Natural history as a branch of the history of science remains one of the most neglected subjects in Ottoman studies. The ways modern Ottoman historians have categorized certain kinds of Ottoman sources limit our visions of how Ottoman literati developed and debated their understanding of the natural world. One example of it is Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s (d. 1692) medicinal encyclopedia entitled Tuhfetü’l-Erîbi’n- Nâfia li’r-Rûhânî ve’t-Tabîb (“The skillful, beneficial gift for the spiritual elect and the physician”). Tuhfetü’l-Erîbi’n is more than a medicinal encyclopedia, since it consisted of elaborated descriptions of plants drawing on from various canonical sources from Aristoteles and Hippocrates to Hezarfenn’s own time. In this alphabetically arranged work, Hezarfenn also listed the original version of the loanwords of plants, animals, and other medicinal products as well as their equivalents in Persian, Arabic, Greek and Latin. Despite the fact his ancient Greek sources are replete with references to Cretan plants, Hezarfenn rarely mentions medical usage of Cretan plants even though he served as a register officer during the Ottoman conquest of Crete in 1669. Instead, most of the medicinal plants Hezarfenn addresses are from Egypt. Through examining this textual preference of Egypt over Crete in the medicinal context, this paper sheds light on unexplored domains of the Ottoman intellectual world and complicates the history of cross-cultural exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean. How did Hezarfenn interact with different intellectual traditions in his encyclopedia while also creating a text that was distinctively his own? What was the place of Egyptian nature in Ottoman philosophical and medical traditions? How was it connected to the medical markets across the empire? I argue that for early modern Ottoman scholars like Hezarfenn, political shifts and change of borders did not necessarily have a direct effect on the intellectual traditions of what we call “natural history.” This is because these Ottoman scholars continued to prioritize natural resources in geographies such as Egypt, in accordance with Islamic tradition.