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CERTAINTY, DOUBT, AND ERRORS IN BYZANTINE ASTRONOMY ANNE TIHON Université Catholique de Louvain 1. The certainties From the beginning of their history until its end, the Byzantines were aware that they possessed the scientific knowledge of the Greeks. Until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, and even beyond, they studied, annotated, edited, and practised the astronomy of Ptolemy, using both the Almagest and the Handy tables. 2. The doubts In spite of their love and admiration for Ptolemy, the Byzantines could not conceal from themselves the fact that Ptolemy's tables were out of date. But how were they to be corrected? The context of the Byzantine world was very different from that found in the Islamic world. It never happened that an Emperor patronized specific scientific research, and practically no Byzantine made a profession of astronomy. How would it have been possible to establish new astronomical tables under these conditions? The Byzantines got around the problem by adopting foreign tables, Arabic or Persian, or, at the end of the Empire, Latin and Jewish. Only George Gemistus Plethon made new tables towards 1433, but these were partly based on a Hebrew version of al-Battani. The Byzantine
Early Science and Medicine – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2002
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