Robert Morrison (Bowdoin College)

The courts of the Ottoman sultans Mehmed II (d. 1481) and Bayezid II (d. 1512) were, on one hand, the site of significant developments of earlier scientific traditions inherited from Iran and Central Asia. On the other hand, scholars at the Ottoman court were more interested than their predecessors in the scientific culture of contemporary non-Islamic societies. Important science came east while the science of Islamic societies traveled west. In this lecture, Professor Morrison will describe some of the content of the science but focus on the cultural dynamics that facilitated this remarkable scientific exchange which had a lasting impact on the European Renaissance.