Amirdovlat Amasyatsi (Armenian Ամիրդովլաթ Ամասիացի; in the sources Amirdovlat Amasiatsi or Amirdovlat of Amasia; in Turkish "Amasyalı Amirdovlat") was an Armenian physician, natural historian and writer of the fifteenth century. He was born in Amasya, travelled through Anatolia, Iran and the Balkans, served as chief physician at the court of Mehmed the Conqueror, and, according to some of the sources, returned to his native city at the end of his life. He owes his name above all to Angitats Anpet (Ankitats Anpet; "Useless for Ignoramuses"), a dictionary that lists drugs of plant, animal and mineral origin in six languages. The title is a barb: it treats knowledge as the property of those who know, and warns the reader from the start that the book is of no use to the ignorant.

Amirdovlat wrote all of his works in Middle Armenian, the spoken language of his day, rather than in Classical Armenian. This choice followed a tradition that went back to Mkhitar Heratsi, and it meant that his books could be used not only by scholars but also by students and ordinary readers. Some of his books are addressed to physicians, others to the general public. It appears that he wrote most of them in Istanbul.

Birth and Education in Amasya

The sources agree on his birthplace: Amasya. His year of birth is uncertain. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says "about 1420/25," Stella Vardanyan's chronology gives a range between 1420 and 1430, and some scholars place it earlier, between 1414 and 1419, while others put it at the end of the 1420s or the beginning of the 1430s. The spread shows that his youth, like most of his life, is poorly documented. One Russian-language source gives his father's name as Yegia; we could not confirm this in any other source.

According to Vardanyan's chronology, Amirdovlat studied in the Armenian schools of Amasya and Sivas (Sebastia) in the 1450s. The fifteenth century was one of the hard periods of Armenian history. The wounds of Timur's invasion had not healed, and the struggle between the Kara Koyunlu and the Ak Koyunlu was wearing the region down. Even so, alongside great monastic schools such as Tatev, the schools of Amasya and Sivas gave medicine a special place. Amirdovlat grew up in this milieu. We do not know who his teachers were or which books he read, but his later writings show a close familiarity with the Armenian medical tradition and with Arabic sources. One view holds that he learned medicine in Mesopotamia; this remains an unconfirmed guess.

After his studies he travelled as an itinerant physician through Anatolia, Iran and Armenia, collecting medicinal plant specimens wherever he went. We do not know why he set out. It has been suggested that the Ottoman policy of resettlement, or simply a thirst for knowledge, played a part, but neither is documented. In the colophon of Angitats Anpet he states himself that he knew Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Persian and Latin, and that he drew on medical sources written in all of these languages.

Istanbul and the Court of Mehmed the Conqueror

In the late 1450s he crossed to Istanbul by sea and continued his studies in medicine, natural sciences and philosophy there. The city had been the capital of Mehmed II (the Conqueror) since 1453. His first work, The Lore of Medicine, written in 1459, and the first Akhrabadin of the same year show how hard he worked in his early years in Istanbul. According to an account of Armenian origin, he soon translated this first book into Turkish as well, and this attracted the sultan's attention.

In the 1460s he became Mehmed's chief physician and received the title of "chief physician-ophthalmologist." In the Russian-language sources the title appears as "charah-pashi" (chief surgeon), and in the colophon of one of his works the physician calls himself both "charah-pashi" and "bostanji-pashi" (head of a guard corps). We could not support the claim that he held the post of bostancıbaşı with another source. The rapid rise of a Christian to such a position may have provoked envy at court. The Armenian account mentioned above says that the physician was removed from the palace through the intrigues of his rivals; Vardanyan's chronology says only "afterwards ten years of exile and wandering around Balkan countries for unknown reasons." The detail about intrigue rests on a single secondary account and should be read with caution.

For Amirdovlat the exile was less a lost period than a productive one for botany. He is said to have collected, classified and tested on patients the medicinal herbs of the Balkans, Anatolia, Armenia and Iran during these years. Between 1466 and 1469, in Philippopolis (Plovdiv) in present-day Bulgaria, he wrote his main clinical work, The Benefits of Medicine. This book is the expanded form of The Lore of Medicine, written ten years later.

In 1466-1467 plague broke out in the Balkans and in Istanbul. According to the Russian-language sources, Mehmed left the capital during the epidemic and went first to Vidin, then to Nikopol. Amirdovlat is reported to have treated the sick at the centre of the outbreak and to have described these events later in The Benefits of Medicine. The Armenian account says that the sultan, seized by fear, sent for his former physician and restored him to the post of chief physician; some scholars date this return to 1471, while Vardanyan's chronology puts it in the 1470s. Although the year of the return is not known, the outcome is clear: until Mehmed's death in 1481 Amirdovlat kept the sultan's trust and regained his former position at court.

During these years the physician did not write only about medicine. He is also remembered as a guardian of the Armenian book tradition. He had old Armenian works of philosophy, history and ethics copied by scribes, copied some himself, and translated books from foreign languages into Armenian. The scribe of a Psalter dated 1480 reports that Amirdovlat saw a fine Psalter that Mehmed had plundered at Baberd on his return from the campaign against Uzun Hasan and brought to Istanbul, and that he rescued that holy book from captivity; the event is placed in the year 922 (1473). Another scribe praises him, for his love of books, as "the second Ptolemy of our time." Among the manuscripts he commissioned are the philosophical works of Grigor Tatevatsi and Hovhannes Vorotnetsi, the historical works of Michael the Syrian and Samuel Anetsi, and biblical texts. Translations of Galen and Hippocrates dated 1468 are also reported to be his.

His Works

Over a quarter of a century of work Amirdovlat built a library that touched almost every branch of the medicine of his day: embryology, anatomy, physiology, clinical medicine, pharmacology, surgery and therapy. The list below is accepted for most of his works; the English titles are translations of the English and Russian titles in the sources, and we found no established English rendering for some of them.

  • Usumn bzhshkutyan (The Lore of Medicine), 1459: his first known work. It deals with anatomy, pathology, pharmacology and hygiene. The author's own manuscript has survived, and according to its colophon the book was completed on 3 November 1459. It is said to have been written at the request of a certain "Vard, son of Shadibek."
  • Akhrabadin (Akrabadin, drug lore), 1459: a detailed description of drugs and their effects on the organs. The second Akrabadin dates from 1481 and differs considerably from the first in structure.
  • The Benefits of Medicine (Armenian Ogut bzhshkutyan), 1466-1469: the expanded form of The Lore of Medicine. According to the sources it has two parts and 224 sections, and describes 209 kinds of disease.
  • Alphabetical Dictionary of Diseases, 1468: a small dictionary of pharmacological terms, twenty-six manuscript pages long.
  • The Symptoms of Patients (signs that foretell recovery or death): a handbook for physicians on the symptoms of dying patients and on minor surgical operations. Its only known copy is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
  • Girk ramkakan (Folk Medicine, or "the book of the common people"): contains elements of magic medicine and astrology. Its date is given in two different ways, 1474 or 1478. It is a list of astronomical observations and astrological predictions; some scholars think it may be a translation of a lost Arabic work.
  • Angitats Anpet (Useless for Ignoramuses): a dictionary of simple drugs of plant, animal and mineral origin arranged in the order of the Armenian alphabet. The years of composition vary in the sources between 1478-1482 and 1478-1492.

The second Akhrabadin is, after Angitats Anpet, Amirdovlat's largest book. It tells plant collectors and spice sellers in which season of the year the leaves, flowers and roots of a plant should be gathered, and in which room and in which vessels they should be stored so that they do not spoil. It describes various drugs for external and internal use, methods of purifying the air and preserving food, and gives maximum daily doses for powerful drugs. The first Akhrabadin, by contrast with the usual Eastern akrabadins, which treat only compound drugs, also takes in simple ones. Its twenty-third chapter consists of seventy tables; each table presents five drugs, giving their names in Armenian, Greek, Frankish, Arabic and Persian, together with their appearance, dose and nature, for 350 drugs in all. The interpretation that Amirdovlat, working from the book of Maimonides (Musa ibn Maymun), expanded 2,600 drugs to 3,700 has been rejected by Jean-Pierre Mahé as a misreading of Amirdovlat's words.

Angitats Anpet: A Six-Language Drug Dictionary

The Encyclopaedia Iranica calls Angitats Anpet its author's "by far most important accomplishment." The work describes the healing properties of drugs of plant, animal and mineral origin, their physical and chemical qualities, the range of their therapeutic use, the area where plants and animals are found and the places where minerals occur. Amirdovlat shows a greater preference for wild plants as a source of drugs. He recommends saffron, mandrake and hashish as pain-relieving and sleep-inducing drugs; he advocates the use of animal organs and minerals, particularly common salt, in drug making. For abdominal and intestinal ailments and anemia he recommends preparations with iron, and for skin diseases a sulfur ointment. A saying attributed to him sums up his view of medicine: everything created in the world is either food, or a drug beneficial to the body, or a poison that changes the nature of the body and kills it.

The dictionary gives the names of drugs side by side in six languages: Armenian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This makes it a valuable source not only for historians of medicine but also for linguists. The figures given for the scope of the work differ from source to source: 1,400 drugs, more than three thousand plants and plant names, 3,754 Armenian plant names and references to fifty sources, among others. We could not resolve this discrepancy, and it is right not to give a single exact figure. References to fifty sources are regarded as a notable number for the period. It is also said that some of the plants in the work later proved to contain active substances used in cancer treatment; we could not test this claim against an independent medical source and note it only as a report.

The earliest surviving copy of the book was written on parchment in Sivas in 1490 at Amirdovlat's order and is in the British Library; the author's own manuscript has not survived. A copy prepared in Marzvan (Merzifon) in 1626 was commissioned by the Sivas physician Buniat and contains Angitats Anpet together with The Benefits of Medicine and the second Akhrabadin. About twenty copies are in the Matenadaran in Yerevan, and further copies are in the Mekhitarist libraries of Venice and Vienna, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Museum. The work was printed in Vienna in 1926 in K. Basmadjian's edition; The Benefits of Medicine was published in Yerevan in 1940 by S. Malkhasiants. Vardanyan's Russian translation appeared in Moscow in 1990 and a Bulgarian translation in Sofia in 2011.

The recipes in the book are the kind that even an ordinary reader could apply in his own kitchen and garden. As reported, Amirdovlat writes that milk warms the body and strengthens the brain, and advises no more than 175 grams at a time, taken with honey water. He considers melon seeds both a laxative and a cleanser of the liver and kidneys. He praises parsley as a plant that eases breathing and relieves headache, but warns that it is dangerous for pregnant women. These examples show that the book is a source not only for medicine but also for the cuisine and diet of medieval Anatolia; indeed it has been studied for that purpose.

His World of Thought as a Physician

Amirdovlat combines the medical sources of the Greek and Islamic worlds with the Armenian folk medical tradition. He lists his predecessors as "our first physicians, the Great Mkhitar, the physician Aaron, his son Stepanos and their line." He scattered short poems and aphorisms through his works because he wanted what he wrote to be understood by everyone. He himself practised mainly surgery and, above all, the treatment of eye diseases, but preferred traditional methods of treatment.

What he wrote about the physician's ethics stands out in the medical literature of his time. In a passage quoted from The Lore of Medicine, the physician is required to be intelligent, conscientious, patient and ready to give counsel, not a drunkard, greedy or self-seeking, to love the poor, and to be merciful and morally pure. He also writes that a physician who does not grasp the essence of a disease should give no medicine, so as not to stain his name. He gives great importance to the family physician: he sees the task not only as treating the patient but also as watching over the family's way of life and domestic circumstances. He grants the family physician wide powers and makes confidentiality a condition; he compares the physician to a priest, and says that just as sins are told to the priest in confession, so the disease must be told to the physician without hiding anything. In a society where an outside man could not enter the family circle, this approach counts as liberal for its time.

He is reported to have required seven conditions for drug trials. The drug to be tested must be pure and unmixed with other substances. Each drug should be tried on a person of balanced constitution, and its effect watched in terms of heat, cold, moisture and dryness. A drug should be tried on only one disease at a time; if it serves several diseases, one should investigate whether the effect belongs to the drug or depends on other circumstances; the strength of the drug should match the strength of the disease, the season should be taken into account, and the constancy of the effect should be observed. These principles lie within the limits of the medical knowledge of his age, but they stress the importance of experiment and observation. In The Benefits of Medicine, five factors are listed that a true physician must consider: the air of the city, the weather, the character of the patient, the nature of the disease and the strength of the drug's action. A saying that fear, anger and grief can be causes of fatal diseases is also attributed to him. We could not verify at first hand modern assessments of his views on the effect of emotions on the body, such as "psychosomatic" readings, and only note them.

The physician evidently also took an interest in astronomy. It is reported that an astrolabe belonging to him has survived, bearing an inscription in Armenian giving the year 928 of the Armenian era, that is, 1479. The same sources say that this instrument was bought in 1997 at an auction in Paris by a Qatari prince for more than 200,000 dollars; we learned this only from secondary sources.

The Return to Amasya

According to most of the sources, Amirdovlat returned to Amasya after Mehmed's death. Vardanyan's chronology gives the year of return as the 1480s, and a Russian-language source says 1483. The English-language sources name the prince who ruled the city at the time as "Ahmed, son of Mehmed the Conqueror." There is a possibility of confusion here. Until Mehmed's death the sanjak of Amasya was held by his son Prince Bayezid (the later Bayezid II); Mehmed himself had also spent time in Amasya as a prince. Prince Ahmed, on the other hand, was Bayezid's son, that is, Mehmed's grandson. The Russian-language source states this generational difference correctly and writes that on Amirdovlat's return Ahmed, then local ruler of Amasya, received him warmly. We could not offer a document for when Ahmed was appointed to the sanjak; it seems more likely that the return fell after 1481 and that the invitation came from Bayezid's son.

In 1490, old and ill, Amirdovlat went for treatment to Bursa, famous for its mineral waters. He died on 8 December 1496. The sources differ on the place of death: Bursa (the Iranica and the Russian-language source) or Amasya (the English-language sources and Vardanyan's chronology). The Armenian account writes that he died in Amasya among his students. No definite document has been found.

Amirdovlat left a school behind him. His students and the physicians of Sivas went on copying and commenting on his works; according to the sources, most Armenian medical dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were influenced by Angitats Anpet. The traces of this school are felt especially in physicians from the Sivas region, in the works of such names as Hovasap, Asar and Buniat.

His Traces in Amasya and How He Is Remembered

We found no source indicating that there is a grave, a monument or a building bearing Amirdovlat's name in Amasya. That he is named alongside Strabo among the well-known sons of Amasya shows that the city counts him as its own. Today he is remembered mostly in research on Armenian medical history, plant names and medieval Anatolian diet. He is also at times mentioned together with Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu, another physician from the Amasya region in the same century.

Chronology

Between 1420 and 1430: Birth in Amasya (Iranica: about 1420/25).

1450s: Studies in the Armenian schools of Amasya and Sivas; itinerant medical practice.

1459: The Lore of Medicine and the first Akhrabadin (Istanbul).

1460s: Chief physician to Mehmed II; then about ten years of wandering in the Balkans.

1466-1469: The Benefits of Medicine (Philippopolis).

1466-1467: Plague in the Balkans and in Istanbul.

1470s: Return to Istanbul and reappointment as chief physician; Folk Medicine (1474 or 1478).

1478-1492: Angitats Anpet (1478-1482 in some sources).

1481: The second Akhrabadin; death of Mehmed II.

1480s: Return to Amasya (1483 in one source).

1490: Earliest copy of Angitats Anpet (Sivas); journey to Bursa for its mineral waters.

8 December 1496: Death (Bursa or Amasya).

Sources

Academic studies

  • John L. Gueriguian, "Amirdovlat' Amasiats'i: His Life and Contributions", Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 3 (1987), pp. 63-91 (only the bibliographic entry and summary were seen; the full text could not be obtained).

Other sources

  • Avedis K. Sanjian, "Amirdovlat' Amasiats'i", Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2003 (iranicaonline.org). iranicaonline.org
  • "Амирдовлат Амасиаци", Wikipedia (Russian); works cited in it: Stella Vardanyan, Amirdovlat Amasiatsi, a Fifteenth-Century Armenian Natural Historian and Physician, Caravan Books, 1999; John L. Gueriguian, "Amirdovlat, Mehmed II, and the Nascent Armenian Community", The Armenian Review 39/2 (1986); Jean-Pierre Mahé, "La version arménienne du médecin Abou-Saïd", 2006. ru.wikipedia.org
  • "Amirdovlat of Amasia", Wikipedia (English). en.wikipedia.org
  • Kari Amirkhanyan, "How the Armenian physician Amirdovlat Amasiatsi served at the court of Mehmed the Conqueror", Art-A-Tsolum (allinnet.info).
  • "Armenian Healers in History", AGBU (agbu.org).
  • "Death of Amirdovlat of Amasia (December 8, 1496)", This Week in Armenian History, 2018.

Online sources