Abstract
“His curiosity is not limited only to flowers; it led him to all the sanctuaries of sciences. He saw the monastery of Saint-Denis, the Observatory, the school of medicine and surgery; he was even present at the Sorbonne on the 8th of July and was received by the doctors and the bacheliers in furs and ceremonial cloths.”1 This entry from the Parisian monthly Le Nouveau Mercure (the June and July 1721 issues) described Yiumisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, the Ottoman special envoy to France, whose embassy report contains one of the earliest Ottoman accounts of European arts and sciences. Although he had been sent to the court of Louis XV on a diplomatic mission, it is no accident that Mehmed Çelebi’s report contained numerous observations on the state of arts and sciences, for he was also enjoined by the grand-vizier “to visit the fortresses, factories and the works of French civilization generally and report on those capable of application.”2 Mehmed Çelebi’ s long itinerary for his short trip in 1720–1 encompassed many such sites, from mirror workshops, the Opera, the palaces and gardens of Saint-Cloud, Meudon, Versailles, Marly and Chantilly, to the new learned institutions of early modern Europe, the botanic gardens and the Paris Observatory. Documenting an encounter between two cultures, Mehmed Çelebi’s report bears witness to the formation of a scientific centre in Paris, one of the most vigorous in Europe at the time. It is at the same time a valuable source for the historian who seeks to understand scientific travels, and the related issue of how science travels.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Excerpts from “Le Nouveau Mercure,” included in G. Veinstein, ed. Le paradis des infidèles (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1981), p. 199.
The quotation is attributed to the Ottoman grand-vizier Nevlehirli Ibrahim Pala. See N. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: Hurst & Corn., 1998, facsimile ed. of 1964), p. 33.
See B. Latour, Science in Action. How to follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
New historiography in Ottoman studies questions both the character of this periodization and the extent to which westernisation, especially in art and architecture, was a dominant trend in this era. Settling this larger issue does not play a crucial role for the theme of this essay. On modern Ottoman historiography, see S. Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Architectural Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Boston, M.I.T.: unpublished thesis, 1999) and E. Eldem, “18. Yüzyil ve Degisim,” Cogito, 19 (1999), 189–199.
For biographical information, see the introduction to Veinstein, op. cit. (1), and the Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition, 1991), s.v. “Mehmed Yirmisekiz,” also written by Veinstein.
The English word “science,” from the Latin “scientia,” corresponded at the period to systematic knowledge based on necessary first principles. Less ambitious in aim were “natural history,” concerned with the identification and the classification of the kinds of things existing in nature, and “natural philosophy,” dealing with the causes of natural phenomena. The fields of physics, chemistry, physiology and the like evolved from the latter category by specialization. Since the word “scientist” is only a nineteenth century coinage, anachronism would be avoided by using the expressions “natural historian” or “natural philosopher” for the practitioners of these inquiries in this period. For the sake of convenience, however, the words “sciences” and “scientific” will be used to refer to the activities involving all of the above categories.
For the travel route, see F.M. Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 19. Göçek provides a detailed analysis of the cultural differences which can be inferred from Mehmed Çelebi’s narrative, from table manners and courtly socialization to the idea of entertainment, but she does not dwell on contemporary epistemic cultures.
While the original report Mehmed Çelebi submitted to the court has not been found, four copies of a later draft dating from 1722–23 are preserved in the Ottoman archives. See F. R. Unat, Osmanli Sefirleri ve Sefaretnameleri (Ankara. Türk Tarih Kummu Basimevi, 1984), p. 57. Mehmed Çelebi’s account was published in 1757 in French, Relation de l’ambassade de Mehmet Effendi à la cour de France en 1721, which is the basis of the recent edition of Veinstein’s op. cit. (1). The translation into modern Turkish used throughout this essay, that of B. Akyavas, Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi’nin Fransa Sefâretnâmesi (Ankara. Türk Kültürünü Arastirma Enstitüsü, 1993) is based on the 1866 Ottoman printed version, Sefaretname-i Fransa (Istanbul: Matbaa-i ilmiyye-i Osmaniye).
Mehmed Çelebi reverted to the first-person singular when he quoted himself; on a few other occasions too, he used the first-person singular, probably inadvertently. See Sefaretname, pp. 14, 22, 25, 38, 40, 46, 47, 53, and 56.
The autobiographical form of literature, writing in the first-person singular, was not that common in contemporary Ottoman prose literature, but not entirely absent either. See C. Kafadar, “Self and Others: the diary of a dervish in seventeenth century Istanbul and first-person narratives in Ottoman literature,” Studia Islamica 69 (1989), 121–150.
See Unat, op. cit. (8), for an inventory of the embassy reports, and some excerpts.
Sefaretname, p. 42. The words “garip,” for strange, and “garb,” which means “west,” have the same Arabic root g-r-b. The history of this linguistic evolution is yet to be investigated. See Hamadeh, op. cit. (4), p. 270.
For the various items listed here, see Sefaretname, pp. 29, 32, 29, 30, 34.
That is not to say that the Ottomans cultivated the “bastion style” formal gardening developed by the French. For the cultural and social make-up of the contemporary Ottoman taste for public and private gardens, see Hamadeh, op. cit. (4).
Mehmed Çelebi was awed by the sight of what he thought to be some very wonderful and strange plants and flowers; he could neither describe nor classify them. He ventured to describe one such strange animal brought from the New World at the private garden of Ecouen. Its nails were like those of a deer, body as big as a cow, fur like a sheep’s, neck and ears like a horse’s, yet with a head, mouth, nose and eyes like a deer’s (Sefaretname, p. 54). The animal was probably a llama from the Andes.
For the excerpts from Le Mercure, see Veinstein, op. cit. (1), pp. 198–9. The same report indicates that Mehmed Çelebi reciprocated this invitation by calling d’Ozembray and certain Geoffroy brothers, reported to be members of both the Paris and London Academies of Sciences, to dine in his quarters. The d’Ozembray in this report must be Louis-Léon Pajot d’Onsenbray. See R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). See also the memoirs of Saint-Simon on the pleasant impression Mehmed Çelebi made on Parisians, by kindly gratifying their wish to display the items they took pride in. Saint-Simon, Mémoires, Vol. 6 (Pleiade, ed. by G. Truc), pp. 732–3.
For the contrast between the austerity and the modesty of the contemporary Ottoman interior decoration with its ostentatious and flashy French counterparts, see Göçek, op. cit. (7).
For a history of these collections and their roles in shaping natural history and philosophy, see L. Daston, K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
For these pieces of information, see Sefaretname, pp. 43, 28, 36, 32, 54, 39.
See I. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) for a history of statistics.
These city models or city plans in relief were kept in the Tuileries at the time of Mehmed Çelebi’s visit, and were later moved to the Musée de l’Armée. See Veinstein, op. cit. (1), p. 114.
Sefaretname, p. 42. Mani and Behzad were masters of painting who flourished respectively in China and Persia. In the Ottoman commentaries on art, they were frequently mentioned as exemplary of eastern artistic excellence. See Hamadeh, op. cit. (4), p. 271.
The depiction of emotional affect was not within the purview of the prevailing traditions in physiognomy in the Ottoman realm, which also influenced traditions of portrait painting. The science of physiognomy was primarily concerned with the portrayal of personality and with the art of reading the invisible character from the visible appearances. The immediacy of emotional expression in portraiture was probably a novel experience for Mehmed Çelebi. On the relation between physiognomy and Ottoman art, see G. Necipoglu, “The serial portraits of Ottoman sultans in comparative perspective” in Selmin Kangal, ed., The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Sultan (Istanbul: Í,sbank, 2000).
Sefaretname, p. 32. The Ottoman word for three-dimensionality, milcessem, also stands for form or corporeality, and has the connotation of lifelikeness. It is the same term Mehmed Çelebi used to describe the relief maps.
See A. Sayih, The Observatory in Islam (Ankara. Tiirk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1960).
He reported that being unable to take in so many strange and wondrous items at one time, he visited the Paris Observatory twice. Sefaretname, p. 50.
Ibid., p. 49. Veinstein surmises this instrument to be the one constructed by the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer in 1680. Veinstein, op. cit. (1), p. 149.
A survey of the Ottoman scholarly texts of the period indicates that while some of these contentious positions were reported, they were not seen as cause for upheaval. The controversy was mentioned in a few Ottoman works produced in the 17th century, for instance, in the partial translation of Noel Durret’s Novae Motuum Caelestium Ephemerides Richeliane (1641) by Tezkireci Köse Ibrahim Efendi in 1660–4, and in Janszoon Blaeu’s Atlas Major, translated in 1685 by Abdullah el-Hanefi el-Dimaski. For these translations, see E. Ihsanoglu, Büytik Cihad’dan Frenk fodulluguna (Istanbul: Ileti§im Yaymlan, 1996). Mehmed Çelebi was familiar with another work, Katib Çelebi’s translation of the 1621 Atlas Minor of Mercator and Hondius in the 1650s, which did present the controversy using graphical illustrations (Sefaretname, p. 17). However, the credibility of Katib Çelebi’s translation or of the original work (Mehmed Çelebi was aware it was a translation) must have been put into question when Mehmed Çelebi wanted to verify a fact it reported: At a certain location in Charenton, voices would be echoed back and forth as many as thirteen times. Mehmed Çelebi and his retinue found no-one in this town on their travel route who knew of this “strange” fact (Sefaretname, p. 17).
See G. Henry, Newton on the Continent (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981).
The father Cassini, perhaps out of religious affiliation—he was of Jesuit orders— remained anti-Copernican until he died in 1712. See Dictionary of Scientific Biography, s.v. “Gian Domenico Cassini.”
Sefaretname, p. 50. In the original manuscript in Ottoman, Mehmed Çelebi drew miniature diagrams to illustrate the positions of the satellites he had seen. Ibid., p. 141.
Sefaretname, p. 3. Mehmed Çelebi used the same word, dürbün, to refer to both instruments.
See S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) for some of these qualms.
Mehmed Çelebi posed for various artists, including the painter Coypel. See G. Írepoglu “Innovation and Change,” in Selmin Kangal, ed., The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Sultan (Istanbul: hbank, 2000).
Complaining at first of the incommensurability of the mile system with the “hour” system of the Ottomans, and having described distances in his trip to Paris in terms of hours and days, to describe his return trip Mehmed Çelebi began all of a sudden using miles rather than hours. For this conversion, contrast Sefaretname, pp. 14–15, 56–57.
See E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon Press, 1962) and The Story of Art (New York: Phaidon Press, 1966) for a start.
Sefaretname, p. 51. Ulugh Beg (1394–1449), whose real name was Muhammad Taragay, was a Timurid governor and patron of mathematics and astronomy in Central Asia. Together with several scholars, including Ali Kushcu, Ulugh Beg established an observatory in Samarkand, and produced the ephemerides that were used for many centuries after his death.
For the collapse of the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, see L. Daston, “Nationalism and Scientific Neutrality under Napoleon,” in T. Fraengsmyr, ed., Solomon’s House Revisited (U.S.A. Science History Publications, 1990).
For an account of the Republic of Letters, see L. Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context, 4 (2) (1991), 367–386.
Recently, however, historians have begun to question not only the periodization of the Scientific Revolution—in the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries—but even the existence of a single major revolution that can be localized in space and time. An exponent of this view, Shapin, nonetheless does not deny that “the seventeenth century witnessed some large-scale attempts to change belief, and ways of securing belief, about the natural world,” op. cit. (44), p. 5. My observations in this section are based on the view that, without loss of their specificity as indicated in my discussion, a cluster of events beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing well into the eighteenth century can be referred to as the Scientific Revolution.
See Shapin, op. cit. (44) and A.R. Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750 (London and New York: Longman, revision of the 2°a ed. in 1662) for accounts of the changing practices in sciences.
State sponsorship of large-scale academic undertakings distinguished France from the rest of Europe in this period. In Britain, for instance, instruments were private possessions, and therefore less costly and less powerful. See Hall, op. cit. (54) and Hahn, op. cit. (16).
See Göçek, op. cit. (7) for the items Mehmed Çelebi carried back. See O. Kurz, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1975) for the production and trade of watches in the Ottoman Empire.
That the Sefaretname bore the marks of a material culture, and inspired a novel sense of appreciation of material goods, was also noted by the French ambassador in Istanbul, Jean-Louis d’Usson Marquis de Bonnac (1672–1738), who was personally acquainted with Mehmed Çelebi. Reading Mehmed Çelebi’s initial report, Bonnac remarked “he well noted many of the things he saw and described almost all with much exactitude… but it is surprising that he has never said anything either on the subject of his embassy, or on the spirit of the nation, nor on the characteristics of the diverse persons with whom he had dealt. For all intents and purposes, his account is of material things.” (Quoted in Göçek, op. cit. (7), p. 65. For the original, see also Veinstein, op. cit. (1), pp. 234–6).
Only much later was there a clear recognition of the utility of European sciences. The nineteenth century Ottoman intelligentsia known as Young Turks journeyed to Europe in search of models of statecraft and engineering, and were by and large convinced that European sciences marked the culmination of human civilization. The students who travelled to Europe in the first part of the twentieth century aimed in general to absorb and transmit the culture of modernism, at the same time firmly believing in the universality of that culture.
After the insurrection of 1730, Mehmed Çelebi could no longer enjoy courtly patronage in Istanbul, and was sent to Cyprus as a governor. His son did serve the state for a long time afterwards, becoming an ambassador in his turn to France and Sweden, and rising to the position of grand-vizier in 1756, but only for a short time. His intellectual activity did not extend beyond writing a medical dictionary and a collection of poetry.
It was only in 1792 that Selim III’s government began establishing resident Ottoman embassies in the major European cities—in London in 1793, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris in 1796. The first significant Ottoman mission of students, about 150 of them, were sent to various European cities in 1827 during the reign of Mahmud II. Prior to that, numerous Christian Ottoman subjects went to study to European, and especially to Italian universities, and a few of them remained there. See B. Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York and London: Norton & Company, 1982), and K. Kreiser, “Türkische Studenten in Europa” in von Gerhard Höpp, ed., Fremde Erfahrungen. Asiaten and Afrikaner in Deutschland,Österreich and in der Schweiz bis 1945 (Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch, 1996).
C. Kafadar, “The Ottomans and Europe” in T. Brady et al, eds., Handbook of European History 1400–1600, I. (New York: Leiden, 1994).
This view is advanced in S. Faroqhi, Osmanli Kültürü ve Gündelik Yaşam (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yaylnlan, 1998; trans. of Kunst and alltagsleben im Osmanischen Reich, Munich: C.H.Beck’sehe Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kilinç, B. (2003). Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi’s Travelogue and the Wonders that Make a Scientific Centre. In: Simões, A., Carneiro, A., Diogo, M.P. (eds) Travels of Learning. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 233. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3584-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3584-1_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6281-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-3584-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive