Ottoman History Podcast - Alchemy in the Ottoman World

Episode Date: November 30, 2013

with Tuna Artun hosted by Nir Shafir This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise.   Download the seriesPodcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Alchemy has traditionally been understood as a pseudoscience or protoscience that eventually gave way to modern chemistry. Less often have the writings of alchemists been studied on their own terms. Yet, given the endurance and prolific nature of the alchemical traditions and the involvement of important figures of "modern science" such as Isaac Newton in the field of alchemy, a teleological understanding of the transition from alchemy to chemistry seems inadequate for discussing how science was practiced in the past. This may be particularly true for the Ottoman context, where a longstanding tradition of alchemy becomes subsumed under a larger narrative of the triumph of Western science during the nineteenth century. In this podcast, Tuna Artun explores the world of alchemy and discusses its transformation during the Ottoman period. « Click for More »

The following episode is part of an ongoing series on the history of science and the Ottoman Empire, curated by Nir Shafir and available for download on iTunes, HipCast, and SoundCloud. Check out the series tab on our website to learn more about this and other series, available only through OttomanHistoryPodcast.com. Hello and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Nir Shavir and today we have with us Tuna Artun. Tuna is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers at New Brunswick and he will be speaking to us about alchemy in the Ottoman world.

This is part of a series that we have on Ottoman history of science, and I think Ottoman alchemy really kind of goes into the heart of the questions that we often face when we try to study history of science in the Ottoman Empire. We have this, basically, science, this branch of knowledge called alchemy, that to us today seems both irrational or pseudoscientific, but for most of the period of the Ottoman Empire, actually was a major branch of knowledge and followed up by all sorts of scholars. Today we'll be discussing different traditions of alchemy, both the early Greek and the Islamic versions, and how Ottoman alchemy, both the early Greek and the Islamic versions, and how Ottoman alchemy developed from

that. And then we'll be talking about different examples of Ottoman alchemy and how this kind of compares to the recent European literature, literature on European alchemy as well. Thank you for coming on, Tuna. Thanks for having me, Nir. alchemy as well. Thank you for coming on, Tuna. Thanks for having me, Nir. Now, Tuna, let's just start off with the most basic question. What is alchemy? What do we mean by that? That's a big question, and I'll try to summarize it as best as I can. Needless to say, alchemy meant different things to different groups of people both in the Ottoman world and in the societies that preceded it in a more general

sense it means transmutation and transformation so if you read for example Ottoman poetry you can encounter Kimya Nazar right the beloved's gaze has certain

transmutational powers. Again, in Sufi literature, certain sheikhs also have kimya nazar, or powers of alchemy, by which or through which they change or they transmute the souls of their murids, their believers. What we mean by alchemy in more history of science sense is ilm al-kimya or ilmi kimya, the science of alchemy. The most basic definition of which is transmuting base metals into precious ones. So, for example, transforming copper or lead into silver or gold. But, of course, in the Islamic literatures on alchemy, transmutation or transforming or transmuting metals, base metals into precious ones is not the only goal of alchemy.

Alchemy has, oremy was believed to have very real applications in the field of medicine, for example, just as the expert alchemist can treat a metallic body to cure of its impurities and make it a perfect metal such as gold. The same alchemist can also use alchemical methods and inorganic materials to cure a person of various diseases. The elixir can achieve this, or at least it was believed to have those properties. Even though you don't see this much in the Ottoman alchemical tradition

and the earlier Islamic medieval tradition of alchemy there's also a tech queen creating artificial life which is also transmutationally if you think about it okay wait hold on okay let's just back up here how many we've talked about like already three different types of right right so we have the alchemy of precious metals, which is basically taking a cheaper metal and trying to transform it to gold. Exactly. And that was the most well-known, both in the historiography, but also in pre-modern societies. That was the most widely known application of alchemical practices. But needless to say, there were other methods, and you were summing it up.

Medicine is one, and taquin, creating artificial life is another application of alchemical methods. And then on top of that, you have metaphorical understanding. Oh, absolutely. It's a loaded term and of course i mean i i don't mean to compartmentalize these disparate meanings that i mean they they did comprise a holistic uh union if you will of various meanings but all kind of stemming from that meaning of alchemy or kimia as an act of transmutation. So you can transform the soul, you can transform metals, you can, I mean, when you're saying you're creating artificial beings, like, how is that transformation?

It's not actually creating artificial life out of nothing, because you put in something, an inorganic material or sometimes you know hair for example and you can create another kind of life out of it and actually you know i mean we'll talk about this down the line in this interview but the elixir the highest form of elixir the elixir al-azam was believed to be a living creature it had life so i mean there's creation of life right there okay but i'm assuming that alchemy was you know this quest for either the transmutation of metals or you know the quest for the elixir this is obviously not just an ottoman thing that it's been present uh you know throughout islam Islamic societies or even further back? Absolutely. I mean, textually speaking, the oldest surviving evidence is from Hellenistic and actual late antique Egypt,

and it's generally accepted that, you know, Egypt or Hellenistic Egypt was the place where the earliest texts on alchemy, alchemy as we know from the later traditions existed. So people such as Zosimos were present in Egypt and writing there. Of course, the kind of alchemy that was practiced in Hellenistic or Egypt differed quite a bit from the later Islamic tradition. This earlier tradition is generally referred to as Alexandrian tradition, which was also inherited by Byzantium. Well, it was part of the Byzantine world, of course,

but after the loss of Egypt to the world of Islam, Alexandrian alchemy was continued to be practiced in Constantinople, in Thessaloniki, in lands where the Byzantine Empire was able to hold off. So then there's this other thing called Islamic alchemy? Okay, there are many Islamic alchemies, but the one tradition that has, I think, overwhelming importance is the Jabirian

tradition, which takes its name from Jabir ibn Hayyan, about whom there's an entire literature which I will not try to summarize, but even in Islamic times, early Islamic times, for example, in Basit Baghdad, there were debates about whether or not Jabir ibn Hayyan as a real human figure existed. So they were aware of the difficulty of pinning down this entire corpus on a single person. And what Jabir did, or what the Jabirian corpus rather did, in addition or on top of Alexandrian alchemy, was to introduce something called among many other things ilm al-mizan the science of the balance but before I get there I should probably talk about Alexandrian alchemy yeah just for a basic yeah very very very basically presumably even

before these earliest texts existed there were those who tried to, you know, do certain things with metals, right? I mean, metallurgy is a very ancient science and, you know, technical expertise. But what Hellenistic Egypt did, or, you know, philosophers thereof did, was to provide a philosophical and natural scientific background, a theory. They gave a theory to a practice, in a sense. And the theory was that all metals share a common nature. The differences between them were actually accidental qualities that came into the metal after it began to be formed.

One of the basic tenets of this is the sulfur-mercury theory. And here, already in Hellenistic Egypt, we get into the metaphysical aspects of alchemy. Sulfur usually represents the masculine figure, the male figure. It's hot and dry. And mercury represents the female figure and it's cold and moist and the two coming in together

they produce offspring which is new metals in the process at least according to these ancient texts many of them actually from the late antique era planetary influences give certain accidental qualities to the offspring of sulfur and mercury, which creates various forms of metals. But because they all share a common origin in sulfur and mercury, you can actually

play, right? The expert alchemists can do certain things to the metal to cure of its impurities and thus create silver and ultimately gold. And of course Aristotelian physics come into the play here because coldness, well actually hotness, coldness, and dryness, and moistness are the four qualities that these metals share. And by balancing these in a certain metal, you can perfect the metal. So that was the basic tense of Alexandrian alchemy in a very crude fashion. What Jabir did was to use something that already existed in the Hellenistic tradition, actually coming from Galenic medicine,

which was that not only were there four qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness, but these had four degrees of intensity, which complicated things, and then you could do more. What Jabir did was introduce seven more degrees. So four times seven is 28, which also corresponds to the letters of the Arabic alphabet. And here we get into some really tricky stuff, which is the Ilm al-Mizan,

which I have doubts whether or not people who copied the text exactly knew what was going on. It's a very complicated science. And it basically stipulates that there's an ontological relationship between the word, which stands for metal, and its qualities. So fuddah, right? Silver. You look at the individual letters in the word or dhahab, right? You look at the individual letters of the word, find the numerical values of the Arabic letters that constitute the word,

and then to make it another metal, you obviously have to alter the numerical value of the word itself. But in the meanwhile, you actually process the metal with very real alchemical or chemical procedures that start changing the metal. So that, in a sense, was one of the novelties of Jaberian alchemy. So you've given us a good kind of overview. There's this Alexandrian tradition.

And then building on top of that, you have this Jaberian tradition. But what is, let's say, you know, I want to make a bunch of gold. Like, you know, what would a 10th century person in Baghdad tell me how to do it? You want to just start melting copper and then, you know, throw in pieces of sulfur? Or how does it, what would they, what would they say? Well, they would definitely tell you, they would warn you that books alone will not teach you how to make gold. you how to make gold. They would advise you very strongly to find a master, a master alchemist, who would train you and who would reveal the hidden meaning of the text. So as you might already know, alchemical texts are notoriously difficult to read and comprehend. Most alchemists use deck nomen, code names for various procedures and metals. Some of them

are very obvious. Others are not necessarily so. So even within the textual tradition of alchemy, there's occultization of knowledge. And this was, as they say, done to hide the science from the unworthy because they thought it was actually a science that could be used for evil if it fell into unworthy hands. So the first task of an alchemist,

if you're a knowledgeable one, is to weed out the unworthy from the worthy. But what would be the good uses of alchemy? The good uses of alchemy would be, at least in the Islamic tradition, to use the science not to enrich yourself, but to perfect your soul. So here we get into the first discussion we had, the multiple meanings of alchemy. So the goal of a philosopher alchemist was not to enrich himself, to make himself wealthy,

but rather to perfect his soul. So there was, at least in the Islamic alchemical tradition, and of course it has some parallels in, for example, Taoist alchemy in China, the journey of a base metal to a precious metal parallels, not only parallels, but in a very real way, follows and is integral with the journey of a sinful, unworthy human soul into the perfect man. And I think that's precisely why you have so many Sufis engaged in the production and reproduction of alchemical knowledge, not only in the Ottoman society, but in the Islamic world in general. And actually, this is really interesting, I think. Alchemy, as you probably already know,

had a lot of detractors in the Ottoman world, in various Islamic societies in general, who had very real concerns about, or questions about the validity of the science. It wasn't a science such as astronomy slash astrology that pretty much a good chunk of the society accepted as valid. There were a lot of people who questioned the validity or even the possibility of metallic transmutation, right, starting with Ibn Sina.

And not starting with him, but one of the best examples, I, starting with Ibn Sina, and not starting with him, but one of the best examples, I think, is Ibn Sina, and what was their objection to alchemy? Well, one of the objections was all of these metals were actually, all of these metals were actually, they did not have differences just in accidental qualities, but by their very nature, they couldn't be turned into one another just as you cannot turn a dog into a cat or vice versa. So they were accepted as different beings in the mineral kingdom, right? But then... Sorry, just to clarify to the listeners.

So an accidental quality would be like... An essence would be wood, and the accidental quality would be like the form of a chair or the form of a table, right? Yes, I know. I mean, that that would be another example. What I mean would be, for example, the level of moistness in a given metal. So we have to understand what they think of as accidental qualities in terms of their own scientific worldview, right? So the fact that, for example, silver has coldness and gold has hotness in it, those would be accidental qualities that, according to alchemists, could be fixed,

whereas people like Ibn Sina thought otherwise and then there were other detractors who argued that God created silver and gold rare I mean that God made these metals rare for a particular reason which was you know to give a social balance to the world and you know the individual alchemists who can, if this was true, if we could, you know, if one could create silver and gold in abundance, that would really unravel the social fabric of the society. And we get into, you know, medieval Islamic economic theory

and social theory, which is interesting in and of itself. But so one of the points that the detractors of alchemy made was that most alchemists that they could observe are, you know, very much impoverished. They spent all of their wealth on tools such as alembics, which you would also have to get. What is an alembic? Alembic is a vessel, it's hard to describe in words right now. I'm making a motion with my hand. It has a spherical bottom and then, again, a glass tube attached to it, and it's used for distillation. There were other kinds of containers for different alchemical procedures, such as teclis, calcination. different alchemical procedures such as tech lease calcination and you would also need a lot of base metals which also gets expensive and you would require sources for heat etc as you can

imagine this was not a cheap a poor man's you know endeavor and once you started on this path there was also an idea at least I, you encounter in this literature that people were addicted to alchemy, right? People were addicted to this kind of unreachable goal of transforming, you know, base metals into precious ones. So they spent all of their fortune on this particular science. so they spent all of their fortune on this particular science. And then the alchemists, again in the medieval period, retorted back by saying that it was a good thing that many alchemists were impoverished, and that was actually one of the unintended impacts

or effects of alchemy, because only then could you attain spiritual perfection. And here we can get into the literature on wealth and whether or not wealthy men can achieve spiritual perfection. But at least the more mystically inclined alchemist argued that by becoming poor, the individual alchemist could then perfect his soul. We have kind of an overview of the different traditions, the pro and the anti-alchemical sides of the debate. If we move into the early modern period, what changes, what do we see when you speak about,

is there something called Ottoman alchemy? That's a great question and one that I try to answer in some fashion in my dissertation But I have to of course do a lot more thinking about it The the Ottoman alchemical tradition of course derives as you know You might suspect almost entirely from the earlier Islamic alchemical tradition So what happens starting and of of course, when I say Ottoman, especially in the context of the 15th century, I'm talking about Bilad-i Rum, right,

the Anatolia, lower Balkans, and eventually Constantinople. I'm keeping separate the Arab lands for a particular reason, which was that the alchemical tradition in places like Egypt and Syria was more or less continuous, whereas in what became the Ottoman world or the early Ottoman world was, of course, what had been the Byzantine world, and there we have actually sort of a paradigm shift from Alexandrian alchemy, or not exactly a paradigm shift, but rather a changing of traditions, especially in urban areas that became predominantly Muslim over the centuries.

Instead of reading Stephanos of Alexandria or Zosimos in Greek, more and more people started to read Jabir ibn Hayyan or Zosimos again in Arabic or you know sometimes in Persian so that was the beginning of the textual tradition you know individual texts that were brought in by various learned people who came to the Ottoman lands to seek patronage from the imperial family or from other you know powerful men in the empire. Or, of course, you also had a lot of scholars who went to places like Egypt and Syria and the Maghreb or India and Iran and brought back texts with them. The two of us talked about this particular text before, but there's a very interesting manuscript in, for example, Princeton University Library,

which was presented to Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II in 1497. And that was a Persian text, which was written by Azizullah ibn Attaullah al-Hindi, an Indian scholar who wrote in Persian and gave the work. And that's pretty much one of the oldest texts, alchemical texts with a particular Ottoman context to it. Of course, I need to say there were earlier texts which were lost in time. But I would argue that the earliest Ottoman alchemical tradition is almost all in Arabic and Persian

and were brought into Anatolia and the Balkans and Istanbul, and they were reproduced. Now that we have all these people interested in alchemy, presenting treatises to the Ottoman court, switching from Greek to Arabic texts, how does that change the theory? What changes in this Ottoman alchemical tradition? For much of the 16th century, actually,

theoretically speaking, or speaking of the theory of alchemy, Ottoman alchemists, or those who wrote on alchemy, followed the Jabirian tradition. Only, I think, with Ali Celebi, or Ali Ziniki in the late or the third quarter of the 16th century do we start seeing some changes to

tradition, Jaberian alchemy One of the changes that Ali Celebi Izniki is a difficult individual to pin down the textual tradition is, relatively speaking, substantial. The text started appearing in the second half of the 16th century, and a lot of the copies date from the 17th and 18th centuries. Ali Çelebi, or Ali Bey ibn Hüsrev, as Katip Çelebi wrote about him in the Keşf-i Zunun,

was almost certainly a Rumi figure. Some sources call him Saruhani from the province of Saruhan. Others call him İzniki. He wrote predominantly in Arabic, both in prose and verse. The number of individual works he produced number around 60, although it's almost certain that other texts entered the corpus after his death. And what changed with Ali Celebi and his later Ottoman followers were not major in the sense of the technical aspects of what was being done to the metals, but how Ali Celebi positioned alchemy vis-a-vis other sciences and what he called the world

of alchemy, which he did not coin, but let me talk about that very briefly. So in the Jaberian tradition, there are three alams, the three worlds, which are all interconnected. And this, of course, goes back to the Greek tradition, the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. Macrocosmos, as you might suspect, is the world of the heavens, and the microcosmos is this world. In the Jaberian tradition, the world of alchemy, is between the microcosmos and the microcosmos, and it's through alchemy that the world of man is connected to the microcosmos, the realm of the stars, the realm of the heavens, rather. the macrocosmos, the realm of the stars, the realm of the heavens, rather. Ali Çelebi switches this order and makes alchemy the microcosmos, which is, I think, a very interesting interjection of Ali Çelebi into the tradition.

And thereby he places the world of men or the human being or human agency as a sort of a conduit between the stars and the world of materials we don't actually see, right? So they're inorganic materials and they don't talk about it in this way, but it's at a microscopic level the the you know the actual internal qualities and the world of men or the mankind uh is um a conduit or an agent that connects the two worlds and i think um what it does with um astrological and astronomical information is also very interesting. He, above all other alchemists, spends the most time on conjunctions and more specifically on how conjunctions, what are conjunctions? Yeah, so conjunctions meaning like when planets align?

Yeah, the alignment of various planets, for example, the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter which can be the major conjunction and hence the Sahib crown that we know from you know political literature or a political astrology so the alignment of stars and how they influence various alchemical procedures is given a lot of thought in the Ali Celebi corpus. On top of that, he also, and I think in line with this, he also changes or he introduces a new schema of the actual origin of metals. Whereas in the Jaberian tradition you have only sulfur and mercury

and in Razi and Paracelsus who's a Swiss alchemist of the 15th century they introduced salt Ali Celebi actually postulates that there are seven things that go into the creation

of a metal and needless to say, these seven things parallel the seven stars, right? The five observable planets plus sun and the moon. And just in a similar fashion, he divides the world of alchemy, the alam al-kimya, alchemy, the alam al-kimya, into nine spheres, which parallel the nine spheres of the heavens. So technically, in terms of the technical contents of what he's trying to do, I think he's a devout follower of Jil Daki, who's a Memluk alchemist of the 14th century, and thereby of Jabir ibn Hayyan, but he does, I think,

innovate in theoretical matters and I think that's one of the reasons why he was known as al-muallif al-jadid by the you know later tradition which is the new or the modern author. Why do you think he was so interested why did he introduce these astrological these greater astrological elements to the alchemical tradition? these astrological, these greater astrological elements to the alchemical tradition? That's a very interesting question, and I'm afraid it's difficult to answer. Of course, astrology and astronomy was always relevant to alchemists. Whether or not why Ali Chalabi thought these mattered more than previous alchemists is difficult to answer without knowing more about Ali Celebi himself.

And we know surprisingly little about him. His own works aside, there isn't much about him until we get to Keshf-i Sunun and Nevzat Atayi. Well, Keshf-i Sunun of Khatib Chalabi and Nevzat Atayi, but I don't think the person they have in mind is the actual Ali Chalabi. So what little we know from his own words is that he was definitely born and grew up in Western Asia Minor.

He doesn't say where, although one of his teachers, actually his one teacher in alchemy is called Ahmed Shemsettin Saruhani. So he was from the Saruhan region. We don't know whether or not this is the famous Ahmed Shemsettin Saruhani, who's a Halweti Sheikh. And then he doesn't give much information about his master either except for the fact that his master's master Ali Marjoushi came from Egypt and that he was actually executed in Egypt by the Ottoman governor of Egypt under Suleiman the Magnificent. It seems like alchemy is a rather, how should we say this?

Elite? Elite, but also kind of a world that's not easily accessible both to the people of the time and to researchers today. So can we find actual examples in the chronicles and so forth of people talking about alchemy, of people actually conducting alchemy, of people, you know, actually conducting alchemy?

Mm-hmm. Apart from the alchemical treatises themselves, which have very interesting marginalia about, you know, various procedures. For example, from an 18th century manuscript, I found one Ottoman alchemist based in Istanbul who writes that he tried to, you tried to execute a certain alchemical procedure as it was described by Paracelsus, but he was not successful in this.

And of course by the 18th century Paracelsian texts were available in a limited fashion in Arabic and Turkish. So we have some textual evidence of people actually trying these things out. So it's not necessarily a solely textual tradition, that's for sure. I think that's actually one of the debates about early modern Islamic alchemy in general.

Because it could be. Some people argue that it's just people reading it. And reproducing older works, that's correct. And reproducing older works. That's correct. And just trying to metaphysically better themselves. Absolutely. And I'm sure some of that was going on,

but that was not the whole picture. And then the next line of big evidence actually comes from Menachem Names. What are Menachem Names? Hagiographies. And of course there there's, you know, a lot of debate on how to use hagiographies, especially for the purposes of writing history or understanding historical societies.

But taking some of the stories about various sheikhs and tekehs, and especially about disciples, which is, I think, interesting, who pestered these sheikhs for alchemical information, we can imagine that at least on the part of certain disciples, joining the circle of a certain sheikh was also a way into attaining certain kinds of information or knowledge or have some expertise in a particular science

which was not otherwise available right such as alchemy and you know we can think of other sciences like this and even though reading the um you know the ottoman or otherwise alchemical literature suggests that this was um an elite uh branch of knowledge we have evidence of alchemy as it was practiced by other means. And I'm reluctant to call this low alchemy, but definitely some of the alchemists talked about swindlers or tricksters or people who tried to defraud others

by promising them to teach alchemy and so one of the criticisms of course was that these people did not know the science of the balance as it exists in the Jabirian tradition and thereby they couldn't actually transmute base metals into precious ones. A Muhammed Eftir from the third quarter of the 16th century actually talks about a certain Remmal, so someone who was knowledgeable in the science of Remmal Mehmet. Which is Geomancy? Geomancy. Who went around in the region of Kastamonu and Bolu

promising to teach people the science of alchemy. And he collected a lot of money from the locals there and disappeared. He did this multiple times till he was imprisoned. I believe in Kastamonu. And there's another decree from the same Muhammed Eftere which suggests that he escaped imprisonment. But certainly, and very interestingly, he was described as a Maghrebi. And it's interesting that Maghreb, that is, you know, North Africa and once Spain,

had a reputation for being an excellent source for alchemy. had a reputation for being an excellent source for alchemy. Okay, so you've given us a sense of kind of what was going on in the Ottoman world in terms of alchemy. You know, a few of the figures. In our previous conversations, you know, we also talked about Murad IV and his interest in alchemy and his sponsorship of alchemists in an attempt to actually create large sums of gold. Which brings up, I think, to some degree, inevitable comparisons with the European tradition of alchemy. We also have kings in Bavaria and Saxony and all these other places also patronizing alchemists, trying to increase their wealth and so forth.

When we compare, you know, what was the alchemical tradition in Europe, or for that matter, in China, which also had a strong alchemical tradition, you know, what was going on there, you know, are there connections, are there comparisons that we can make? What was going on there? Are there connections? Are there comparisons that we can make? In terms of connections, the best known case, of course, Paracelsus and materials about which we spoke a little bit earlier.

Could you go into more detail about who Paracelsus is? Of course. Paracelsus was a Renaissance Swiss sage, philosopher, alchemist, physician, and prophet, as he, I think, fashioned himself. And he certainly had a lot of followers, not only in the 16th century, but also in the 17th century Europe. One of the innovations of Paracelsus in the field of medicine was the introduction of certain alchemical precepts and the notion that you could cure diseases with inorganic materials, such as mercury, which also existed in the Islamic tradition. But I think parasols gave a new emphasis to the use of things like mercury,

which was, of course, very dangerous. So you had to be, or the particular physician had to be extra careful not to poison people while trying to cure them. Parasauces was not translated into Arabic until the middle of the 17th century by Ibn Salim, who was the Syrian chief physician of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV. After Ibn Salim's translations, not only of Paracelsus, but later Paracelsian texts, various other Ottoman scholars translated more. Some of these Arabic translations were translated to Turkish. So that was the introduction of Ottoman physicians to pericelsian medicine. But I think it's very

important that pericelsian tradition, as has been noted by various historians, was not adopted wholesale. Hellenic medicine was never really dethroned. It was merely that certain certain approaches to pharmacology on the part of Paris Alsian physicians was adopted by Ottoman physicians but at the same time Paris Alsian texts precipitated a renewed interest in alchemy on the part of Ottoman physicians who I should mention here, or I should emphasize, were not interested in translations of European alchemical texts from the 17th century, but who went back to their own tradition, the Ottoman tradition on alchemy

and the Islamic tradition on alchemy. And I think it's very important to note that the earliest manuscript, which contains probably the most important works from the Ali Çelebi Corpus, all put together in a big volume, came from late 17th century Istanbul, and it was copied by a physician. And if we read Ömer Şifahi, who was a chief physician at Bursa, he cites Ali Çelebi's works quite frequently. So they were obviously reading not only the Ali Çelebi corpus, but other Ottoman and earlier alchemical texts, hopes of making better use of Parasalcian medicine.

But speaking of European alchemy, in the same period, of course, there's a huge literature now, and I'm not trying to summarize it. I will not try to summarize this, but individuals such as Isaac Newton, right? He wrote more on alchemy than he did on physics. Yeah, I think this question of, this example of Isaac Newton,

who we kind of put forward as the image of modern rational scientific thought and his obsession with alchemy is a, you know, is a very interesting example. For instance, when I teach history of science classes to my undergraduates, I always give them pieces of Newton's alchemical journals and try to see if they can figure out what in the world it is and who wrote it. And they're always astounded by the fact that, you know, Newton was just, had hundreds of these alchemical journals, which I think brings this larger question of, you know, how do we understand something like alchemy in terms of history of science? Because, you know, in the popular image of alchemy, it's seen as a pseudoscience, as something irrational, as something mystical or metaphysical.

You know, you get these images of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, or, you know, people just sitting in basements trying to make gold, but not understanding the true physical world that underlies, you know know metals and our material world like so how how have people you know why one why study alchemy as a historian of science how have people gone about it especially I mean the European case is the most well developed I guess let's start with those two questions then we can move on I'll answer the first one later and address the second one first. Of course, in the historiography of Western alchemy in the past 30 years, there has been a lot written. It's generally referred to as, in the literature, at least the new historiography of alchemy.

As you pointed out, this wasn't just the general sense or the general populist sense of alchemy. As you pointed out, this wasn't just the general sense or the general populist sense of alchemy, but also many historians of science, such as George Sarton and others, they did not think very highly of alchemy or alchemists and did not think it was something fit to study. But what happened in the past 30, 35 years was people like Bill you know, Bill

Newman, Lawrence Principe, and others have posited that alchemy, or as they call early modern European alchemy, chemistry. It's chemistry with a Y, right? Yes, exactly. Chemistry with a Y, which, you know, exists as a word in this period's literature, alchemical literature, was one of the driving forces of the scientific revolution. So rather than imagining or conceptualizing alchemy as a pseudoscience that was pushed aside by the scientific revolution, they put alchemy at the very beginning of it. the scientific revolution, they put alchemy at the very beginning of it. And the reason why they do this, or one of the rationales behind this historiography is that at least early modern European alchemists that they study,

they were meticulous in note-taking. They had heightened emphases on experimentation, and these two things were actually one of the two driving forces of the European scientific revolution or revolutions. Of course, this new historiography is not without its detractors. People like Brian Vickers think that an overemphasis of alchemy vis-à- particular historians or, you know, their works. But I think it's also a mistake which, you know, some historians of Islamic science do to imagine medieval Arab alchemists as the perfect scientists, you know, toiling in their laboratories as, you know, beacons of positivism, that that wasn't the whole story or even an accurate story of alchemy as it was practiced in the medieval or early modern Islamic world. Of course, approaching alchemy from the point of view of those,

and there were many of them in, for example, early modern Ottoman society, approaching alchemy from their point of view, alchemy was not just a branch of knowledge. It was the culmination of all other branches of knowledge, right? So an alchemist had to know medicine. He had to know, you know, science of talismans and science of letters, ilm al-huruf, but also astronomy and astrology and mathematics and arithmetics.

So the perfect alchemist was also the perfect man of knowledge, the perfect scientist. And I think that alone makes alchemy interesting to study from the point of view of those who are engaged in it. So I think it's important not to give value judgments to certain branches of knowledge from our contemporary point of view. We already spoke about detractors of alchemy, but there were also many believers in its precepts

and many, many people over the centuries trying to um engage with alchemical texts understand them and you know make it happen so i think it's important to understand where those people fit in their respective societies and you know i i think that that's something very important for you know social and cultural history of early modern Ottoman world. Because, frankly, you see references to alchemy not just in alchemical texts. We spoke about this before. But you see references to alchemy in poetry and in geographies and histories.

And it was part and parcel of Ottoman intellectual tradition in a way. And I think thousands and thousands of volumes on alchemy in libraries across the world attest to that. And I think it's important to account for why exactly these people were interested in this branch of knowledge and how they went about doing so i think this is an interesting response to this problem we have when we try to study ottoman history of science the problem being if you study alchemy in the european world you always know

that something called chemistry comes afterwards and that you can always you know tie in this irrational branch of knowledge to a rational one and you can always kind of draw a line between these early experiments and something better that more true more accurate that comes up uh later down the line the 18th and 19th centuries when true chemistry emerges and for us uh scholars that study the the Ottoman world or the early modern Islamic world, you know, you have all this interest in all these treatises on alchemy, but you don't necessarily, you know, you don't have that telos at the end that's saying, okay, out of this came chemistry. So how do, you know, again, how do we value alchemy? and how do we value alchemy? I mean, that's actually a great way of putting it. A lot of the European literature,

especially the older literature on alchemy, is teleological, right? They know that chemistry will be born out of the pseudoscience after the scientific revolution. And actually, there were quite a number of historians of science who used to call alchemy protochemistry. Some still do. And that's teleological to begin with. Whereas in the Ottoman case, you're right.

Not only that, you know, chemistry comes only with a paradigm shift, which is the introduction of Western, you know, ways of producing knowledge, Western model or institutions of learning based on the Western models. But you also, I mean, going back to this so-called new historiography of alchemy, you also don't have a scientific revolution in the Ottoman world. So then, unfortunately, some of the questions asked by historians in, you know, the previous decades was, you know was questions of failure. Why did the Ottoman society, or the famous Needham question, right? Why did not China

have a scientific revolution? Why did not the Islamic world have a scientific revolution? And alchemy can become a part of this story of failure but if we do that I think we neglect to see the importance of alchemy for studying the social and cultural history of the Ottoman society so I think rather than asking negative questions vis-a-vis history of science, historians should focus on how that particular branch of knowledge was practiced and where exactly it fits in the act of producing knowledge in a particular society, whether it's the Ottoman one or some other non-Western society.

Speaking of Joseph Needham and his grand endeavor to chart out and explain, chart out Chinese scientific literature and explain why it never developed into a scientific revolution. If we look at kind of Chinese scholarship or China historian scholarship on alchemy, can we find useful lessons for writing on in history? on alchemy can we find useful lessons uh for writing on in history at least the literature that i'm familiar with vis-a-vis chinese alchemy a lot of it uh focuses on political history and how chinese alchemists uh try to um use alchemical precepts or daoist alchemy to reinforce the body of the emperor, right? So it has direct political connotations, which is not the case with Ottoman alchemy, with the exception of Murad IV, whose interests in alchemy were not necessarily, I mean, they had more to do with the economic plight of the Ottoman world at the time than with any concern with his own body. There isn't much interest on the part of the Ottoman

court in alchemy. And I think that is part of the story of why alchemy has not been studied to this date, you know, by most Ottoman historians, is that it doesn't have a clear connection to the Ottoman court. I mean, we have some texts which were presented. Thanks to Atufi's catalog, we know the imperial, you know, the Topkapı Library had, you know, a few dozen books on alchemy, but neither in the chronicles or, you know, for example, in Fermans, etc., or, you know, the Başbakanlık archives, you're not going to see alchemy either as an institution at the palace, there was no court alchemist, but, you know, there was a court astrologer,

there was a court astrologer uh so that and how state-centric ottoman historiography has been until you know a few decades ago um i i think that also explains why alchemy among several other sciences have been neglected by ottomanists okay if we can't find it let's say if the state of if the Ottoman dynasty itself is not necessarily interested in alchemy, where do we find alchemical texts? How can we write this history? Where do we go for sources to look at this? And how many of these sources are still extant?

Are there hundreds of treatises out there or are there just a few? There are hundreds of individual treatises on there or are there just you know a few there are hundreds of individual treatises on alchemy i mean suleimani alone is chock full of alchemical treatises i'm imagining a lot a lot of them originally came from private collections um a lot of them have very particular sufi connections so for example one of the major books written by Ali Chalabi Surah Rabbani was translated

it's a work in Arabic and it was translated into Turkish by a certain Sheikh Ahmed Al Qadiri so we know various Halwati copyists translators so certainly the Sufi connection is there.

A couple of technical libraries had alchemical treatises. Whether or not they used these texts to better themselves spiritually or whether or not they actually engaged with this, technical aspects of alchemy is another matter. But certainly there are many, many texts, with this technical aspects of alchemy is another matter. But certainly there are many, many texts, and I'm pretty sure there are so many that have not been uncovered yet that exist in Megemois, etc.

And of course, you know, speaking of alchemy, you not only have these dedicated texts or dedicated manuscripts talking about, you have thousands of recipes, right, found in, you know, various kinds of medjmois and other kinds of unrelated material. Well, thank you for this fascinating look into the world of alchemy, Tuna. You should say this without laughing. Thank you, Tuna, for this fascinating look into the world of alchemy. It seems like there's going to be a bright future ahead, you know, both for history of science as a whole, and I think specifically looking at alchemy in the Ottoman world.

Again, I invite our listeners to check out our other episodes in the history of science series on the Ottoman world. If you want more information, Tuna will be providing us a short bibliography on our website, which will guide you to the relevant sources. Thank you again, Tuna. Thank you for having me, Nir.