In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murad III invited TaqI al-Din Muhammad Ibn-Ma'araf to build an observatory in Istanbul. Using his exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, TaqI al-Din constructed instruments and built mechanical clocks that he used in his observations of the comet of 1577. Such astronomical and mechanical activity was documented, in 1580, by an anonymous painter who illustrated some miniatures in a manuscript titled Shahinshahnama. In the same decade, European astronomers, such as Tycho Brahe, built instruments and promoted a mechanical worldview of the celestial bodies. Although the scientific cultures coexisted for years, current historiography tends to present them as developing along separate linear paths. Yet, if we examine closely the peculiarities in one of the miniatures, we extract clues about a possible connection between TaqI al-Din's and the European mechanical culture.Astronomers played many roles within the court, where they relieved the anxieties of the rulers they served and helped provide those same rulers with displays of power and influence. During wars, times of crises or natural disaster, they were summoned to lengthy and usually tense meetings in which they looked for guidance from the stars. They also attended solemn receptions when ambassadors from far-flung nations brought with them gifts of scientific objects and books. More than any other early modern scientific figures, they operated within cross-cultural networks and were aware of adjacent cultures.1 Traditional historiography, however, tends to view them through a narrow cultural lens and cuts them off from those adjoining cultures.2In the historiography of Islamic TaqI al-Din emerges as a purely Islamic astronomer. Scholars have desired to show that even up to the seventeenth century, natural philosophy in Islam was still viable, and so they have looked toward TaqI al-Din as the last representative of its 'golden age'. They framed TaqI al-Din's achievements as an internal scientific product of an Islamic culture, operating without regard to Europe's astronomy and mechanical worldview.3 However, they gave little attention to the sources of TaqI al-Din's cutting-edge mechanical skills. As this paper argues, such mechanical skills were acquired via European sources and were incorporated into the ways he observed celestial bodies. The observations materialized into a new science, as he put it, which introduced to the Islamic world the European mechanical worldview of the universe. Moreover, TaqI al-Din not only presented the celestial mechanics as wheels of a machine, but more importantly he carried on his Hermetic belief that just as the artisan manipulates the laws of nature with the machine, so can the mechanic-astronomer manipulate the cosmic order with Hermeticism.SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS AS CLUESIn looking for clues to Taql al-Din's awareness of the rising, mechanical worldview in Europe we pay close attention not only to scientific writings but also to those that are non-scientific. Despite the fact that most of his writings are technical scientific texts, the titles of works, introductions, paintings, and other writers' texts (not necessarily in natural philosophy) give us access to the cultural crossroad where Taql al-Din was situated and where the margins of his surrounding cultural fields overlapped. There are more than a dozen scientific writings found in various libraries and archives in Istanbul that document his intellectual interest; their subjects vary from astronomical models for the planets to observational data of the comet of 1577, to manuscripts of mechanics with instructions how to build automata like clocks and watermills. However, there is also a piece of cultural writing, a manuscript of poetry titled Shahinshahnama (Book of the king of kings), which contains clues about the context within which he worked. The work was composed in 1580 by a Persian poet named 'Ala' al-Din al-Mansur. …