Early Contacts:
 Figure 3. Latin translation of Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine (Source) |
During the period when elements of this composite Arabian culture began to penetrate the Latin West, France was the seat of Latin civilisation, and its schools occupied the leading position in the cultural life of the Latin world. Englishmen were at the heart of this `Gallic’ territory. From the time of Alcuin of York, the first French minister of education, the activity of English teachers and students at the French schools was ever increasing, and in the diffusion of Saracen learning throughout the West, English scholars were the pioneers.[27]
English contacts with Muslim learning began via a third party: Lorraine (then known as Lotharingia), in today’s north-eastern France. Contacts between Lorraine and the Islamic world date from the 9th century. A century after such early links, there took place the famed trip by John of Gorze (Abbot at Gorze (970-74), near Metz, in today’s Lorraine. The trip to Spain was the result of exchanges between Abd al-Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, and the German emperor Otto the Great. On his return, John brought back with him the first elements that were going to stir the scientific awakening in Western Christendom in the Lorraine region.[28] John had just spent three years in Cordova. There, he had encountered a Jew, named Hasdeu (Hasdai ibn Shaprut) who understood Latin, and of course, was acquainted with Arabic. A man of intelligence and culture, very deeply interested in mathematics and astronomy, John in all probabilities brought back with him manuscripts of Islamic scientific nature, as he did from his previous trip to Italy.[29]This is all the more certain as Cochrane notes, the original point of contract between Islamic science and the Christian West being the result of Carolingian interest in manuscripts to be found in Cordova.[30] John was certainly helped in his enterprise by acquiring knowledge of the Arabic language from the Spanish Jews who understood Latin (amongst them Hasdai).[31]
Studies by Haskins, Thompson and Welborn,[32] the latter two most particularly, show that mathematical and astronomical learning quickly expanded in Lorraine, a learning that was based on Islamic sources. Thompson and Welborn show this Islamic influence in minute detail in places, needless to dwell upon here. What is important is how did this learning pass on to England. Here, worth returning to Haskins who stresses a crucial point, that is the role of the monasteries as islands of learning. It is through these places that Muslim learning voyaged between the two countries (Lorraine and England), carried by men of religion. Many early Muslim manuscripts in fact were located in monasteries and cathedrals. The reason for this, as it must be reminded, is that at the time, unlike in the Islamic world, where learning was universal, the learned in the West were the men of religion alone. John of Gorze was himself an Abbot.
Mathematicians and astronomers of Lorraine, now well versed in Muslim science, and the first Western Christians, if we do not take into account those of Muslim Spain, began to carry their learning to England mainly thanks to one crucial factor: the preference of King Knut the Great, the English king, for churchmen from Lorraine.[33] From his time, on through many generations, scholars from Lorraine were very popular in England, and were appointed as bishops and masters of the schools.[34] Before the death of Knut, Duduc (from Lorraine) had already become Bishop of Wells, Hermann, another man from Lorraine had become Bishop of Ramsey; and Leofric, who had also been educated in Lorraine was bishop of Exeter (1046-1072). Under Edward the Confessor there was another group of these clerics, all of whom interested in learning and many brought books with them from their own country.[35] Earl Harold, too, encouraged learning from Lorraine. He had travelled extensively and had discovered that the schools of Lorraine and the nearby German cities were not only much better than those of England, but also than those of France and Northern Italy at that time.[36] He appointed Walter as Bishop of Hereford (1060-1079) and Gisa as Bishop of Wells (c.1060). However, his most important appointment was that of Athelard of Liege as the head of the College of Canons, which he established at Waltham. During the times of the first Norman ruler (1066) William the Conqueror, and following him, under William Rufus, more men from Lorraine arrived to England, including Robert of Lorraine, a distinguished mathematician who was finally made Bishop of Hereford (1079).[37] Other figures included Walcher of Malvern, Walcher of Durham, Thomas of York, and Samson of Worcester.[38]
Just named amongst the men from Lorraine was Walcher of Malvern, possibly the greatest figure of learning from Lorraine to reach England about 1091.[39] Walcher, scholar, and monk, of course, was the first native student of Arabic learning in England, and was the first Latin critic of the work of translation from Arabic.[40] He was the first English astronomer; and also the first of his nation (or one of the very first) to translate or adapt a Muslim treatise.[41] Walcher had observed lunar eclipses in Italy in 1091 and 1092, and compiled lunar tables about 1109.[42] The tables of Walcher’s first treatise are worked out by the clumsy methods of Roman fractions, but in the second, written in 1120, he uses degrees, minutes, and seconds, and the more exact observations, which he had learned, evidently in England, from Petrus Alfonsi who was then King Henry I’s physician,[43] and on whom more further down. Walcher had already adopted the Arabic methods of astronomical calculation and has transposed them to the meridian of England, the country in which he lived.[44] Walcher’s tables call to mind others compiled a little later, about 1140, by Raymond of Marseilles. These were simply an adaptation of al-Zarqali’s tables.[45]
Walcher had come into possession of the astrolabe, and for the first time, in Latin Europe, on 18 October 1092, he used such instrument to determine the time of lunar eclipse that he had observed in Italy.[46] This clear bit of evidence is of some importance as confirming specifically, what we know in general from treatises on the astrolabe commonly ascribed to Gerbert and Hermanus Contractus (who both preceded Walcher (Gerbert died Pope Silvester II, in the year 1003) and containing numerous Arabic words,[47] that an acquaintance with this instrument had in some unknown way passed into Latin Europe in the course of the 11th century, thus preceding considerably the arrival of Muslim astronomy as a whole.[48] Walcher had become interested in astronomical observations after experiencing the darkness of an eclipse in Italy and then discovering on his return to Malvern that the selfsame eclipse had been observed in his own monastery at a different time of the day.[49] Whatever knowledge of Arabic or Arabic terminology Walcher had it transmitted to him by Petrus Alfonsi.[50] Petrus shared Walcher’s respect for real experience, dismissing the mere book learning of those who presumed that they could learn astronomy by reading Macrobius and other Classical sources.[51] Which leads to Petrus and other Spanish links.
The Spanish Connections:
Petrus Alphonsi was a Spanish Jew convert to Christianity.[52] He was born in Huesca, Aragon, Spain, in 1062 or 1063, and lived in the learned court circle in the Muslim ruled cities of Huesca and Zaragoza, where he received a good scholarly education.[53] When the Christians took Huesca in 1097 and Zaragoza in 1118, Petrus converted to Christianity.[54] Educated in Hebrew and Arabic, his writings show familiarity with the Talmud, with texts of Arabic astronomy, medicine and philosophy, and with ‘the Arabic wisdom traditions.’[55]In 1110 Petrus Alfonsi appended a nearly accurate description of the tenets of Islam to his Dialogi contra Judeos, which gained a wide readership across Latin Europe in cultivated circles. Alfonsi, Tolan correctly notes
Could provide the fairer assessment because he relied not on the Church’s teachings, rather on his own Arabic education and personal experience in Andalusia, where adherents of all three monotheistic faiths regularly interacted.”[56]
Petrus himself held that:
The ignorant have to be educated in Islamic science, and that he (Petrus) has labored hard-`magno labore…. et summo studio’ to translate Islamic works `for the benefit of the Latin.”[57]
He even expressed a `sense of mission’ in spreading Islamic astronomy among `the Latin in the land of the Franks.’[58] Like Daniel of Morley, nearly a century after him, sometime in the 1120s, it seems, he was in France, as he wrote an Epistola ad petrus alfonsi peripateticos in Francia (‘Letter to the peripatetics in France’), in which he complains of his lack of students, professes his expertise in the art of astronomy, and lambastes Latin intellectuals for preferring the study of grammar and logic to the ‘hard science’ of astronomy.[59]
His admonition addressed to Latin scholars (to acquire Islamic science) became part of the Western heritage, and was now being handed down to a young Englishman of royal blood.[60] He was one of King Henry’s physicians in England from 1112 to 1120.[61] Thanks to this privileged position, Petrus introduced to the West knowledge completely unknown then, including astronomy, cosmology, cosmogony, elemental theory, meteorology, psychology, and medicine.[62] Most significantly, though, Metlitzki notes, are the twelve dialogues (Dialogus) between Peter and `one Moses,’ which reflect the Islamic astronomical learning, which Petrus was first to carry to the attention of the Western Christians on their own ground.[63] It was Petrus who introduced Islamic astronomy to England, and translated texts from Arabic for the first English scientists.[64]Two of his students in England are known by name: Walcher of Malvern and Adelard of Bath. Walcher composed a text on how to predict eclipses, based on the teachings of Alfonsi, and Adelard revised and improved Alfonsi’s Latin version of al-Khwarazmi’s text.[65] Evidence of his astronomical contributions is contained in a treatise preserved in Oxford where he put a set of chronological tables based upon Islamic ones, including a concordance of eras for the year 1115; also a series of tables for the various planets and an explanation of the use of the chronological tables.[66]
The Muslim Spanish connection was very much diverse. In Muslim Spain, Scott notes, there was not a village where `the blessings of education’ could not be enjoyed by the children of the most indigent peasant, and in Cordova, there were eight hundred public schools frequented alike by Moslems, Christians, and Jews, and where instruction was imparted by lectures. The Spanish Muslim received knowledge at the same time and under the same conditions, Scott points out, as the literary pilgrims from Asia Minor and Egypt, from Germany, France, and Britain.[67]
Besides these students/pilgrims, other agents of dissemination of Muslim science were the Mozarabs, i.e Christians living under Islamic rule.
Bad as it was from the point of view of Christianity [Metlitzki remarks], the cultural assimilation of the `would be Arabs’ the Mozarabs played a vital part in the transmission of Arabic learning to the West and may well have left traces in early England which still elude us.”[68]
More importantly, many manifestations of Islamic civilisation travelled through the courts, or more properly via the ruling families, who married members of the ruling monarchies of Spain (Aragon and Castile principally). Eleanor, King Henry II’s wife, is a good case. She and her entourage, `much like her grandfather and his crowd, were familiar visitors to their relatives in courts where, since knowledge of Arabic was often de rigeur, translations from the Arabic were not as important as they were in London.’[69]A daughter of Eleanor and Henry II had married into the royal family of Castile, and as the wife of Alfonso VIII of Castile and an eminent figure in Toledo, this other Eleanor (she had been named after her mother) `welcomed visitors from throughout Europe who came to Toledo to drink from its fountains of knowledge-and to take much of that knowledge back to England, France, and Germany.’[70] The ruling family members spread many of the symbols of Islamic civilisation, then a mark of sophistication, aped by the higher echelons, at court and amongst society at large.[71]
Muslim scientific influence also travelled through clerks belonging to royal households who moved to and fro on diplomatic missions.[72] Some served both in England and in Spain, like Godfrey of Everseley who was in the employ of Edward I and also Edward’s brother in law, Alfonso of Castile in 1276-82, at the very time when the learned king was producing the scientific treatises and the Alfonsine astronomical tables which have ‘immortalised his name.’[73]
The Spanish connection was even stronger as a result of the translation effort from Arabic into Latin, done in large measure in the 12th century. It must be reminded, that after they took Toledo, in 1085, the Christians came across the abundance of Muslim scientific treatises left there. The beginning of the disintegration of Muslim rule in Spain, Metlitzki observes, had finally brought the Latin and Islamic worlds into intimate contact. [74] The scientific activities that developed after the fall of Toledo were described by Valentin Rose in 1874 as “nursery (Pflanzstätte) of the ‘doctrina Arabum’” for all Europe.[75] A vast translation effort was undertaken as the flower of Western scholarship descended onto the town and were organised under the patronage of the local religious authorities. Amongst these scholars/translators were Englishmen. The transmission of Arabic science to England is ‘in full swing’ with Robert of Ketton, Daniel of Morley, Roger of Hereford, Alfred of sarechel, and Michael Scot who continued Adelard’s aim of `Arabum studia scrutari’. Most of these Englishmen went to Spain in search of astronomical and mathematical treatises and took an active part in the systematic work of translation in which Latin, Mozarab, and Jewish scholars collaborated at Toledo and other seats of learning in the valley of the Ebro and the region of the Pyrenees.[76]
This vast translation effort, through the 12th century explains the decisive changes that took place in 12th century in Western Christendom, the so called 12th century Renaissance, and the rise of university learning in the Christian West.[77] It must be reminded, here, that the crusaders were also in contact with the Muslim East exactly in the 12th century; and with Sicily in the same century, which indeed, explains why things changed in Western Christendom in this crucial century.
Focus here is on Robert of Chester, also known as Robertus Castrensis, Cestrensis, Retinensis, Ketenensis, Ostiensis, Astensis, Anglicus; Robert the Englishman, Robert de Retines. He was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and translator from Arabic into Latin.[78] He lived in Spain about 1141-1147; was archdeacon of Pamplona, Navarre, in 1143; and lived in London about 1147-1150.[79] He translated a number of treatises; notably one on alchemy (1144), one of the earliest works of its kind to be imported from Islam into Christendom. However, he is chiefly remembered because of his versions of the Qur’an (1143), and of al-Khwarizmi’s algebra (1145).[80] In regard to the translation of the Qur’an, it was the leading Christian figure, Peter the Venerable, the Abbot of Cluny, in France, who commissioned both he, Robert, and Herman the Dalmatian, to translate the Qur’an into Latin. With its publication in 1143, ‘serious students of Islam no longer had to rely on Scripture or myth.’[81] This was the first translation ever, but it was far from perfect, and not for good intentions, either, Peter’s aims being to study the text so as to make a more sustained attack on Islam.[82] The abbot of Cluny could not have made better choice for his purpose, for both Robert of Chester and Herman the Dalmatian were well versed in Arabic, and they also had access to Muslim `chests’-armaria (libraries joined with mosques) and had gathered an abundance of material.[83] We know from Robert himself that he was deeply engrossed in astronomical and geometrical study when he was interrupted by Peter.[84]Robert was a man of higher intellect, and was attracted by the more scientific side; witness his translation of a treatise on the astrolabe, his compilation of tables for the longitude of London (1149) derived from those of al-Battani and al-Zarqali, and his revision of the tables translated by Adelard of Bath. ‘His main claim to our esteem,’ Sarton says, however, was his translation of the algebra of al-Khwarizmi (1145).[85] Like his translation of the Qur’an, this latter one ‘broke completely new ground Western Christendom.’[86] The Book of Algebra and Al-Mucabola (of `making whole’ and `balancing’) introduced the name and function of a new branch of mathematics-algebra, from Arabic jabara, to restore.[87] The name of the author, al-Khwarizmi, was itself becoming a new concept from the opening sentence (`Dixit algoritmi’) of another of his works, the Arithmetic. The concept is algorism. [88] It was ‘a fundamental landmark in the history of that subject, as it may be considered the beginning of European algebra,’ Sarton notes.[89] In his translation, Robert copied even Al-Khwarizmi’s introduction:
Praise be to God, beside whom there is no other. Here ends the book of restoration and opposition of number which in the year 1183 (Spanish era) Robert of Chester in the city of Segovia translated into Latin from Arabic.”[90]
Two years later, in 1147, Robert is back in London, writing, like Adelard, a treatise on the astrolabe, which by now is the standard trademark of every English ‘Arabist.’[91]
