The astral sciences in the Ottoman Empire

Popular perception of history are almost always constructed out of half remembered facts, myths and legends and very often have no real relation to what actually took place. In the western world the popular perceptions of the Ottoman Empire are very much like this. If they think anything about it at all, most people have some sort of image in their heads of barbaric, Turkic Muslim, hoards in turbans sweeping down on Constantinople in 1453, a date they remember from their school history lessons, destroying the last vestiges of classical culture and learning, as long bearded Greek Orthodox monks flee the city, their arms full of the great books of antiquity bringing them to ignite the European Renaissance. Later the westward expansion of those hoards was finally stopped before the gates of Vienna. The second image is of the depleted, dissolute remains of a once great empire being finally put to rest in the early decades of the twentieth century. Already in his The Renaissance: A Very…