Learn More About Our New Co-Director Tunç Şen

The highlight of my summer was spending two weeks at Columbia's Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. I visited the Bibliothèque nationale de France each day (except Sunday) to examine dozens of Islamic manuscripts brought from the Ottoman world to France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of which were acquired by the French scholar and early Orientalist Gilbert Gaulmin. 

This was part of my broader research on how warfare and piracy contributed to the movement of Arabic-script manuscripts into European collections during the early modern period. The opportunity to immerse myself in these materials, and to do so in Paris and at Columbia's Reid Hall, was tremendously rewarding.

The Ottomans were hardly unique in seeking astrological advice. From ancient Babylonian kings and Chinese emperors to Abbasid caliphs and even some twentieth-century U.S. presidents, we have abundant evidence that sovereigns consulted astrologers. What distinguished the Ottoman case was the creation of a formal court office, that of the chief munajjim, which regularized exchanges between astrologers and ruling elites. Trained in mathematics, astronomy, and astrology, these munajjims prepared calendars, calculated planetary positions, advised the court on auspicious times for major undertakings, and interpreted celestial phenomena as signs of possible political and social developments. 

Their role reveals how scientific expertise became intertwined with governance. They offered rulers techniques for anticipating uncertainty and managing risk, yet their authority remained precarious. They had to demonstrate the value of their knowledge and compete with other experts claiming insight into the future. Their careers raise a broader question that remains relevant today: how do political decision-makers determine which forms of expertise to trust, especially when confronting uncertain futures?

Microhistory is a historical approach that uses a microscopic focus on a seemingly small subject (a single individual, family, community, or event) to illuminate much larger historical processes. The scale of inquiry may be small, but neither the questions nor the body of evidence necessarily is. By reconstructing one person’s experiences as fully as the sources permit, historians can see how institutions and social structures operated in everyday life and how individual actors perceived them in ways that official records might obscure. 

My next book centers on the life and troubles of a sixteenth-century Ottoman college professor who wrote extensively about his often unsuccessful efforts to build a satisfying academic career. His experiences allow me to examine the deeply hierarchical and rigidly ranked Ottoman educational system as a world inhabited by people navigating intense competition, financial insecurity, ambition, anxiety, and disappointment. Microhistory is especially useful here because it connects the development of educational structure to its human consequences. Through one scholar’s life, we can better understand how the academic hierarchies established by the early modern Ottomans shaped the Ottoman scholars who had to move through them.