Books on Astrology, Astronomical Tables, and Almanacs in the Library Inventory of Bayezid II
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Abstract
Paratextual elements in manuscripts often offer surprising clues as to the different stages of transmission a particular copy has undergone. Take, for instance, the sü leymaniye library Ayasofya Collection ms 2595, a thirteenth-century Persian translation of a popular medieval illustrated star catalogue, Kitāb ṣuwar al-kawākib (The Book of Constellations of Fixed stars), produced originally in Arabic in the tenth century by ʿAbd al-rahman al-sufi (d. 986).1 several marks on the title page and colophon of the manuscript reveal information about its date of composition as well as the subsequent chain of owners/readers during its circulation in the next few centuries. The colophon on folio 97b states that the famous polymath and founder of the maragha observatory, nasir al-din al-Tusi (d. 1274), completed this Persian translation on monday, 25 dhu’l-Qaʿda 647 (march 1, 1250). next to this colophon is a statement written horizontally in another hand, indicating that the book had been penned by Tusi himself and was later acquired in Baghdad in the year 805 (1402–3) by the Jalayirid ruler Ahmad b. shaykh uways (d. 1410). There are yet other possession statements on the title page (fol. 1a): what seems to be the earliest one, li-aḥwaj khalq Allāh Ulugh Bīg (for the most needy of created beings, ulugh Beg), refers to ulugh Beg (d. 1449), the famous Timurid ruler and founder of the samarqand observatory. Above this note is the endowment (waqf) statement and seal of the ottoman sultan, mahmud i (r. 1730–54). At the bottom of the same page is the impression of yet another stamp, the idiosyncratic almond-shaped seal of Bayezid ii (r. 1481–1512). The same seal is also stamped on the colophon page, documenting without any doubt that the manuscript was in the ottoman imperial treasury by the turn of the sixteenth century. in addition to the colophon and possession statements, two different versions of the book title are recorded on the title page of the manuscript. The short one just above the seal of mahmud i reads: Kitāb ṣuwar alkawākib tarjama-i Khwāja Naṣīr (The Book of Constellations of Fixed stars, Translated by master al-nasir [al-Tusi]). The second, longer title is inscribed at the top of the page in the hand that apparently penned the titles of many other surviving manuscripts bearing Bayezid ii’s oval seal. This title reads: Kitāb tarjama kitāb ṣuwar al-kawākib bi-al-fārsiyya marqūm bi-annahu bi-khaṭṭ mutarjimihi alladhī huwa al-Naṣīr al-Ṭūsī min qibal alnujūm (The [Persian] Translation of the Book of Constellations of Fixed stars, marked as the Autograph Copy of its Translator, al-nasir al-Tusi, Pertaining to [the science of] the stars). This longer version of the title is repeated verbatim in ʿAtufi’s inventory (see list of entries [126]/[158]) dated 908 (1502–3), a clean copy of which was produced the following year in 909 (1503–4).2 The documented circulation of this particular manuscript—first from the ilkhanids to the Jalayirids, then from the Jalayirids to the Timurids, and finally from the Timurids to the ottomans—embodies the otherwise relatively abstract notion of the transmission of scientific knowledge and ideas. The curious stories offered by such surviving copies stimulate the historian’s imagi nation with the detailed logs of the movement of man uscripts across wide territories. That books were presented as personal or diplomatic gifts, or that valuable objects, including manuscripts, were at times of military encounter seized by the conquering party, can explain how written materials were transmitted from one courtly context to another. The physical transition of manuscripts may also be correlated with the simultaneous movement of scholars accompanied by their