Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660

5 Exchanging Heavens and Hearts

In 1634, Tommaso Campanella joined the court of Cardinal Richelieu in Paris and stimulated there a great interest in the Copernican cosmology. In the same year, a court cosmographer named Noël Duret dedicated to Richelieu a book entitled Nouvelle théorie des planètes, which included astronomical tables calculated from the tables of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho, and Lansbergen. In 1660, the Ottoman scholar Ibrāhīm Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated Duret’s book into an Arabic manuscript. Early modern scholars came across books in a variety of ways. They may have searched for important books they had heard of or books they had been assigned to read. Sometimes, they randomly surveyed book stacks and accidentally stumbled upon a new text. Of the many such encounters, very few sparked the reader’s interest and intrigued him enough to make him want to introduce the book to others. For a scholar living in a scribal culture, the rare encounter with a book from a foreign locale must have created a magical moment in which various streams of cultural consciousness converged. Al-Zigetvari’s encounter with Duret’s book was one such moment. By tracing the mechanism of circulation of Duret’s book and al-Zigetvari’s encounter with it, we can recapture al-Zigetvari’s motives and the cultural context in which he deliberated as he made his translation. However, we meet roadblocks in all directions. Who was Noël Duret, and how significant was his book in relation to other books on the Copernican system? His name does not appear in major works, and he is mentioned only in passing as someone who wrote on Kepler. His major work, Novæ motuum cælestium ephemerides Richelianæ, published in 1637, deals with astrology, hermeticism, and mysticism and, in passing, mentions the heliocentric Copernican system. Duret’s publications took a convoluted course. He was inspired by the foremost Dutch Copernican, Philips Lansbergen, who emphasized the relation bec h a p t e r f i v e Exchanging Heavens and Hearts 140 Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660 tween celestial and terrestrial mechanics, especially in describing the earth as a ship that was to carry humanity to the heavenly Jerusalem. Following in Lansbergen’s footsteps, early in his career Duret published the Nouvelle théorie (figure 26), essentially based on Lansbergen’s popular tables, which imitated the Alfonsine tables. In the Nouvelle théorie, Duret mentions the Rudolphine tables only in passing, as an example of tables named after a monarch. In 1637 he extended his work and his commitment to Richelieu by publishing the extensive ephemerides, Novæ motuum cælestium ephemerides Richelianæ, dedicated to and named for his patron , Richelieu. Through the Richelian tables, which were based on the tables of Philips Lansbergen and the Rudolphine tables, one could calculate astronomical positions and compare them with current observations or with earlier positions calculated by Ulugh Beg, and could also use the tables to make an almanac. However , when Duret was part way through computing his extensive ephemerides from the earlier tables, he discovered that in 1631, the Lansbergen tables erred Figure 26. Title page of Noël Duret’s Nouvelle théorie des planètes (Paris, 1635). Courtesy of Owen Gingerich. Exchanging Heavens and Hearts 141 in predicting the transit of Mercury observed by Pierre Gassendi. Duret then turned his back on his own Richelian tables and switched in midstream to using the Rudolphine tables. In 1639, he published his monumental Supplementi tabularum Richelienarum, pars prima, cum brevi planetarum, Theoria ex Kepleri, sententia, in which he very accurately simplified the Rudolphine tables. The publisher ’s remainders of the Supplementi were later sold and reissued in London in 1647 with a new title page (figure 27). Duret’s Nouvelle théorie circulated from Paris outward, as a material object that carried textual information on post-Copernican astronomies. At the outer reaches of this circle, in Istanbul, al-Zigetvari encountered the book. Although Figure 27. Title page of Noël Duret’s Novæ motuum cælestium ephemerides Richelianæ (The New Richelian Ephemerides). Note the pillars of astronomy, according to Duret: Lansbergen and Tycho. This page is from the London edition of 1647. The London reissue, which has the same printed pages as the French edition, was given a new title page. The English publisher also bought the remaining pages of Duret’s seminal work Supplementi tabularum Richelienarum...