Byzantine Intellectuals Translating from Greek into Arabic at the Court of Mehmet the Conqueror

The translations of at least two ancient Greek texts into Arabic were commissioned by Mehmet the Conqueror and executed at his court: Ptolemy’s Geography (by the Trapezountine intellectual George Amoiroutzes and his son, as we know from the testimony of Kritoboulos Imbrios), and the Chaldean Oracles (by an unknown translator, who may or may not have been one of the Amoiroutzides). At first glance, each text seems to belong to a different intellectual realm: the Geography is an instrument for the mathematical sciences. Interest in studying it in the early Ottoman period can be firmly placed within the exploration and critique of Ptolemaic astronomy evident both in the Islamic and the Byzantine world since the 13th century (especially under the influence of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and the school of Maragha). It can also be understood as part of the Ottoman interest in cartography. Politically, it could serve as an articulation of Mehmet’s success at conquering and of his further aspirations for world dominion (especially as the translation project was accompanied by the construction of a world map in exceptionally grand scale). The Chaldean Oracles is a pagan religious revelation compiled in verse in the 2nd c. AD that later Neoplatonic philosophers studied and commented on. Ottoman interest in the text must be linked with its renewed study by Pletho and Marsilio Ficino. The paper will examine in which ways the two translation projects were connected and will also place them in the context of the activity evidenced in Mehmet the Conqueror’s Greek scriptorium already studied by Julian Raby [DOP 37 (1983), 15-34].

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