Practicing Astral Magic in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul

The Ottoman courtly context in the “long sixteenth century” (1450 to 1640), as Fernand Braudel has called it, is an ideal but neglected historical laboratory for examining the use of occult lore for purposes predictive, protective, and entertaining. A sizeable yet sorely understudied amount of archival and material sources testifies to the fact that several sixteenth-century Ottoman sultans utilized an impressive array of occult arts in furtherance of their royal aims. For instance, a number of astrologers and alchemists worked for Bāyezı̄d II (r. 1481–1512), whose keen interest in and cultivation of these sciences provoked the curiosity of his contemporaries.1 His son Selı̄m I (r.