La politique scientifique dans l’Empire ottoman

• Main Author: Efthymios Nicolaïdis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles 2006-03-01
• Series: Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles
• Subjects: Académie des sciences; Mehmed le Conquérant; sciences; Tanzimat
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/11502

Once he conquered Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror called on Byzantine scholars to study geography, science used for making war, and led a scientific education policy in the image of the Arab tradition. But the Ottoman Empire very soon abandoned any scientific education policy, and at the same time, all scientific development policy. The last vestige of such an inclination was the founding of the Istanbul observatory in the late sixteenth century, followed by its total destruction. The sciences were now abandoned to the Empire’s Christian millet, that is to say, the orthodox Christian communities under the responsibility of the patriarch of Constantinople. Contrary to Christian Europe, the Ottoman Empire did not found a university or an academy of sciences. This lack of policy toward the sciences, considered by some historians as a negative policy, would be felt during the scientific and technological development in Europe in the early eighteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, clearly surpassed, called on Western experts to build military schools at the very least. The modernization efforts in the nineteenth century with the Tanzimat policy timidly introduced a coherent science policy. The first Ottoman university was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the meantime a scholarship policy was established to send Ottoman subjects abroad to study. This effort was too late, however, to hold back the breaking up of the Empire, facilitated by its scientific and technological tardiness.