Ottoman flora and materia medica in sixteenth-century European travel writing
Atti e Memorie: Rivista di Storia della Farmacia, cilt.43, sa.2, ss.7-26, 2026 (Hakemli Dergi)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 43 Sayı: 2
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Dergi Adı: Atti e Memorie: Rivista di Storia della Farmacia
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.7-26
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- Erciyes Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Sixteenth-century European travel accounts from Ottoman and connected eastern Mediterranean settings hold an important place in the history of medical botany. Written while ancient materia medica still shaped learned medicine, they show the growing value of direct observation, collecting, market inquiry, linguistic mediation, local expertise, and specimen preservation. This article examines how European travelers, diplomats, physicians, apothecaries, and merchants encountered plants and drugs across Ottoman and connected regions, including Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, and the Aegean. It focuses on Pierre Belon, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq and Willem Quackelbeen, Leonhard Rauwolf, Prospero Alpini, Hans Dernschwam, Reinhold Lubenau, and Filippo Argenti. Their writings reveal a transitional culture of knowledge in which Dioscorides, Galen, Theophrastus, Pliny, and Avicenna remained essential, while inherited claims were increasingly tested through autopsia, or direct observation. The article treats “Ottoman flora” as a historical field of encounter rather than a fixed botanical region. Gardens, bazaars, aktar shops, trade routes, manuscripts, vocabularies, images, and specimens served as channels through which living plants, commercial drugs, resins, minerals, animal substances, ornamentals, and vernacular names entered European natural history. These encounters reshaped European pharmaceutical, botanical, and horticultural knowledge, while depending on local intermediaries whose knowledge was often filtered or displaced in European texts.