Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire. By A Tunç Şen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025. Pp. 330. $65.00 (hardcover) ISBN: 9781503642652; $65.00 (e-book) ISBN: 9781503643017.
In Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600, A. Tunç Şen offers a significant reassessment of Ottoman court astrologers (munajjims) between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rejecting portrayals of these figures as either superstitious fortune tellers or dominant architects of imperial ideology, Şen instead presents munajjims as technical experts whose authority depended on patronage, institutional structures, and continual negotiation with competing communities of learned specialists (pp. 3-4, 31-5). Drawing upon an impressive variety of archival documents, manuscripts, autobiographical writings, biographical dictionaries, and scientific treatises, Şen situates munajjims within broader discussions of expertise, bureaucracy, and knowledge production in the early-modern Ottoman Empire.
The book develops this argument through a carefully structured format. Şen first reconstructs what it meant to become a munajjim, demonstrating that the profession required rigorous education in mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. As Şen explains early in the book, the profession was characterized by an “ambivalence” in which its expertise was simultaneously “trusted and mistrusted, rewarded and rebutted” (p. 53). That ambivalence becomes the organizing theme of the book and informs Şen’s interpretation of patronage, bureaucracy, and scientific authority. He then traces the Persianate scholarly traditions that shaped the earliest Ottoman court astrologers before examining the institutionalization of the office under Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512). Later chapters show how changing patterns of royal patronage under Süleyman (r. 1520-1566) altered the status of court astrologers while elevating rival forms of expertise, including dream interpretation and letter mysticism. The conclusion returns to the destruction of Taqi al-Din’s Istanbul Observatory in 1580, reframing it not just as a story of scientific decline but as evidence of the changing institutional and political conditions under which expertise was cultivated.
The book’s greatest contribution, however, lies not only in its reinterpretation of Ottoman astrology but also in its methodology. Şen’s reconstruction of forgotten scholars depends on what he describes as “hitherto unexamined, even uncataloged, manuscripts” (p. 91). Şen draws on a multilingual corpus of Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic texts, including annual almanacs, birth horoscopes, astronomical tables, astrological manuals, and treatises on subjects such as talismans, geomancy, and timekeeping. He examines these manuscripts alongside petitions, correspondence, endowment records, and bureaucratic registers documenting appointments, salaries, gifts, and other forms of court patronage. His research encompasses the Ottoman Archives and the Topkapı Palace Museum Archive, together with manuscript holdings in the Süleymaniye and Topkapı Palace Museum libraries and collections elsewhere in Turkey, Europe, and the United States. The effectiveness of this approach is especially apparent in his accounts of ʿAli, better known as Riyazi (d. ca. 1587), an Ottoman court munajjim active from the early 1540s through the mid-1550s, and Taqi al-Din (d. ca. 1585), the chief court astrologer and astronomer who persuaded Murad III (r. 1574–95) to establish the Istanbul Observatory. By combining administrative documents and autobiographical fragments with ownership statements, annotations, colophons, and other paratextual traces, Şen reconstructs careers and patronage networks only partially visible in conventional narrative sources.
Equally compelling is Şen’s broader conceptual framework. Rather than treating expertise as a fixed body of technical knowledge, he presents it as a socially negotiated status that depended upon institutional recognition, patronage, and continual competition with other claimants to specialized authority. Although Şen acknowledges that “expertise” may appear anachronistic when applied to the early modern period, he defends it as both an analytical framework and a category recognizable to Ottoman historical actors, whose vocabulary included terms for specialized skill, practical mastery, and authoritative knowledge. At the same time, he emphasizes that these practitioners were neither specialists nor professional scientists in the modern sense. His differentiation among astrologers, dream interpreters, geomancers, and practitioners of letter mysticism similarly move beyond the undifferentiated category of the “occult sciences.” Without imposing a modern division between science and superstition, Şen uses differences in practitioners’ methods, forms of knowledge, and claims to authority to distinguish astrologers’ technical prognostications from the spiritual or esoteric prophecies of their competitors. This emphasis on expertise connects the book not only to the history of science but also to broader questions concerning bureaucracy, professional identity, and the relationship between knowledge and political power.
If the book leaves one issue unresolved, it is because Şen deliberately resists replacing older narratives with new certainties. The strengths of his source base also impose limitations on the study. Because the surviving archival record overwhelmingly concerns court-affiliated munajjims, the book offers a much clearer account of elite, “high-register” astrology than of independent, provincial, or socially marginal practitioners and their clients. The uneven survival of evidence also gives unusual prominence to well-documented individuals such as Riyazi, raising the question of how representative their careers were of the profession more broadly. At the conceptual level, Şen’s flexible definition of expertise enables valuable comparisons across different communities of knowledge, although it can sometimes blur distinctions among technical competence, bureaucratic position, reputation, and recognition by patrons. Finally, the book’s concentration on 1450–1600 effectively captures the formation and early transformation of the court munajjims’ institutional position, but it leaves the relationship between Ottoman bureaucratic structures and longer-term scientific innovation suggestive rather than definitive. Some readers may therefore wish for a firmer account of the causes and consequences of changing scientific priorities after the sixteenth century. These limitations do not undermine Şen’s argument, but they identify questions that his study leaves open for future research.
Forgotten Experts is an important contribution to Ottoman history, the history of science, and manuscript studies. By recovering the lives of court munajjims through meticulous archival and manuscript research, Şen demonstrates that the study of scientific expertise is inseparable from the material traces through which scholars, patrons, and institutions can be reconstructed. His work not only reshapes our understanding of Ottoman astrology but also models an approach to writing intellectual history from manuscripts, offering a methodology that will be valuable well beyond the specific subject of astral sciences.
Mercedes Morris
University of Texas, Austin