highly specific, and accompanied by clear policy recommendations (capture Bahrain, for example). Şen warns us to be careful of uncritically gathering astrology and divination under the same ‘occult’ umbrella; not only were there crucial differences between these bodies of knowledge and practice, but they were also always in competition ‘for social capital and epistemic recognition’. Although astrology – with its reliance on ‘visible portents, patterns, and data’ – often won out, a saying attributed to Muhammad was perpetually repeated: ‘All munajjims are liars.’

Such ambivalence can be seen beyond the Ottoman case. Although historians have now amply demonstrated the centrality of astrology to medieval and early modern life in Europe, there is sometimes a tendency to overplay its position. At any point in both European and Ottoman history, even when astrology accommodated itself to hegemonic culture, there were always critics and doubters. The appeal to astral expertise ‘is a globally common theme’ for most of history, but Şen’s book shows the importance of historicising astrology’s ups and downs. After all, the problem of astrology’s marginalisation in elite culture – now a key concern for historians of astrology – will be far easier to solve if we acknowledge that neither society underwent a sudden turn from full belief to full unbelief.

• Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600
  A. Tunç Şen
  Stanford University Press, 352pp, £56
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Michelle Pfeffer is a historian at Magdalen College, Oxford.