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In 1580, an anonymous painter illustrated a manuscript entitled Shāhinsh āhnāma (Book of the King of Kings). One of his miniatures documents scientific activity at the observatory established by the newly crowned Ottoman sultan , Murād III. When he came to power in 1574, he urged an Egyptian judge and rising star in natural science, Taqī al-Dīn Muh .ammad Ibn-Ma‘ārūf (1526–85), to come to his court and build the observatory. With exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, Taqī al-Dīn constructed instruments and built mechanical clocks for an observation of the comet of 1577. In the same decade, Tycho Brahe settled at Uraniborg, in Hveen, Denmark, from where he observed the same comet and made astronomical observations until the end of the century. The last observatory of Islam and the first significant observatory of Europe coexisted for many years. Current historiography tends to present the two projects as developing along separate paths. Yet, if we examine closely the details in the Shāhinshāhnāma miniature, we can extract clues about a possible connection between Taqī al-Dīn’s and Tycho’s worlds. Astronomers played many roles at court. They relieved anxieties of rulers they served and helped provide them with displays of power and influence. During wars, times of crisis, or natural disasters, astronomers were summoned to lengthy and usually tense meetings in which they looked for guidance from the stars. They also attended solemn receptions, where ambassadors from far-flung nations brought with them gifts of scientific objects and books. More than any other scientific figures of the sixteenth century, astronomers operated within crosscultural networks and were aware of adjacent cultures. Traditional historiography , however, tends to view them through a narrow cultural lens, cutting them off from their adjoining cultures. Such was the case with the narratives about Tycho Brahe and Taqī al-Dīn. c h a p t e r o n e Trading Clocks, Globes, and Captives in the End Time Trading Clocks, Globes, and Captives in the End Time 9 Relying on Pierre Gassendi’s presentation of Tycho, John Louis Dreyer’s 1890 account gave us Tycho as an architect of new ideas that gave birth to an entire generation of astronomers. Dreyer looked for ways to prove that Tycho had cut himself off from traditional astronomy and presented him as the latest link in a cross-cultural chain that, in some cases, took in Islamic astronomy, especially that of al-Battānī (d. 929) and al-Zarqāll (d. 1087). In the late 1980s, Victor Thoren shifted the discussion from the “history of ideas” to “intellectual history,” focusing on the “person” Tycho, how his work changed society, and how he functioned within the Danish nobility. In 2000, John Christianson presented Tycho’s project as a political display of power and as embedded in contemporary culture, a presentation that blurred the lines used in previous historiography to define Tycho’s work—the lines between culture, politics, and natural philosophy. From Dreyer to Christianson, the result has been a purely European Tycho, detached historically from his Islamic predecessors and spatially from the Ottoman Empire —which in fact played an enormous role in shaping Tycho’s broader European culture, politics, and natural philosophy. In the historiography of Islamic science, Taqī al-Dīn emerges in only a slightly different manner. Scholars have tried to show that even up to the seventeenth century, natural philosophy in Islam was still viable, and they have looked to Taqī al-Dīn as the last representative of Islam’s “golden age.” They frame Taqī al-Dīn’s achievements as an internal scientific product of an Islamic culture, operating without regard to Europe’s new astronomy, natural philosophy, and natural history . In the 1950s, Sevim Tekeli elevated the significance of Taqī al-Dīn’s work to that of a challenge to the Ptolemaic system. Moreover, she looked for similarities between Taqī al-Dīn and Tycho by comparing their astronomical instruments, and framed a picture of Taqī al-Dīn as “the Tycho Brahe of the Ottoman Empire.” Another Turkish scholar, Muammer Dizer, with a nationalist agenda, denied a possible connection between Taqī al-Dīn and the new astronomy and mechanics in Europe, wishing to present him as working concurrently—but without the taint of diffusion—on the same themes. Moreover, some scholars have appreciated Taqī al-Dīn’s achievements in terms of institutional history. Aydin Sayili...

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